Domesticating Symbols 9783990435588, 3990435582

Table of contents :
TABLE OF CONTENTS......Page 5
On the book series......Page 6
Introduction — Domesticating symbols......Page 12
I Mechanical Justice......Page 20
Introduction......Page 22
I On Quantity and Its Influence on the Quality of the Administration of Justice......Page 23
II Design of a Mechanical Justice......Page 31
III Acceptance of a Mechanical Justice......Page 39
Conclusion......Page 44
II Toward A Fantastic Genealogy of the Articulable......Page 46
I 7,000,000,000......Page 50
II Enthusiasm......Page 53
III stepping on the Brakes......Page 55
IV Bodies of thinking......Page 56
V aggressive ignorance......Page 75
VI ON TODAY'S STAG E......Page 79
VII BACK-COUPLINGS TO A THIRD REALM......Page 83
VIII WAYS OUT OF A SECOND NATUR E......Page 85
IX A LOVE AFFAIR......Page 88
III Two Images of Global Violence......Page 94
I The war-machine ......Page 96
II The planetary death of god-machine, or religion today......Page 101
IV Arché, Arcanum, and Articulation: The Universal and its Characteristics vera bühlmann......Page 112
I Genericness as symbolical body of reciprocity......Page 121
II Lemmata in How to Therorize the Universal While Remaining Neutral on Matters of Belief......Page 132
III Realism of Ideal Entities : Conceiving, Giving Birth to, and Raising Ideas on the Stage of Abstraction......Page 155
IV The Amorous Nature of Intellectual Conception: Universal Text That Conserves the Articulations of a Generic Voice ......Page 167
V Displacement: The impossible interlude between man and machine......Page 178
I Technics as Organ Substitute and Thought Model: Anthropomorphic Mirror Games 180 —......Page 0
II Neither Message nor Prosthesis : Media as Trans- Mission......Page 190
III Tillable Technics : Notes to a Leading Query......Page 192
IV The Empty Locus : About the Topology of the Symbolic......Page 195
V Who Loses, Wins : Displacement as a Chance......Page 197
VI Media Code— Dialogues on Digital Society......Page 204
I SCRIPT......Page 206
II Se ction 1 : Aperçus of Me dia Society......Page 207
III Section 2 : Media Code – Constituent Parts of Media Presentations......Page 213
Image references......Page 224

Citation preview

Applied Virtuality Book Series DOMESTICATING SYMBOLS — Metalithikum II Edited by Vera Bühlmann, Ludger HovestadT

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Editors: Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD), Institute for Technology in Architecture (ITA), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. Dr. phil. Vera Bühlmann Laboratory for Applied Virtuality at the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD), Institute for Technology in Architecture (ITA), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically those of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, broadcasting, reproduction by photocopying machines or similar means, and storage in data banks. Product liability: The publisher can give no guarantee for the information contained in this book. The use of registered names, trademarks, etc., in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and are therefore free for general use. © 2014 AMBRA | V AMBRA | V is part of Medecco Holding GmbH, Vienna Printed in Germany The publisher and editor kindly wish to inform you that in some cases, despite efforts to do so, the obtaining of copyright permissions and usage of excerpts of text is not always successful.

Layout and Cover Design: onlab, Thibaud Tissot, Pepita Köhler, www.onlab.ch Translation: Reinhart R. Fischer (Hovestadt, Tholen, Doelker). Copyediting: Leah Whitman-Salkin Proofreading: Max Bach Printing and binding: Strauss GmbH, D-Mörlenbach Printed on acid-free and chlorine-free bleached paper.

With 50 figures ISBN 978-3-99043-558-8

DOMESTICATING SYMBOLS — Metalithikum II

TABLE OF CONTENTS

on the book series 

6

Introduction — Domesticating symbols

12

I Mechanical Justice Marcel Alexander Niggli and Louis Frédéric Muskens

20

Introduction 22 — I On Quantity and Its Influence on the Quality of the Administration of Justice 23 — II Design of a Mechanical Justice 31 — III Acceptance of a Mechanical Justice 39 — conclusion 44

II Toward A Fantastic Genealogy of the Articulable 46 Ludger Hovestadt I 7,000,000,000 50 — II enthusiasm 53 — III stepping on the brakes 55 — ­IV Bodies of t ­hinking 56 — V aggressive ignorance 75 — VI ON TODAY'S STAGE 79 — VII BACK-COUPLINGS TO A THIRD REALM 83 — VIII WAYS OUT OF A SECOND NATURE 85 — IX A LOVE AFFAIR 88

III Two Images of Global Violence gregg lambert

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IV Arché, Arcanum, and Articulation : The Universal and its Characteristics vera bühlmann

112

i The war-machine 96 — iI the planetary death of god-machine, or religion today 101 

1 Genericness as symbolical body of reciprocity 121 — II Lemmata in How to Theorize the Universal While Remaining Neutral on Matters of Belief  132 — III Realism of Ideal Entities : Conceiving, Giving Birth to, and Raising Ideas on the Stage of Abstraction 155 — IV The Amorous Nature of Intellectual Conception: Universal Text That Conserves the Articulations of a Generic Voice 167

V Displacement: 178 The impossible interlude between man and machine Georg christoph tholen I Technics as Organ Substitute and Thought Model : Anthropomorphic Mirror Games 180 — II Neither Message nor Prosthesis : Media as TransMission 190 — III Tillable Technics : Notes to a Leading Query 192 — IV The Empty Locus : About the Topology of the Symbolic 195 — V Who Loses, Wins : Displacement as a Chance 197

VI Media Code — Dialogues on Digital Society christian doelker

204



224

I SCRIPT 206 — II Section 1 : Aperçus of Media Society 207 — III  Section 2 : Media Code – Constituent Parts of Media Presentations 213

image references

ON THE BOOK SERIES VERA BÜHLMANN, LUDGER HOVESTADT Only one hundred years ago, hardly any scientist of renown would have been unaware of philosophy, and hardly any artist or architect uninformed about up-to-date technology and mathematics. Today, our ability to explain and explicate our own work within a shared horizon of assumptions and values beyond our specific scientific community has, perhaps paradoxically, turned into an inability and resulted to some degree in a kind of speechlessness. Only rarely now is it thought important that we relate our work to, and integrate it with, an overall context that is in itself “on the table” and up for consideration. More and more, that kind of context is taken for granted, without any need for active articulation, refinement, or development. At the same time though, the media are full of news stories about catastrophes, crises, and an impending doom that cannot, it seems, be warded off. Climate change, shortage of resources and population growth, urbanization— this is just to name a few of the critical issues today. Quite obviously, the notion of such an overall context, both implicit and assumed, is extremely strained, if not indeed overstretched today. This all is widely acknowledged—the UNESCO Division of Foresight, Philosophy, and Human Sciences in Paris, for example, launched a discourse on this subject in their 21st-Century Talks and Dialogues under the heading “The Future of Values”. The companion book, published in several languages simultaneously in 2004, is structured in three parts, and includes one chapter on the ethical issues of values and nihilism lying ahead, another chapter on technological progress and globalization, as well as a third chapter on the future of science, knowledge, and future studies. What remains strangely implicit, and in that manner ignored here, in a way that is typical of this inarticulacy with regard to an overall context mentioned above, is the societal, scientific, and cultural role that inevitably is ascribed to technology against the backdrop of such discussions, along with the expectations that are associated with that role of technology. In the Metalithikum series, we tend to regard technology in an extended sense. Along with its respective solution-oriented application to the

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DOMESTICATING SYMBOLS — Metalithikum II

sciences, culture, economics, and politics, we think that technology needs to be considered more fundamentally, especially regarding the semiotic and mathematical-philosophical aspects it incorporates. From this perspective, we see in technology a common factor for facilitating a discourse that seems to have been largely lost from today’s discursive landscape, the degree of its disappearance inversely proportional to the increasingly central role technology plays in every domain of our lives. Such a discourse seems crucial if we are to develop adequate schemes for thinking through the potentials of today’s technology, something that is in turn essential for all planning. Our stance is an architectural and, in the philosophical sense, an architectonic one. Our main interest centers on the potentials of information technology, and how we can get used to the utterly changed infrastructures they have brought us. But have our infrastructures really changed substantially ? Or is it merely the case that a new level of media networks has emerged on top of the technology with which we are already familiar ? Are the “new” and digital media simply populating and exploiting, in a parasitic sense, the capacities of modern industrial infrastructures that have brought prosperity and wealth to so many ? In his contribution to the UNESCO dialogues, Paul Kennedy was still convinced : “In the Arabic world, 3% of the population has access to the internet. In Africa, it’s less than 1%. This situation won’t improve as long as the infrastructures remain in their current state. It won’t change, as long as these countries lack electrification, telephone wiring and telephones, and as long as the people there can’t afford either computers or software. If knowledge is indeed power, then the developing countries today are more powerless than they were thirty years ago, before the advent of the internet.” Our experience since then has allowed us to see things a little differently. There are meanwhile as many mobile phones in use worldwide as there are people living on the planet. Six billion people out of a seven billion world population can meanwhile read, write, and calculate (at least in some basic sense). Only three decades ago, this proportional measure was not 6/7, but 2/5 ! We have seen the “Arab Spring” that brought simultaneous political revolutions in several Arabic countries, giving facticity to the cultural impact of digital media, and this to a degree that was unexpected or previously deemed improbable by many. And the credence of this facticity is not harmed, we think, by the fact that since then we have had to witness ongoing fundamentalist reactions as in Egypt and in Syria, where the situation is currently escalating into a veritable civil war. To say that the facticity of the cultural impact of digital media is not impaired in its credence thereby is not to downplay the seriousness of these complex situations. Of course, in political, economic, religious reorientation all is at stake at once, and the idea that technological modernization be sufficient for consolidating the complex conflicts that arise in such phases of reorientation must strike one as quite naive.

On The Book Series

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Even if technology affects how people live on the collectively existential level of infrastructure, it cannot do away with conflicting cultural values whose roots lie in different mentalities. Modernization of technological infrastructure, as “democratizing” and empowering for the people they may be, might even have an infantilizing effect on societies who begin to depend on it, because it fosters the idea that all kinds of problems may be solved technically, and can in essence be taken care of by respective experts and specialists. The same must be observed with greatest prudence also on a global scope, where we cannot help but observe an increasingly tyrannical polarization of values into a crude and simple distinction of good and bad – orientated around the two poles of (1) sustainability or the collective care for the health of the larger whole (the climate), and (2) terrorism as a new, diffuse form of violence. We call this polarization tyrannical because it refutes interpretative investigations into the nature of this complex issues and instead focuses on “objective” measures like a numerical index for CO2 pollution or registered documentation of power abuse; interestingly, the same technology is used by military and intelligence agencies alike with defenders of civil rights as Edward Snowden. Thus we see the same technological means instrumentalized sophistically from all sides. We read these constellations as strong indicators for just how limited the applicability of our noetic schemes is for thinking through long-term developments. These schemes have evolved from our experience of prosperity in times of strong modern nation-states and industrial technology with matching economics. They go along with notions of centeredness for thinking about control, notions of linearity and nested recursion, of processes and grids, and of mechanical patterns of cause and effect used for planning. It is a truism, perhaps, to point out that these notions do not fit information technology very well. They are stressed and overstrained by the volatile associativity that emerges from logistic networks and disperses throughout user populations. Going by our inherited notions, industrial infrastructures appear to be used as a playground for what is called, somewhat helplessly, “consumer culture” or “the culture industry.” But in the case of India, for example, what came back as a result of the success of mobile telephony, astonishingly, were new infrastructural solutions. With no banks and no cash machines on hand, people simply invented the means to transfer money and pay by SMS. Yet the standards developed for micro-banking today can be referred to and linked up with solutions that exist for other areas, such as energy provision maintained by photovoltaics and micro-grids, for example. But this is not the place to present scenarios. Let us remember that in India, Africa, and the Middle East, information technology has achieved what no administration, no mechanical infrastructure, no research, and no aid has been capable of : enabling people in developing

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DOMESTICATING SYMBOLS — Metalithikum II

areas of the world to use standard, state-of-the-art, technological infrastructures, not state administered and directed for their own benefit. We would simply like to invite you to consider the profound extent to which codes, protocols, or algorithms, standards such as ASCII, barcodes, MP3, or the Google and Facebook algorithms, have challenged our established economic, political, and cultural infrastructures. From this we get a sense of the potentials that come with information technology, directly proportional to these challenges. We deliberately call them potentials, because we are interested in developing adequate noetic schemes for integrating them into thinking about information technology from an infrastructural perspective. We are interested in how these potentials and dynamics can be applied to finding ways of dealing with the great topics of our time. We are interested in how we could understand computing as a literacy that is at once more capacious and more demanding than the strict reduction of complex issues to simplified and mechanically treatable measures of truth values. As the contributors to an article in this book on mechanization and justice maintain : “We might advance with greater ease once we admit that law bears greater resemblance (and hence is linked more strongly) to quantum physics and its often perplexing complexities.” Since information technology itself is constituted by quantum physics, this argument may well be extended to any field and domain that is organized today by this new form of technics. In another contribution to the UNESCO dialogues mentioned above, Michel Serres observed, somewhat emphatically : “Today’s science has nothing to do with the science that existed just a few decades ago.” Computers and IT bring us the tools for statistical modeling, simulation and visualization techniques, and an immense increase in accessibility of data and literature beyond disciplinary boundaries. With the colloquies that are documented in the Metalithikum book series, of which this is the second volume, our main interest lies in how to gain a methodological apparatus for getting familiar with the potentials and dynamics that are specific to information technology and applying them to deal with the global challenges that are characteristic of our times, by referring them to a notion of reality we assume will never be “fully” understood. The prerequisite for making this possible is a regard for, and estimation of, the power of invention, abstraction, and symbolization that we have been able to apply, in past centuries and millennia, in order to come up with ever-evolving ways of looking at nature, cities, at trade and exchange, at knowledge and politics, the cosmos and matter, and increasingly reflected at our ways of looking, speaking, representing. Rooted in their respective historical cognitive frames of reference, we have been able to find ever-new solutions for existential challenges. There has most likely never been any such thing as a prototype for

On The Book Series

9

coordinate systems : their detachment from substance-space and its formal symbolization result from acts of abstraction. Plato may have already considered the idea of a vacuum, yet he thought it “inconceivable”; nevertheless, this notion of the vacuum inspired abstract thought for ages, before Otto von Guericke invented the first vacuum pump as a technological device in 1654. Electricity was thought of as sent by the gods in thunderstorms before the algebraic mathematics of imaginary and complex numbers were developed along with the structures that allowed us to domesticate it. Today, we imagine the atomic structure of matter by means of orbital models gained from a better understanding of electricity. So, in short, we do not share the idea that characterizing our time as post-anything is very helpful. While we agree that we seem to be somewhat stuck within certain mindsets today, we do not consider it at all plausible that any kind of concept or model, political or otherwise, will ever come close to anything resembling a natural and objective closure. The concepts behind any assumption of an End to History—whether this be in the Hegelian, the Marxian, or the more recent Fukuyama sense—stem from the nineteenth century, when Europe was at its peak in terms of imperialist expansion. To resurrect them today, in the light of our demographic, climatic, and resources-related problems, to us seems a romantically dangerous thing to do. By now it is safe to say that technology is not simply technology, but has changed character over time, perhaps even, as Martin Heidegger put it, it has changed “modalities in its essence.” In order to reflect this spectrum, we propose to engage with a twin story, which we postulate has always accompanied our technical evolution. Historically, the evolution of technics is commonly associated with the anthropological era called the Neolithic revolution, which marks the emergence of early settlements. We suggest calling our twin story “metalithikum”. As the very means by which we have been able to articulate our historical accounts, metalithic technics has always accompanied Neolithic technics, yet in its symbolic character as both means and medium it has remained largely invisible. The metalithikum is ill suited for apostles of a new origin, nor is it a utopian projection of times to come. Rather, we wish to see in it a stance for engaging with the historicity of our culture. As such, it might help to bring onto the stage as a theme of its own an empirical approach to the symbolics of the forms and schemes that humans have always applied for the purpose of making sense. This certainly is what drives our interest in the Metalithikum colloquies, which we organize once a year in a concentrated, semipublic setting. As participants, we invite people from very different backgrounds—architects and engineers, human and natural scientists, scholars of humanities, historians—or, to put it more generally and simply, people who are interested in better understanding the wide cultural implications and potentials of

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DOMESTICATING SYMBOLS — Metalithikum II

contemporary technology. This as well characterizes the audience for whom this book is written. We are very grateful for the opportunity of collaborating with the Werner Oechslin Library Foundation in Einsiedeln. The library chiefly assembles source texts on architectural theory and related areas in original editions, extending from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. Over fifty thousand volumes document the development of theory and systematic attempts at comprehension and validation in the context of humanities and science. The core area of architecture is augmented, with stringent consistency, by related fields, ranging from art theory to cultural history, and from philosophy to mathematics. Thanks to the extraordinary range and completeness of relevant source texts and the academic and cultural projects based on them, the library is able to provide a comprehensive cultural-history perspective. When we first talked to Werner Oechslin about the issue that troubled us most—the lost role of Euclidean geometry for our conceptions of knowledge, and the as-yet philosophically unresolved concepts of imaginary and complex numbers and their algebraic modeling spaces—he immediately sensed an opportunity to pursue his passionate interest in what he calls “mental chin-ups” as a form of “mental workout,” if not some kind of “thought acrobatics.” We would like to express our thanks to him and his team for being such wonderful hosts. We would also like to thank the editors at ambra (Vienna), David Marold and Angelika Heller, for all the support we have received for our project, and for realizing this second volume.

on the book series

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INTRODUCTION — DOMESTICATING SYMBOLS VERA BÜHLMANN, LUDGER HOVESTADT Pursuant to the first colloquy, about “printed physics,” the second one takes off from the rather clinical observation that the substrate on which today’s data-processing machines operate has changed, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, since we have learned how to deal technically with energy in electrical form; information-technological media and apparatuses no longer operate primarily based on the substrate of physical forces and their mechanical principles. Rather, their effectiveness deploys on a quasi-immaterial bed made of probabilistic signal horizons of symbolic codings, through which the erstwhile physical substrate is now formally getting rendered, as “data” in the sense of “informational constellation.” In this regard, it is important to stress that information technology today is no longer simply confined to elaborately controlling and investigating processes that may already be accessed through mechanical apparatus. Indeed, a movement is underway toward learning how to grant the energetic constitution of our world an own right, and form of address, amid its mechanical constraints. This form of right and this form of address ought to take into account that for the first time, photovoltaics succeeds in harvesting energy in electrical form straight from sunlight, and, to boot, completely without recourse to any of the ever-dwindling tangible energy resources that our planet (still) holds in store. Let us therefore abandon closed inter-process relationships of physical forces and power as a basic reference frame for the symbolic substrate of today’s information technology—let’s do so at least hypothetically and for the length of this colloquy. Information is not matter nor energy, as Norbert Wiener put it more than half a century ago, although it is very likely that nothing further than transformation of energy-consuming appliances was yet foreseeable to him in terms of information technology. No later than with the latest such transformation, however, of

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DOMESTICATING SYMBOLS — Metalithikum II

harnessing infrastructures to IT-related energy production and distribution, new, application-oriented, pragmatical questions are popping up about what is calculable. POPULATION DYNAMICS: FROM QUANTITIES TO QUALITIES Whereas the “symbols” handled by information technology are first taken in their formal-mathematical significance, i.e. no differently from the functional-equation systems of mechanical technics, the question of an adequate referential framework is arising with increasing intensity : of how to assess the capabilities and proficiencies that are acquirable in the potential-related spaces that are opening up pursuant to these information-technological transformations. Because symbolic coding allows the behavior of mechanical relations of forces indeed also to be rendered and controlled. But at the same time, other effects-relationships, especially genuinely social interrelations, can be symbolically represented and medially organized. Complete business models, of firms such as SAP or IBM, are based on it. Yet, a strictly formal-mathematical acceptation of said “symbols” suggests an approach to information technology that treats it as a continuation of mechanical technics—now however made analytically accessible, and therefore more powerful by magnitudes in relation to the possibilities, seemingly optimizable and automatizable, to be operationalized through the algebraic symbols. From this application-oriented angle one might, perhaps a tad provocatively, declare the computer, taken as a universal Turing machine, to be nothing more than just a geometrical machine, precisely because of the analytical notation standards, and at once in spite of them. The Metalithikum colloquies start from the premise that the behavior of processes media-ized by a form of technics, the processing unit of which is information, may not adequately be described through the physicalmechanics referential framework that is traditional to our understanding of technics. With the fantastic-programmatic term “metalithicum” we are reaching out for an abstraction to it. This neologism seeks to apprehend the before-said qualitative change of our relationship with stones and their geo-index, meta- standing for abstraction and -lithicum pointing to the various eras of the so-called stone age, in particular the Neolithic age that denotes the Neolithic revolution and the incipient settled way of life : domestication of nature. Because subjacent to the incipient operable availability of our gradually acquired techniques of symbolizing and operationalizing the relations, the interplay of which makes up our world, there changes, along with the technical substratum, likewise the substrate of our existence. This substrate reveals itself today as some sort of “symbolized physics,” to which we can refer for the moment as media-ized nature—more for want of a better term than out of conviction.

Introduction

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The first printed-physics colloquy examined the technical-functional principles of current information technology indirectly and projectively, through studying the conditions of their production-related (re-)producibility and the resulting economic availability. For illustrative purposes, we suggested a similarity between the “print revolution” currently taking place in the production of information technology, and the situation surrounding the introduction of letterpress printing at the beginning of the modern age. Just as the then development contributed—in a manner probably unimaginable to Gutenberg’s contemporaries—to popularizing, and thereby secularizing, the so-far largely monastically administered knowledge of that time, we suspect, in function of the presently ongoing mutations, the advent of similarly momentous consequences. In this context, it is important to remember that the current “print revolution” is, as already emphasized in early reflections, e.g. by Marshall McLuhan, first of all concerned with the availability of documents, i.e. of representing products such as books, periodicals, newsletters or e-mails, as well as radio and TV programs. To be sure, on that level, too, drastic changes are underway. Much more fundamental appears, however, the said development where it concerns production of the appliances themselves that are operating on the physical level : from processors, storage media, aerials, amplifiers, LEDs in screens, lights, etc., up to photovoltaics : all of them functioning machines that are produced in the shape of printed foils, on an industrial scale, and for quite some time now. At least since the modern era, energy processes pass as universally describable regarding their principles, but locally situated as to their occurences, and in this very respect as geo-metrically grounded. The mechanical principles of dealing with fire, e.g., or wind, water, or stone, therefore seem “natural” to us, even where their processes are susceptible of being set off by mechanical apparatuses, engines, or even seemingly self-driven automata, and in this sense of being caused; nevertheless, they remain largely reliant upon the channeling and conducting of physical forces by means of cultural techniques—and in this respect localized and grounded, too—from the early forms of farming up to the most modern infrastructures of today’s power supply. As we manage, however, to secure our power through electricity that we harvest straight from the currents of the sun, and make it available by means of information-technological networks, we convert these principles of localization and grounding of mechanical-geometrical cultural techniques into a principle of deterritorialization, such as is characteristic of digitalization in general. While we are familiar with modified accessibility and availability of digitized documents from the Internet, similar accessibility and availability might develop for the digitizing of apparatuses, and indeed for power production. The second Metalithikum colloquy, this one treating “domesticating symbols,” addresses the question of our dealing with the near-ubiquitous

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pervasion of our everyday life by these patches of machine-made, but intellectually symbolized fabrics of effectiveness. Those first, merely quantitative dispositions will not fail soon to lead to the appearance of other qualities, too. What then, if these developments reach a certain level of saturation across populations, so that they cause new structures to take shape, to the point where we might, dimly, make out the conditio humana ? We shall attempt to reflect upon the specific potential-related spaces that are presently accessible to us, along with the modified conditions of our speaking of, and dealing with, them. CULTIVATION AND DOMESTICIZING STRATEGIES WITHIN THE SYMBOLIC Today we are both capable and in the process of generating textures of effectiveness of sorts, in the form of printed foils, the physical-energetical behavior of which we are able to code symbolically. We shall take this circumstance as a sort of model miniature for generating a thought draft of how to comprehend the generic-urban infrastructures from a distance, in their articulable symbolicalness instead of understanding them as a kind of scientific-secular nature. The decisive turn in all this seems to us to lie in a strange self-referentiality that we experience between the technically formalizable and operationalizable, and a physically understood naturalness, such as taken, at least since the modern age, as the referential plane for algebraic-­ functionally perceived symbols. It is in such physically understood naturalness (the Cartesian res extensa) that we are used to rooting the relations facilitated by algebraic symbols, and into which we are used to placing our apparatuses, machines, engines, etc. Yet the locus proper to the Cartesian res cogitans, and especially the interrelation between both, has not ceased to puzzle the thinking of philosophers. Kant still paraphrased a peculiar effectiveness not immediately derivable from that physical referential plane, as Geistertreiben, a ghosts’ race. While he was not to argue away the phenomenon of some effectiveness that was not primarily physically motivated and, in this sense, immaterial, even if it may unfold its effectivity in material terms, he kept it outside the scope of his concept of reason. This way, positivity gets shifted to center stage of strictly scientific query and development; but its limits clearly come to light today, as this positivity is being externalized and logistically distributed in the by-now dominant electricalpower and information technologies. The rational-grid-based projection planes applied in functionally representing relations of effectiveness, which Kant used as the basis for his reflections about the workings of nature—those planes today actually still provide the framework for all manner of fantastic projections. We call such projecting “fantastic” because such projectional space has turned into topological space on behalf of associative networks. Upon the technical substrate of “information,” and the global netting that

Introduction

15

results, mechanical causality, as an explanatory principle for interrelations between territorial spaces, dissolves, within the logistical setup of the territories, into probabilistics. Such probabilistics not only is no longer referable to any universal measure or metrics, nor does it unfold on any foundation. It is at work outside of any geometrically delineable space. Along with the actuality of probabilistic relations goes a new primacy of operable discreetness before the proportionally conceived continuity of analogue recording and registering. To emphasize this aspect is important because the primacy of the discreet and articulable over the passively recordable also introduces a new power of expression into the formulation of problems—in both senses, mathematical and linguistic formulation. For not every possible solution is equivalent in its mightiness of accommodating complexity to other solutions that are equally possible. It seems we might perhaps best approach this situation by seeing in it the beginnings of a new “alphabetization.” Information science has already for long been speaking of “alphabets of coding,” yet this seems to be largely meant metaphorically. Still, are we not observing a new kind of sophistry, related to simulations and the techniques of imaging (bildgebende Verfahren) that are applied in computer-aided diagnostics and forecasting, as well as to techniques of data processing in general ? If we take this observation seriously, and consider the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece out of the tension between alphabetization and sophism, we may hypothesize interesting symmetries to our own times. To explore these symmetries, fantastically-projectively, will certainly not hand us any prognosis of what to expect. But it might help to develop a literacy in coding that would be more adequate to the new alphabetization we seem to be experiencing. THE CONTENT OF THIS BOOK All the texts in this book center upon the role of a coding and decoding practice that is capable of putting up such fantastic projection spaces. This practice is necessarily at work in all synthetic construction as well as in analytic deduction and integration—all notions of atoms, elements, characters, letters, numbers, etc., are necessarily symbolic in the form in which we deal with them. Otherwise we could have no systematic and precise concepts and ideas of them. Therefore it isn’t by accident that the reflections about domesticating the symbolic converge upon the most fundamental cultural areas: religion, politics, and scientific secularization; space, geometry, and law; spirituality, communication, and learning. The first article, “Mechanical Justice,” by Alexander Niggli and Luis Muskens, reflects upon the relationship between law and logic. “Are dealings with justice mechanizable?” ask the authors. They hold the opinion that today this question urgently needs addressing. Because avoiding to engage in the problematic implications of possible jurisdictional mechanization and its inclusion within a critical framework results inexorably in

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opening the door to the quasi-standardizing of verdicts. It is, therefore, a matter of grasping the connection between logic and decisions, and of examining ways for tenable delegation to appropriate infrastructures, exactly in order to successfully avoid creeping, implicit de-facto mechanization. The authors consider an analogy between the Turing test— about computers’ faculty of imitating the process of thinking—and the mechanization of justice to be false, the real question being how to find algorithmic ways by which computers may mimic jurisdiction in sufficiently complex manner, and be trainable to decide certain cases in an acceptable fashion. The second article, “Toward a Fantastic Genealogy of the Articulable,” by Ludger Hovestadt, argues for understanding programming languages as a genuine and novel paradigm for language comprehension. He suggests to go beyond considering programming languages as merely encoded representations of formal (logical) languages, but to reformulate, on the strength of these languages’ performance, the question of the articulable—of what is at all sayable. Guided by considerations how this might be brought about, Hovestadt presents a fantastic genealogy of that which is articulable digitally, today. This will be followed, in a subsequent volume, by a schema by which we may learn how to comprehend the computable in light of the articulable, and the articulable in light of the computable. The third contribution, Gregg Lambert’s “Two Images of Global Violence,” is about the linking up of technical terms with theology and religion, and addresses—in his words—a form of violence that is unparalleled in documented history, and of global dimensions. In the course of technically induced globalization, a governing reality has arisen that we do not know how to deal with: global violence cannot be comprehended as strictly human, nor as divine or natural. Therefore, our thinking needs specifying, in accordance with economic, technical, political, cultural, and ideological mechanisms. Vera Bühlmann’s “Arché, Arcanum, Articulation: The Universal and Its Characteristics” takes up the same field, and discusses the stakes attached to the philosophical notion of the “universal.” Her text suggests comprehending the mathematical as a language in which the universal is characterizable for the very reason that nobody is native in it, i.e. at home in it as we are in our mother tongues. No one can learn to speak it without intellectual effort. To that end, it is important, as Bühlmann upholds, to situate the cultural technique of writing on a stage of abstract thought which can be set in different manners, in accordance with a particular technique’s algebraic-symbolical constitution. In pursuit of this movement, the finiteness of what is intellectually graspable grows richer in saturation as it is confronted by the inexhaustibility of that which could, virtually, be rendered lucid. The universal is no longer taken as a referential frame for that which is articulable, transmissible, and

Introduction

17

communicable in writing, but, in its own right, as pre-specific genitality and fertility proper to the thinkable, within the horizon of which a strict separation of natural and artificial things is no longer sustainable. Thus, Platonic dialectics are being virtualized and thereby put in a position of approaching a geo-philosophical idea of wisdom, in which technics no longer is the transparently set condition of the possibility of thinking, but might become thematic in its own right. The fifth contribution, by Georg Christoph Tholen, “Displacement: The Impossible Interlude between Man and Machine,” discusses why, in an era of digitalization, the question about the locus of technics and media must be re-situated. He makes clear why anthropological and instrumental categories—of technics as a means and instrument of already existent purposes (telos)—are unable to grasp the scope of the symbolic in its specificity, i.e. in its oscillating between form-giving and formwithdrawing. Tholen’s text takes stock of the current media-scientific discourse in its most prominent positions, and proposes a media metaphorology in order to incorporate the unique performance of the digital into the horizon of critical-analytical philosophy. The last contribution, “Media Code—Dialogues on Digital Society,” by Christian Doelker, brings in some friendly distance toward the apparently singular urgency of these questions today, and provides the ground for some good-humored self-irony. He advocates eluding, today more than ever, the ongoing demands for direct engagement, and the urgent prompts to which we are subjected by our continually being wired. As a means, he proposes recalling the wise men and women, and situations, that were, in the course of cultural history, already beset by questions similar to those that today are posturing as incomparably unique. His text comes in the form of the script of a fictitious radio-broadcast series, in which Ortega y Gasset, the philosopher, invites eminent figures of our intellectual history to a discussion about form, message, content, and code, and the alertness of mind that is anything but a matter of course. His guests are Marilyn Monroe, Berthe Morisot, Charles Darwin, John Amos Komenský a.k.a. Comenius, und Plato.

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I Mechanical Justice Marcel Alexander Niggli and Louis Frédéric Muskens Introduction 22 — I On Quantity and Its Influence on the Quality of the Administration of Justice 23 · Overabundance of Cases as the Initial Problem 23 · Quantity as Cause of Mechanical Law 226 · Law’s Ambivalent and Paradoxical Character 28 · Automatic Administration of Justice as a Possible Solution 30 — II Design of a Mechanical Justice 31 · Equal Justice and Self-Reference 34 · Predetermined Criteria 35 · Uncertainty and Possibility as Influential to the Final Decision 36 · Openness and Self-Referent Evolution 38 — III Acceptance of a Mechanical Justice 39· Quality Evaluation Problem 39 · ­Symbolic Problem 40 · Transparency Problem 40 · Mechanical Randomness Problem 42 · ­Speed Problem 42 · Error Tolerance Problem 43— conclusion 44

Marcel Alexander Niggli is Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Philosophy of Law, as well as the current Dean of the Law Faculty, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He studied law, philosophy and sociology at the University in Zurich. www.unifr.ch/ius/niggli. Louis Frédéric Muskens is a lawyer and legal theorist. He is cofounder of the journal Quid? Fribourg Law Review.

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The following essay discusses the question of whether it is possible to mechanically administer justice and how such a mechanism should function for its achievements to be accepted and regarded as just. In short : can justice be mechanized ? As we will see, this question inevitably leads us to the next : what is it that law produces, and what are its accomplishments ?

21

Introduction Most of the time, discussions about law and science, or about justice and mechanics, emphasize their respective differences. However, by 1672, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had already proposed a possible link between justice and logic.1 The dream of a law consisting of logical decisions (and hence one that could be administered mechanically by machines) has essentially been alive ever since.2 We start, however, not by discussing the differences and similarities between mechanics and justice, for this would imply that we are free to decide whether to mechanize law or not, which essentially we are not. Rather, we begin with a description of the influence of quantity on the administration of justice. We argue that our actual judicial systems are simply overwhelmed by the quantity of cases presented to them and that they would break down if all these cases were to be decided individually. This would force judicial systems all over the world toward standardization, toward the kind of mechanical jurisprudence Roscoe Pound described more than one hundred years ago.3 Pound isn’t the only critical voice against mechanical jurisprudence. At about the same time, in Europe, Henri Bergson identified mechanicality as the distinctive feature of the comic.4 Following Alan Turing’s proposal of an “illusion game” in lieu of the question “can computers think ?” we will ask not if it is possible for a computer to administer justice but rather if an algorithm can be found that mimics human justice administration well enough to cover the fact that it is a machine, not a human being, making and rendering the decisions.5 This means we are trying to design an algorithm that could administrate justice and pass Turing’s test.6 1

Leibniz not only developed the infinitesimal calculus, but also was Assessor in the Court of Appeal and published some widely used books on jurisprudence (among them Corpus juris reconcinnatum, 1672, and above all Nova methodus discendae docendaeque jurisprudentiae, 1667); for Leibniz as a jurist see John MacDonell and Edward Mason, eds., Great Jurists of the World (Boston : Little Brown and Company, 1914), 283–303; Huntington Cairns, “Leibniz’s Theory of Law,” Harvard Law Review 60 (1946) : 200–32; Markku Roinila, “Leibniz on Rational Decision-Making,” Philosophical Studies from the University of Helsinki 16 (2007); John H. Wigmore, “Nova methodus discendae docendaeque jurisprudentiae,” Harvard Law Review 30 (1916) : 812–29. 2 See H. M. Hoeflich, “Law & Geometry : Legal Science from Leibniz to Langdell,” American Journal of Legal History 30 (1986) : 95–121; see also Michael J. Saks and Samantha L. Neufeld, “Parallels in Law and Statistics : Decision Making under Uncertainty,” Jurimetrics 52 (2011) : 117–22. 3 See Roscoe Pound, “Mechanical Jurisprudence,” Columbia Law Review 8 (1908) : 605– 23; though in continental legal systems we don’t blindly apply precedents but statutes. 4 Henri Bergson, Le rire (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), 28–50. Bergson identifies “du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant” (something mechanical encrusted upon the living) as the core element of the comic. An English translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell can be found at http ://www.gutenberg.org/ files/4352/4352-h/4352-h.htm. 5 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (1950) : 433–60. 6 As Weizenbaum showed with his ELIZA program, it is possible to mimic human communication with an algorithm: Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA—A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,” Communications of the ACM 9, no. 1 (1966) : 36–45.

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In the second section, we discuss the possibility to design a mechanical justice that would enable us to decide a vast number of cases without compromising the results’ acceptance. We identify the main features that such a mechanical justice would have to embody in order to accurately mimic the administration of justice. In the third section, we point out further problems related to a mechanical justice. These problems could be the field of future academic inquiries. I On Quantity and Its Influence on the Quality of the Administration of Justice Over the last two hundred years, quantification has become increasingly important.7 No sector of physical, biological, social, or intellectual life has been spared from that trend. Interestingly enough, though, neither quantification’s advantages nor its legitimacy are usually addressed. Rather, they are implicitly treated as self-evident indicators of increasing neutrality and objectivity, and therefore as progress—as if something that can be measured was ipso facto of greater value than something that cannot. In consequence, quantification is regarded as a guarantee of quality, so that it is applied even to scientific research (e.g., bibliometry, impact factor, etc.). As understandable as the quest for objectivity is, a word of caution seems necessary : quantification creates the possibility of measurement, and measurement tends toward standardization, so that quantification fosters mediocrity. Everything really new is extraordinary and hence unexpected. It necessarily exceeds and therefore changes our measurement scales. In a normative context these difficulties are even more pronounced and complex. Overabundance of Cases as the Initial Problem What exactly does a judge do ? She decides cases. A good judge decides cases justly, that is to say she decides equal cases in an equal manner. But where cases differ, she will differentiate and decide differently. To do this, she must recognize and identify each case’s idiosyncrasies. And this, in turn, presupposes time and resources to do so. In reality, though, judges are under pressure to render hundreds of judgments within a limited period of time. And, we should not forget, they do not like to bear the entire responsibility of their judgments and their consequences.8 7

8

See Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability : A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1975). As Seneca nicely puts it : “Unusquisque mavult credere quam iudicare” (Everyone had rather believe another than form his own opinion). Seneca, De vita beata, I, 4. An English translation by Aubrey Stewart can be found on : http ://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Of_a_Happy_Life/.

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23

The closer we look at something, and the longer we ponder it, the more we detect distinctive characteristics and unique peculiarities. It seems evident that the less time a judge dedicates to a case, the more it will resemble other cases, and the more indistinctive it will appear. From far away giants become dwarfs, enormous and unique problems become everyday trifles, and highly specific circumstances blur and disappear. The less details we take into account, the more things appear similar. It seems evident, then, that the quantity of cases to be decided as well as the amount of time available to do so have an impact on the decisions themselves. The more seemingly similar cases we decide, the less likely it is that we will perceive their differences. The less we perceive differences between cases, the less time we devote to our decision. However, the less time we devote to a decision, the more similar cases will appear. Quantity alone, then, changes our decisions’ character. The same holds true for judicial decisions : the less time there is to decide, the more mechanic the administration of justice will become. It will not pay (and will not be able to pay) attention to the individuality of each case, but rather automatically apply predetermined and standardized solutions. One could argue that in doing so, decisions necessarily become more unjust, since justice means treating equal things equally.9 This being said, it is important to remember that all things are equal to a certain extent (as well as unequal, of course), and that the question is not whether we legitimately treat unequal things as equal, but to what extent their differences matter to us, and to what extent we are willing to distinguish them. George Orwell captured this idea in a simple rule : “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”10 Justice can’t be blind, at least not completely so. It needs to have a look at things, and sometimes very closely. The crucial question, then, is : what should it see, and what not ? Or more precisely : what do we allow it to see, because time is an essential condition of justice administration. Looking into matters takes time, so time allowed is the measure and limit of justice. Let us start with a simple fact : in recent decades, most legal systems have witnessed a true explosion of law and concurrently of judicial decisions. People are ever more seeking ever more justice. Two main reasons can be identified : (1) law’s proper growth—i.e., an ever-growing part of life is covered and regulated by legal rules and, consequently, people seek more justice; and (2) population’s growth—i.e., more people seeking justice. If we first look at law’s own growth, developments are rather disquieting. To give a rough impression of the order of magnitude we are talking about, the following figure shows the number of pages that are used to 9

This core idea can already be found in Aristotle’s distinction of numerical and proportional equality : Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Barlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago : Chicago University Press, 2011), 1130b–1132b. See also Plato, The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (London : Penguin Books, 2004), VI, 757b–c. 10 George Orwell, Animal Farm : A Fairy Story (London : Penguin Books, 1987), 90.

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publish all federal laws of Switzerland. That number has risen from about 1,500 in the last seventy years to almost 8,000 in 2012. Figure 1 : Official publication of Swiss Federal Laws : Number of pages per year 8,000 7,000 6,000

Pages

5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0 1939 1944 1949 1954 1959 1964 1969 1974 1979 1984 1989 1994 1999 2004 2009 Year

Of course, this neither counts the number of laws, nor their regulations, it merely counts the space used by all these rules. Moreover, Switzerland might be a very regulated country, but then, a similar growth can be seen all over the world. Meanwhile, the growth rate is still increasing. It does not come as a surprise that given such developments the quantity of cases to be decided by the law has exploded. The sheer quantity of everyday petty offenses can serve as an example of the first cause: petty offences all over the world are handled in simplified and standardized procedures. These procedures are basically designed to keep these cases out of the courtrooms.11 Think of traffic offenses like speeding or exceeding the parking time. Legal systems do not differ much from each other in this respect. Differences merely concern the qualification of these offences and the simplified procedures used to deal with them: some countries qualify them as criminal offenses (but with some sort of strict liability, e.g., the French contraventions), others qualify them as purely administrative violations without the character of a criminal offence (e.g., the German Ordnungswidrigkeit). They all agree, however, in the assignment of monetary fines for such petty offenses in a fairly automated way.12 It is crucial to 11

12

i

Husak’s writings deal with the increasing mechanization of criminal law. See for example : Douglas Huask, “Lifting the Cloak : Preventive Detention as Punishment,” San Diego Law Review 48 (2011) : 1173; “The Costs to Criminal Theory of Supposing That Intentions Are Irrelevant to Permissibility,” Crim Law and Philos 3 (2009) : 51–70; “Varieties of Strict Liability,” Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 8, no. 2 (1995) : 189. For Swiss law, see Stefan Maeder, “Sicherheit durch Gebühren ? – Zur neuen Halterhaftung für Ordnungsbussen nach Art. 6 OBG,” Aktuelle Juristische Praxis (forthcoming).

mechAnicAl JuStice

25

realize that, in almost all legal systems, well over 90 percent of all criminal cases are dealt with in procedures profoundly different from the ones we describe to students as “ordinary.” The overwhelming majority of criminal cases (or violations, or petty or administrative offenses, or whatever name we give them) never even come near a judge. It might seem noteworthy that in almost all other contexts the fact that over 90 percent of a group is treated in the same way would define the standard for that group. It is not so in law. Sanctions are automatic in most sectors of the ever-growing criminalization of administrative law (criminal law theory speaks of “Overcriminalization”13 and of “Penumbral Crimes”14). However, automation goes far beyond the sentencing of petty offenses or the ever-widening net of quasi-criminal law.15 More serious offenses, like theft, are decided in a rather mechanical way too. The same holds true for divorces (at least in Switzerland), which follow very strict rules as to the economic aspects.16 Mostly, standardization and the tendency to render mechanical decisions are not the result of conscious decisions but simply the effect of the enormous number of cases. Not only in Common Law jurisdictions (with their focus on precedents) but also in Continental Legal Systems (which rely on codification), a judge confronted with a case will instinctively search for precedents. Judges are human beings, and as such they are prone to look at one another’s decisions to make their own. Judges will always look for comparable cases and precedent sentences and they will judge their case in relation to other decisions. And the more cases there are, the more decisions become standardized and hence mechanic. Quantity as Cause of Mechanical Law The quantity as the cause of both cases and rules could explain law’s increasing rationalization and systematization.17 A more efficient administration of justice comes at a cost though : standardization and formalization, a development Hoeflich calls the “geometric paradigm in law.”18 Inducing general 13 To cite only a few : Sanford Kadish, “The Crisis of Overcriminalization,” American Criminal Law Quarterly 7 (1968) : 17–34; Andrew Ashworth, “Conceptions of Overcriminalization,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 5 (2007) : 407–25; Sara Sun Beale, “The Many Faces of Overcriminalization,” American University Law Review 54 (2004) : 747–82; Erik Luna, “The Overcriminalization Phenomenon,” American University Law Review 54 (2004) : 703–46. 14 See Margaret Raymond, “Penumbral Crimes,” American Criminal Law Review 39 (2002) : 1395–1439; Darryl K. Brown, “Criminal Law’s Unfortunate Triumph Over Administrative Law,” Journal of Law, Economics & Policy 7 (2010) : 657–83. 15 William J. Stuntz, “The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law,” Michigan Law Review 100 (2001) : 505–600. 16 For the property regime of participation in acquired property, see Art. 204–20 Swiss Civil Code (SR 210); as well as Heinz Hausheer, Ruth Reusser, and Thomas Geiser, eds., Berner Kommentar II/1/3, Das Güterrecht der Ehegatten (Bern : Stämpfli, 1992); Daniel Steck, Scheidung I, ad Art. 204–20 Swiss Civil Code, 2nd ed. (Bern : Stämpfli, 2011). 17 M. H. Hoeflich, “Law & Geometry : Legal Science from Leibniz to Langdell,” American Journal For Legal History 30 (1986) : 95–121. 18 Ibid., 96.

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principles from a variety of individual cases—i.e., abstraction—enables jurists to solve cases by logical deduction from these abstract principles rather than by reasoning on the basis of concrete facts (of the individual case).19 The method essentially consists in the application of scientific, specifically mathematic, reasoning to law. René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Gottfried Leibniz were the new paradigm’s heroes.20 These names evoke mathematics rather than law, although all of them were mathematicians as well as legal scholars. Their polyvalence explains the cross-fertilization between science and law. Leibniz writes : “Justice follows certain rules of equality and of proportion which are no less founded in the immutable nature of things, and in the ideas of the divine understanding, than the principles of arithmetic and geometry.”21 Is it not striking how this corresponds to what Pound describes as “mechanical jurisprudence,” and—more disquieting—to what Bergson characterizes as the core of the comical ?22 Let us take a closer look at Bergson’s account of laughter : Laughter is a human and hence social phenomenon, consisting in a detachment from sensibility and emotion. It has a moral role : “Si l’on trace un cercle autour des actions et dispositions qui compromettent la vie individuelle ou sociale et qui se châtient elles-mêmes par leurs conséquences naturelles, il reste en dehors de ce terrain d’émotion et de lutte, dans une zone neutre où l’homme se donne simplement en spectacle à l’homme, une certaine raideur du corps, de l’esprit et du caractère, que la société voudrait encore éliminer pour obtenir de ses membres la plus grande élasticité et la plus haute sociabilité possibles. Cette raideur est le comique, et le rire en est le châtiment.”23 Laughter consists in a “mécanisme superposé à la vie.”24

19 Ibid., 97. See also Lee Loevinger “An Introduction to Legal Logic,” Indiana Law Journal 27 (1952) : 471–522. 20 See Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN : Hackett, 1998). Here, Descartes begins to design a universal scientific method by applying mathematics to the whole knowledge. See Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 30, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago : Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1978). See Gottfried Leibniz, Nova methodus discendae docendaeque jurisprudentiae, in Frühe Schriften zum Naturrecht, trans. Hubertus Busche (Hamburg : Meiner Verlag, 2003). On law as a science, also see, for example : Lee Loevinger, “The Methodology of Legal Inquiry,” Law and Contemporary Problems 28 (1963) : 5–35. 21 Gottfried Leibniz, “Letter to Pierre Bayle” (1702), as quoted in Patrick Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence : Justice as the Charity of the Wise (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1996), 19. Note that Riley points out that Leibniz didn’t consistently maintain his idea of justice because of the lack of voluntary act in it (19). 22 See the introduction of this paper. 23 Bergson, Le rire, 16. “Beyond actions and attitudes that are automatically punished by their natural consequences, there remains a certain inflexibility of the body, of the mind and of the character that society would like to eliminate to obtain a greater elasticity and a better sociability of its members. This inflexibility is the comic, laughter is the punishment.” English translation by Cloudesley Brebreton and Fred Rothwell (www. gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/4352-h.htm). 24 “Mechanism superposed upon life.” Ibid., 35.

I Mechanical Justice

27

Complete regularity is not compatible with life.25 A completely regular heart rate, for example, strongly indicates not health but an increased risk of cardiac mortality.26 Complete regularity contradicts and perverts life. “C’est que la vie bien vivante ne devrait pas se répéter. Là où il y a répétition, similitude complète, nous soupçonnons du mécanique fonctionnant derrière le vivant. […] Cet infléchissement de la vie dans la direction de la mécanique est ici la vraie cause du rire.”27 Remember Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) ? Remember him in the factory scene, or, similarly, the morning routine of Wallace or the Snoozatron in the Wallace and Gromit movies ? Likewise, an automatic application of rules necessarily is a mechanical one, and a mechanical administration of justice is comical in the Bergsonian sense. So mechanics and the law do not go well together. Mechanical administration of justice—that is, mechanical jurisprudence—seems impossible. Where mechanics rule, life must retreat, justice must recede. Mechanicality kills the law, as we understand it.28 Law’s Ambivalent and Paradoxical Character Even if we admit that mechanics and life do not match but rather contradict each other, it does not follow that the same holds true for the law. Is the law as vital and vibrant as life itself ? Should it not be conceptualized as something much more rigid and abstract ? In 1939 the English poet Wystan Hugh Auden wrote his poem “Law Like Love,” which could serve as an introduction : Law, say the gardeners, is the sun, Law is the one All gardeners obey To-morrow, yesterday, to-day. Law is the wisdom of the old, The impotent grandfathers feebly scold; 25 Valery states : “Le ‘déterminisme’ est la seule manière de se représenter le monde. Et l’indéterminisme, la seule manière d’y exister.” Paul Valery, Cahiers, vol. I (Paris : Gallimard, 1973), 531.  26 Heart rate measured by heart rate variability (HRV); see M. M. Wolf et al., “Sinus Arrhythmia in Acute Myocardial Infarction,” Medical Journal of Australia 2 (1978) : 52–53; Leon Glass and Michael C. Mackey, From Clocks to Chaos : The Rhythms of Life (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1988). 27 Bergson, Le rire, 26. “This is because really lively life is not supposed to repeat itself. Where there is repetition, complete similarity, we suspect that there is mechanism behind life. That diversion of life towards mechanism is the real cause of laughter.” English translation by Cloudesley Brebreton and Fred Rothwell (http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/4352/4352-h/4352-h.htm). 28 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law (Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press, 2009), 3; “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review 10 (1897) : 457. Holmes challenges the view that law just turns solely on logic. On logic and judicial decision making, see Loevinger, “An Introduction to Legal Logic.”

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The grandchildren put out a treble tongue, Law is the senses of the young. Law, says the priest with a priestly look, Expounding to an unpriestly people, Law is the words in my priestly book, Law is my pulpit and my steeple. Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose, Speaking clearly and most severely, Law is as I’ve told you before, Law is as you know I suppose, Law is but let me explain it once more, Law is The Law. Yet law-abiding scholars write : Law is neither wrong nor right, Law is only crimes Punished by places and by times, Law is the clothes men wear Anytime, anywhere, Law is Good-morning and Good-night. Others say, Law is our Fate; Others say, Law is our State; Others say, others say Law is no more, Law has gone away. And always the loud angry crowd, Very angry and very loud, Law is We, And always the soft idiot softly Me.29 […] Law takes place in society; it is part of the social system. If it symbolizes the importance of society’s rules, these rules are neither strict, nor absolute, nor immutable. No one really can say what punishment would be just for a theft. We only can discuss whether generally a sentence for theft should be higher than one for, for example, an offense against personal honor. We can relate a sentence for robbery to a sentence for theft, and conclude that the punishment for robbery should be higher 29 W. H. Auden, “Law Like Love,” in Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 154.

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because robbery implies violence, which we detest. But nothing else could be concluded. Law’s relativity and self-reference (namely that we consider other decisions when we have to make one) are necessary consequences of the fact that a just (i.e., an absolutely just) decision simply does not exist.30 No decision is per se just. Judicial decisions are contingent. Each and every verdict could be different (but as well established and substantiated as the one actually rendered). This is what Gustav Radbruch meant by saying that only those can become good jurists who are jurists with a bad conscience.31 Law consists of decisions. Basically, it decides the undecidable. Law decides cases that otherwise could not be decided, or else they would not have come before a judge. The mechanics of law, then, reside in the world of classical Newtonian physics. It is either/or, red or blue, day or night, allowed or forbidden. It seems to be a binary system. However, law’s grounds lie in quantum physics. The cases that law decides are subject to some sort of superposition principle (remember Schrödinger’s cat ?). Cases are always what they are—and their contrary. All cases are a multitude of cases. Hence, the sentence passed is only one of a multitude of possible sentences. Stated boldly, then, we could say that every judicial decision is just, but, more discomforting, that it is unjust also, and, most discomforting, necessarily so. In the end, we do not arrive at a conclusion very different from Auden’s poem, which ends as follows : […] Like love we don’t know where or why, Like love we can’t compel or fly, Like love we often weep, Like love we seldom keep.32 Automatic Administration of Justice as a Possible Solution Linking law and mechanics does not seem easy, if at all possible. Independent of this, however, remains the legal system’s need for a solution to the problem of quantity. How can all these cases be treated without suffocating the legal system ? The question is, how can we concurrently address the problem of quantity but avoid (1) the legal system’s breakdown and (2) law’s mechanization. In order to do this we will have to distinguish the administration of justice from 30 The relativity of the law is a common claim of legal positivism as opposed to natural law. For example see Hans Kelsen, “What Is Justice ?,” in What Is Justice ? Justice, Law and Politics in the Mirror of Science : Collected Essays (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1957), 1–24, part III in particular. 31 Gustav Radbruch, “Preface to an Edition of J. H. von Kirchmann’s ‘The Worthlessness of Jurisprudence as a Science’ (1952),” in Radbruch Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4 (Heidelberg : C. F. Müller, 2002), 22. 32 Auden, “Law Like Love,” 154.

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justice itself, or, more directly : law from justice.33 Therefore, we will focus on justice and try to find the conditions for mechanical justice, as opposed to a mechanical jurisprudence.34 We aim at designing a mechanism that would produce justice rather than destroy it. We will try to find an algorithm capable of deciding a great quantity of cases without human intervention while nonetheless paying attention to each case’s individuality. Such a mechanism could provide judges with enough time to look closely at problematic cases. As we noted earlier, the administration of justice actually works already on a quite mechanical basis, so our proposition or thought experiment does not present a complete revolution of jurisprudence. Our main concern is to argue that previous attempts to mechanize justice have not paid enough attention to justice’s main features or prerequisites to adequately mimic it. We will argue that mechanicality doesn’t necessarily mean inhumanity, coldness, and total lack of liberty. Frankly stated, the questions would be : Do we really need a judge just to apply standard solutions that fit the majority of cases ? Could we not replace such a mechanical judge by an algorithm, by a machine or a mechanism ? How should such a mechanism be constructed ? And could an algorithm outperform human judges, not only in velocity but also in quality ? We have stressed the challenge quantity represents for our justice system. Therefore, we should turn to the question of efficiency. Yet, we understand efficiency not in purely quantitative but also in qualitative terms : Could automation permit not only a faster but also a better administration of justice ? II Design of a Mechanical Justice Earlier, we briefly exposed the geometric paradigm of law and its influence on our conception of the administration of justice. Previous research dealing with automation of justice mostly drifted toward that geometric paradigm following mostly the same reasoning : P1 : The administration of justice relies to a great extent on deductive logic; P2 : Legal rules can be formalized (A^B è C); P3 : Facts can be formalized; P4 :The administration of justice consists in the deductive application of the law to the facts; 33 It does not come as a surprise that lately the link between law and justice has been questioned. See Paul H. Robinson and Michael T. Cahill, Law without Justice : Why Criminal Law Doesn’t Give People What They Deserve (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005); and also Roger Berkowitz, The Gift of Science : Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2005). Also see Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, trans. Max Knight (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1967). 34 Roscoe Pound, “Mechanical Jurisprudence,” Columbia Law Review 8 (1908) : 605–23, 606–7 in particular.

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P5 : Computers are binary logic machines (they count, calculate, and operate with categories like true/false); C : Computers can calculate an exact solution based on formalized rules and facts.35 The approach’s main problem lies in the fact that the administration of justice doesn’t rely on deductive logic as much as one might think. Premises 1–4 conform to the geometric paradigm in law, a paradigm unable to describe law’s life, as we have argued in part I. Premises 2 and 3 are very tempting, because they sound objective and scientific. However, they shift the focus of attention from the “administration of justice” to its precondition—that is, to a prior stage. In doing so, an algorithm for the administration of justice becomes an algorithm of law enforcement.36 Formalization itself, as we will illustrate in a moment, becomes the core of the administration of justice : Both legal rules and the facts they are applied to are expressed in language. However, language is sometimes imprecise, unclear, and contradictory. In order to apply a formalized rule to formalized facts, the core of any analytical work must already be done and expressed in the formalization itself. The application of such a formalized rule to a formalized fact merely executes the formalizer’s decision. Hence, justice is not administered by the one who applies formalized law to formalized facts but rather by the formalizer, by the one who decided that the rule should apply in this particular case. Let us look at a concrete example to illustrate this. Homicide (criminal rule) can be formalized as follows :

A^B^C^D è F A : x is a human being B : y was a human being C : y is dead D : x provoked y’s death F : x must be sentenced with prison (between 1 and 10 years)

Consider the following facts : Barbara gives birth to a son, Helmut. Helmut grows up and gets married to Rose. One day, Helmut kills Rose. These facts can be formalized as follows : A^B^C^D Barbara is a human being (A) Rose was a human being (B) Rose is dead (C)

35 Paul-Henri Steinauer, L’informatique et l’application du droit (Freiborg : Editions Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 1975); Allen Harris, “Judicial Decision Making and Computers,” Villanova Law Review 12 (1967) : 272–312. 36 Ibid., 246–53, states that a computer can only apply the law, this suggests that such a pure mechanism can only enforce law, not create it. He then writes that the legislator should have this mechanical application in mind when writing the rules of law, which in turn support our conclusion that law is shifting backward.

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Barbara provoked Rose’s death by giving birth to Helmut, which in turn was causal to Rose’s death (D)

A machine analyzing these formalized facts and applying the formalized legal rule would come to the conclusion that Barbara must be convicted of homicide and therefore punished. Yet, such a result would not at all mimic our actual administration of justice.37 We know that the administration of justice takes place at the moment of formalization because we feel it.38 Indeed, the formalizer remains free in his decisions (i.e., his formalizing), but not the one applying these formalizations. No matter whether they are human judges, mechanisms, or machinery, they are not free in their analyses and decisions. Giving birth to someone who later on happens to kill someone else is not what we commonly would call “provoking the latter’s death.” Wanting to have a child would not commonly imply wanting everything that child would do. Therefore, the rule’s formalization would seem faulty since it does not take into account intentionality. One could argue that the rule’s formalization does not take each man’s free will into account. It is quite obvious that the one who formalizes rules and facts, not the mechanism or machine applying them, makes the decisions. The one who decides isn’t the one who wrote the condition “x provoked y’s death” but rather the one who states that “provoking someone’s death” also means giving birth to a son who later kills his wife. Again we find that where there is pure mechanicality, there is no liberty, no life, no law. As the example shows, formalized deductive systems cannot produce what we call law. Moreover, formalization cannot achieve what it promises to do : it cannot substitute human jurisprudence but rather it moves the administration of justice elsewhere. The application of deductive logic based on formalized facts and laws seems possible. Yet, it does not pertain to the administration of justice.39 It is not law that is mechanized by such a procedure but something else. Law seems to elude our attempt at mechanization, as life does. But perhaps these problems occur because mostly we are trying to adapt justice to computers rather than computers to justice. If we plan to design a possible mechanical justice, we should disregard computers’ mechanisms and structures (especially their binary logical character) and try to identify a properly functioning administration of 37 We are aware that some readers would argue that this mechanism leads to an unwanted solution because the rule it applies or the facts it is based on haven’t been formalized correctly. This objection leads precisely to the conclusion we wanted to illustrate : the administration of justice is then shifted to a prior stage. 38 George Edward Moore, “A Defense of Common Sense,” in Philosophical Papers (London : George Allen & Unwin Publishers, 1959), 32–45; Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York : Harper & Row Publishers, 1972). 39 Roscoe Pound, “Mechanical Jurisprudence,” Columbia Law Review 8 (1908) : 605–23. Pound describes jurisprudence’s mechanization as a petrification process (606–7).

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justice’s necessary features. Only after that we should turn to computers and try to make them match these features and characteristics. Let us start from today’s actual legal systems and identify justice’s distinctive characteristics, for they will constitute our algorithm’s main features. To our minds the following features characterize law and jurisprudence : self-reference, the use of criteria on which we have agreed upon, and uncertainty, to some extent. Furthermore, they are susceptible to social evolution and the influence of those directly concerned. The algorithm therefore will have to reproduce all this. That is, it will (1) be self-referential; (2) work with predetermined criteria; (3) be uncertain to some extent; (4) be influenced by those to whom it applies; and (5) be open to social evolution. Equal Justice and Self-Reference Of course, each case is different, but then we seem to have a tendency to compare different cases and to think that a more or less similar case should be treated equally and deserves a more or less similar answer.40 Evidently, the core question is what exactly can be qualified as similar. Different solutions do not pose a problem as long as the particular case differs from other cases previously decided upon or as long as we explain why previous cases haven’t been judged correctly. It is noteworthy that we tend to establish similarities rather than differences. Our ability to see what is common allows us to reduce complexity by way of abstraction. We look at facts, identify what they have in common, and induce general rules. We tend to subsume new cases as mere instances under previously established general statements or rules.41 This “normativity of facts” makes the law, to some extent, self-referential. Again, a judge sentencing a thief can serve as an example. Independent of principles like stare decisis, every judge will primarily look at other, previous judgments for theft. Such self-reference is, in practice, largely justified by invoking the equal treatment principle. Nevertheless, equal treatment can only legitimate one of the acceptable sentences, not an inacceptable sentence. This means that it isn’t because we treat every similar case similarly that the treatment itself is just. To prove this let’s pursue this idea ad absurdum. A teacher has to correct students’ exams. Due to the fact that he doesn’t have enough time to correct these exams he gives a C to every student. All the students receive the same average grade : C. Simply because all the students receive the same grade doesn’t mean that the grade itself is just. One could naturally argue that all the exams weren’t similar and that such a correction violates the principle 40 Cf. the discussion about equality and relativity supra I/A. 41 Pound also describes this tendency and emphasizes its role in jurisprudence’s mechanization : Pound, “Mechanical Jurisprudence,” 607 : “Principles were no longer resorted to in order to make rules to fit cases. The Rules were at hand in a fixed and final form, and cases were to be fitted to the rules.”

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of equal treatment. This leads to the even more difficult question : What does a particular student deserve ? To answer this question, one must inevitably compare one exam with others. Since law is a symbolic process, we might look at law’s self-reference as a consequence of law’s symbolic character. Judging an offense shows both the infringed rule’s importance and its resistance to the infringement.42 Moreover, the sentence mirrors the offense’s more or less condemnable and reprehensible character compared to other offenses. Law represents a hierarchy of infringements, a hierarchy of social expectations. The prison term adequate for any offense cannot be known. All we can know is whether, compared to other rules, one rule is more or less important to society. Therefore, if an algorithm is to mimic justice, it must take precedents into account (namely previous decisions in similar cases), just as a judge would do. Such an algorithm would have to find similar cases and analyze the pronounced sentences. It could then decide on a similar sentence and, by doing so, create and maintain the symbolic hierarchy of social expectations. Predetermined Criteria Law is self-referential mainly because it is a symbolic process. Law is a language. As such, it is not identical with “reality,” but rather separate and isolated from it. However, it needs be congruent to reality in some way, it cannot be totally arbitrary.43 Decisions (outcomes of our communication) may be arbitrary; the language that legitimates these decisions (these outcomes) may not be. We have to speak the same language (or play the same language game) in order to communicate and to agree. Justification by referring to commonly known and admitted principles (shall we say “words” ?) turns the arbitrary into law, the nonsense into sense. Justification normally operates on the basis of (democratically legitimated) abstract rules defining the relevant criteria one has to consider when confronted with a case. Again, these criteria have to be relevant; they should not be arbitrary. To give a concrete example : the owner of a parcel of land wants to expand his house and requests the competent authority’s approval to do so. Without even knowing the relevant statute (or rule), one can safely state that the authority can either grant the approval or refuse to give it. The outcome is contingent. However, the argumentation by which the authority is bound to legitimize its decision cannot be arbitrary. If the authority decides to refuse its approval by referring to, for example, the will of God or the color of the owner’s shirt to justify its decision, chances 42 Niklas Luhmann, Rechtssoziologie, 4th ed. (Wiesbaden : VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), 43. He speaks of norms as contra-factually stabilized expectations. 43 See Ludwig Wittgenstein on “language-games” in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1958).

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are high that the owner won’t accept it. Outcome may be contingent, but judges should have good reasons to support their decisions. Criteria applied in judicial decisions serve less to find the correct solution than to justify it with a higher chance of acceptance, not only from the owner himself but also from other owners, for instance. The acceptance of a decision is linked to the criteria the decision refers to. Acceptance stems from the relevance of these criteria and from consent to their expression in the written law. Through democratic processes we agree on texts that contain the criteria thought to be relevant. Consequently, we are more likely to accept sentences or decisions based on these criteria. An algorithm that aims for acceptance, therefore, should be constructed correspondingly on such criteria. Let us use our example of theft again : In Switzerland, the relevant criteria for judging such an act can be found in article 139 of the Swiss Criminal Code : appropriation of moveable property (with consideration of its value); which belongs to another person; acting in the name of one’s own or another’s unlawful gain; with the object of permanently depriving the owner of it.44 Judgment for theft should be based on, or at least justified with these democratically determined criteria. Yet, there remains an important problem : these criteria seem very close to a formalization of law, something we found to be inadequate und dysfunctional before. How can we possibly avoid ridiculous mechanization ? In the following paragraph, we will argue that both uncertainty and the possibility to influence the final decision serve that scope. Uncertainty and Possibility as Influential to the Final Decision Any modification of a purely mechanical application of criteria should take into account possible critiques. Despite reference to relevant and accepted criteria, any automatically pronounced sentence can obviously be unjust because, for example, the person convicted is innocent or because the sentence is perceived as too harsh. In such cases, one should be able to raise an objection against it. This being said, raising objections cannot suffice to produce justice; the objection must also have the power to influence the decision. A system that offers the possibility to raise objections but does not grant these objections any potential to influence the decision in question would be regarded neither as just nor as acceptable. Hence, an algorithm mimicking justice should be capable of taking into account objections and consequently arriving at conclusions and decisions different from the initial ones. Objections should allow us to criticize not only the relevant criteria’s misapplication but also the criteria themselves (asserting their irrelevance, among other things) and thereby possibly influence the decision. A system 44 Swiss Criminal Code of December 21, 1937 (SR 311.0).

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that applies the same legal consequences regardless of other possibly important elements and circumstances would not be perceived as just. Yet, a decision’s acceptance is not solely based on its justification but also on the fairness of the process of sentencing and deciding. We would probably refrain from calling just any process that we cannot influence at all, be it only minimally. Any algorithm that applies the same solution over and over again, mechanically and fully predictably, would be perceived as that : mechanics and therefore, as we have seen, contradictory to justice. One possible explanation for this lies in the relation of past, present, and future. A system mechanically applying predefined schemes would necessarily apply the past to the future.45 One a case has been decided (en if this was years ago), we have a tendency to repeat that decision, without considering the possibility of doing something else. We simply would replicate the past—not having any liberty. In Bergson’s description, mechanicality is contrary to liberty, it stiffens the living. Mechanicality is the description of something that cannot be described (and thus it is mechanization of something that cannot be mechanized).46 An example from everyday life might serve as an illustration : I may plan my future or part of it. If I plan, for example, my holidays for the next two years without having the possibility to change my opinion or to opt out, I would not feel free during that period of time, regardless of the fact that I myself was the author of that planning. Similarly, law is not characterized by certainty but (rather surprisingly) by uncertainty. Something the dictum Coram iudice et in alto mari sumus in manu Dei (before the court and on the high sea one is in God’s hands) illustrates quite well. In the words of Teubner : “Law is certainly synthetically determined, but not analytically determinable; it is dependent on the past, but not predictable.”47 Certainty would not only make the law (absolutely) predictable and therefore subject to abuse and calculation.48 Certainty would also make the achievements of the law more difficult to accept and maybe even inacceptable or, as Bergson would say, laughable or ridiculous. 45 As Pound justly remarks : “One of the obstacles to advance in every science is the domination of the ghosts of departed masters. Their sound methods are forgotten while their unsound conclusions are held for gospel.” Pound, “Mechanical Jurisprudence,” 606–7. 46 Bergson, Le rire, 99–100. “Le raide, le tout fait, le mécanique, par opposition au souple, au continuellement changeant, au vivant, la distraction par opposition à l’attention, enfin l’automatisme par opposition à l’activité libre, voilà, en somme, ce que le rire souligne et voudrait corriger.” 47 Gunther Teubner, “‘And God Laughed …’ : Indeterminacy, Self-Reference and Paradox in Law,” German Law Journal 12, no. 1 (2011) : 378. 48 A certain amount of predictability of course is necessary. Oliver Wendell Holmes defined law by its predictable character (prediction theory of law) : “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.” “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review 10 (1897) : 457.

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Along with uncertainty comes the fact that we are more likely to accept a judgment if we have the opportunity to argue our case and the feeling that we could succeed. Uncertainty necessarily contains at least the slightest possibility to influence the decision, or should we say, it offers us at least the possibility to imagine we could influence, or have influenced the decision. If the legal system’s answer remains always the same, regardless of our arguments, we would not accept such a decision as law at all. Any objection is senseless when there is simply no chance at all that it will succeed. Hence, in order for an objection to be meaningful at all, there must be a possibility (as small as it might be) that the objection will be approved, and this in turn means that there must exist a minimal amount of uncertainty as to whether the objection will be approved or dismissed. Hence, law must be uncertain to some extent in order to constitute law at all. If our algorithm is to produce justice, it necessarily must contain a certain amount of uncertainty. It is uncertainty that softens a uniform administration of justice’s harshness and inhumanity to some extent. Moreover, uncertainty obstructs calculation and abuse. In summation : acceptance of a mechanical justice’s outcomes or decisions presupposes an algorithm capable of (1) taking into account precedent decisions; (2) justifying its decisions by reference to relevant criteria; while these decision are both (3) uncertain to some extent; and (4) can potentially be influenced by the concerned party. Openness and Self-Referent Evolution Legal systems are in constant evolution : they adapt to society’s expectations, learn from their mistakes, and so forth. It seems highly unlikely that we would ever accept an immutable system that issued the same decisions over and over again, even if they were consistent with prior decisions (self-reference), justified by reference to relevant criteria, and to some extent uncertain (possibility to lodge an opposition with uncertainty as to its approval or dismissal).49 As time goes by, it is also highly probable that criteria once felt as adequate may come to seem inappropriate (e.g., sexual abuse and marriage of perpetrator and victim). Law evolves with society’s expectations. Rape (art. 190 SCC) might constitute a suitable example. Rape committed by a husband on his wife was qualified as an offense prosecuted only upon complaint by the victim, from 1942 onward, the year the Swiss Criminal Code came into force. In 2004 this changed, and today, rape committed in a marital relation

49 Pound in “Mechanical Jurisprudence” states : “The effect of all system is apt to be petrification of the subject systematized. […] One of the obstacles to advance in every science is the domination of the ghosts of departed masters. Their sound methods are forgotten, while their unsound conclusions are held for gospel” (606–7). This is precisely what we want to avoid.

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is qualified as an offense liable to public prosecution.50 Moreover, it is quite possible if not probable, that we do not even think about all the possibly relevant criteria for judging cases. Consequently, we should have the possibility to add new criteria if they are deemed necessary. Therefore, our algorithm should be able to evolve. It should have the capacity to modify the criteria it is based on, and, consequently, be capable of learning (adapting or changing). It should have the capacity of autopoesis. After analysis of an objection raised, it could, for example, automatically organize a survey and thereby recognize the existence of a certain amount of other oppositions on the same or other grounds. Doing so would enable it to question the legitimacy of its actual criteria. It thereby could change these criteria if need be. Such a process would be democratic and very similar to the Swiss model of public initiative and referendum.51 III Acceptance of a Mechanical Justice We have argued that our algorithm should be self-referential in order to work with predetermined criteria, that it must be uncertain to some extent (with the possibility to potentially influence the final decision), and able to evolve. All this, of course, engenders practical problems. While part II focused on the principles of constructing an algorithm aimed at justice would have to enact, part III will address six practical problems of creating an algorithm so designed. Quality Evaluation Problem The first problem an algorithm designed to administer justice would encounter is that of quality evaluation. Computers calculate; they work with quantity, with true/false dichotomies. Yet, law does not only require quantities but also qualities for its functions. Facts or arguments are never entirely true or false; most of the time they are somewhere in between.52 We could be tempted to try quantifying law. However, as we have tried to show with our discussion on formalization, quantification would get us away from justice. Therefore, we need a way to evaluate qualities. Law is not so much a logical, but rather an empirical process. It is not as objective and rational as one might think, and as Oliver Wendell Homes, of course, knew very well : “The life of the law hasn’t been logic, it has been experience.”53 Administration of justice is not only a symbolic process, but also a subjective and intuitive one. 50 See article 190 paragraph 2 SCC (cum 30 SCC); repealed by nr. I of the Federal Act of October 3, 2003 (AS 2004 1403; BBl 2003, 1909, 1937). 51 See article 138–42 of the Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation of April 18, 1999 (SR 101). 52 See our remark about quantum physics and Schrödinger’s cat above. 53 Holmes, The Common Law, 3.

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Therefore, the question is : Can a quantified administration of justice—including the possibility (1) to influence the decision by lodging oppositions, but (2) doing so under uncertainty—make up for the lack of quality evaluation ? And if not, is there a way to escape the quality evaluation problem ? It seems safe to state that today’s computer technology does not yet permit a real quality evaluation (it does not yet permit subjectivity). This being said, we could get around the problem by introducing human beings at a specific stage or moment of the procedure. We could, for example, provide the possibility to lodge a second opposition, which in turn would trigger a human judge’s decision. Or, we could make provisions that a human judge examines a certain number of decisions/ judgments that would be randomly chosen. In such a structure, human judges would not be superfluous but rather complementary to our algorithm, since the algorithm would only discharge them from the mass of basic cases. By applying such an algorithm only to offenses against property and traffic law violations, more than half of all criminal cases could be withdrawn from human jurisprudence. This, in turn, would enable them to dedicate more time to problematic cases. Symbolic Problem The second problem that the mechanization of justice would have to face is that, with mechanization, justice would lose (at least some of) its symbolic character. As we have seen, mechanical justice can also produce the basic symbolic hierarchy of norms a humanly administrated justice creates. However, since a machine would pronounce these sentences, the procedure and the judgment would essentially take place between the offender and a machine, and this, in turn, would mean between the offender and himself. In front of another human being, we are more likely to feel remorse, to recognize we have done something wrong. Justice administration has primarily a symbolic function. Justice is part of society, it takes place among human beings, and therefore has to do with ethics and hence shame. One cannot overestimate the importance of ethical shaming and it is uncertain as to what extent a machine could produce it. It is possible that law’s symbolic function would disappear if offenders just had to deal with machines when breaking the law. Essentially, the offender would be alone without any contact to other human beings in the process. More important still, the sentences would be almost invisible to society, because they would take place outside of it. Since there is no compelling reason to admit to the existence of something we cannot see, justice would become invisible and thus inexistent. Transparency Problem In order to be functional and to achieve its goal, our algorithm’s design should remain hidden. Knowledge of the fact that the judicial decision contains a certain amount of randomness would hinder its acceptance. Randomness always has to be

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justified—or should we say hidden—by a rational explanation referring to relevant criteria. It was Valery who justly remarked : “Nous sommes faits pour ignorer que nous ne sommes pas libres.”54 There exist strong indicators that ignorance plays a major role in a deterministic causation’s acceptance. Yet, that lack of liberty in an algorithm can easily be outweighed by ignorance of this deficiency. This is the basic idea of Turing’s “imitation game,” where through an interface—that is, without seeing whom we are addressing—we can ask two different individuals questions, one of whom is a computer, the other a human being.55 Consequently, it seems more important to reasonably imagine oneself as a free being than to really be free. Interestingly, John Rawls’s theory of the “veil of ignorance” seems to link quite well with this, since it proposes a form of ignorance in order to see justice.56 According to Rawls, individuals that have to design societal rules chose an equal rights system as soon as they do not precisely know to which social group they themselves would belong. Due to the rule makers’ ignorance, they will not try (and not be able) to favor their own interests. It is their ignorance that enables them to design just and fair rules. So it seems that (a certain form and amount of) ignorance and justice are somehow related. The more we know, the less we are able to consider something as just. Of course, such a conclusion constitutes a failure in a certain sense. A system that must hide itself, and rule makers that must forget who they are in order to design a fair system, are not admirable. But then, although we need explanations (and we constantly are on the lookout for them), and we need knowledge to some extent, knowledge and explanations have their limits. Do we need to see behind the scene, do we need to see some so-called truth ? Seeing the truth frequently produces disobedience and disillusion. In Wittgenstein’s words : “To be sure there is justification; but justification comes to an end.”57 Actually, the administration of justice is already based on a certain kind of randomness. It consists of arbitrary (namely subjective) decisions that are turned into law only by reference to criteria declared relevant. However, these (basically arbitrary) decisions only lose their arbitrary character when the criterion is applied over and over again with time passing. The transparency problem consists in the fact that law, in order to be operational (in order to gain acceptance and hence to be valid), must deceive. Law seems to be something like an enormous placebo. This, of course, raises important concerns about its legitimacy to do so.58 54 Valery, Cahiers, 498 : “We are made to ignore that we are not free”; our own translation.. 55 Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 433–60. 56 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1971), 207. 57 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 192. 58 See also Marcel Alexander Niggli and Marc Amstutz, “Recht als Amoral,” in Herausforderungen an das Recht am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Francois Paychère (Stuttgart : Franz Steiner, 1995), 11–32.

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Mechanical Randomness Problem The fourth problem we encounter is the problem of mechanical randomness. This can be expressed as follows : Computers work with algorithms that have to be programmed. However, randomness never is programmed. Thus, computers cannot generate randomness. If our algorithm depends on a certain amount of randomness in order to mimic justice, we face an important problem if it cannot be achieved. First, let us explain why we cannot create randomness through calculation. Calculation is an exact science. Numbers are abstract elements that are defined in a certain way. For instance, 2 is defined as 1+1, and 4 as 1+1+1+1. Therefore, 2+2 has to be equal to 4. The result of such a calculation cannot be random without being false. Yet, you can design an algorithm that calculates the result of 1+1 as being 10. Of course, this would not be correct with regard to our definition of 1 and 10. However, since we programmed the computer to calculate in such a way (i.e., 1+1=10), the resulting 10 would not be a random one. Rather, it is the result of our calculation (correct or incorrect, yet defined). Therefore, the goal of computing a random number is paradoxical, because the very concept of randomness implies the absence of order and coherence. However, all computational calculation relies on formulas, and their results are necessarily deterministically causal. Here, we can think of websites that generate “random” passwords. This is what is called “pseudorandomness.”59 Pseudorandomness is the result of a formula, of an algorithm that is so complicated that its result does not seem deterministically causal but random. As can easily be guessed, it is mainly used in cryptography. So, pseudorandomness is something that seems random but actually is not; in fact the Greek verb ψεύδω means “to deceive.” If a computer is to produce real randomness, it needs to rely on some external cause; it must measure some randomness in the outside world. It is possible, for example, to link a cosmic-ray detector to a computer. Since one cannot mathematically describe and thus predict when cosmic rays will hit a certain surface, the occurrence of a cosmic ray hitting that surface will be random. The same holds true for radioactive decay. Only by measuring such cosmic rays or radioactive decays, could a computer have a random input and thus generate a random output. Speed Problem The fifth problem we can identify is the speed problem. The problem results from the speed of our actual, “real” justice administration system : even if an algorithm could decide a vast number 59 See Oded Goldreich, Computational Complexity  : A Conceptual Perspective (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008); Oded Goldreich, A Primer on Pseudorandom Generators (Providence, RI : American Mathematical Society, 2010); Oded Goldreich, Modern Cryptography, Probabilistic Proofs and Pseudorandomness (Berlin : Springer, 1999); and Salil P. Vadhan, “Pseudorandomness,” Foundations and Trends® in Theoretical Computer Science 7, no. 1–3 (2011) : 1–336.

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of cases in a very short time, the enforcement of these sentences, as well as all other measures preceding or following the actual sentencing would still need to be managed by human beings. The human part of the decision system would not be able to handle all the cases the algorithm could decide. In fact, any computational algorithm would face a bottleneck problem. Accelerating the administration of justice would not make the rest of the world go faster. It would be useless to speed up the administration of justice, if the enforcement of its decisions would be incapable of keeping up with it. The human bottleneck would cause the judicial system to collapse. Therefore, designing our algorithm, we should take into account that bottleneck and introduce a kind of speed control in order to prevent the piling up of cases. Error Tolerance Problem Finally, the sixth problem we face is a psychological one : human beings seem to be more likely to accept errors made by other human beings than by machines. We do not understand or accept the concept of machines making mistakes. We perceive machines that commit errors as faulty and in need of repair. We perceive computers or machines as completely reliable, with perhaps an exception when they break down entirely. A computer capable of computing a calculation must give the correct result, not any other one. On the other hand, we are tolerant of mistakes committed by humans, since human beings are perceived as “imperfect” or “faulty.” A concrete example might help to illustrate this point : People tend to have more faith in their GPS navigation systems than in the signs they see along the road. In fact, some of us would follow our GPS in a direction exactly opposite to our destination. When we finally admit that our GPS was wrong, we tend to bring it back to the vendor or to replace it with a new one (if not by chance we find out that we ourselves did not configure the machine correctly). We forgive a relative, a friend, or even a stranger with relative ease when they admit to their error indicating the wrong direction. We would not do the same thing with a GPS system leading us astray. So, where there is more than just one possible and justifiable solution to a question, as is typically the case with legal cases, decisions are much more likely to be accepted when they are made by human beings than by machines. The probable cause for this lies in the fact that if a human being renders an unfavorable decision, we can always retreat to the position that the decision was wrong and unjust because the decision maker was wrong. If a machine renders the decision, however, such an argument would be excluded and immediately be qualified as self-justification, since the machine could not be wrong.60 60 On self-justification and mistakes made by others, see Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (San Diego, CA : Harcourt, 2007).

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Conclusion In the foregoing, we have tried to show that today law faces a new challenge : quantity. In order to cope with that challenge, law has evolved and become a quasi-mechanical system based on logical deductions. We have argued that such an evolution kills justice, as we understand it, because pure mechanicality is not able to encompass law’s functionality and produce its proper life. As an alternative, we have proposed to proceed bottom-up, and first to analyze law’s characteristics in order to then design a mechanical justice system based on the characteristics found. The idea is to create a system that could handle the sheer quantity of cases, while at the same time avoiding mechanical jurisprudence as Pound describes it. Therefore, our thought experiment set out to identify our current justice administration’s main features. We found law to be characterized by its (1) self-referential character, (2) use of criteria we have agreed upon, and (3) uncertainty (to some extent). Furthermore, we found the necessity of law’s (4) constant evolution and (5) capacity to be influenced by those directly concerned. Applying these elements to the design of a possible algorithm capable of administrating justice, we found different problems, namely that (1) the evaluation of quality is inevitable; (2) judgments bear a symbolical meaning, and that judgments rendered by machines bear different symbolic meanings than those of human beings; (3) our algorithm should not be transparent or openly declared; (4) randomness is inevitable although difficult to realize; (5) the speed of justice administration could be too great; and finally (6) the necessity to find a way of dealing with errors made by machines. To sum it all up, we can safely state now that our starting point should be the law, and not mechanics. In doing so, we find that justice (and its administration) are much more complex than one might think. Especially in that they are essentially free (or should we say, contingent). Mechanics are not an adequate means to capture and reflect law’s primordial characteristics; that mechanics necessarily destroy the law. It does not come as a surprise, then, that the dreams of reason produce monsters, as Goya knew.61 It seems important, though, to note that it is not the link between law and rationality in itself that is problematic, but the link to a specific form of rationality, namely Newtonian physics. We might advance with greater ease once we admit that law bears greater resemblance (and hence is linked more strongly) to quantum physics and its often perplexing complexities.

61 See Francisco Goya’s print El sueño de la razón produce monstrous, 1799.

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45

II Toward A Fantastic Genealogy of the Articulable Ludger Hovestadt I 7,000,000,000 50 — II enthusiasm 53 — III stepping on the brakes 55 — ­IV Bodies of thinking 56 — V aggressive ignorance 75 — VI ON TODAY'S STAGE 79 — VII BACK-COUPLINGS TO A THIRD REALM 83 — VIII WAYS OUT OF SECOND NATURE 85 — IX A LOVE AFFAIR 88

Ludger Hovestadt is Professor for Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. His approach, broadly speaking, is to look for a new relationship between architecture and information technology. He aims at developing a global perspective that relates to and integrates with developments in different fields such as politics and demographics, as well as technology, in a postindustrial era. He is the inventor of the digitalSTROM® chip and founder of several related companies in the fields of smart building technology and digital design and fabrication. A showcase of his recent work can be found in Beyond the Grid – Architecture and Information Technology: Applications of a Digital Architectonic (Birkhäuser, 2009). www.caad.arch.ethz.ch

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“Actors, taught not to let any embarrassment show on their faces, put on a mask. I will do the same. So likewise, I am now about to mount the stage of the theatre of the world, where I have so far been a spectator, and come forward masked.” 1 “When contemplating the NotreDame cathedral, one had better consider how its compares with other cathedrals and sacral buildings rather than begin by visualizing it as an accretion of mineral solids.” 2 In the last volume of this series I introduced a “fantastic genealogy of the printable” : today we are 1 2

One of the earliest examples of Descartes’s writings from a lost notebook, preserved in a copy made by Leibniz, 1619. D. Corfield, Towards a Philosophy of Real Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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printing not just written or drawn material, today we print all things that are, in a machinic and analytic way, depictable. And of course, every new abstraction of the technics of writing—and we understand printing as just such an abstraction—engenders a new kind of language. Therefore we shall here, in a next step, attempt to abstract from both Saussure’s and Chomsky’s linguistic paradigms, and raise the question about the articulable on a new plateau. That’s no easy job. Of course not. And I am far from pretending I have fully understood it or am able to embrace it in toto. I am an architect and a computer scientist who chafes against the limits of his disciplines. Nevertheless, a promising body of thinking is shaping up. 48

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Yet, even in a sketchy, preliminary form it would exceed the scope of this book; hence we shall present it in two parts. The first one, here below, “Toward a Fantastic Genealogy of the Articulable,” prepares the ground for the second one, “A Scheme for a Fantastic Genealogy of the Articulable,” which will appear in the next volume of this series. Thus, let’s begin in the fashion of the Fantastic Genealogy of the Printable, and examine today’s speech, examine what we are able to express, articulate with the new script. All this, as must forcefully be stressed, is in no way merely a decadent nicety, for this new manner of speaking turns out to be incomparably more powerful than anything we know. Indeed, II  toward a Fantastic Genealogy of the Articulable

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it is about the constitution of our digital, global world. But let us relax, lest we find ourselves incapable of clear thinking. I 7,000,000,000

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People. So many. Talking, speaking, discussing, arguing, shouting, quarreling, threatening, bragging, swaggering, strutting it, boasting, priding themselves, competing, fighting, exercising, educating, cultivating, fostering, managing, acting, refining. Since forever. Getting up, washing, yawning. Writing, calculating, counting, integrating, planning, construing, fantasizing, dreaming, yearning, discovering, inventing, constructing, reckoning, simulating, optimizing, narrating, negotiating, arguing … telephoning, listening in, watching in, doing checks, e-mailing, listening to music, ingesting news, googling for whatever : neighbors, the news, the latest flick, the weather, Earth, water, food. Security. Breathing. Spoken. Written. Thrust. It’s noisy out there. Warm, cold, dry, wet. To run, swim, fly. Fields, buildings, cities. Workshops, factories, industries. Machines, appliances, applications. Landscapes, environment, nature, climate, milieu. Organs, organisms. To analyze, draft, calculate, construct, visualize, encode … five hundred years of analysis. Plenty moved. Plenty changed. Much curiosity, plenty of urge. Heaps of ambition, toil, aspiration, impatience. Mountains of doubt, fear, shudders, panic. Lots of mistakes, of dying, of sorrow. Analysis before synthesis. So as to forestall the inventing of novel truths.3 Sheltered in the whole. Immotive mover. Yet invariably the annoyance of those gaps between pieces that won’t add up to a whole; of some Pythagorean quantities that comprise proportions while being neither even nor odd; of Leibnizian numbers that are functional while lacking proportions; of some Gödelian operations that are not functional yet articulable. So what is there to do ? Today ? Slim trust broadly in language,4 in things spoken, talked over, promised, agreed; distrust rather toward attribution, abstraction, notions stemming from those parts that 3 4

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Jules Vuillemin about Descartes, in Introduction à la philosophie de l’algèbre, vol. I, Recherches sur quelques concepts et méthodes de l’Algèbre Moderne (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). Alain Badiou, e.g., discards the idea of “notion” and argues explicitly for handing language over to axiomatic algebra.

DOMESTICATING SYMBOLS — Metalithikum II

won’t go into one integer. It is within that distrust that language is being analyzed and acquiring its significance today as a structure, as a construct shorn of the unexpected. And not without success, either : Linguistic Turn, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism. And it’s inheriting the sanctuary within the whole as well as the repugnance against any parts that won’t fit. Hence apprehension mostly outstripping any marveling at the richness of our world. This sheltered view unable to perceive such richness other than reductively in narrow terms of affluence. And in fear—of shrinkage, of using up resources. And in shame—of consumption. Zero energy, e.g. as though no-energy might throw up anything but deadlock. Balance. Entropy. Uniformity, lethargy. Nothingness. Boredom. Individuality, creativity, caring, provision, security, equality, justice, brotherliness5 … pawns in the entropic language game of analytic-functional balances.6 Please bear with this text’s impatience. Harsh argumentation about many of today’s thought figures and their champions—do not take it as verdicts but as appraisive pointers letting a thought be articulated quickly and without too many words. Critique is not destructive as usual; it is, unusually perhaps, valuing. In the process we will, on the one hand, acknowledge the going notion that there is not enough space on our planet for everybody,7 while remaining aware of the dead end we’d be heading into, were we to follow paradigms of fundamental scarcity. On the other hand however, taking one step back, we will take 5

6 7

Jeremy P. Rifkin’s popular The Empathic Civilization : The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (New York : Tarcher, 2010), e.g. contains the droll attempt at naturalizing, via the global technological infrastructures, all global problems into our capacity for compassion. How were this supposed to work, save through delegating guilt to technology at the price of collective submission to this very same technology ? … with the effect that, as a serf, one has absolved oneself of any guilt and involvement : just as witnessed everywhere in the Western world. “Language game” : term created by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1936–46 (Oxford : Blackwell, 1953), § 23. Interesting examples are the “green” Wuppertal Institute or the Rocky Mountain Institute, both characterized by notions such as “ecological footprint,” and forty years proportionating of our cultural ways of life—endeavors as futile as they are prominent. These argumentations had their heyday in connection with the CO2 discussion and the climate conferences in which, bowing to the diktat of general comprehensibility, calculating happens by the rule of three, and argumentation through proportionating ratiocination. Those discussions thus belong entirely and unequivocally to the thought universe of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, i.e. way before the advent of any technology. As though technology were not culturally invented and brought about, but a natural given. And here again, as an outgrowth of naturalization, the brazen demand of submission to some proportionality-reduced technology geared at an ideologically projected world population of four, respectively ten billion, but with an actual capacity of—as their complaint goes—less than one billion people, i.e. the equivalent of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century global population. Cf. Ernst von Weizsäcker et al., Factor Four : Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use; The New Report to the Club of Rome (London : Earthscan, 1997); Factor Five : Transforming the Global Economy (London/Sterling, VA : Earthscan/The Natural Edge Project, 2009); or even with regard to factor 10, cf. http ://www.factor10-institute.org.

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the by now so familiar modern-times analytics as a specific idiom— without critically discarding it, for we owe it our present existence, our wealth, our capabilities in science, medicine, technology. What we are submitting, however, is that this idiom is found wanting in the face of us 7,000,000,000 people on Earth, and falling short of our capabilities, to boot. It will therefore not be enough to improve our effort, our coming to terms among ourselves, our disciplining ourselves. A more fundamental question arises : What if it were not our look upon Earth as a territory, not our tracing the moving shadows of the sun, not our capability for geometry that are our distinctive qualities ? What if we were no longer dependent upon our geometrical intuition, but able to follow our breath, our speech, our articulations ? If we became able to trust the fleeting, the breathed, the atmospheric ? In antiquity and in the Middle Ages it was the substances spoken out as nouns that conferred stability and that most writing was committed to. In modern times their place is taken by the adjectives attributed to the nouns and traced and visualized through our analytics and our constructions. Now, in the face of global logistic infrastructures and generic availabilities, the fleetness of the spoken verbs seems to us the congenial medium for our inquisitive roamings.8 More congenial than the familiar intuitions that trace, shadowlike, the lines of the attributed adjectives—lines that in the global networks are becoming so arbitrary. Isn’t the question rather, 0 or 1 ? Right or left ? Time and again. How then can there be talk of intuitiveness, of lines, of transformations, of constructions ? What is there to be traced ? Which model to be learned from ? Discovering what ? Where to look for some orientation, some security ? Seeing there isn’t a path to be followed. Just 0 or 1. No longer any following the stabilities of the subjects or the moves of the predicates for us. We are now up to learning to dance, to juggle with the 0s and the 1s. Exercise, exercise, exercise, for achieving stabilities from our abilities.9 Let us therefore try to talk differently : let’s cast the verbs first, let’s provoke, assess, and bundle them with the old friends, the attributes, so as to assign them, as we have always done, to the subjects. How then may we cast our words, turn them, and set them, within the streams of our world, 8

9

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We take exception to cybernetic utterances such as that provided by Buckminster Fuller : “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.” I Seem to Be a Verb : Environment and Man’s Future (New York : Bantam, 1970). Or to Lucien Tesnières’s (1893–1954) “dependency grammar” with his core thought that “the verb rules the clause,” Esquisse d’une syntaxe structurale (Paris : Klincksieck, 1953). They treat clauses as a function of their relationality, respectively their structure, thus putting—notwithstanding phraseology to the contrary—adverbs into the first place. Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern (Frankfurt/Main : Suhrkamp, 2009.) In English : Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life : On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge/Malden, MA : Polity, 2013).

DOMESTICATING SYMBOLS — Metalithikum II

and engender them to prosper in their wealth ? We don’t want to stand on the shore being scared of the streaming waters, scared of floods. For how could we learn dancing with the waves, surfing, while being scared of the water ? There is so much our speech is up to describing, naming, meaning, yielding, arousing. Provided we trust it, let it do it. And at all that, our speech is not innate, but our cultural competence, evolved over time. Once our faith went to speaking mythical bodies, then to the bodily logic of the written, intuitive language, and today it is going to the intuitive functions of a language full of values. Today we are now preparing for the step where we ought to learn to trust the appraisive articulation of the live language. And marvel at the richness of our means of expression. Through intuitive scripts we expressed the mythical bodies, multiplied them, let cities emerge. Through functioning apparatuses we expressed the intuitive scripts, multiplied them, engendered landscapes, nations, and history. And now through valuing applications we express the functional apparatuses, multiply them, engender climates, life, and the world. We are now able, through photovoltaics, to print energy, because we are able to express it. Our articulations are so very rich. Rich beyond expectations. With processors, we are able to print our logical, analytical thinking, because we are able to express intuitiveness. Any intuitiveness we know, and any that we may be going to know in the future. All we can articulate. Through machines our bodies became explicit and multiplicate, through the apparatus our motions became explicit and multiplicate, and we are just now experiencing that through the applications our intuitions become explicit and multiplicate. For a long time we followed the shadows of the sun with the nouns of our language and our bodily reflexions; then we brought out the accents of the shadows of the sun with the attributes of our language and our motioned projections. Today we are able to step out of the shadows of the sun, with the verbs of our language and the energized forms of intuition.10 HELLO SUN. The world shimmers. Ever more.

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II Enthusiasm As an architect and IT man I wonder how to design, construct, inhabit these riches. I grew up with the fascination emanating from Fritz Haller’s generic node, and in Konrad Wachsmann’s tradition. With Buckminster Fuller as a model. Thirty, sixty years on, I have a hard time still finding that fascination. Weak shadows. Functionalism is accused of reductionism. Which itself is now the butt of reductionisms. Understood in this fashion, it is impossible to demonstrate 10 Cf. Ludger Hovestadt, “A Fantastic Genealogy of the Printable,” in Printed Physics, ed. Vera Bühlmann and Ludger Hovestadt (Vienna : Ambra, 2012).

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exhaustively all of the generic node’s qualities. Nor those of structures built with it. But does that then really mean there is not much there ? The marveling at, or rather appreciating of, something we created without being directly visible, seems to be on the fade. We are doubting our intellect. Appreciate only what we can touch, what we can see. How may it be considered natural that a screw, lifted from one appliance, can be put into another appliance that will then re-function; that a gramophone can play any instrument, or a telephone transmit any language ? That one number can count apples, pears, and birds ? That letters may render any word, or script any sentence ? Even such as are yet unspoken. Why did we forget that our forebears had different words for either two apples or three apples ? They weren’t any dumber than we are. And their lives weren’t any less rich than ours. But speech, script, numbers, telephoning are cultural inventions, conventions. A bit baffling, this imagining all of it to be simply natural, just lying about somewhere until being discovered one day. Putting on helmets expecting to watch my thoughts. A hundred years ago, they charted faces. Geo-researchers (as earthy and territorial as you can get) were able to prove, or so said the news of August 25, 2011, that bad weather—El Niño in particular—causes civilian wars. While Gaddafi’s palace is being stormed in Tripoli. What are we talking ? Talking up ? “WikiLeaks trusts in the wisdom of the masses.” What wisdom ? A mean value ! Irresponsibly narcissistic rant about our talking. Or the widespread tendency to take the Fukushima nuclear incident for a natural catastrophe. Calculations have been accurate, really. Just the earthquake too strong. And the tsunami synchronous. An unforeseeable set of coincidences. Why are we so quick to reject responsibility ? Whence this lethargy ? How could the fascination so quickly be forgotten that these inventions exerted ? The imagination they required, and the risks taken ? Consciously taken. On account of the fabulousness of possibilities. Somewhat astonishing then this building of metropolises with energy while dumping the risks upon numbers and nature. Not even dreaming of forgoing metropolitan life. Indeed, more of it ! Curiosity. I remember vividly how I was unable to sleep one night after I had seen the first color television picture. Just as if it were today. Or perhaps twenty years later, when on a Xerox monitor different texts were flowing in two independent windows. Or my grandfather’s typewriter for the few important letters, with the strong odor of cigar ashes between the keys. Carbon paper rustling. The fuzzy copies. What sense does it then make to say : this functions this or that way ? No miracle, then ! What are you getting worked up about ? Take it easy. The things, the thoughts, the talking are well rehearsed. An “a” is written this way, an “f” that way. The word “tree” is spelled with such and such letters. Clauses have a subject, a predicate, an object.

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It works. Where went the magic of the first letter on the typewriter ? The magic of the first letters with the fountain pen ? Where did the fascinations, the excitements go ? What was being exercised, what had to be exercised ? How was it exercised ? Who was an expert ? What was he up to ? Breeding grounds for new, different adventures. What was being pacified ? How was it pacified ? What fears were allayed ? As three hundred years ago ? Or five hundred years ? The year one is only sixty generations away. My grandfather was born 120 years ago. The Napoleonic wars were a mere eighty years earlier. Not very distant, all this. Almost today. III Stepping on the Brakes Technics accelerate.11 Everything quickens. This we are shouting out against stormy weather, against the climate. We are lodged on the dry dam, sitting in our cosy room, driving in our safe car, watching on TV how the river picks up speed, how the water rises, and we call out to it to slow down please because we are afraid. Striving to put the brakes on the storm, the flood. Talking of financial crises, educational calamities, climate catastrophes, media floods. It is all getting too much. Too rapid. Ease off. Decelerate. Making out the culprits to be the technicians, of all people. The very technicians that for centuries haven’t been doing anything but brake, brake, brake.12 Technics is not the rushing torrent. It is the dam, the safe car. The world rushes, and thanks to technics we managed to pull up this or that dam for channeling, decelerating the stream. Technics does not push. Technics impedes. Water, e.g., evasive, always flowed away. Through technics, we channel it, hold it back. So that we may retain it as long as possible. Agriculture. Settledness. Every ideative line decelerates the flow of what is happening. Every scientific reference point is an anchor for our holding onto within the all-engulfing flow. Alright, we can draw faster with lines; calculate speedier with numbers; and, thanks to logic, argue quicker. Build dams higher. Medially speed up our dialectics and our denouncing of technics-driven acceleration. Forgetting, over our narcissistic inebriation, that our analytical masterstrokes are mere thought figures that revolve around our sloweddown comfort and security systems within which in reality, thanks 11 E.g. Paul Virilio, Rasender Stillstand : Essay (Munich, Vienna : Hanser, 1992). French original : L’Inertie polaire : essai sur le contrôle d’environnement (Paris : C. Bourgois, 1990). Or : Jacques Derrida, Apokalypse, ed. Peter Engelmann (Vienna : PassagenVerlag, 2000 [1985]). In English : “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” in Psyche : Inventions of the Other (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2007). 12 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Was ist Philosophie ? (Frankfurt/Main : Suhrkamp, 1996 [1991]). In English : What Is Philosophy ? (New York : Columbia University Press, 1994).

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to that mastery, very little moves. We take multitude for magnitude,13 numbers for quantities, our thinking for real, and are being scared at our own thoughts. As per Jules Vuillemin, above :14 If synthesis is the method of composition, and the eventuality of the inventing of new truths is to be avoided, then analysis must precede synthesis. That is why Descartes invents a mathematical order stripped of any existence outside of thinking. It is schematical and inapt to let us capture the flow of events. But not inapt to become the foundation of a science. We are all too easily following these well-trod paths—in engineering as well as in arts and humanities. For the technically intuitive speech today leads to formal restraining; the humanistically intuitive speech to structural restraining. Raising to a power and taking a root. On these reduced-speed, sheltered, evened-out tracks (the dams) our arguments and analyses (the flow) run ever faster. And they will proliferate. And grow denser and denser. Networks. Safeguards. Insurances. Infrastructures. Comfort. Sustainability. Dwelling types. Hygienes. Psychoanalyses. Designs. Interfaces. Embodiments. Surveillance. Empathies. Sustainabilities. Breakneck standstill. Entropy. Speechlessness, and agitated talking to no one in particular. Technically functional, or humanistically differentiated. Isolated. Silent. Stiffened. Balanced. Entropy. Because we are bent upon avoiding the invention of new truths. Because we are putting analysis before synthesis. IV

Bodies of Thinking

What are computers and what should they be doing ?15 How to make them available in everyday life ? That’s our question, of us architects. What can they do that machines can’t ? They are particularly tiny and rapid machines, or so everybody says. They are too fast, too tiny, and there are too many of them, or so a lot of folks complain. That is practically all there is to hear, besides the unreflecting outpours of the new-technologies champions. Computers are no machines—that’s how we are going to put it. Computers are universal machines,16 or so one often hears. No, we are affirming, that puts it beside the point, they 13 Eudoxos, in chapter V of Euclid’s Elements, distinguishes between numbers (exactly measurable) and magnitudes (which are not). Also : Augustus de Morgan,The Connection of Number and Magnitude : An Attempt to Explain the Fifth Book of Euclid (London : Taylor & Walton, 1836). 14 Vuillemin, Introduction à la philosophie de l’algèbre. 15 Echoing Richard Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen ? (Braunschweig : Vieweg, 1969). In English : “The Nature and Meaning of Numbers,” in Essays on the Theory of Numbers (Chicago : Open Court Publishing Company, 1901), http ://www. gutenberg.org/files/21016/21016-pdf.pdf. 16 The term “Turing or von Neumann Universal Machine” is, in the sense described, appropriately used, but is, regretfully, often getting misused in the sense of “general” or “common.”

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are abstract machines. Now you are overdoing it a bit, you might say. So let us show you where all that leads. Machines make up the infrastructures of today’s world—but we’d speak more appropriately of apparatuses.17 Bundled potentials, capital, projections. With their aid single projects are being economically, technically, politically balanced toward a common ideational aim.18 Infrastructures are networks. In individual, specific balance. Infrastructures are stabilizing horizontally. They demarcate themselves territorially. Scientific disciplines, administrations, industries, nation-states. Stabilizing in their internal motion. In relation to their ideals. That’s the apparatus-like. Computers are different. Totally different. In this image of horizontal, territorial, ideal structures, computers are the junctions.19 Still, they are not—as would be a valve or a pump, an interest rate or a risk, some printed form or instruction, a transformation or a representation—in a functional, ideal, logic relationship with their neighborhood. That’s how we’d understand the familiar machines and apparatuses. Computers, however, lend an operational, ideal, logistic access to the whole network. Computers are cardinals, no ordinals. Concepts, not things. Logistics, not logic. No matter what Frege, Russel, and the cyberneticists may say. Computers afford explicit access to the totality of nodes of the network; machines have the explicit access to their immediate neighbors. Through machines, the ideal network is really explicated. It is reality. Through computers, the ideal network is really available. It is an idea. With computers, in each node the net is present as an idea—at the price, however, that it is not materially present. Every concretization, or rather every articulation in an informationtechnological node, every 0 or 1, indicates—and there our understanding stumbles—that it is not this very concretization that is of interest to us, but the fact that none of all the others are present. Thus we delimit the ideational from the ideal, the concept from the thing, the computer from machines. Thus the computers rest as upright, vertical identities on the functioning, horizontal infrastructures. Machines are no longer the actors of the dramatic thought games of the nineteenth century : theaters, operas, novels, mysteries, journals, reports, geniuses, artists, politicians, scientists, industrialists, bourgeoisie. The machines are now the generically functioning backdrops for the articulations of new actors. New plays on new stages. This openness secures 17 Michel Serres, “Motoren : Vorüberlegungen zu einer allgemeinen Theorie der Systeme,” in Hermes IV, Verteilung (Berlin : Merve, 1992), 43–91. 18 In both the Kantian and Hegelian sense. 19 Cf. in this context especially the idea of Vilém Flusser’s, who characterizes the electronically wired house as a net node. Vilém Flusser, “Die Stadt als Wellental in der Bilderflut,” in Medienkultur (Frankfurt/Main : Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997 [1988]), 175–82.

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the necessary air for fruitful thinking. Unhurried by the speeding, densifying logics of computers as machines. What might be the new scripts on a new stage ? What has been keeping us moving for those past hundred years ? Film, publicity, brands ? Urban phenomena today, in London, Tokyo, Paris, New York ? As well as in Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Singapore ? Delhi, Lagos, perhaps ? As in town, as in the countryside ? How are we cultivating infrastructures today ? Infrastructure as the logical essence of that which we ourselves not long ago called culture. But let us concentrate upon the body of thinking itself and the movement of inversion described in relation to the slowing-down character of technics, and the streaming happenings of the world. It directly contradicts the notion of cultural or technological progress that so dangerously obstructs our adequately dealing with information technology. We expect these inversions to enable us to cultivate both our familiar and unfamiliar cultural riches. The ideal notion of progress requires functional and logical orientation, following the motto That’s the way to do it. If, on the other hand, one is able to articulate, in a particular situation, all the ways that it’s not to be done, one gains breathing space for the different and gets—with the computers as ideate technical module— operational without being forced to function within the dictates of the technical infrastructures. Thus encouraged, we shall find without particular difficulties bodies of thinking and inversions in our culture and enjoy a rich and free view. What, e.g., distinguishes Leibniz, in his famous dispute with Newton ?20 Leibniz affirms the mathematical articulative forms of his time, applies them infinitarily upon themselves, negates them, and thereby proclaims a new notation and new numbers. With his infinitesimals he creates a new level of abstraction, symbolizes the old procedures, and puts them as figures upon the new-level stage. He calls his new numbers a “mathematical fiction”.21 He orthogonalizes the familiar for a new game on a more abstract stage. This is the movement that ought indeed to interest us : in lieu of the notion of progress, the old thinking order is being infinitely self-referentially rethought, inverted, and negatively symbolized. Whereas Newton integrates the new phenomena into the old notation, and then gives a virtuoso performance on the old orthodox stage. With short-lived success. While Leibniz’s playing the new stage took some time before breakthrough; under the 20 A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War : The Quarrel between Newton and Leibniz (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1980). Jason Socrates Bardi, The Calculus Wars. Newton, Leibniz, and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time (New York NY : Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006). 21 On the designation of the infinitesimal as fiction cf. especially no. 6 of Leibniz’s letters to Bartholomé des Bosses (1706). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Leibniz-Des Bosses Correspondence, ed. Brandon Look and Donald Rutherford (New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2007).

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Fig. 1 Promotional film of Electricité de France.

Fig. 2 Curios Gallery at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Fig. 3 Troisdorf (1985) by Gerhard Richter.

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Fig. 4 Rice farming in Japan.

Fig. 5 Wheat farming in Germany.

Fig. 6 Fellini, La Dolce Vita.

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Fig. 7 Marlboro advertisement.

Fig. 8 Lol Coxhill.

Fig. 9 David Bowie, The Man Who Fell to Earth.

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Fig. 10 Mall facade in Singapore.

Fig. 11 Play actress in India.

Fig. 12 Airport, Fischli/ Weiss.

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Fig. 13 Subway in Tokyo.

Fig. 14 3-D printer.

Fig. 15 Elbe Philharmonic Hall Hamburg, Herzog & de Meuron. Fig. 16 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Frank Gehry.

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Fig. 17 Will and Jaden Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness.

Fig. 18 Sunset in Iceland.

Fig. 19 Karlheinz Stockhausen.

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Fig. 20 Konrad Wachsmann.

Fig. 21 Buckminster Fuller. Fig. 24 Alfred Hitchcock in Think Different Apple ads.

Fig. 22 Marcello Mastroianni.

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Fig. 23 Douglas Engelbert.

Fig. 25 The Rider on the White Horse, by Theodor Storm, in an illustration, 1924. Individual struggle.

Fig. 26 Der Schimmelreiter. Film, dir. Hans Deppe and Curt Oertel, 1934. Symbolically dramatized didactic play.

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Fig. 27 Die Schimmelreiter. Film, dir. Lars Jessen, 2008. Deterritorialized schema.

Fig. 28 Hurricane, a mediaized spectacle.

Fig. 29 George Stiny, Shape Grammar, 1972.

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Fig. 30 David Hilbert, Logical Algebra, 1891.

Fig. 31 Machine or no machine ? Machines rebel against testing in Blade Runner, a 1982 film.

Fig. 32 Ibid.

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Fig. 33 Machine or no machine ? Kasparov loses against Deep Blue at chess, 1996.

Fig. 34 What is language up to ? Ali G challenges the computer linguist Noam Chomsky, 2007.

Fig. 35 Stevie Wonder challenges the “symbolimachine builder,” Ray Kurzweil.

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Fig. 36 What is intelligence, now ? Douglas R. Hofstadter, 2005.

Fig. 37 The uneasy birth, coming-out, emancipation from second nature. The Matrix.

Fig. 38 Strike, by Sergei Eisenstein.

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Fig. 39 Mimic octopus. Confining.

Fig. 40 Measuring characters.

Fig. 41 Thought-reading.

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Fig. 42 Bodiless and mindless properties. Clean, unassailable, efficient. Terminator 2, 1991.

Fig. 43 Simulated evolution in a video game, Creatures 3. Fig. 44 Dr. Strangelove, by Stanley Kubrick.

Fig. 45 Wall-E. The last man out cleans up Earth, 2008.

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Fig. 46 Markov indexings.

Fig. 47 Algebraic landscape. Amazonas River presented by Greenpeace.

Fig. 48 Tokyo. Fig. 49 Ecuador.

Fig. 50 Alain Ducasse.

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unceasing and vicious attacks of the standoffish Newton he even lost his reputation for urbanity. So much so far about the overlaying of stages for the purpose of engendering a new body of thinking. In a first step, let us here characterize succinctly the stages played by Western cultural history. The second part of this text will then do it in more depth. So what was being performed on the stage of antiquity and medieval times ? Who were the actors ? What was the scenery ? As actors we find typical characters : fire, heat, tree, roof, tradesman, prince, priest … first and second substances22 … as plays, typical schemata, topoi : all humans are mortal, Socrates is human, Socrates is mortal; Minnesong; the estates; the marketplace; bartering; trades … The scenery : the unmoved mover,23 the proportion of qualities, movements, and positions of the actors. The module is the plinth. Its magnitude determines the numbers. They, not the magnitude, may be inserted into the proportion, the ratio.24 With this ratio, temples, churches, villas, buildings are being erected in artful systems. And on the modern-age stage ? As actors, we find now calculable properties : motion, power, energy … first and second substances in new guise … relationships balanced as stage plays : “When the sun is in the ecliptic, the stars are visible,”25 the individual, health, nature, the landscape, the principality, the bourgeoisie, economy, wealth … As scenery, the unmoved mover in new guise : the function through which the values of the properties are mutually proportionating themselves. The endless continued fractions of circle calculation or interests are being gathered into new-notational functions. Projects thus possible. Rationality’s ratio. Analytical geometry is born. Now apparatuses are being construed within the artful systems of the arithmetic. Intuitive, intertwined, balanced motion lines behind the scenery of things. Leibniz was first in radically formulating this, along with Spinoza. Against this backdrop, the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” is a halfway house. As developments showed, it’s not all about strapping thinking back into being, it’s about the being getting opened up unto speaking. The stage center moves from the basic to the attributed within Aristotle’s ontological square. And Newton ? With his theorem 22 Aristotle, Metaphysics, books 7–9. S. Marc Cohen, “Aristotle’s Metaphysics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2009 (Stanford CA : Stanford University, 2009), http ://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/ aristotle-metaphysics/. 23 Aristotle, Physics, book 8 and in the run-up to his theology (book 12). 24 Howard Stein, “Eudoxos and Dedekind : On the Ancient Greek Theory of Ratios and Its Relation to Modern Mathematics,” Synthese 84 (1990) : 163–211. 25 Example from George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London : Macmillan, 1854). Reprinted with corrections : New York : Dover Publications, 1958.

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“A symmetric polynomial in n unknowns can be written in terms of the elementary symmetric polynomials in n unknowns”26 he construes a procedure through which every balanced curve may be subdivided into a sequence of proportions of the old order. How effective in his time, how orthodox from our time ! This inversion of the old stage into an upright actor of the new stage, this algebraic embodiment,27 we shall call orthogonalization. V Aggressive Ignorance28 Before moving on to looking at exercises in how to speak on our contemporary stage, we shall delve into some detail and corroborate our motivation with a number of concrete examples. In 1987 I began as an architect to turn my research seriously toward information technology. Artificial intelligence, shape grammars. Fritz Haller’s perdifferentiated construction systems as a topic. IT afforded me fascination and easy examples; toys, one might say. As a young researcher one believed of course in those new technologies being applicable to real problems too. But insurmountable difficulties popped up in a hurry, arising from the facile shallowness of the successes of the new technical paradigms. Prime reference, and foundational document of that technology : Stiny 1972.29 A grammar of forms. Fascinating directly in the first games, rapidly frustrating in serious applications. It took me fifteen years to discover and realize the mathematics behind it, and thereby an open discourse and the origin of that technology : Hilbert 1891.30 The same topic and even the same images you produced as an artist, Stiny. Unreferenced. Eighty years earlier than you. And useful for my purpose of modeling architecture in novel fashion. For Hilbert shares the same roots as Fritz Haller’s functionalistic architecture, and is therefore sufficiently differentiated. Indeterminations determine the forms. Your naturalized forms are too simple as starting points. Useless, 26 John Derbyshire, Unknown Quantity : A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra (Washington, DC : Joseph Henry Press, 2006), 102. 27 We are referring to the algebraic fields of group theory, first formulated by Evariste Galois (1811–1832). 28 A particular caveat against possible misunderstandings : as may easily be gathered from its argumentations, operational speed is central to this text and this clashes, in practice, with an emphasis on careful analysis. The text therefore relies upon the integrative power of abstraction, and encourages the readers to be attentive to the choice of language, so as to be able to evaluate on their own the degree of credit they may wish to grant the various trains of thought. And once again : we’ll argue forcefully, differentiate clearly, but reject any attempt to have judgments read into the text. 29 George Stiny and James Gips, “Shape Grammars and the Generative Specification of Painting and Sculpture,” in Proceedings of IFIP Congress 1971 (Amsterdam : North Holland Publishing Co., 1972), 1460–65. Republished in Orlando R. Petrocelli, ed., The Best Computer Papers of 1971 (Princeton, NJ : Auerbach, 1972), 125–35. 30 David Hilbert, “Über die stetige Abbildung einer Linie auf ein Flächenstück,” in Mathematische Annalen 38 (Leipzig : Teubner, 1891), 459–60.

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Stiny. Formal analysis as an architect’s starting point ? Catastrophic. Hilbert’s discourse is vaster, offers an out, is up to assisting me as a researcher. Analysis and synthesis in one. Why, Stiny ? Why this ignorance ? Why this reduction ? Why did you block that path ? Just as most of your colleagues, by the way. Whence this aggressiveness against the rich body of thinking from which our technologies have sprung ? The quest is thus ongoing for similar, serious games, thrust unchanged : Charles Percy Snow, in his much-noticed book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,31 in 1959 describes the clash between the humanities and natural sciences. He laments one-sided syllabi, the impoverishment of those two scientific cultures, and tries to uncover a third culture. And then, a mere thirty-six years later, in an interesting twist, John Brockman’s answer, The Third Culture :32 a gathering of cyberneticists and constructivists proclaiming the passing of the Snowbemoaned cultural starvation, with the following script : Chapter 1— The Evolutionary Idea. (An interesting idea.) Chapter 2—A Collection of Kludges. (A cute show of positivist acrobatics.) Chapters 3+4— Questions of Origin. (Things are getting serious.) Chapter 4—What Was Darwin’s Algorithm ? (The machine.) Chapter 5—Something That Goes beyond Ourselves. (Submission.) This openly pragmatic reduction to technical representation now is the diametrical opposite of the Snow-postulated openness, while being symptomatic for today’s situation : as long as airplanes fly, as computers are getting ever faster, DNA sequenced ever speedier, automobiles ever safer, GPS ever more precise, brain scans ever more colorful, conferences ever larger, and the images of the complexities and emergencies ever more alike … we fall into one another’s arms … who cares … Therefore, let us put the question a bit differently : what is intelligence ? In 1950 the eccentric mathematical acrobat and crypto-analyst Alan Turing proposes a test :33 there is intelligence when after 31 Charles Percy Snow, The Two Cultures (London : Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1959]). 32 John Brockman, The Third Culture : Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York : Simon & Schuster, 1995). Here a picking of articles from Brockman’s opus—a cabinet of algorithmic delusions of almightiness : George C. Williams, “A Package of Information.” Stephen Jay Gould, “The Pattern of Life’s History.” Richard Dawkins, “A Survival Machine.” Brian Goodwin, “Biology Is Just a Dance.” Steve Jones, “Why Is There So Much Genetic Diversity ?” Niles Eldredge, “A Battle of Words.” Lynn Margulis,“Gaia Is a Tough Bitch.” Marvin Minsky, “Smart Machines.” Roger Schank, “Information Is Surprises.” Daniel C. Dennett, “Intuition Pumps.” Nicholas Humphrey, “The Thick Moment.” Francisco Varela, “The Emergent Self.” Steven Pinker, “Language Is a Human Instinct.” Martin Rees, “An Ensemble of Universes.” Alan Guth, “A Universe in Your Backyard.” Lee Smolin, “A Theory of the Whole Universe.” Paul Davies, “The Synthetic Path.” Murray Gell-Mann, “Plectics.” Stuart Kauffman, “Order for Free.” J. Doyne Farmer, “The Second Law of Organization.” W. Daniel Hillis, “Close to the Singularity.” 33 Graham Oppy and David Dowe, “The Turing Test,” in The Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2011, http ://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ turing-test/.

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multiple questioning it is impossible to tell whether one is in presence of a person or an algorithm answering. Turing’s prognoses are prudent. He doubts that within a foreseeable future machines might be able durably to deceive man. And indeed, progress was even less than predicted by Turing. But anyway the question about intelligence must be put differently. For our colleagues of the third culture have given the answer long ago : we are algorithm. And in 1952, prior to our colleagues, Turing himself, with the term “morphogenesis,”34 lays the foundation of that theoretical biology which so fascinates the cyberneticists. And so on : 1966. Joseph Weizenbaum’s artificial psychotherapist Eliza admirably performs his task :35 although the subjects know that they are in face of an algorithm, they in their majority feel understood. In 1968 Philip K. Dick inverts the question of machine intelligence in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ?36 (turned into the film Blade Runner in 1982). Now androids are fighting for emotional liberation and against the so-called Voight-Kampff test. They are up against the test. They refuse to be tested. Today with the algorithms of Google and Siri the intelligence question is out : we are no longer testing the algorithms, we are continuously testing ourselves. We are going to take the Turing-test question as being a suggestive one. The “not yet (intelligent, rapid, precise) enough” and the “but soon (intelligent, rapid, precise) enough,” so often heard, raises, on the stage of intuition, the question about intuitiveness itself. And in Turing’s case, the algorithm principle is being naturalized in this self-reference. In the well-worn analytical manner. While today we are playing a new, more abstract stage. For some time already. At least since 1870. Yet such foreshortening of cybernetics : in 1965, e.g., Gordon Earle Moore, one of Intel’s cofounders, spells out the eponymous Moore Law according to which IT performance doubles every 18–25 months,37 which works out to a factor of 60 after 10 years, one of 10,000,000 after 40 years, i.e. 2005. Impressive ! Great as a business model for Intel. And it actually did turn out that way. But for this calculation being of little use to anyone other than Intel. Because what Intel is printing are no machines, nothing to be intuited. It is—as described above—abstract 34 Alan M. Turing, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences (1952) : 37–72. 35 Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA - A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,” in Communications of the ACM, 9.1 (New York : ACM, 1966). On the Internet, several online versions of ELIZA are available. 36 Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? [1968], SF Masterworks series (London : Victor Gollancz, 2010). 37 Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” in Electronics 38, no. 8 (1965) : 114–17. Also : http ://download.intel.com/museum/ Moores_Law/Articles-Press_releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf.

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machines upstream of any possible intuitiveness. Thus, those at first sight impressive numbers are tantamount to evaluating books by their weight or number of characters. And in actual fact, it did turn out differently from what the intuitive message of the numbers suggests. Whereas in the sixties and seventies the talk was of a few computers as large as houses, and in the eighties and nineties of billions of personal computers with a new set of applications, today we are looking at trillions of links presented worldwide by Google et al. Each time our work and life modes changed. Each time our mode of coexistence with the respective technology changed. Unexpectedly. Overtly. Each time, against any predictions, there were dramatic market upheavals and weighty new players : IBM, Microsoft, Google. Thus Moore’s law does not mean much, and is in particular unable to predict qualitative changes in information technology. But suggests intuitively that of course everything is under control. The rift between the protagonists of the first computers and computer use today is vividly exhibited in a 2007 YouTube interview with Sacha Baron Cohen, alias Ali G., and Noam Chomsky.38 The linguist and information technologist of the eighties, and the new-millennium comedian. Baron Cohen incomprehensible to Chomsky. Chomsky medialized. Google vs. IBM. An interesting play on different stages. Or : why did in 1996 IBM’s Deep Blue for the first time manage to beat Garry Kasparov at chess ?39 The algorithms won because they had given up trying to understand chess analytically. Symbolic algebra, probabilistics, abstraction from any visuality. Quitting of the analytic stage. Memory capacity and processing speed over any contextual contention and meaning. Exit the power of analysis. Welcome to the new stage of nontrivial questions.40 Let’s not forget : Hilbert’s program was sunk by Gödel. We’ll have to take this seriously. Logic and calculability today are backdrops to the play of another music. Or another story in the same language game : in 1976 Ray Kurzweil develops a language synthesizer based on samples, symbolized recording fragments that may, irrespectively of what they contain and mean, be cobbled together at will.41 Synthesis unpreceded by analysis. The two are players in a reciprocal game. It is no more about breaking acoustic phenomena down into primary wave forms and then synthesizing them. It is no longer about the question about what language, or 38 “Ali G. and Noam Chomsky Discuss Language,” Write Now Is Good, January 26, 2007, http ://writenowisgood.typepad.com/write_now_is_good/2007/01/ali_g_interview. html. 39 “Deep Blue,” online article : http ://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/learn/html/e.shtml. 40 cf. Kurt Gödel’s insight that only trivial problems can completely be described algorithmically. 41 Aaron Kleiner and Raymond C. Kurzweil, “A Description of the Kurzweil Reading Machine and a Status Report on Its Testing and Dissemination,” Bull Prosthet Res, 10, no. 27 (Spring 1977) : 72–81.

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music, is, but about how to break them down and what then to do with the fragments. Written text may be recited by a machine or, together with blind Stevie Wonder, drawn by the fascination of the language synthesizer, be put into new music. 1982, Kurzweil Music Systems. Exactitude of analysis of language or music, and comprehension, give way to questions of memory capacity and processing speeds, and the know-how in dealing with initially arbitrary symbolizations. A new music begins to emerge. Kurzweil today is first a prominent futurologist. In his The Singularity Is Near42—the very term is suspicious, threat and solution/salvation in one—he relies mainly upon decomposition of essential cultural phenomena, setting their quantities off against information technology’s exponential growth in genetics, nanotech, robotics. Extending Moore law, he announces the “Law of Accelerating Returns,”43 according to which, in keeping with the Kurzweil Music Systems evolutionary scheme, not only quantities would grow exponentially, but qualities as well. So far, so good. Analytics generates quality. Dissolution of arbitrary technical symbolizations is capable of addressing ever more complex trivial problems.44 Thereby, however, he falls to the cybernetic error that inventions and knowledge precisely are no qualities. And are non-trivial. Whence he is ending up with the breathtakingly reductionist need of a new ethic, to be based on the foundations of “mutual respect.” In a world of exponentially increasing quantities and qualities, this is a position of hyperbolically decreasing personal independence and exponentially increasing subservience to technology. A deeply religious position, as we would say. Kurzweil overlooked or discarded the active and inquisitive design with the symbolizations that were required for breathing life into his abstract musical instruments. Over his simple proportional numbers games, he repressed or forgot Stevie Wonder’s constitutive role in the development of his synthesizers. Which is reflected in Greg Ross’s drastic criticism leveled at Douglas R. Hofstadter, the refined aesthete : “It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid.”45 Quite a mess therefore on the analytical stage today. Cleaning up won’t do. Nor will criticism. The wrong play on the wrong stage, is our point. For 42 Raymond Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology (New York : Viking, 2005). Also : The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York : Penguin, 1999); and : The Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1990). 43 Raymond C. Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” in : Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, March 7, 2001, http ://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns. 44 Again, in the sense of Gödel 1931. 45 Greg Ross, “An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter,” American Scientist, August 28, 2008, http ://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/douglas-r-hofstadter.

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today we are actually playing on a new stage. No longer on the analytic one of Descartes, Leibniz, Lagrange, Hegel. … Whence all those confusions. VI On Today’s Stage So we are going to inquire about today’s stage, ready to learn from the ones of our forebears so as to find stabilities on today’s, and avoid daftly and ignorantly reviving the old plays on a new stage. So let us take a closer look (with even more detailed explanations to follow in the second part of this text). On the modern-age stage the attributable properties were playing and not, as in antiquity and scholasticism, the things. On stage these properties were vested with values. With the values, the properties were proportioned into things. Newton ascribed proportioned values to the spatial properties of a falling apple, so as to be able to stage the movement not just of the falling apple but of the planets as well (1687). The fix, however, is that the apple must already be falling, and the planets revolving, if values are to be ascribed to properties, and properties to be proportioned. A motion with the motion. But what if one were not to extrapolate a movement, but to predict one ? How about a pile of apples ? How will they move if one pulls one of them out ? Here Euler, Bernoulli, and especially Lagrange offer a continuation : he shakes the apples infinitesimally, a motion without motion, in order to ascertain which values may after all be ascribed to which properties. Whereas in Newton’s case the properties are thought before the values, Euler, Bernoulli, and especially Lagrange turn things on their head. In the first place, the many values are being generated, in order to be able then to find appropriate properties with which to perform the proportionalities act (1754). Newton’s proportionalities become potentialities. Likewise Kant 1781 : with him, the Aristotelian categories mutate to schemata. He designs a mechanism that—still against the specific background of space and time—lets originate the non-based (the properties) on the basis of the expressed (the values). Hegel (1806) shifts Kant’s transcendence into the world as a political reality : properties become vectors which grow the more potent and powerful the better they are able to bundle the values. Things become automatons and apparatuses. Infrastructures grow as potent bundlings of Eigen-vectors : bureaucracies, historiography, novels, nation-states, chemistry … The analytical stage thus gets populated toward the mid-nineteenth century. Anything is linkable to anything, which increases the vectors’ power. Along with industrialization and the advent of the nationstates, unthought-of potentials appear. In the tail phase we discover various approaches to how to deal with the stage as a whole, how to

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deal with potentiality. Now the interesting questions relating to generating the new stage come up, now orthogonalization of the analytical stage sets in. Let us start with a prominent position (things may get a bit tricky around this heated topic, but let us have a go at it; at least we may see which way to turn our thinking) : Marx finds himself in a situation where the capital and its apparatus-like manifestations supply the soil for his dramatically narrated blowing up of interest cultivation into industrial landscapes.46 Landscapes in which harvests are apparatus-like tied back to the capital, i.e. the apparatus-like soil of these landscapes. Outrage, in today’s view totally understandable, about the primacy granted this apparatus-like soil in the face of the mean treatment of man. Not capital (the horizontal soil) but labor (vertical cultivation)— at the time widely treated as a property of the soil—was declared to be the origin of wealth. Outrage of an enlightened individual at the tightness of that apparatus-like stage, outrage at being treated as property. Marx very radically and prominently places labor (vertical activity) ahead of capital (horizontal, balanced, and attributable properties). And here he turns the prevailing body of thinking inside out : he grabs vertical labor, takes it as infinite, and inverts it into worker identity. A new play, on a new stage. No more bundling of properties into individuals. Now activities bundled into identities. According to Marx, worker identity as a new symbolic soil. Justice, brotherhood, equality are no longer an ideal goal but an ideational constitution, backdrops to a new game. In Marx’s case, however, this new worker-identity scenery is of rather banal design and antiquated execution. What were the props of that time : we got rational logic and magnitudes, in modern times converted to rationality, and in which we talk of multitudes and potentials. And we got the turning of potentials into potentialities. And we no longer speak of individuals but of identities. So how is Marx distributing his late-modern-times potentiality that imposes itself through rationality ? The interesting part is that, far from cultivating the potentiality-assailed, over-ripe rationality, he first—as a peasant would do with a new field—clears it until nothing is left. While exhausting himself over it. Such clearance happens in two directions. The horizontal infrastructures of his time, the actual potentiality of the industrial, political, middle-class society is being reduced to ratio, the magnitude of the aristocratic soil. It is being dispelled from rationality, chained into ratio, and thereby intellectually, technologically, and economically emasculated. The worker’s vertical identity 46 Karl Marx, Capital [Das Kapital], vol. 1 (Hamburg : Otto Meissner, 1867), trans. Samuel Moore, Edward B. Aveling, and Friedrich Engels (London : Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1887).

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however, which ought to bundle the potentialities based on functioning infrastructures, is being tied back, through the notions of equality and justice, into the analytical potential that a moment ago he had cleansed of the bourgeoisie. So Marx is tying rationality into ratio, and potentiality into the potential of some cleansed rationality sans ratio, thus robbing his symbolic identity, the worker, of any life at all. What we are in effect getting with the Internationale, is a global system made up of pure multitude. A self-referential logical-numbers game of distribution, on the symbolic level dangerously primed through repressed potentialities, and—within the powerful technologies and bureaucracies of the time—entirely uncoupled from any proportion and ratio. The justice ideal symbolized into totalitarian equality with no components of intention. An ultimate disposal site for rationality. A first play on the new stage. Without history, without future. Astonishing that the like of it managed to be staged with such power. Same time, different approach : Boole 1854.47 Instead of enclosing the potentiality of his time in labor and capital, he encapsulates it in 0 and 1, and instead of balancing it arithmetically, he renders it, through a new algebra, operable on a new stage. And in opposition to Marx’s determining the properties, and proportioning and rationally fixing all values, Boole on principle keeps his properties open. To Boole, the values of 0 and 1 mean the basic indetermination of properties. For the first time, therefore, his algebra is able to valuate not the basic properties, the first substances, the instances, but the nonbasic properties, the second substances, the concepts, the notions. And so he is able to name his algebra “An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.” And on the post-analytical stage, properties are no longer the actors allotting values to themselves, but the values themselves as actors allot probabilisms to themselves. Thus we are no longer playing on a stage of proportionalities, but of potentialities. Something comparable may be found in Dedekind 1872,48 and his concept of continuity and the cut, which replaces the rational infinite that since Descartes and Leibniz was constitutive for analysis, and simultaneously, with the real numbers, opens up a new numbers space. What is the idea ? The infinite lines, the analyses are not closed. Indeed, they are infinitely filled, but not closed. The rational circumstances always are isolated points. Dedekind now charges each of these isolated points through infinite polynomials—i.e. with indeterminate potentiality through which the points may adapt themselves mutually toward concrete potentiality in a continuum, according to 47 Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. 48 Richard Dedekind, Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (Braunschweig : Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1872).

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the concept of e.g. the eliminatory process.49 Thus, intensive orders— second substances—may, prior to any extensive potentiality—i.e. first substances—be algorithmically articulated. This is the new stage of potentialities. It allows operating with notions and concepts before they get concretized and also without them ever having been concretized before. While on the potentialities stage properties were concrete and could be “contrived” by way of models and constructs, now values are concrete, and properties are being “contrived,” by way of articulations. Along with this new stage, Bernhard Riemann’s non-Euclidian geometries are originating, which have become so important to today’s architecture. And there evolves a numbers concept into which, even today, we let ourselves be drawn with such great difficulty : “Numbers are free creations of human mind; they serve as the means for easier and sharper apprehending the diversity of things. It is only through the purely logical process of building up the science of numbers, and by thus acquiring the continuous number domain, that we are prepared accurately to investigate our notions of space and time, by bringing them into relation with this number-domain created in our mind.”50 VII

Back-Couplings to a Third Realm

So much for the setup of the new potentialities stage. Now a few orthodox retroversions : Cantor (1895),51 e.g., in his set theory distinguishes ordinals (the actual enumeration of the elements of one set) from cardinals (the totality of elements of a set), but does not, as Boole or Dedekind do, treat the cardinals as second substance, as an indeterminate set, i.e. a quantity whose ordinals, while implicated, are not explicated but explicit as prime first substance and thereby within the scope of the familiar arithmetic, the potentialities, and analyses. In similar fashion, Gottlob Frege (1879)52 ties pure thought 49 We are referring to a mathematical development that found a conclusion of sorts in Carl Friedrich Gauss, “Disquisitio de Elementis Ellipticis Palladis ex oppositionibus” [1811], Astronomische Abhandlungen (Werke) (Göttingen : Dieterich, 1865). Section 13 : 20–22. Trans. H. F. Trotter. Technical Report No.5, Statistical Techniques Research Group (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University, 1957), http ://www.york.ac.uk/depts/ maths/histstat/gausspallas.pdf. 50 Richard Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen ? (“The Nature and Meaning of Numbers,” in Essays on the Theory of Numbers). 51 Georg Cantor, “Beiträge zur Begründung der transfiniten Mengenlehre,” 1. Artikel, in Mathematische Annalen (Leipzig : B. G. Teubner, 1895), 481–513; Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, trans. Philip E. B. Jourdain (La Salle, IL : Open Court Publishing, 1915). 52 Gottlob Frege, Begriffsschrift. Eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens (Halle a. S. : Louis Nebert, 1879). Gottlob Frege Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik : Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl (Breslau : Wilhelm Koebner, 1884). Gottlob Frege, “Function und Begriff,” lecture held on January 9, 1891, at the Jena Society for Medicine and Science (Jena : Hermann Pohle, 1891).

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back into an arithmetic system of notation (predicate logic). Brought to prominence especially through Whitehead and Russell (1910), 53 it is an attempt at visualizing thought, at reverting intentionalities back to the stage of potentialities. In 1918, Frege speaks of a “Drittes Reich.”54 Next to the realm of “subjective representation” and the realm of “objective–real” physical objects, he postulates a third realm of “objective–non-real” thoughts, as basis of a logical-technical performance that is neither subjectively nor objectively controlled. A life of rational thinking of its own, with its technocratic and bureaucratic implications, without body and without intellect. In this short-circuit of intentionalities the national-socialists are winning power, gaining their potentiality. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, in Das Dritte Reich (1923),55 spells out the same train of thought, not as compellingly but louder. It is astonishing that Ernst Block (1935) credits the populist Moeller with the term “Drittes Reich,” remaining thereby within the apparently intuitive, rather than in the repressed intentionality of many of his colleagues.56 All the while, the articulations on the new stage of intentionalities went on : around the turn of the century, there came the “Crisis in Intuition.”57 Hilbert in 1928 very prominently spells out the decisional problem : Is it possible, in intuitive mode, to think, determine rationally the next step, or predict the next event ? Gödel (1929) :58 only in trivial problem fields. 53 Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, 3 vol., (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1910, 1912, and 1913). 54 Gottlob Frege, “Der Gedanke  : Eine logische Untersuchung,” in Logische Untersuchungen, ed. Günther Patzig (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1966), 30–53. Trans. “Thought : A Logical Investigation,” in Logical Investigations, ed. Peter Geach (Oxford : Blackwell, 1975). 55 Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das Dritte Reich (Berlin : Ring Verlag, 1923. Germany’s Third Empire, trans. (condensed) by E. O. Lorimer (London : George Allen & Unwin, 1934). Moeller turns the Christian medieval term “Third Reich” (third age : cf. Joachim of Fiore) into a political one and spreads it in völkisch-nationalistic circles, the First Reich to refer to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and the second one to the German Empire under Bismarck, while the yet-to-come Third Reich was to be founded on an amalgam of nationalism and socialism. The term harks back to the three eras or ages and, within those, to the “Age of the Holy Spirit” of the medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore (Gioacchino da Fiore, 1135–1202), who predicted the advent of a third age or empire, of pure spirit, after those of God the Father, and the Son. Joachim’s empire notion had already influenced the German Idealists, who perceived in it a philosophical ideal realm in which the dichotomy between the material and spiritual world would be absorbed, or synthesized into a higher “third” one. Moeller applied this Hegelian idea to the synthesis of conservatism and revolution, nationalism and socialism. Cf. wikipedia.com. 56 Ernst Bloch, “Zur Originalgeschichte des Dritten Reichs,” in Erbschaft dieser Zeit, complete edition vol. 4 (Frankfurt/M. : Suhrkamp, 1977 [1935]), 126–60. Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge : Polity Press, 1991). 57 Hans Hahn, “Die Krise der Anschauung,” in Hermann F. Mark, Krise und Neuaufbau in den exakten Wissenschaften : Fünf Wiener Vorträge (Leipzig et al. : Deuticke, 1933) 41–64. 58 Kurt Gödel, “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme,” in Monatshefte für Mathematik 38 (Leipzig : 1931) : 173–98.

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Therefore there was assiduous trivializing in order to drive the symbolized potencies catastrophically into war. Yet all this did not keep some, e.g. Karl Popper, from introducing, as late as 1972 ( !), a threeworlds theory,59 in which, along with physical and mental objects, objective knowledge too becomes real. His argumentation, in his Tanner lecture of 1978, is nothing short of breathtaking : he sucks all air out of things, naturalizing all artifacts. “But [Beethoven’s] Fifth Symphony as such just does not exist; although, admittedly, we often use language in such a way that we speak of the Fifth Symphony as if it were one of the existing things.”60 Welcome to the third culture in the Third World. VIII Ways Out of Second Nature In any event, after the World War, and in reaction to it, positions as held by European technocratic bureaucrats and American militaristic pragmatists seem to be the predominant ones. Two primary varieties of international stage play in case one is capable of everything, but at a loss what to put on. Distancing oneself, as a person, frightenedly from the violent potentialities and might. Delegating responsibility to the “objective–non-real” of logic algebra. Safely nestled in the supply, security, and design systems. In the global technical infrastructures and their schematic media-like stagings. A second, animated, technical nature. Shapeless. Mindless. And then an example of a rather European attitude : in 2000, Hardt & Negri publish Empire : Globalization as a New Roman Order, Awaiting Its Early Christians,61 which Slavoj Žižek described as an attempted “communist manifesto of the twenty-first century.” Back-couplings on all levels, but without doing damage to the prominence of the argumentations. The very same paradigm as Marx 130 years earlier. Instead of workers, now creatives. Instead of capital, now Empire. Instead of Internationale, now multitude. The same way as, then, worker productivity was being proportioned, now creativity gets proportionally mensurated and naturalized. Potentiality—now the Empire—is being stigmatized. Scenarios of dissolutions contrived, often with justified outrage : nation-states, wars, prisons, big business … vanish in proportional balance. Equality. Liberation ! In second nature. In multitude. Mechanically. Blind to any potentiality, to new concentrations, to other 59 Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge : An Evolutionary Approach (New York : Oxford University Press, 1972). 60 Karl R. Popper, “Three Worlds,” in Tanner Lecture on Human Values, University of Michigan, April 7, 1978, http ://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/ popper80.pdf. 61 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire : Globalization as a New Roman Order, Awaiting Its Early Christians (Cambridge, MA/London : Harvard University Press, 2000).

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stabilities that emerge. In lieu of emancipation of the working class, magnitude is now to come to terms with itself and shed the parasitic Empire, the potentialities. All this in enforcement of three rights : world citizenship, social salary, and reappropriation. Homogenizing—sterilizing—hygiene. Homogenized global magnitude—mechanistically self-absorbed—impotent—silly. How come the schemata of thought are being denied significance ? Which is granted only to mechanics ? That now creativity is being mensurated, after the mensurating of work proved a flop ? How is it possible to ignore that totalitarian mensuration had catastrophic consequences ? How can one believe oneself able to change anything by dressing the emperor up in new clothes ? By tarting old thinking up through new terms and modern analyses ? After all those twentieth century catastrophes ? Or then another example, of a somewhat pubertal American position. Inverting Hardt & Negri, as it were, Jaron Zepel Lanier criticizes the Internet’s entropic phenomena : “cybernetic totalism,”62 “digital Maoism,”63 and “You are not a gadget.”64 Demands creativity, independencies, autonomies. His way out : post-symbolic communication.65 E.g. the famous cephalopodan camouflages.66 Fantasizes about a new, expanded world in which communication happens intuitively, with images, with our bodies. “For instance, instead of saying, ‘I’m hungry; let’s go crab hunting’, you might simulate your own transparency so your friends could see your empty stomach, or you might turn into a video game about crab hunting so you and your compatriots could get in a little practice before the actual hunt. I call this post-symbolic communication.” Whence this absurd notion, of thoughts being visible ? In the past they used to measure skulls. Today they put on helmets. As though thoughts were lying about somewhere. Amazing, this perceiving the intuitive—i.e. the basic concept of modern times, foundation of the development of every machine, but not that of the computer—as the solution for “cybernetic totalism.” This back-coupling is “cybernetic totalism.” Pure intuitivity leads to entropy, as we know. The way out is “potentiability,” the ability of dealing with potentialities, technically realized in computers. Lanier, prime protagonist of “virtual reality,” dreams of a new man whose potentiability is mechanical. Dreams of a Terminator capable of surviving all destructions and reconfiguring himself without

62 Jaron Lanier, “One Half a Manifesto,” Edge, November 11, 2000, http ://www.edge. org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html. 63 Jaron Lanier, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” Edge, May 30, 2006, http ://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html. 64 Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget : A Manifesto (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). 65 Jaron Lanier, “How Octopi Morph Color,” Discover, April 2, 2006, http ://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/cephalopod-morphing/. 66 Cf. “Octopus wow,” video clip, January 15, 2009, http ://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=8CLKyMFHSfg.

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end.67 Bodiless, intellect-less. Pure mechanistics. Disregards, in his mechanistic camouflage-analyses, the existence of things like facial and gestural expressions, dance, and more. That were with us forever. As cultural, not natural phenomena. Whence then this delusion of having to recreate, on the cultural basis of our usual ways of thinking, our technologies, a new man systematically oblivious of what we culturally are ? Whence this frenzy of naturalizing ourselves within some second, technically animated nature ? Whence this disinclination from all things “impure,” i.e. at once natural and cultural ? In the case of Marx just as in that of Hardt & Negri, or here Lanier’s … Or take the object-oriented ontologies of one Levi Bryant who runs a philosophy blog with some notable 2.5 million visitors.68 Intent upon pulling philosophy out of its “anthropocentric” isolation. Demanding a new “Copernican Revolution.” A backward somersault. Out of man, into the world. For regaining the ability of talking to natural scientists, and engineers. Charging Kant with anthropocentrism. Him of all people, who so handsomely contributed to rendering that Renaissance concept of man calculable through dissecting and meting of thoughts, and vaporizing it. Thus enabling Hegel to orchestrate power structures from populations of humans and things. In every respect. There is no more natural center. Neither sun, nor man. For two hundred years. Only potentials that are being gathered. Vectors that are rationally established. Toward urbanity, nation-states, universities, industries. For a long time now, man has ceased to be the center. And it goes on : the notion of object-oriented programming originated in the 1960s with the intent of simulating physical connections through information technology.69 Today this notion is largely established. Neither the virtual environments of the game worlds nor the graphical user interfaces of the operating systems are conceivable without this paradigm. And here now comes Levi’s real Copernican Revolution : at a central place, he quotes Heidegger’s Being and Time : “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.” Following it up by : “This epigraph could just as easily be rephrased substituting the word ‘object’ for ‘being.’” Amazing, this turning Heidegger so ruthlessly on his head. This insouciantly jumbling Heidegger’s two central concepts of “ontics” and “ontology” into one and then simply carrying on with ontics in ontology’s guise. 67 The T-1000 in Terminator 2 : Judgement Day, directed by James Cameron (TriStar Pictures, 1991). 68 Levi Bryant, “Onticology—A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology, Part 1,” Larval Subjects (blog), January 12, 2010, http ://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/ 2010/01/12/object-oriented-ontology-a-manifesto-part-i/. 69 Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, “Simula—An ALGOL-Based Simulation Language,” Communications of the ACM 9, no. 9 (1966) : 671–78.

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This replacing the “being” by some technical contraption, and instrumentalizing Heidegger so as to gain acceptance as a philosopher for oneself and be loved by the sciences. Daring. Amazing, not least perhaps because one sits, as a humanities scholar, nonplussed before the monitor and marvels at those things learning to walk. Matrix.70 Sims.71 “Mythicizing technical objects as ‘larval subjects,’” or so he calls his blog. A heart for machines. Love-me tech. Bryant, as a philosopher, is now demanding the Copernican Revolution, a Renaissance, for these larval subjects. Emancipating them from man, as man has emancipated himself from the sun. A total subjugation of man under the mechanical. Strangelove. Or : how I learned to love the machine. The last one out to tidy up Earth. Wall-E.72 As we can see, emancipating from today’s naturalizations of the information technologies is far from easy. In my case, abstracting from the reductions of one Stiny, and learning to appreciate the richness of eighty-years-earlier discourses around Hilbert. But perhaps the particular characterization of the twentieth century lies precisely with this ignorance about its roots, which makes possible the breathtaking secularizations of this time : in 1900, there were 100,000 scientists worldwide. Today there are 100,000,000. In 1950, 1,000 million people were able to read and write. Today 6,000 million are. In 1900, life expectancy in the developed countries was forty-seven years; today it is sixty-seven worldwide. What does one do when in such a very short time-span so many more people at once can read and have so much more time ? Perhaps it might be as well in such an instance to go easy about new concepts. Perhaps the mechanistic thinking of the technologies will perforce begin to stabilize, because there aren’t enough different and differentiated models for such growth. So the technical infrastructures are transmuting into an animated second nature. Into the abstract breeding ground that is acceptable worldwide without anyone actually feeling concerned by alien cultures one wouldn’t be able straightaway to integrate. Hence the infantile, the drastic, the stereotypes. Abstractions that make globalization bearable, possible, without need of becoming machine-like themselves. Or Wikipedia : how are these availabilities to be enabled without mediocre authors agreeing about a common denominator ? Might it be that on the one hand we need something Wikipedia-like as a humus, while on the other hand we define ourselves per our difference from Wikipedia ? Is there another way ? Infrastructures, logistics, sediments, intellectual breeding ground. And was the encyclopedias and their eminent authors’ situation any different ? 70 The Matrix, directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski (Warner, 1999). 71 The Sims, computer game, director Will Wright (Maxis : Electronic Arts, 2000). 72 WALL·E, directed by Andrew Stanton (Pixar, 2008).

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IX A Love Affair We shall pursue this train of thought. On the one hand, there are today’s institutional infrastructures, the dependabilities, availabilities, reassurances, stabilities, references of the second nature. We are used to them, in the form of technical infrastructures, cables, pylons, pumps, pipes, tanks, machines, sensors, displays, actuators. And we know them as standardized global media-izations, embedded in the schemata of formats like news, photography, telephony, music, cinematography, teaching programs, cleaning programs, foodstuffs, control systems, research programs, production schemes, politics, jurisdiction … in all those things on which we can depend. With this, we described technology as deceleration. On the other hand, there are things that are open, that unexpectedly burst into being, that surprise. That we may bring about through humor, through know-how, through affection, through concentration. Things that never were. Things that always were, and unsuspectedly appear in a new light. Quite an affair, indeed. Possible anywhere, anytime. Possibly now. Beauty, fascination, love, elegance. Out of the blue. The immanence of the possibility of its happening, upon removing an infinitesimal scrap, upon adding a tiny nuance, by just stirring, touching, briefly halting the mere time of one breath. Perhaps. These immanences throw open the reference system, give birth to new things. Create references, sometime. Things around us are referenced, secured, on the one hand. While on the other hand being indexed, open for any new reference. Our second nature gets animated and alive within the secured schemata, and it is up to us to be spirited, since we live within that nature. Somewhat astonishing perhaps, such terms, in this context. But look up your indices, particularly those of the nineteenth century. Much speaks for this being a real affair. Let us pick up from the discussions about Dedekind, his cut, and the notion of continuity, and turn to Markov.73 His chain of infinite, isolated—now we may say, unspirited—points without meaning. Pure determinability. In 1913, Andrej Andreyevich Markov, the mathematician, grabbed the first 20,000 characters of Eugene Onegin, Aleksander Pushkin’s novel in verse, and mechanically counted off the alternations of vocals and consonants. Just think of that ! Simply counts off the characters of this famous Russian poem. Mechanically puts these numbers in relation to one another. Pulls up a probabilistic structure … and manages, with just one small fragment, mechanically to find the proper text passage. No need to analyze a text completely, to know it thoroughly in order to synthetize the next step. No need 73 Andrej A. Markov, Berechenbare Künste : Mathematik, Poesie, Moderne, ed. by Philipp von Hilgers (Zurich : Diaphanes, 2007).

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for a precise notion of a text in order to find one’s way around in it. According to Markov, the spirit of the text is not within the letters. The spirit is not within the references. It resides in the immanences. And with his schematic indexing system, he demonstrates for the first time that it is possible to operate with immanences. We need a fragment, an idea—and a system made of indices begins to gleam. Abstraction from analysis and synthesis. That’s Markov. Fabulous. And meanwhile it has grown humdrum. Any blurred technical picture,74 any noise-beset telephone call … we do recognize the person, recall the mood, hear the intonation. It does not take many fragments of our analytical reference systems for the situations to become rich. A challenge to any supposedly intuitive immediacy, to analytical care, scientific method, enthusiasts of analogous hi-fi recordings, even to statistics. All relegated to the corner of trivial functionality. Flushed out. Analytics cannot succeed in what Markov can. Not through care, not through orderliness, not through hygiene. Nor through real or metaphorical psycho-technology or bio-technology. Those are all but complications of the trivial. Let us think of an example up to demonstrating the confusion that Markov ought to create. An example from medicine : certain diseases are diagnosable through their symptoms. That’s how the Middle Ages diagnosed and treated. Others are predictable through statistics. That’s how they are identified since the modern age, and fought statistically through hygiene, or checked through vaccination. And then there are diseases that defy statistical methods, that are unpredictable, and therefore beyond hygiene and checking. Yet they are there. As, e.g., cancer. Markov ought to be able to find them, because he abstains from trying to understand Pushkin’s poem, renounces trying to describe cancer, and for this very reason is up to predicting it. That may be putting it a bit imprecisely. More adequately one would speak in terms such as coexistence with cancer, as a thing essentially innominable. One would be living with cancer in order to avoid it. Fantastic ? Not really. For it is indeed the way Google works. Google meets the fragment of our search term with an orderly list of useful documents. No analysis, no understanding on Google’s part. Just nearinfinite lists, indices, and probabilities. We, as users, are, in our coexistence with that medium, setting the ties, the frequencies, the probabilities. Google, just as Markov, doesn’t care a jot about why or how. And yet, the system is fantastic : not in our wildest dreams might we have imagined anything so multifarious. Adaptable, fast, stimulating … movement within the others’ movement … intellectual propellant … 74 Vilém Flusser, Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Göttingen : European Photography, 1983); as well as Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (Göttingen : European Photography, 1990).

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intentionalities … liberating for being ungraspable. No machine. No hygiene. No multitude. Rather “potentitude.” Therefore we had better examine, along with the so frequently misinterpreted Deleuze, the conditionalities for the faculties of reason which are at work within the differences.75 In contrast to Deleuze, however, we are to reflect upon ways we might grow familiar with such a notion of reason. How to “household” such wealth. How to economize those riches, which Deleuze still naturalizes as abilities. Adventurous ? Not quite ! For more than one hundred years Boole, Dedekind, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Turing, Gödel, Markov, and today Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, are playing within this orthogonality. Today, on the new stage of intentional quantities, one may—to extend the metaphor of the running, channeled, and retained water—let the water come. Because we don’t have to hold it this way or that, but are able, on the new orthogonal stage, to hold it any which way. Because computers are no machines, or rather, speaking with Michel Serres,76 no apparatus, but abstract apparatus. We are no longer being talked to via channel systems, by some nature, some machine, some bureaucracy, some technocracy, but we place those, as algebraic bodies, orthogonally on stage, and let them simply do their talking. Now the general apparatus, the processors are talking, are able to decelerate applicatively, analytically, vividly that which is being attributed to them. We combine them on scene, appreciatively. This is what we are going to call “articulating.” In this interplay—electro-magnetic, quantum-mechanical …— we “pump” water, energies, current, data, telephone calls …, and they are all no longer elusive, but concentrating, narrating, joking, having affairs … if we appreciate them. A simple diagram of an inverted channel system may help document that : the quantum-mechanical effects of a solar tree, through a cable, are conducting electro-magnetic effects—current—into the sea. There—back in what we can more intuitively grasp—a pump presses water through a membrane for desalination, which is then piped back to the solar tree. Thus the one solar tree generates enough water for twenty natural trees. Simply because we were able to articulate it and appreciate, e.g. in the desert, having water for trees. Nothing in this staging is being used up, and very little is used. The scenario is pure intellect. If we attempted to put this in a more concrete mode of speaking, however, something were continuously to be held up, channeled, consumed. In a world that corresponds more with our intuitive expectations, water doesn’t arrive just like that. In the mode of 75 Gilles Deleuze, Differenz und Wiederholung, trans. Joseph Vogl (Munich : Fink, 1992), esp. chapter 4. Original : Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1968). 76 Michel Serres, La distribution, Hermès, vol. 4 (Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977). German edition : Verteilung, Hermes IV (Berlin : Merve, 1993).

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↖  [Fig. 48]

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intuitive expectation, things always run out. Whereas a purely intellectual scenario is abstract, whence we may relax. In grading, assessing talk we inspect the many intuitively talking things—from the outside. There are plenty of them. We can hear them talk. They are all intent upon withholding. We should no longer be taking analyses seriously, but populations of analyses. Nor models, but that which is model-like in kind. Nor generalizations, but abstractions. Not any more the functions, causes, signs. By linguistically dealing with the symbols of code, we are in a position of creating stabilities on the level of symmetries, and invariances. Trusting in symbolic algebra in lieu of arithmetics and analytical geometry. In articulations instead of linear, structural, or post-structural constructs or historical accounts. We may become operational within universal richness.Machine or no machine ? Machines rebel against testing in Blade Runner, a 1982 film.

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III Two Images of Global Violence gregg lambert

i The war-machine 96 — iI the planetary death of god machine, or religion today 101 

Gregg Lambert is currently Dean’s Professor of Humanities at Syracuse University, New York. He is the author of twelve books and critical editions, and is internationally renowned for his scholarly writings on critical theory and the contemporary university, Baroque and NeoBaroque cultural history, and, especially, the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. http://gregglambert.com

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In this essay I will attempt to develop two images of the relationship between terror and violence in contemporary philosophy : the first from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the concept of the “war machine”; and the second from the late writings of Jacques Derrida on the global character of religious violence, colloquially identified with the “return of religion,” but which Derrida in his last writings analyzes under the term of what he calls “Globalatinization.” In an effort to render the reality of violence less abstract and to unfold it on a plane of sensation, I will approach these formations of global or planetary violence in the same way one might create a description of machinic phyla 95

for producing a series of movement-images in cinema. That is, I will look at them according to an analysis of the specific economic, technical, political, and cultural or ideological apparatus responsible in each case for producing two distinctive species of global violence today. I The War-Machine First, let us take up the first machinic image of violence, the war-machine, which supposedly finds its origins in Karl Marx’s 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, by turning to a series of lectures that Deleuze and Guattari were no doubt familiar with in the early 1970s when they conceived of the concept : Louis Althusser’s series of lectures later published in 1978 under the title Marx dans ses limits. He presents a striking discussion from a treatise by Vladimir Lenin where the state is characterized as a “machine unlike any other social apparatus or assemblage.”1 Consequently, the state is distinguished from any number of other social forms found in the sphere of civil society : the association, the counsel, the league, the organization, the political party, the church, even the “organism” or the organic cell of the community or Bund. According to Althusser’s interpretation of Lenin, this is what makes the state as such : that it is composed of a special kind of material. Thus, “the State is a special machine in the sense that it is made of another metal […], another ‘matiere,’ which has a completely different consistency.”2 In asking what this consistency is different from, we are referred back to the previous social organizations of civil society, which are composed from the ideological forms of interest. In fact, they are the Louis Althusser, Écrits philosophiques et politiques : Tome I (Paris : Stock/IMEC, 1994), 450. 2 Ibid. 1

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materialization and embodiment of these interests in corporate life, or as G. W. F. Hegel said, in “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). As with any machine, in inquiring after how it functions, the very first question one must ask is where does it derive its energy to function in the first place ? This is because all machines are, by their very nature, “mechanical.” (Moreover, this is why Althusser also understands Marx’s rejection of the term “organism’in reference to the State-form.) But what is even more surprising is that after the nineteenth century, the term “mechanical” itself no longer served to define the term “machine.” This is because the organic is already a metaphor of mechanism, applied to nineteenth-century biology, and thus the mechanical teleology, which stems from an even earlier Aristotelian understanding of nature, cannot serve as the ground for understanding the reality of modern machines. In other words, the special machine of the State cannot be described from the principles that belong to the general field of mechanics. Therefore, in the section of Das Capital on the question of surplus value, Marx (according to Althusser) gives us an indication of the special machine he has in mind by quoting the following definition from Charles Babbage : “A machine is formed by the reunion of all these simple instruments that are placed in motion by a unique motor.”3 It is here that Marx understands the machine not as a simple mechanical apparatus, but through the uniqueness of the motor that causes all the components to move together, and the nature of the force that causes them to move. For example, Marx writes, “The infant has his own force of movement just as the steam engine.”4 He goes on to describe the function of the motor, unique to each kind of machine, as the transformation of one kind of energy into another (for example, caloric energy into kinetic energy). Here, Marx describes the special machine of the State by means of the uniqueness of the motor from which it derives its energy in order to function : the transformation of the energy released by class inequality into the energy that drives the state through legal violence. Thus, law is a force that functions as the motor of the State. All individuals recognize it as a special kind of machine that operates from the “outside” and functions automatically. However, the machine derives its energy by converting raw class inequality into legal violence. It is through this process that the State first appears to separate itself from civil society, only to more effectively intervene into the forms of corporate life, especially the family, to enforce its own form of universal right. In this way we can understand how the reproduction of class inequality, even the production of new forms of inequality, provides the motor of the state-machine with the energy it needs to function, even though it is made to appear that the State exists to end these forms of inequality 3 4

Ibid., 452. Ibid., 453.

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(but then, this is ideology tout court). Simply put, like a baby crawling across the living-room floor, converting caloric energy into kinetic, new forms of inequality provide the state-machine with the energy it requires to function and to expand across the entire socius, connecting to every aspect of social life. The state-machine can even be said to drill into the socius, like a surveyor, to discover new sources of the energy in the forms of inequality that are both produced and redressed by legal forms of violence. Finally, this transformation of energy is responsible for fabrication of the special body of the State and its functionaries (the police, military, bureaucrats, corporations), because the very metal of their body and consistency from which it is composed is suddenly transformed into a unified and special matter in the same way that the bodies of soldiers in a platoon have the consistency of one kind of metal, or bureaucrats in a vast office can be said to all be materially made from the same cloth. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, the State has historically had only two choices with regard to violence : (1) it can form a special part of its apparatus specifically made to deploy violence against its own populations (i.e., its police force, its prisons, its judges, and its bureaucrats, who are responsible for both legalizing and “making abstract” the various forms of state violence); or (2) it can acquire an army. Accordingly, the war-machine is not intrinsic to the form of state power, since the function of state power is to conserve and to protect, even to replenish, the organs of state power; whereas, the nature of the violence deployed by the war-machine is not conservative, but essentially destructive : to vanquish, to destroy, and thereby to ruin the organs of state power. In the Republic, Plato distinguished the two forms of violence using the terms stásis (civil conflict or internal discord) and polemos (pure war). As such, another way of defining the conservative function of state power is to say that it is dialectical. The violence inflicted by the police, or the courts, even by prisons, is made to conserve a form of state power. For example, crime is treated by a form of violence that seeks to either repress or to correct its inherent contradiction to the principles of law and order. The activity of the criminal represents the expression of conflict that must be dialectically remedied in order to restore the principle of identity to the subject of law. It is not by chance that the form of violence or repression enacted by the State is made equivalent to that initial expression : the robber is stripped of all his possessions and imprisoned; the murderer is executed. Although crime certainly represents a form of exteriority—defined as a concrete instance of contradiction that appears against the abstract law—the organs of state power (its police, courts, prisons, and its executioners) render the concrete and external instances of conflict void, “peacefully” resolving the contradiction in the identification of the criminal with the act of crime.

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In this manner, productive violence restores unity to the normally abstract principle of law by giving it a concrete instance of identity in which it can bathe itself anew, or revitalize its organs. Kalos (order is beautiful) becomes the primary virtue of the polis, the first and most primitive of all state forms. And yet, according to Deleuze and Guattari (following the work of Pierre Clastres), the war-machine is invented by the nomads, not by the State. In other words, strictly speaking, the State invents nothing; it merely appropriates—itself an “empty form of appropriation.”5 Being always external to the State-form, the war-machine in its essence has only one goal, the destruction of the State-form; thus in appropriating the war-machine, the State must always assign it another object : total war against an unidentifiable enemy. “The question is therefore less the realization of war than the appropriation of the war machine. It is at the same time that the State apparatus appropriates the war machine, subordinates it to ‘political’ aims, and gives it war as its direct object.”6 However, in both these situations, according to the specific nature of the war-machines produced or created, it appears that one thing is absolutely necessary : an object, whether direct or merely “supplementary.” The problem then becomes : what happens when this object is not provided, or the State fails to resolve this object-relation correctly, as Kleinians would say ? It is here that we find the many examples in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings of those exceptional situations where the war-machine takes itself as an object, becoming a “double suicide machine,” especially the images offered by Melville’s Ahab and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. However, the real problem is separating the image of violence from the act of violence; that is, distinguishing destructive violence from creative violence. Plato considered his very question, and his solution was to distinguish the two poles of violence by causing one to always be directed outward, away from the city, toward the nomadic bands and the “natural enemy” (i.e., the Persian); at the same time, to preserve creative violence and conflict as a form internal to the social segments in the city and assign to this pole the production of friendship (i.e., political economy). Was this not, as Derrida later also says of Schmitt, “Plato’s dream” ?7 In other words, was the belief that he could separate and keep separate the two poles of violence so that one pole would never be confused with another—strict separation of legal violence from absolute or destructive violence—a failure of his political philosophy ? Moreover, is this not the error of so many political theories, particularly those from the 5 6 7

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 419. Ibid., 420–21. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London : Verso, 2005), 116.

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West, that have only served to create a worldwide order from the initial chaos of violence that may ultimately create, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “a peace more terrifying than fascist death” ?8 Even Deleuze and Guattari determine the concept of the war-machine to be inadequate, since from the very beginning they must admit that “violence is found everywhere, but only under different regimes and economies.”9 It is in this last statement, I believe, that we discover the entire problematic that motivates Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the nomadic war-machine, which explains why they seek to go back to the beginning, prior to the moment when one pole is chosen over another; that is, before the State apparatus is erected and, in order to shield itself against the violence of the war-machine it has appropriated as its own supplemental organ, must assign to the latter an object that is external to its own organs. However, in what might appear as a blatantly contradictory assertion on their part, even the State-form is finally discovered to have no “natural” affiliation with the idea of war. As they write, “States were not the first to make war; war, of course, is not a phenomenon one finds in the universality of Nature, as nonspecific violence.”10 In other words, there is no such thing as “an original State of War in Nature” (i.e., “unspecific violence”). All violence is specific in that it is invented to have an aim (technologically, ideologically, politically, economically, etc.). This is the same principle expressed in the invention of weaponry, which underscores the emphasis Deleuze and Guattari place on the assertion that the war-machine is “invented,” and not something that exists in nature. As they write, “We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war machine to the nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating that the war machine as such was invented.”11 Finally, after establishing the specific origins of the relationships between the nomadic war-machines and the State-form, they ask who, then, is ultimately responsible for creating war in the first place, the State or the nomad ? Deleuze and Guattari do not attempt to answer this question, which in some ways can be compared to what Foucault called the “enigma of revolts.”12 However, already in the final pages of their 1984 treatise, Deleuze and Guattari forecast the development of total war against an “unspecified enemy” as the final stage in the development of the war-machine appropriated by globalized capitalist societies. They posit this as the sec8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 422. 9 Ibid., 425. 10 Ibid., 426. In many regards, I find these questions to have a profound resonance with the meditation at the heart of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (or the meditation on war in nature), where the main protagonist asks : “Who first started this war in nature ?” “Who’s killing us ?” 11 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 422. 12 I am referring to the statement “Useless to Revolt ?” that appeared in Le Monde in 1979. It is reprinted in Foucault, Power, ed. J. Faubion (New York : New Press, 2000), 4 ­ 49–53.

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ond, post-fascist figure of a war-machine that takes peace as its direct object, “the peace of Terror or Survival.”13 The most important thing to notice is the extreme nature of this alternative, which will also determine the future evolution of the State-form according to the same form of the political that also seems beyond Ideology. In other words, if Marx defined Ideology as the manner in which the pure “extortion” of surplus value from labor can be expressed as the legal, rational, moral, and even political choice that determines the social contract, then the most recent alternative upon which State power is founded no longer requires any of the old trappings of conscious deception, and thus is the most literal and rudimentary, even primitive, in establishing its principle, which might be better compared with armed robbery. Perhaps it is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari admit, even twenty years before 9/11 and the worldwide “war on terror,” that “the present situation is highly discouraging,” since the war-machine has grown like a creature in science fiction, “has taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now [even then] no more than objects or means adapted to that machine.”14 Perhaps this would be the first image of global violence we need to contend with today : what is the nature of this machine, which is to say, where does it derive its energy to function ? II The Planetary Death of God Machine, or Religion Today In response to the above question, I will immediately try to provide a second image or describe a second machine, which I will simply call a planetary death of god machine. The Imperial State-form, as Marx noted in his early analysis of Roman Law—neither a purely juridicallegal apparatus, nor a strictly economic machine of calculation—can be understood to operate on their own. In fact, it only appears that these first two machines operate automatically and are driven by a kind of energy that Marx himself saw as nothing less than miraculous. However, like Spinoza before him, Marx was not one to believe in the existence of miracles, and so this led him to theorize the “miraculous nature” of this other machine, which is partly discursive and partly composed of “the human passions,” whose entire function was precisely understood to create gods and “Religion.” This machine was partly discursive in the sense that Marx understood modern religion to be identified as a global political rhetoric, which is to say, as Ideology tout court. In his own analysis of this technical machine and this global political rhetoric, however, rather than returning to Marx’s concept of Ideology, Derrida’s primary source for what he will call “Globalinization” is the conclusion 13 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 421. 14 Ibid.

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of Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion, in which Bergson identifies the universe as a “refractory mechanism, a planetary machine for creating Gods.”15 Following Bergson’s definition of religion, Derrida speaks everywhere of machines (technical machines, translating machines, techno-scientific machines, legal-juridical machines, commercial credit and banking machines, and the machines of capital). But rather than speaking of the universe as a machine, he speaks instead of Globalatization as the planetary machine that is responsible for producing the meaning of religion in its global setting today. In other words, as we will discover, not only was it first a Roman and then a European-colonial form of global political rhetoric (spreading to the United States, of course), but today this rhetoric can also be heard everywhere (including China) on a planetary scale. It can be heard to speak mostly (if not obsessively) of religion, about religion, but also of beyond religion, that is, from the horizon of a certain death of God (or of multiple gods, historically speaking). I must forego a detailed analysis concerning all these “returns of religion,” but instead, simply observe that in his argument Derrida appears to agree with Martin Heidegger’s claim in his “Letter on ‘Humanism’” that the resurgence of “religion” (the original Latin term we find in Derrida’s text now uprooted and speaking Anglo-American, perhaps even with a Texas accent) is bound up with the historical destination of a Roman juridical-legal apparatus. Derrida argues that the gradual innovations of this apparatus must be understood in the most “European-colonial sense possible,” since it is also founded upon the first global political rhetoric : Humanitas.16 Moreover, if, as Heidegger claimed, “every humanism is a metaphysics or serves as the foundation of one,” then what I am cautiously identifying is nothing less than a new humanism, or at least “the original and unprecedented source.”17 15 Henri Bergson, Two Sources for Morality and Religion (Notre Dame, IN : University of Notre Dame Press, 1963) 221. In the context of this statement, I will cite the following passage : “Who is this energy itself, they could only spring into being in a universe, and therefore the universe sprang into being. In that portion of the universe which is our planet probably in our whole planetary system such beings, in order to appear, have had to be wrought into a species, and this species involved a multitude of other species, which led up to it, or sustained it, or else formed a residue. It may be that in other systems there are only individuals radically differentiated assuming them to be multifarious and mortal and maybe these creatures too were shaped at a single stroke, so as to be complete from the first. On Earth, in any case, the species which accounts for the existence of all the others is only partially itself. It would never for an instant have thought of becoming completely itself, if certain representatives of it had not succeeded, by an individual effort added to the general work of life, in breaking through the resistance put up by the instrument, in triumphing over materiality, in a word, in getting back to God. These men are the mystics. They have blazed a trail along which other men may pass. They have, by this very act, shown to the philosopher the whence and whither of life.” (221–22). 16 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (London : Routledge, 2002), 79. 17 Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998), 245.

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As Heidegger writes, “We encounter the first humanism in Rome : it therefore remains in essence a specifically Roman phenomenon.”18 Moreover, “the first humanism, Roman humanism, and every kind that has emerged from that time to the present, has presupposed the most universal ‘essence’ of the human being to be obvious.”19 First and foremost, this first humanism assumes the form of a global political rhetoric that proclaims openly and for all the meaning of the Homo humanus as opposed to the Homo barbarus (and today we might substitute the term Homo terrorem, who has succeeded Homo barbarus as representing the “mortal enemy” to the form of existence of Humanitas). Second, in a refractory manner, this rhetoric also imposes the meaning of religion and the religious upon things it designates according to a quasi-imperial decree and its claim of sovereignty over other forms of life, including cultural life, or even biopolitical life. As Derrida writes concerning the first so-called apparatus, the Roman apparatus of Imperial Law is also accompanied by a global rhetoric that is historically incarnated in “the dominant juridical system and the concept of the State,” but also in the most “Latinoglobal and cederomized” rhetoric concerning the universality of a certain concept of religion that one hears around “certain death of God.”20 As Derrida writes, “Inasmuch as it comes from Rome, as is often the case, it would first try, and first in Europe, upon Europe, to impose surreptitiously a discourse—i.e., a global rhetoric—a culture, a politics, and a right, to impose them on all the other monotheist religions, including nonChristian fundamentalisms.”21 If this new planetary machine for creating gods and religions is refractory today, as Derrida observes, it is because it detaches its meaning from a particular place or site in order to become globalized. In this sense, it can be said that it, like the word “religion” today, has no specific original source or site, or is purely a tele-communicational satellite that lifts off and circulates the globe following a preordained code or automatic pilot. At the same time, its global signal broadcasts specific sites and places, certain local phenomena, certain groups and cults (threskeia), that is, certain manners of religion or “having scruples,” even certain “bonds or ties” (religare) : most of all, it comes down and lands, attaching itself again to the very site of the “home” (or the familiar) and the family; it produces the meaning of “religion” in the hearts and minds of every living body on the planet today. It is by means of this double movement of incredible abstraction and, at once, terrifying concreteness, that the most contemporary meaning of religion 18 Ibid., 244. 19 Ibid., 245. 20 Derrida, Acts of Religion, 79. 21 Ibid., 77.

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detaches from “the specific place or cultural form, becoming more or less a globalized phenomenon that, in turn, reattaches itself to the local custom, the idiom, the literal observance, and to everything confusedly collected today (especially in the so-called developed world) under the terms “identity” and “identitarian,” marking the two moments of exappropriation and re-appropriation, or deracination and enracination, of the seemingly opposing and antagonistic currents that define the “return of the religious” for us today.22 Already in the late 1980s, the very same moment Deleuze and Guattari were creating their concept of the war-machine and warning us of the approach of “a peace more terrifying than fascist death,” upon observing both aspects of this apparatus today, juridically calculating and discursively rhetorical, Derrida makes what in my view is the most acute prognosis of the ultimate destination of the return of religion “for our times.” He writes : “The task seems all the more urgent and problematic (incalculable calculation of religion for our times) as the demographic disproportion will not cease henceforth to threaten external hegemony, leaving the latter no other stratagem other than internalization.”23 In quoting this passage, I want to underscore the use of the words “hegemony” and “stratagem,” which signal the theologico-political sense of sovereign war (jus belli). Derrida calls this “a gesture of pacification,” which is not a neutral word, but a stratagem or tactic invented by modern technological warfare.24 Certainly, most can immediately identify that one of the etymological sources of “pacification” first comes to us today from the United States, and like the word “religion,” can be understood as the hybridization of the original Latin Pax, or the contemporary meaning of Pax Romanus. In other words, as the horizon of Globalatinization appears to encompass the entire planet and exercises an almost complete “hegemony” over the “original and unprecedented” meaning of religion today, leaving no place in the sun for all the religions of Man, particularly for those religions that have been found to either belong to a receding horizon of past cultures, or are publicly condemned in both the local and global marketplace as “blasphemous,” leaving them no other stratagem (or “line of flight”) than open hostility or clandestine retreat. What, then, are the stratagems of the internalization of religion ? First, all the fundamentalisms—and what Derrida calls all the various “integrisms,” including those that are grouped under the name of “identity” and “identitarian” politics.25 These have often been described by contemporary sociologists, political scientists, and theologians alike 22 Ibid. 23 Derrida, Acts of Religion, 79. 24 Ibid., 77. 25 Ibid., 79.

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as “globally localized reactions” (occurring also in “the developed world”) to the encroaching horizon of modernization, which often take the form of viral reintegrations of the earlier representatives of threskia, religio, and even religare (including the creation of new bonds or social ties that are associated with the multiplication of the forms of biopolitical life). But there are other stratagems of internalization, particularly “the return of religion” into the home; the reappearance of the pater familias as the “head of the family”; but also in the return of a phallic determination of the body (whether sexualized or racialized), that is to say, those forms of existence and faith that are found to be closest to the living body and its virulent sense of “autoimmunity.”26 As Derrida observes, all these phenomena mask “a reaction against that with which it is partially linked : the dislocation, expropriation, delocalization, deracination, disidiomization, and dispossession (in all their dimensions, particularly sexual-phallic) that the tele-technoscientific machine [of Globalatinization] does not fail to produce.”27 Taken together, they might even express the virulent forms of resentment of Life itself (zoe), which is no less machinic in another sense, but in a sense that now appears violently opposed to the tele-techno-scientific machines of what Derrida names “Globalatinization.” Consequently, one area I would highlight in Derrida’s argument is the often brooding observations concerning “another death of God that comes to haunt the Passion that animates him,” as well the frequent allusions in Derrida’s reflections concerning a certain phallic sexuality that is expressed in modern techno-scientific warfare involving rape warfare and biopolitical miscegenation—i.e., the exploding body without organs in the marketplace—which find their source in an expression of phallic jouissance. Thus, if religion had no recourse other than a stratagem of internalization that touches the phallic source of life for its inspiration, we also find that for the same reason Life itself has no recourse than to choose religion as perhaps the most powerful form of resentment, or worse, to affirm the possibility of radical Evil in order to reassert its former sovereignty over Man. This possibility for the “return of religion” is equally original and unprecedented as the return that is produced by its Globalatinization. In this sense, as Derrida remarks, the horizon for the future of religion appears doubly divided, just as the very determination of the form of existence of faith appears today as the distinction between two mortal enemies who grasp the very essence of life in the death of the other, as if vividly dramatizing the riddle by Heraclitus : “The name of the bow (bios) is Life (bios), but its work is Death.”28 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 82. 28 “Bios,” Etmologicon magnum, ed. T. Gaisford (Amsterdam, 1962), 22b48.

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However, at this point, I want to point out one glaring contradiction in all these phenomena that now appears in the very concept of “religion” itself. It would appear as if there is no “living religion” that does not belong to this receding horizon, as if the very source of religion has become bound up with “a certain death of God” that announces or proclaims his end like Nietzsche’s earlier madman. It is as if religion can no longer serve to preserve and to protect the dignity and the mystery of Life—the sacred, the holy—but also it appears that this vital (if not virulent) expression of life in the very creation of religion has been exhausted of all its productive powers, which Derrida identifies with the power of its autoimmunity. Consequently, we often speak of religion today only in the historical past tense, somewhat like anthropologists speak of past cultures, as if there is not the slightest expectation either on earth or in heaven for the creation of a new religion of Man springing from the prodigious power of Life itself. The source has been dried up, it seems, leaving us, quite remarkably, with no inspiration. Simply put, is there space or time for us to imagine the coming of a new Christ, much less a new Paul ? We do not even need to imagine a “return of religion” that would take the form of these world-historical figures; instead we can simply imagine the coming of a certain cult, the invention of new rituals, the creation of new scruples that would be without a name, or would not go under the official name of “religion,” according to an older etymological source. Not yet, at least. Recalling Bergson’s statement that the universe is a machine for creating Gods, the fact that this machine no longer continues to be productive in this fashion means that it has been left idling or out of use, or superseded by newer machines, or condemned by a contemporary global political rhetoric as fundamentally despotic, under the terms of an archaic form of sovereignty. For this reason, perhaps, it has come to represent both the most primitive as well as the most contemporary biopolitical threat for the security of our species—as if signaling a form of monstrosity that is both fundamentally archaic and mythic in its constitution, but also in a form that appears like something from science fiction. Following this final remark or provocation, in conclusion, I will make several observations on how this new planetary (or global) machine for producing or engendering the death of God can be connected to the renewed and explicitly post-Enlightenment meaning of the “post-secular.” First, I would like to point out a striking similarity between Foucault’s remarks on the historical transformation of the nature of sovereignty associated with the birth of “the Rights of Man” and the emergence of what he calls “bio-power” alongside Derrida’s observations concerning what he calls a “double horizon” of the Death of God. Here, we might also recall Foucault’s earlier statements from the History of Sexuality regarding the transformation of the symbolic of blood to sexuality that occurred in the last half of the nineteenth century, but which he also

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argues did not occur without overlapping and producing forms of violent contradiction as in the case of modern and state forms of racism. Consequently, as he writes : A eugenic ordering of society, with all that implied in the way of extension and intensification of micro-powers, in the guise of an unrestricted state control (étatisation), was accompanied by the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood; the latter implied both the systematic genocide of others and the risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice. It is an irony of history that the Hitlerite politics of sex remained an insignificant practice while the blood myth was transformed into the greatest blood bath in recent memory.29 In parallel fashion, in Derrida’s observation we discover that the first horizon that is announced in “the self-destructive affirmation of religion” (which also proclaims the essence of “religio” as pacifist, ecumenical or even “Catholic” sense) also hides or conceals another horizon that is associated with a gesture of total pacification of all the earlier senses of religion. In fact, like Foucault, Derrida challenges us to think of the meaning of “the return of religion and of the religious” under both horizons, which, he reminds us, are always complex and overdetermined. He poses the following question : How is it possible to understand the form of absolute peace announced under the first horizon, even of a certain pacific or oceanic feeling often associated with the theological pronouncements of “religion at the end of religion” or “religion without religion,” without also announcing (at least as the condition of this new horizon) the total pacification of all other senses of re-ligio that is embodied by the term’s other historical representatives, even if this would also include the pacification of the sense of religare that is embodied in the subjective form of faith that belongs to historical Christianity as well ? Therefore, it could also be argued that the recent attempts to “think God otherwise” are part of a larger movement of Globalatinization that Derrida identifies by a certain double horizon of “the Death of God.” This horizon is said to be doubled in the sense that the first horizon announcing the death of God (the death of an archaic or fundamentalist image of God as despot and absolute sovereign) is elided by another horizon that both conceals and divides the same horizon into two unequal moments. These echo the fact that both images of God can be said to actually exist in the contemporary world and both define the war over the very meaning and the form of existence that belongs to the word “religion” today. Second, recalling the “etymological and logical scandal” that Derrida also highlights in his reading of Émile Benveniste, we need to pay attention to a particularly Christian genealogy that fundamentally determines, according to Benveniste’s subtle argument, the first 29 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, kindle location, 1982.

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encroachment of a specifically Christian horizon of meaning that still determines our sense of religion as religio understood as obligation or social bond (Bund). Accordingly, what was formerly assumed to be an essentially subjective disposition (that of “having scruples,” an inhibition with regard to action, which could be ritualized in observance of certain moral prohibitions) becomes an objective propriety ascribed to certain things or to an ensemble of beliefs and practices. It is this objectivity (toward a particular set of beliefs and practices) that would undergo further systemization and codification, allowing one set of beliefs to be distinguished from another by means of external practices and rituals, later identified with the characteristics of other religions that the advent of the modern scientific and anthropological meaning of “religion” proper. As Benveniste argues, this entails not just a transformation of the etymological sense of religio, but even more crucially, “it is the very content of religio that has changed.”30 It is here that we find the exact moment of the scandal that Derrida points to. According to Benveniste, it is not simply that the word underwent a diachronic semantic alteration in which its earlier meaning could coexist alongside its new signified, but rather a complete synchronic transformation in which one signified was replaced by another and organized hierarchically (if we are to understand this is what Benveniste means by “content”). What is this new signified, and how is it specifically found to be a Christian invention ? “For a Christian,” Benveniste writes, “what characterizes this new faith, in relation to pagan cults, is the bond of piety, this dependence of fidelity in relation to God, this obligation in the proper sense of the word. Thus the concept of religio is remodeled upon the idea that the human makes of his relation to God; an idea that is totally different from the old roman religio and one that prepares for its modern sense (acception).”31 Third, if we accept Benveniste’s argument concerning the horizon of a specifically Christian sense of religion, one that will prefigure its modern senses, as being bound up with the substitution of external obligation for subjective scruples, then what are the implications of this total semantic transformation ? First of all, since obligation is defined as the state of being “bound to the oath,” objectively determined by a set of beliefs and practices, then the existence of religion is henceforth determined by the degree to which it can create obligation and the manner in which it effectively commands obedience ! Here, I would recall that the entire premise of Benveniste’s analysis is to explain how what was formerly a purely subjective disposition found in all Indo-European 30 Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, tome 2 (Paris : Minuit, 1980), 265. 31 Ibid.

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societies, representing all manners of religious scruples and cultic expressions of the sacred, becomes, after the Roman recognition of Christianity as the official and “authentic cult,” set against the various illegitimate “superstitions,” the emergence of religion as a distinct and separate social institution that evolves alongside the State-form from that point onward. At the very beginning of his analysis, Benveniste writes : “If it is in fact true that religion is an institution, this institution has not always been separated from others, nor positioned outside of them. We will be able to conceive of this clearly and thus define religion only at the moment when it is delimited, and where its domain is distinct.”32 (Almost all of Benveniste’s conclusions show how the etymological aberrations of late Roman society fatally determined the path of Western social and political ideas, producing any number of logical scandals that cannot so easily be explained.) Therefore, following from the emergence of religion as a “distinct domain,” characterized by a “a set of beliefs and practices” that are themselves obligatory in nature, it will become inevitable that this institution will enter into strife and conflict with other powers for determining subjective obligation such as the family, or even the institutions of the State itself. Returning to my first observation, this will especially occur around the conflicts that pertain to the new set of state-sponsored obligations surrounding “the Rights of Man,” which continues to be responsible for bringing the era remarked by the power of religious institutions to a point of intense crisis. Fourth, and finally, in the sense of this unprecedented “double bind,” or of an affirmation that paradoxically hides or conceals its hostility the form of the affirmation of religion itself, we are also reminded of Deleuze’s enigmatic statement that today the Rights of Man can both preserve biopolitical life and, at the same time, authorize another holocaust. “From that point on the death penalty tends to be abolished and holocausts grow for the same reasons,” Deleuze writes and elaborates: Law increasingly renounces that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death (the death penalty), but allows itself to produce all the more hecatombs and genocides : not by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the name of race, precious space, conditions of life and the survival of population that believes itself better than its enemy, which it now treats not as a juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of “biopolitical danger.”33 In commenting on this passage in relation to Derrida’s reference to a “pacifying gesture” (which could also be understood implicitly to au32 Ibid., 266. 33 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (London : Continuum, 2006), 76.

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thorize another holocaust in the name of universal peace), I would simply point out that the qualities of “insanity” or “madness” could also be treated as biopolitical dangers. Therefore, I would consider these reflections that appear in Faith and Knowledge around the concept of “Globalatinziation,” which specifically concern the double bind of immunity and autoimmunity of religion and science, to be among the most acute and profound reflections on the same phenomenon that Foucault earlier observed under the concept of biopolitical life. It is only by bringing both horizons together in a combined and systematic analysis, yet to be performed, that we might have a chance of glimpsing the total phenomenon of what goes by the name of “bio-power” today.

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IV Arché, Arcanum, and Articulation : The Universal and its Characteristics vera bühlmann 1 Genericness as symbolical body of reciprocity 121 · enunciating the universal 121 · universal text, generic code, pre-specific data 123 · Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers 124 · Algebraic Paradigms 126 — II Lemmata in How to Theorize the Universal While Remaining Neutral on Matters of Belief  132 · Lemma  1 ­133­ ·Lemma  2 133 · Lemma  3 134 · Lemma  4 137 · Lemma  5 142 · Lemma  6  144 · Lemma  7 147 · Lemma 8 149 — III Realism of Ideal Entities : Conceiving, Giving Birth to, and Raising Ideas on the Stage of Abstraction 155 · Intellectuality has its natural residence in universal text whose corpus provides a collective body to think with and to reason in. 157 · Homothesis as the Locus in Quo of the Universal’s Presence 159 · 1st Iteration 159 · 2nd Iteration 160 · 3rd Iteration 161 · 4th Iteration 162 · 5th Iteration 164 · 6th Iteration 166 — IV The Amorous Nature of Intellectual Conception : Universal Text that Conserves the Articulations of a Generic Voice 167 · 1st Iteration 167 · 2nd Iteration 168 · 3rd Iteration 170 · 4th Iteration 171 · 5th Iteration 172 · 6th Iteration 174 

Vera Bühlmann is founder and head of the Laboratory for Applied Virtuality at the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. She studied English language and literature and philosophy at the University of Zurich, and holds a PhD from the Institute for Media Sciences, University of Basel. Her work focuses on the double-articulation of semiotics and (mathematical) communication, especially on how an algebraic understanding of code and programming languages enable us to consider computability within a general literacy of architectonic articulations. She is editor of pre-specifics : Some Comparatistic Investigations in Research in Art and Design (with Martin Wiedmer, jrp ringier, 2008) and four other books, and author of several essays as well as of the forthcoming book Die Nachricht, ein Medium : Annäherungen an Herkünfte und Topoi städtischer Architektonik (ambra, 2014). www.­monasandnomos.org

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This essay continues to explore the perspectival shift in cogitating the infrastructural genericness of our urban fabric, picking up from my contribution to the first volume of Metalithikum. This shift involves an approach to infrastructures that is based not solely on functionality, but predicated on capacities and capabilities depending upon, and varying according to, the mastership in intellection exerted within the symbolic : i.e. in the symbolic space of mathematics’ universal “characteristics” (abstract algebraic symbols), and in the domains of the logistical orders which are articulated in such mathematical “scripting.” Mastership in characterizing the universal has traditionally being reserved for the 113

discipline of geometry alone. This article explores and meditates on Michel Serres’s thesis of attributing such mastership to characteristics (mathesis) rather than to forms (geometry). He thereby rejects the paradigm of Platonic dialectics as anchored in recollection alone, and instead adopts an atomist viewpoint—with the atom as that which can only be thought. Serres’s surprising claim is that pure geometry has never actually been born—that it does not manifest itself, in any immediate sense, in all things natural and physical. Precisely because it has never actually been born, he holds, pure geometry can continue to inform mathematical reasoning in its constitutive role for the domains of science. He regards 114

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the elements of geometry as arcane, and dependent upon mediation through the mathematical characterization. This perspective involves regarding the scene of knowledge in terms of its very fabric, namely as a stage of abstraction on which spaces of homothesis can be formalized and quantified in a manner that lives up to our contemporary state of the art in mathematics : category theory, sheaf theory, topos theory, and algebraic topology. This is what makes Serres’s perspective so promising for thinking about infrastructures and technics in terms of capacities and capabilities. “The paradox of the enunciation of the universal. Historical experience and the history of philosophy have made us highly skeptical towards the very possibility of enunciating the universal, yet the universal can be said to have become a fact of contemporary life, and the attempt at enunciating the universal

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remains an inescapable demand, in politics and notably in practice. Not to enunciate the universal is impossible, but to enunciate it is untenable.”1 Traditionally, the notion of the universal is the comprehension of that which is the property of all things. If Étienne Balibar raises the problem of the universal within a dedicatedly political setup (as is the case with the quote above), it is because the universal necessarily addresses problems of justice and judgment. As a philosophical problem, the question of how to enunciate the universal is usually raised in relation to secularized forms of power—Carl Schmitt, for example, famously declared “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”2 For Schmitt, the whole history of politics and law can be understood in relation to, and read indirectly through, the history of metaphysical systems. However we might think about his manner of making this postulate, the recent revival of “political theology” certainly expresses the relevance of his perspective : Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben all consider themselves atheists, and yet they have given fresh attention to arguments from religious traditions, especially the writing of St. Paul, in order to formulate versions of universalisms.3 If we were to look for stages in the development of the concept (rather than what it is meant to comprehend and refer to), we might say that in ancient Greek philosophy, the universal was articulated in the philosophical categories, as that in which the systemic structure is given from which an order of natural kinds may be deduced by proper reasoning. Within the scholastic heritage of Greek thought, the Aristotelian and realist idea of natural kinds gave way to the idea of divine predication, and the universal was addressed in Christian terms as the Judgments of God. Against the background of this profile we can see how, as Schmitt points out, finding a way of dealing with the universal is a challenge at the very heart of the diverse modern processes of secularization. Against the legacy of conceiving identity according to a specifically general nature (antiquity) of how the universal is given in natural kinds, or according to an individual nature in scholastic theological philosophy, modernization began to pose the problem of the universal 1 2

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Étienne Balibar, “Construction and Deconstruction of the Universal,” Critical Horizon 7, no. 1 (2006) : 1. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology : Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2006), 36. To briefly recall two of Schmitt’s favorite examples, the modern concept of political sovereignty is a transformed and disguised concept of God, and the modem concept of juridical decision is a transformed and disguised concept of the Miracle. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul : The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1997); Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains : A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2005); Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject : The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London : Verso, 2000).

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by seeking a nonindividualistic identity notion in the split terms of a scientific objectivity, to be determined by a political notion of subjectivity. Political subjectivity is natural subjectivity enveloped and predicated in the terms of the law in whose terms a national State is constituted. Within such constitutional terms, the universal is distributed according to a kind of political grammar. Objective is that which is controlled by political subjectivity; it alone can lay claims for its particular nature on a positive notion of truth. All things that cannot be controlled by political subjectivity, and hence can claim no positive truth status for the nature that they name, are bound to remain entangled within a logics of salvation (not one of scientific objectivity). This is how, through the status of political Law, the problem of articulating and formulating the universal rests at the very heart of political modernity. The search for a positive notion of truth remains indispensable, it seems, even if nature is understood as a book written in the language of mathematics. The universal may well be attributed to a notion of nonindividualistic and nonclassificational identity, and hence be formulatable in the language of mathematics. Yet with such formulation, the universal nature of such a generic identity is not yet enunciated or articulated. The issue at hand is the question of law and the question of how symbols are capable of contracting what is to count as truth. With this, the political approach to the universal culminates in the problematic status of mathematical symbols, problematic because they themselves appear to be either “free creations of the human mind,”4 or must be considered as being of divine origin : “God made the integers; all else is the work of man.”5 Even if we refrain from attributing them any kind of positivity—and in that respect the immenseness (literally the immeasurableness) of the very fact that there is life, nature, thought, consciousness, and death— by maintaining that mathematical symbols are ciphers, the question of how we might reason the triad of arché, arcanum, and articulation into a properly meaningful fabric of sense remains the crucial issue. Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou maintain, for example, that mathematics deals with ciphers of voidness and absence, neither properly negative nor positive. With this, they both hold on to respecting the mystery of Being. But with positioning law as the cipher of finitude,6 politics is subjected to an economy of death as the only assumedly possible framework within which one might attend to life-in-general. In this manner, mathematics, universality, and with that the very condiRichard Dedekind, Essays on the Theory of Numbers, trans. Wooster Woodruff Beman (Mineola, NY : Dover, 1963 [1858]), 31. 5 Leopold Kronecker, cited in Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics (New York : Simon and Schuster, 1986,) 477.# 6 See Alain Badiou interviewed by Adam S. Miller, “Universal Truths and the Question of Religion,” Journal for Religion and Scripture 3, no. 1 (2005), http ://www.­ philosophyandscripture.org/Issue3-1/Badiou/Badiou.pdf.

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tions for politics, aspire to formulate generic life. And this shifts the concern with the universal in a political sense to another level : that of the forms of thinking according to which formulations of generic life formulate its (generic life’s) “nature” as “universal nature.” It is always systems of how to think about life in its “truth” that constitute the basis for Law and political Rights. While metaphysical manners of thinking seek such nature in qualities, and emphasize conceptual forms of thinking about qualities, modern scientific and critical philosophy seek to formulate the nature of generic life quantitatively, and emphasize mathematical forms of thinking. The implicit assumption is in both cases that “naturalness”—and hence the reference for how legal rights are distributed and articulated—be expressible primarily in either one of these symbolic forms : the conceptual or the mathematical. It is obvious how Schmitt’s concern, that any purely secular understanding of politics and law must (1) either consist in a certain forgetfulness of its own conditions, namely the theological principles that politics and law unwittingly invoke and require, or (2) that they themselves must turn “religious” (at least in a formal sense) when demanding of their subjects the schematically conforming performance of particular methods that are meant to counter such forgetfulness—a demand which is, inherently, in contradiction with the acclaimed non-doctrinary character of experimental, critical, mathematical, and objective science. The dilemma of secularized politics and law lies in how to conceive of the proper finitude necessary to define the mathematical form of thought : method per se, without being rooted in some sense of transcendent nature axiomatic of Euclidean geometry or any other set of axioms, seems ill suited not for particular, but for principle reasons : mathematics itself is the domain where methods are invented. As a form of thought, the mathematical is purely symbolic : the more rigorously methodical it becomes, the more abundantly inventive it becomes; we can observe this in the drastic evolution of mathematics since the sixteenth century. It constitutes a symbolic corporeality of reciprocal determinability. Mathematics is just as little a dead corpus as language is a dead corpus; it lives within the infinite as its very element. Algebra, as we will see in a moment, is generally understood as “providing with finite means ways of managing the infinite.”7 Like that, no particular body of reciprocal determinability ever exhausts the power of the infinite, of which mathematics captures, symbolizes, and appropriates more and more throughout its ongoing “genesis.” Hence, every sentencing of its vivid corporeality into a corpus that is stated introduces artificially—arbitrarily and deliberately—economic conditions that are to determine what may count as possible or impossible, feasible or unlikely, and so on. These conditions are 7

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See Vaughan Pratt, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v., “Algebra” (2014), http :// plato.stanford.edu/entries/algebra/.

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almost inevitably fitted for supporting the particular political manners of governing that claim to find their legitimization in such a stated corporeality. If law and politics use mathematical forms of thought as their “secular” grounds of legitimation, they must necessarily anchor themselves within a particular body of reciprocal determinability, and hence face the dilemma of sentencing the mathematical body within which they root to rigidly conform to one particular symbolic regime. In effect, law and politics elevate themselves above science precisely in aspiring to conform to nothing else but the manifestations of that which counts as objective. This conflict indeed seems to be at stake in the so-called foundational crisis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it became bluntly undebatable that the elements of mathematics are symbolically constituted, and thus rest, at least to a certain degree, on the conventional grounds of notational systems. Around the 1850s, George Boole reformulated the legacy of syllogistic reasoning in such a manner that logics itself became the object “computable” by algebra’s symbolic systems of reasoning—systems of reasoning being plural, importantly. For Boole, it was clear that thinking itself must be attended in its bursting nature, a nature that necessarily exceeds any one form of thinking in particular. Yet such a view cannot be accommodated within a purely secular understanding of science, as it puts at its very heart a “spiritual” nature. Undoubtedly, this is the background in which people like Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud considered a genuinely psychical quantity notion,8 and developed proper phenomenological and psychoanalytical methods of how they ought to be dealt with. What we have experienced throughout the twentieth century is an unfortunate split in delegating all psychical aspects of reality to “soft” or “subjective” sides of sciences (the humanities), while maintaining an understanding of mathematical quantities largely untouched and nonresponsive to their algebraic “deliberativeness” for the “hard” and “objective” side of sciences (engineering and natural sciences). It is with the popularization of computers and information technology at large that this division into distinct departments becomes increasingly less tenable, as they produce abundant artifacts that shape and condition our lived realities with “mathematical” power combined with “subjective” deliberation. The symbolic corporeality of reciprocal determinability has turned into a symbolic apparatus of objectivity, which can no longer be considered “natural” (as opposed to “artificial”). Thus, the dilemma that Balibar’s paradox formulates reaches deeper than the levels that he himself (and many of the political philosophers who theorize universality in relation to questions of legal 8

Freud, by applying the mathematical methods of analysis and functions to psychical “content”; and Husserl, in his habilitation thesis entitled Über den Begriff der Zahl : Psychologische Analysen (1887).

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rights, political subjectivity, and citizenship) usually addresses. The paradox at stake relates both strings of thought—natural belonging and mathematical truth—together. As such, enunciating the universal emerges as a paradox, because (1) when we claim to be objective, by the secular standards of scientific method rather than on grounds of a particular belief or ideology, we associate the universal with the mathematical; and (2) no one is, properly speaking, “native” to that realm of the mathematical. To put it in other words : anyone who wishes to enunciate a mathematical notion of universality must en-familiarize herself with it through intellectually appropriating the customs of this realm. Yet these customs lack an originality and pureness that could be restored, laid bare, or instituted in their proper rights. We might say instead that the realm of the mathematical is an abstract continent of ongoing origination, self-engendered through the symbolizations of its proper forms of thinking. The problem again seems twofold. On the one hand, appropriating the customs of the mathematical comes at a huge cost : namely, to deliberately grow into a stranger to what we believe to be our native selves— the ways of everyday conduct into which we are all, in our singular ways, born and within which we are more or less well accustomed. That this is so, we learn from all the discourses around identity politics, postcolonialism, international law, and so on. On the other hand, such en-familiarization to an abstract symbolic “continent” requires an estrangement from ways of conduct which we feel to be native, and which are dear and valuable for that reason; this not only requires intellectual efforts for being achievable at all, but it also animates intellectuality to grow capable of developing mastership on the new grounds—that of the mathematical—in an infinite variety of ways. Hence, difference is again introduced into the realm of a common and generic nature. Proportional to how successful we are in en-familiarizing ourselves to mathematical truth as our origin, we learn to master its conditions to greater or lesser degrees. Attempts to “state” the universal seem, inevitably, to corrupt the very intention behind doing so : namely, to establish and control living conditions that may count as truly just and unbiased. Tragically so, the “mathematical language” in which “the book of nature” is written has turned out, between Galileo Galilei and, let say, Alexander Grothendieck, not to be a hoped for quasi-original language that would relieve the people who speak it from all needs and power to interpret and communicate. This is, or so we can at least speculate, why Balibar speaks of enunciation and thereby makes reference to Émile Benveniste’s linguistic theory of utterances. Benveniste had raised some structural problems of a general linguistics, which, I would suggest, extend no less over mathematical language than over the languages of mother tongues. With his theory of utterances, Benveniste sought to open up an intermediate condition

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between the formal space of statements in logics (in mathematical language this would correspond to algebraic sets and categories) and the morphological space of sentences in grammar (which would correspond to the diagrams in topology) : “As individual production, utterance can be defined, in relation to language, as a process of ‘appropriation,’” he writes. “The speaker appropriates the formal apparatus of language and utters their position as speaker by means of specific signs, on the one hand, and by using secondary procedures, on the other.” As a consequence, he continues, “the individual act of appropriation of language places the speaker in their own speech. The presence of the speaker in their utterance means that each instance of discourse constitutes an internal point of reference.”9 To put it a bit drastically, it seems as if the language confusion, which is said, allegorically, to have resulted from building the Tower of Babel, has spread from the realm of language and the conceptual to the realm of the mathematical. Instead of the allegorical diaspora of one people into many peoples, who begin to occupy their respective territories in competitive manners, the abstract continent, while promising to welcome and accommodate anyone who speaks the language of mathematics, disperses into a number of bodies of reciprocal determinability—into many competing symbolical bodies of universal genericness. Each of these symbolical bodies provides and cultivates different customs of coding, and hence different realities of laws and rights. What I want to consider is that if we affirm that mathematics is a language, we can attend to its formulations and articulations as a kind of textuality that articulates a generic voice. Its articulations and formulations are relevant for the many and they are conserved in all that is computable. Every instance of a generic textuality does no more, but also no less, than providing and distributing the wealth of intellectuality throughout the reign of objectivity. I

genericness as symbolical body of reciprocity “Never forget the place from which you depart, but leave it behind and join the universal. Love the bond that unites your plot of earth with the Earth, the bond that makes kin and stranger resemble each other.”10

Enunciating the Universal When we attend today to Galileo’s famous statement that nature may well be written in a book, yet that this book be written in the language of mathematics, we usually Émile Benveniste, “L’appareil formel de l’enonciation,” Langages 5, no. 17 (1970) : 14; my own translation. 10 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1995), 50. 9

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treat it as a metaphorical statement. We tend to feel that mathematics is not a language. It is more immediate, a structure or an order that is independent of mediation, interpretation, and rhetorical instrumentalization. In this manner, I referred to mathematics as an abstract continent, which has for centuries now promised to welcome and accommodate anyone who proceeds according to its methods. But with informationbased computation, the perspective of seeing in mathematics a language must appear much less metaphorical today. Hence, what I would like to consider in the following is how this dilemma is intimately related to the role of algebra within mathematics, and furthermore, with the constitutional status of algebra for computing. In computing, algebra indeed appears, in a sense that almost feels vulgar, as a kind of mathematical language. But the perspective of regarding algebra in this manner is far older than actual computers as we know them today, and it was perhaps most prominently pursued by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century, and then again by the algebraists in the nineteenth century. At issue for this perspective was, then as today, how we could make sense of objects if their extension in time and space is rooted within an analytical and abstract construction, and not within a directly measurable, real, and concrete immediacy of datum (givenness). To illustrate in perhaps the quickest manner what such rootedness within analytical extension involves, we can recall the Cartesian distinction between two substances, res extensa and the res cogitans. This distinction is hardly overestimated if we consider it crucial for modern science at large : science that is rational, experimental, and objective, because it only settles with statements that are backed up empirically. Discarding mathematical proofs without empirical basis from scientific methods acted as a lever to lift science from dogma. But it also opened up a particular lacuna : symbolic notations multiplied, and acquired specific capacities. Whereas arithmetics used to be self-evidently applicable in a uniform manner to all that can be counted, there began to emerge particular systems of symbolic reasoning, of which not all embodied the same capacities for treating problems. In short, calculation acquired an indeterminate prefix, and began to need specification with regard to the nature of the system whose deduction it was to govern. By the nineteenth century, there were numerous calculi around, and indeed, it became difficult even to distinguish between “a calculus” and “an algebra.” It is in this situation that Boole set out to postulate that there is a nature proper to thought in the same manner as there is a nature proper to physics. He conceived of his Laws of Thought not as axioms in any logically foundational sense, but as conservational laws in a manner analog to how physical laws are conservational laws. In other words, Boole’s laws of thought were not a kind of police system that is to control behavior; rather, they are laws that allow for an empirical approach also to the Cartesian res cogitans. With such an outlook, the

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physical reality, in its status as the transcendent referent of mathematics, was challenged by a complementary “reality”—that of the symbolic. This is what stands behind the rising interest by mathematicians toward the end of the nineteenth century in establishing psychology as a natural science—on equal par and next to physics (Freud), or mastering physics (Husserl), or subjected to physics (Bertrand Russell, school of logical empiricism). We will come back to this bifurcation in the second chapter of this text, where we will discuss a few of the lemmata that arise from it in more detail, with an eye to their historical context and, especially, with regard to our question of what is at stake with the notion of the universal. But first, let us attend to how these backgrounds have given way to the rise of programming languages, and how we might think about the “analytical extension” at stake in computing as a universal kind of text whose elements are generic and whose extension is objective, in the sense of not being “authored” by any one voice in particular. Universal Text, Generic Code, Pre-Specific Data Universal text, I will argue, manifests not only a kind of writing that is more profound, and more abstractly decoupled from writing that captures and represents voice and articulation, as Derrida suggests. Universal text also manifests as a generic body-to-think-in, along the following lines : (1) like language, universal text is collectively engendered before it can be individually appropriated; but, also like language, it dies, turns stiff and formulaic once it ceases to be inhabited; (2) a generic body-to-think-in does of course have a form of organization, but the referent of this form is not transcendent to it, rather it is engendered in an immanent manner. Conditions for transcendentality within the immanence of a distributed body, organized through the way this body collects itself, are provided from the distributed collectivity as it insists. A generic body-to-think-in does not, properly, exist; and we cannot think of it as a being, because its essence is not perennial but selfpredicative—its very nature is to engender its own nature. We should rather say, universal text conserves what remains invariant throughout all the forms and characters into whose expressions it might in principle engender itself. Universal text’s collective originality does not follow the linear order of progeny, but is comprehensively and circularly constituted. But unlike Derrida’s idea of an apparatus of arché-writing, generic textuality is not itself dead; it is quick and vivid, and its vividness is animated by no other transcendent principle than that constituted by the open totality of all the acts of learning that it comes to collect and organize. It is not a logics that follows an economy of parceled finitude (death); it is an animal that lives and prospers from how it is treated— generic textuality is animated by literacy. Its appropriation does not deprive or consume it, but enriches and engenders it. Thus, neither is

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it a logics that follows an economy of properties (life); rather might we see in it an infinitely wealthy principle, distributing rights of birth for all things in their universal origin. Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers Let us begin by considering the backgrounds of programming languages. Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the somewhat scandalous poet (and freedom fighter) Lord Byron, is famous for the major leap in thinking that stands behind the paradigm of computational language. She considered that Charles Babbage’s The Differential Machine, and its successor Analytical Engine, incorporate an abstract space in “manifest” (symbolical) form, such that it could be coded. The problem that Babbage’s machines address is very pragmatic : they were both devised to automatically compute trigonometric calculations and logarithmic tables on which British Trade depended while sailing over the seas. The library entry of the European Graduate School gives a lively account : Charles Babbage came up with the idea about the time the Analytical Society was founded in 1812. He was sitting in front of a set of logarithms that he knew to have errors. At that time there were people, called “computers,” that would compute parts of logarithms in a sort of mass productive enterprise. Babbage had the thought that if people could break down bits of a complicated mathematical procedure into smaller parts that were easily computable, that there must be a way to program a machine to work from these smaller bits and compute large mathematical computations, and to do so more quickly without human error.11 Lovelace was a mathematician, but her interest in Babbage’s engines was precisely not that they operated mechanically on bundling arithmetic sequences in handy bits and pieces, but that the numbers actually open up an entirely different kind of space to think in. She was the first to consider that the numerical space, as it is “manifest” in such an engine, could actually have memory, and hence be structured in much more complex ways than the ideas of nonstriated number spaces on which arithmetics usually relies. Much more, she thought, a numerical realm with memory and differential, heterogenous coordination can be structured such that it can host activities not unlike the verbs are hosted by the grammatical structures of nouns, prepositions, and adverbs. That is, in different temporal forms that allow for storytelling, or, as we are more likely used to saying, to encode several activities into what we call “procedures.” From a contemporary perspective, we could say that she attended to the mediality of numbers, not only to their in11 “Charles Babbage – Biography,” European Graduate School, http ://www.egs.edu/ library/charles-babbage/biography/.

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strumentality : it is still means to an end, yet the end does not count as being predetermined a priori. Rather, it is informed by what the means is capable of achieving—much like since the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy, we attend to the mediality of language within a transformational notion of grammar (see Noam Chomsky). Lovelace has been called “the Enchantress of Numbers,”12 because she thought about the numbers in these engines as notational codes, and on this assumption she could invent the first theory of how to do what we today call, somewhat colloquially, “programming.” But these are retrospective descriptions, and I put them in somewhat suggestive terms. Lovelace says : Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies, imagine that because the business of the engine is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly. It might develop three sets of results simultaneously, viz. symbolic results […]; numerical results […]; and algebraical results in literal notation. This latter, she continues, has not been deemed a necessary or desirable addition to its powers, partly because the necessary arrangements for effecting it would increase the complexity and extent of the mechanism to a degree that would not be commensurate with the advantages, where the main object of the invention is to translate into numerical language general formulæ of analysis already known to us, or whose laws of formation are known to us. We can see where her way thinking was, to a certain degree, in conflict with the pragmatic task at hand. “But it would be a mistake to suppose,” she is careful to point out, “that because its results are given in the notation of a more restricted science, its processes are therefore restricted to those of that science.”13 This last remark contains Ada Lovelace’s leap in thinking, and here, her contribution of an additional and genuinely intellectual dimension to the mechanical instrumentality to the genius of Babbage is fully enunciated. Thus, let us look briefly, with Lovelace’s leap of abstract conception still in mind, at the much more recent development of how such thinking situates itself in 12 See Betty Alexandra Toole, ed., Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers : A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron’s Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer (Mill Valley, CA : Strawberry Press, 1992). 13 Ada Lovelace, translator’s notes on Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, L. F. Menabrea (Geneva : Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, 1842), http :// www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html.

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an encodable number space that can host grammars for formulating computational utterances. Moreover, we can imagine these “abstract” activities that Lovelace envisioned as that which can be staged and dramatized, through programming, in a number space that is, peculiarly so, symbolically literal. Two very strong paradigms in programming throughout the last decades can be distinguished. Early languages such as Fortan, Ada, or C started out with a procedural paradigm. The main interest with these languages was to make available for easy application, as a kind of toolbox of “instruments” in coded “form,” the precise way of how a certain organizational procedure needs to be set up in order to function well. Think of SAP,14 for example. The developments in this paradigm are driven by the fact that every step of decision can thereby be “dispersed” into constitutive procedures, and hence, an infinitesimal limberness can be introduced into organizational forms. The paradigm subsequent to the procedural one pursued a much less directly hands-on approach, and instead became more didactic. With languages like smalltalk, Java, and C++, an object-oriented paradigm follows the procedural, and it keeps apart the what (described by procedures) and how (the specification of this what). Through this distinction, negotiation begins to be supplied by “computational augmentation” about what is to be reached, and about how systems can be devised that allow the instantiation of procedures (whats) in much wider variations. Object-oriented programming allows devising entire libraries of abstract objects that do not depend on a statically specified order or classification system. Such abstract objects are called generic, and if we consider the algebraic genericness as the levels of abstraction in which things are treated in their powers, we can understand that they are not really “objects” at all. It be much more adequate to say that they incorporate entire “objectivities” : they allow for one-of-a-kind particulars to “concretize” singularly, and be fitted optimally according to the local and contextual requirements of a task—and this not despite their mathematical formulation, but precisely because they are specified instances of universal enunciation, in the manner of algebra. Algebraic Paradigms So let us look at algebra more slowly, by following its discussion in a dedicated article in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Algebra is “a branch of mathematics sibling to geometry, analysis (calculus), number theory, combinatorics, etc.,” we are told, although, as the article continues, “in its full generality it differs from its siblings in serving no specific mathematical domain. Whereas geometry treats spatial entities, analysis continuous variation, number 14 SAP is the name of a widely used enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations.

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theory integer arithmetic, and combinatorics discrete structures, algebra is equally applicable to all these and other mathematical domains.”15 What we can immediately see from this is twofold : (1) it is commonplace to regard algebra on equal par with other mathematical disciplines, in a manner that is “instrumental,” and not “constitutive,” as I would like to argue—it is presented as a brother or sister to them, not their parent; (2) however, we find support for the noninstrumental perspective immediately : unique about algebra among its siblings is, we are told, that it is independent of any domain in particular. A bit later on, when it comes to why algebra is of philosophical interest, the implications of this get even more explicit : “Algebra is of philosophical interest for at least two reasons. From the perspective of foundations of mathematics, algebra is strikingly different from other branches of mathematics in both its domain independence and its close affinity to formal logic.”16 Herein lies the problem at stake in conceiving mathematics as language : whether it is governed and organized by algebra or by logics is the point of debate and lobbying. And yet, isn’t it rather strange to see them in competition, if we follow how the article continues ? Algebra has also played a significant role in clarifying and highlighting notions of logic, at the core of exact philosophy for millennia. The first step away from the Aristotelian logic of syllogisms towards a more algebraic form of logic was taken by Boole in an 1847 pamphlet and subsequently in a more detailed treatise, The Laws of Thought, in 1854. The dichotomy between elementary algebra and modern algebra then started to appear in the subsequent development of logic, with logicians strongly divided between the formalistic approach as espoused by Frege, Peano, and Russell, and the algebraic approach followed by C. S. Peirce, Schroeder, and Tarski.17 This observation, that algebra has played a crucial role in the development of logics over the millennia, gives the actual structure the encyclopedia article follows. On its basis, it distinguishes three “generations” of algebra : elementary, abstract, and universal. The article makes no suggestion of how these generations are related to one another. This is rather confusing because the separation into elementariness, abstractness, and universality seems to suggest that they all unfold within a common scale where they gradually, and in a kind of bottom-up manner, extend their scope. This invokes a narrative of progressive approximation of a final goal—universality, the most recent generation of algebra, supposedly being the place to be reached. If we assumed instead that the generations corresponds to different levels of abstractness—each of which further 15 Pratt, “Algebra.” 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.

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correspond to notions of elementarity, abstractness, and universality specific to each level—we can rely on such a generational model of algebra in order to compare how these notions can be formulated in a variety of manners. In the third part of this text, I will outline such a model by suggesting that each level of abstraction be a stage of “homothesis”—that is, of how relations of equivalence and identity can be formulated. It is within such a space of homothesis, I will argue, that scenes of originality can be staged in different manners : elementarity associates algebra to geometry and forms, and establishes the construction frame of a space of homothesis; abstractness associates algebra to arithmetics and numbers, and provides the axiomatic frameworks within which particular inventories (calculi) of how to count, occupy, and govern a space of homothesis can be developed; universality associates algebra with the alphabeticity of language and the articulation of invariant quantities, and allows to saturate the stage of abstraction with sense. The crucial shift in taking the mathematics-as-language-perspective culminates in the nature of these invariant quantities : they need not anymore be restricted to phonemes, to quantities that articulate the stream of breath, but rather we can read movement as a stream to be articulated, or equally, energy can be read as such a stream. But for now, and just to get more familiar with this difficult relation between logics and algebra, we will stick close to the generational distinction as is proposed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article. Let us recall that algebra provides “finite ways of managing the infinite,” as the article states, by elaborating general procedures of how we can enumerate and count possible solutions that can be found for a problem insofar as it is formulated in general terms. The article speaks about elementary algebra as having provided, throughout the history of algebra until the nineteenth century, finite ways of managing the infinite.18 It elaborates : a formula such as πr² for the area of a circle of radius r describes infinitely many possible computations, one for each possible valuation of its variables. A universally true law expresses infinitely many cases, for example the single equation x+y = y+x summarizes the infinitely many facts 1+2 = 2+1, 3+7 = 7+3, and so forth. Each of its methods is also applicable to many 18 The article marks the developments in the nineteenth century, which it labels “abstract algebra,” as a singular event in an otherwise continuous history, an event that shatters all continuity that could possibly be expected from the (contemporary) developments he labels as “universal algebra.” This is a view to which I do not subscribe. It would seem much more plausible to treat what Pratt distinguishes as “elementary” versus “universal” as being a rotational return of the same elementary character of algebra, yet on a different level of abstraction. We could then see in abstract algebra, which Pratt treats as a singular and intervening event, the logical “lever-phase” that institutes a new stage of abstraction. According to this scheme, we could look hypothetically to find similar “lever-phases,” for example, before the invention of infinitesimal calculus, or before the adoption of the decimal number system, and so on. But as this is not the place to develop this view in any adequate detail, I will follow largely the structure proposed by the article.

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nonnumeric domains such as, for example, subsets of a given set under the operations of union and intersection, words over a given alphabet under the operations of concatenation and reversal, or permutations of a given set under the operations of composition and inverse. Each such corpus of application is called “an” algebra, and it consists of the set of its elements and operations that rule over certain elements. Here, each algebra is treated in a fixed and closed-off manner. We can say that what is provided in them are distinct inventories of coding. These inventories allow to encode particular situations (events) in manners that allow them to appear as a case—that is, as an instance of a general form for which the inventory provides the means for computing possible articulations, declinations, conjugations, and so on. We can imagine the relevance of these inventories for science by considering that its symbolic constitution was, for example, crucial for learning to deal with quantities that must appear, in any intuitive sense, as genuinely “unreal”—as negative values, infinitesimals, imaginary units. In effect of dealing with them purely symbolically, instead of intuitively, algebraic inventories allowed, for example, to go from mechanics to dynamics : elementary algebra opens up toward counting the movement of elements in space (mechanics), and abstraction opens up to the interplay of elements in time (dynamics). Together, they introduce new magnitudes (speed, heat, and eventually electricity and information), and thus engender a whole wealth of new possibilities that can now be realized— thermodynamics, the clocking and control of processes in systems that are steadily supplied with power by the steam engine, the translation of this systemic view to working conditions, the invention of electricity, and so on. Algebraic inventories deal with symbols whose referents may be left arcane—in this sense, algebra can work with assumed quantities that, strangely so, are not really (physically) there. An infinitesimal is an infinitesimal exactly because it has no extension in space even if it has one in time, and the imaginary unit not only proportionalizes “complex” quantities, but, strictly speaking, it proportionalizes “virtual” quantities—virtual in the sense that if we try to picture them, they have a discretized extension in time without having one in space. In his 2007 book History of Abstract Algebra, Israel Kleiner writes illustratively : [Rafael] Bombelli had given meaning to the “meaningless” by thinking the “unthinkable,” namely that square roots of negative numbers [imaginary units] could be manipulated in a meaningful way to yield significant results. This was a very bold move on his part. As he put it : “it was a wild thought in the judgment of many; and I too was for a long time of the same opinion. The whole matter seemed to rest on sophistry rather than on truth. Yet I sought so long until I actually proved this to be the case.”19 19 Israel Kleiner, A History of Abstract Algebra (Basel : Birkhäuser, 2007), 8.

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Kleiner describes what Bombelli meant : he had developed a “calculus,” he explains, for how to manipulate these impossible quantities, which signified the birth of complex numbers. “But birth,” he points out, “did not entail legitimacy.”20 This question of legitimacy arises because computing with such arcane symbols added a new dimension to mathematics with striking consequences : the input of certain values in a formula may now not only turn out to be unsolvable because of lack of solutions, it may also yield a solution space that is so vast in options that none of the possible solutions seems more necessary than any other. The next generation of algebra is called abstract algebra. Whereas elementary algebra is conducted in a fixed algebra, as distinct inventories, abstract algebra treats classes of algebras having certain properties in common, typically those expressible as equations. Such general properties represent an axiomatic unity. In this generation, which emerged in the nineteenth century and was introduced via the classes of groups, rings, and fields, inventories of elementary coding are comprehended within larger frameworks—generic frameworks—that allow for generalizing the elements which they comprehend in different ways. With this, the central interest was no longer to find a particular solution, but to modulate and synthesize entire solution spaces by exploring the symmetry structures among them. Abstract algebra establishes, we might say, on the basis of elementary inventories for coding, generic spaces of potentiality. Within these generic spaces, the main goal is to expand the vastness of generically formulated solution spaces. Such solution spaces are rendering spaces for transformations (temporal change). With them, algebraic inventories can be elaborated into ontologies, into generically “natural” Gestalten. With this, we are in the third generation of algebra : universal algebra. In universal algebra, the movement of analysis is no longer one that departs from cases and seeks to find generalization. Analysis in universal algebra is inverse : it assumes a generalization speculatively, and computes “backwards” in order to see whether one might empirically find cases that correspond to these generalizations. Whereas elementary algebra treats equational reasoning in a particular algebra (inventory for coding), and abstract algebra studies particular classes of algebras (generic solution spaces), universal algebra studies classes of classes of algebras, by attending to the categoricity incorporated by the inventories. It begins to explore the problematicity proper to the abstract and generic solution spaces. Universal algebra does not apply inventories of coding, nor does it conform to the conceptual generalization of the inventories into classes and sets (generically “natural” forms); it adjoins speculatively specified natures to the generic ontologies, and thus, by challenging them to grow ever more capacious, prevents them from 20 Ibid.

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resting firmly. With this, universal algebra destabilizes the link between mathematical formalization and empirical falsification, because it treats any solution that can be computed as an arbitrary case. It regards any one formulation of a problem as problematical—that is, as genuinely indeterminate and yet (possibly so) resolvable. Let us work out the contrast more strikingly : abstract algebra operates within a notion of fully determined general and conceptual nature, where a correct computation corresponds to a necessary framework within which a solution is to be found, and within the confines of which it allows for gradual variation. Universal algebra, on the other hand, operates within the impredicative horizon of definable frameworks, within which solutions can vary not only gradually, but also categorically—the values of its formulations can be predicated within varieties that may differ in kind. This was indeed the key critique on Boole’s algebraic logics, and it is illustratively expressed in an open letter by one of his contemporaries in the mid-nineteenth century : The disadvantage of Professor Boole’s method is […] he takes a general indeterminate problem, applies to it particular assumptions […] and with these assumptions solves it; that is to say, he solves a particular determinate case of an indeterminate problem, while his book may mislead the reader by making him suppose that it is the general problem which is being treated of. The question arises, is the particular case thus solved a peculiarly valuable one, or one more worthy than any other of being solved ? It is clearly not an assumption that must in all cases be true; nor is it one which, without knowing the connexion among the simple events, we can suppose more likely than any other to represent that connexion.21 Boole’s methods were not shown to be faulty or inconsistent—the reason why they had been disliked or even spurned by so many was the immense depth of horizon they had opened up. The openness of this horizon results from regarding intuition not as based in a sensible quantity notion, referring to something that extends in both time and space, but as referring to an intellectual quantity notion. It is a distinction that affects the very heart of critical philosophy. Immanuel Kant himself had considered this possibility before discarding it. In a short appendix to the second book of his Critique of Pure Reason entitled “The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection,” Kant criticized Leibniz’s thoughts on a universal characteristics, in particular that they departed from an intellectual notion of intuition instead of a sensible one; he rightly observed that in 21 A letter by Henry Wilbraham, published as a supplement in The Philosophical Magazine 7 (June 1854); cited in Rod Grow, “George Boole and the Development of Probability Theory,” http ://mathsci.ucd.ie/~rodgow/boole1.pdf.

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consequence of this, judgments about a thing in general—that is, about an object—can never be possible in an unproblematical manner.22 With this development, mathematics opens up an abstract domain for developing and raising our faculties to make judgments—yet daringly decoupled from all grounds that could, unproblematically, be considered grounded in “natural” reason. This is why, as I want to argue here, we ought to begin considering our abilities to compute in terms of literacy. It is surely due to these reservations that Boole’s algebra, like the contributions of Hermann Grassmann, Bernhard Riemann, and others, were met with the greatest possible suspicion by their contemporaries. It is hardly exaggerated to say that within philosophy, the view on algebra as a natural and vivid language that is capable of articulating the universal in different manners (either in the elementary or universal form of particular cases or in the abstract form of generic logics) fell onto deaf ears except for some enthusiasts like Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, until Claude Shannon realized that Boole’s logic could be applied to electrical current. On this basis he invented his Mathematical Theory of Communication.23 The revival of the view on algebra as language, and as constitutional rather than instrumental for mathematics at large, is very recent (category theory developed roughly from the 1960s onward), and it still tends, today, to be regarded as “too abstract to be useful” by many. And yet, in what kind of world would we find ourselves if we began to consider that through information technology, universal algebra is de facto constitutive for nearly all domains in how we organize our living environments today ? II

Lemmata in How to Theorize the Universal While Remaining Neutral on Matters of Belief

In this chapter, a few of the lemmata shall be raised that mark the current impasses and limitations in how the universal can be theorized from a stance that wishes to remain neutral on matters of belief. We have already pointed out that toward the end of the nineteenth century, the project of developing a rigorous method for gaining insights on psychical phenomena that may count as objective as those gained on physical phenomena began to emerge broadly—in part from within the very heart of mathematics (namely number theory,24 in the case of Husserl’s phenom22 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (London : Bohn, 1855), 194–208. 23 Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27, no. 3 (1948) : 379–423. 24 See Husserl’s early academic treaties on variational calculus and on the notion of number : Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (PhD disseration, 1882); Über den Begriff der Zahl.

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enological method), or by alluding to the new and emerging sciences of applied mathematics, namely the polytechnical sciences (in the case of Freud, who set out to characterize the human psyche in the generic terms of a dynamical apparatus). The question that gradually gained importance thereby concerns the “nature” (in the sense of “categorical status”) proper to technical objects : are they to be considered as generic objectivities ? Universal natures ? Deliberately designed artifacts ? In the following I will move in an indexical and annotating manner through some of those theoretical stances that deal in an explicitly critical sense with the question of technics and artificiality, and their relevance for aiming to formulate universal objectivity. Lemma 1 : The Universal in Terms of Objectivity. Lemma 2 : The Universal in Terms of Subjectivity. In reasoning, so the agnostic stance maintains, there is a dimension at work in which we are all, as individuals, dispossessed. This stance expects the objects of such reasoning to be described in a universally valid manner : only under this condition can the concepts that comprehend such objects qualify as scientific concepts. Yet the question remains : to whom, to what subject, might we attribute such objective thinking ? A universal subject would be a subject that needs to be conceived, somehow, as being capable of predicating the objective without any personal investment, will, or appropriation as privation. Indeed, we can read much of contemporary political philosophy with the lens of the ways in which universal subjectivity is be conceived—from this point of view, almost every contemporary contribution to the discourse roots back to G. W. F. Hegel’s Bureaucracy as the universal class of such subjectivity, and Karl Marx’s turn of it into the Proletariat : from Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s heteronomeous condition of hegemoniality to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude, Badiou’s and Slavoj Žižek’s ideas about how to conceive of such an abstract persona whose voice is to matter most (Žižek’s Lacanian-Hegelian master-slave discourse and Badiou’s mathematical ontology) to Giorgio Agamben and Paolo Virno’s interest in personifying abstractly the (Marxian) concept of a general intellect. What has haunted political theory since the dawn of modernity is the idea of a subjectivity that is at once natural and universal, a truly “generic” subjectivity. A subjectivity that can truly claim to qualify the genus it describes without any reference to properties that would not naturally belong to all of its instances equally—naturally meaning, by their birth, by that which is given from the beginning, with what a thing is “equipped” to “set out” and “start with” in continuing to be itself. Robert Musil famously wrote a novel about a man he portrayed as living within an essential abstinence, without having individual qualities and property; the protagonist aspires to be, tautologically, nothing but a man—hence the book’s title, The Man without

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Qualities. The question that the novel struggles with is that as a character with a life of its own, the protagonist, Ulrich, is inevitably faced with a fact of life that challenges the pages like a sheer impossibility : Ulrich tries to find meaning in his life while refuting all possibilities offered to him by the particular class to which he belongs—as an intellectual, a mathematician by education—namely, that of the bourgeoisie. In vain attempts to reconcile “soul and exactitude,” his individual vocation and his individual profession, Ulrich searches for a place and role purely within the “universal class of mankind”—that is, by refusing to accept any privileges that might be granted to him on the basis of his particular individuality-within-the-actuality-of-the-social.25 Musil’s novel is appreciated widely for its capacity to express and thematize in subtle and differentiated ways a particular zeitgeist. Lemma 3 : Thanatology, or Becoming Generically Human within an Economy of Death. Let us look at a more recent example, which wrestles with the same topos, Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time, 1 : The Fault of Epimetheus. Stiegler’s book is concerned with the question of humanism. Against the pragmatic eagerness of anthropological attempts at answering to this question, Stiegler reminds us of the Aristotelian distinction between natural beings and technical beings : “Every natural being […] has within itself a beginning of movement and rest, whether the ‘movement’ is a locomotion, growth or decline, or a qualitative change [… whereas] not one product of art has the source of its own production within itself.”26 The essence of a technical being, in distinction to a natural being, Stiegler points out, is that no form of “self-causality” animates it. Self-causality is the essence of nature—of things that are born and decay, things that continue a genealogical lineage that unites them, in a distributed manner, through a shared generic origin. In the case of humans, and this is the trouble Stiegler wants to address by relating technics to time, both qualifications of the Aristotelian distinction apply : humans are natural, they are born and they die, but at the same time, humans are also the product of their own art, as the entire history of civilization testifies. Similar to Musil, Stiegler also maintains that man is the animal without qualities; yet unlike Musil’s narrative, which projects the personal story of an individual protagonist, Stiegler’s narrative accounts for this theme on the level of history. Thus, Stiegler’s concern is not primarily Ulrich’s admirable naïveté of attempting to continue with himself as purely himself in generic terms. Stiegler’s concern is a

25 Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (London : Picador, 1995). 26 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1 : The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1998 [1994]), 1.

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significant twist, abstracted. It is precisely because we cannot possibly succeed in Ulrich’s honorable ambition, he maintains, even if we tried hard, that we qualify as generically human. For Stielger, humankind is not only, in its essence, the animal without quality. For him, this is only a derivative observation. What really characterizes man, according to Stiegler’s narrative, is that he had forgotten in the original act when natural properties were being distributed among all kindred animals. What in Musil is the naivety of an individual’s life project, turns with Stiegler into a naïveté that is man’s original predicament. Stiegler refers thereby to the myth of Prometheus and his brother, Epimetheus, who, when the appointed time came for mortal creatures to be born, were told to distribute suitable powers as their natural properties among all animate beings. Epimetheus apparently begged Prometheus to do the distribution himself, and asked him to review it after it was done. Plato tells the story in his dialogue Protagoras : In his allotment he gave to some creatures strength without speed, and equipped the weaker kinds with speed. Some he armed with weapons, while to the unarmed he gave some other faculty and so contrived means for their preservation. To those that he endowed with smallness, he granted winged flight or a dwelling underground to those which he increased in stature, their size itself was a protection. Thus he made his whole distribution on a principle of compensation, being careful by these devices that no species should be destroyed. […] Now Epimetheus was not a particularly clever person, and before he realized it he had used up all the available powers on the brute beasts, and being left with the human race on the hands unprovided for, did not know what to do with them. While he was puzzling about this, Prometheus came to inspect the work, and found the other animals well off for everything, but man naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed, and already the appointed day had come, when man too was to emerge from within the earth into the daylight. Prometheus therefore, being at a loss to provide any means of salvation for man, stole from Hephastaeus and Athena the gift of skill in the arts, together with fire—for without fire, there was no means for anyone to possess or use this skill—and bestowed it on man. In this way, man acquired sufficient resources to keep himself alive, but he had no political wisdom. This art was in the keeping of Zeus.27 As such, Stiegler maintains, what is essentially human is to be in advance of one’s self—yet, he maintains, this is as much a delay as it is an advance. The means of salvation for human is skills in the arts, and mastership of fire, yet it is an incomplete means because humans also lack 27 Ibid., 187–88; Stiegler citing Plato, Protagoras, 320d–322a.

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political wisdom. Without political wisdom, developing the power that is meant as their proper “means of salvation” might as well be turned against them. Stiegler’s narrative follows a proper logic, which he believes to be capable of relaxing (or even healing the wound of) this predicament. It is a logics that lives not from thinking itself timeless, but that must keep itself alive through remembering the mythical origin of the thought whose forms it organizes. And the origin of such thought is its own original indetermination. According to the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus, humankind owes its predication in Genesis, that which makes humans properly humane, to having been forgotten. Prometheus equips humankind with the gifts of technics to compensate their being, originally, forgotten. Thus it is true that human beings are, generically speaking, technical beings; but coming to terms with our generic nature, for Stiegler, is bound to fail if we pursue it in terms of anthropology—that is, in terms of a logics that assumes an original fullness and determinedness of humankind’s identity. Coming to terms with human nature can only succeed if pursued in what Stiegler calls thanatology : “The tragic Greek understanding of technics […] does not oppose two worlds. It composes topoi that are constitutive of mortality, being at mortality’s limits : on the one hand, immortal, on the other hand, living without knowledge of death (animality); in the gap between these two there is technical life—that is, dying. Tragic anthropogony is thus a thanatology that is configured in two moves, the doubling-up of Prometheus by Epimetheus.”28 The originality of humankind consists in its own origin as a default that is left empty—that is, pure form without specification. If we reconsider our nature in terms of an original indeterminedness, which was only “compensated for” by the gifts that characterize humankind as a species, and if we invest our intellectual energies into actively remembering this origin, then the tragic way in which human capacity to intellect and reason seems to be bound up with the two generic temperaments of Prometheus (which is foresight) and Epimetheus (which is hindsight), might be temporarily postponed and controlled. Such investment of intellectual energies might well be made in the form of logics, and its pursuit for identifying the proper relations between things. Yet it must be a logics which proceeds, first and foremost, by granting anything that presents itself—all apparent evidence—a proper autonomy and lawfulness about which all that can be said is that it must be different from what appears evident. At this point, Stiegler follows the doctrines of Derrida closely : we must think originality through writing, the latter maintains. For Derrida, writing is the act of bracketing an empty object, and must be considered as independent from the full presence 28 Ibid., 188.

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of speech as, for Stiegler, the generic form of humankind must bracket an empty object, and considered as independent from the full presence of humankind in its assumed identity. Both hold onto how logics may organize forms of life and thought. And for both it is a non-metaphysical logics of reproduction : for Derrida, literacy has to be considered as an apparatus,29 and for Stiegler, the nature of humankind has to be considered as an empty default. Only by considering the relation between Derrida’s thought about writing and Stiegler’s thought about human’s origin like this can we see that Stiegler’s dramatization of the Musilian theme (man without quality, or rather, positive properties) would be ill understood as an anthropological theory. For Stiegler’s position neither seeks to define the generic identity of humankind, nor that which might count, in logical terms, as the negative other to such identity—which Derrida calls différance : “the history of life in general.”30 The whole problem consists, Stiegler writes, in this Derridean theme (the history of life in general), and in the sense that death is being given once the “rupture” has taken place—the rupture being humankind remembering that what is essentially human is to be in advance of oneself : “Life is, after the rupture, the economy of death. The question of différance is death.”31 In this, Stiegler and Derrida agree; yet on its basis, the former articulates a theory of history as an apparatus that is to account for anthropogony, and the latter articulates a theory of literacy as an apparatus that is to account for the textuality of all knowledge. Lemma 4 : Outraged About the Hypocrisy that Reigns for Principle Reasons where Thanatology is in Power. Michel Serres is as outraged as Stiegler about any positivist anthropological project. For him, too, there is a dimension of dispossession at work in what may count as generically human. Yet he sees this dimension of individual dispossession in what we experience in shared knowledge, literacy, and theory. “Today, it is all about mastering mastery, at stake is not anymore the mastering of nature,” he contends.32 What appears like the one and only outlook to Stiegler and Derrida—to write the history of life in general, according to a logics that organizes its forms in apparatic terms—to him counts as the utmost betrayal, as an act of servile hubris. For Serres, such aspiration seeks to realize the absurdity of eternal motion, or, as he sharpens the formulation of what this means : the mastery of “eternity in actu.”33 Thus, Serres’s own out

29 See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1967]). 30 Ibid., 139. 31 Ibid. 32 Michel Serres, “Verrat : Thanatokratie,” in Hermes III : Übersetzung, trans. Michael Bischoff (Berlin : Merve Verlag, 1992 [1974]), 127. All translations of this text are my own. 33 Ibid., 136.

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rage concerns a certain hypocrisy that he sees elevated to power once humankind settles into the conditions of thanatology. This is so for principle reasons; it is not out of arbitrary coincidence : any apparatus, Serres calls to mind, must (1) be driven from a motor, and (2) feed from energy stocks. While the first point is considered by both Derrida’s and Stiegler’s apparatic logics (a difference, literally, is considered by Serres as the very principle of any motor),34 the second point presents problems for a logics that is conceived in terms of an apparatus. The act of striving to master eternity in actu requires us to collapse our relation to the colossal, the immense, the only true source of all humbleness—as Serres holds—the very distinction that there are things that depend upon human powers, and things that don’t. The desire to master eternity in actu grows out of fear, despair, and violence, in Serres’s opinion. What he sees shaped thereby is an instrument that, because it is declared to be absolute and uttermost mighty, has no purpose or project anymore—the most powerful and most productive “triangle,” as he calls it, the “triangle of industry, science, and strategy.”35 He sees this instrument developing along a suicidal vector : for establishing the constitution necessary to support apparatic mastery (knowledge) on purely general grounds, it depends upon activating all forms of reason into a restless state of available mobility within a closed, triangulated parcours.36 This parcours of pure instrumentality, without purpose, is characterized by Serres as a motor—“the abhorrent motor of modern history. Which reproduces itself by absorbing, within its exponential growth, all that it is not.”37 There are several instances of it, as it is part of this motor’s structure to be “the greatest of all possible multiplicators.”38 Without a proper purpose or project, this closed parcours circumscribes all forms of reasoning, which are subjected to the categorical demand of obeying how a particular instance of this instrument “plays” them. And each one of the particular instances is geared toward nothing else but feeding from what it is not—hence, the “true objective” of each triangle apparatus “is the death of that which has produced the same infrastructure.”39 Serres puts it drastically : “The sum total of all these objectives is genocide. Humanity has turned, collectively, suicidal.”40 34 Cf. Michel Serres, “Motoren : Vorüberlegungen zu einer allgemeinen Theorie der Systeme,” in Hermes IV : Verteilung, trans. Michael Bischoff (Berlin : Merve Verlag, 1992), 43–91. Also, Vera Bühlmann, “Primary Abundance, Urban Philosophy : Information and the Form of Actuality,” in Printed Physics, Metalithikum I, ed. Vera Bühlmann and Ludger Hovestadt (Vienna : ambra, 2012), 114–50. 35 Serres, “Verrat,” 104. 36 Ibid., 105. 37 Ibid. Translated in German as “Der abscheuliche Motor der neuen Geschichte.” 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid.

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Knowledge-in-general literally rules in an irresponsible manner, because it listens to nothing that comes from outside the institutions it sanctions. In a servile and suicidally committed manner—“excited to madness”41—institutionalized knowledge guides human politics not by striving to accommodate what is observed without ever having been expected. Instead, it rules idiotically—that is, without inhibitions due to its own state of ignorance, sanctioned as the common denominator of all that counts in the name of thanatology’s voided forms of integrity. Institutionalized knowledge rules self-righteously, and hence mercilessly, by disposing over death in a manner almost completely immune to irritation and doubt. Such knowledge decides and acts as if on a mission that takes place in the service of life. But life-in-general is life-intheory, Serres maintains : it is theory raised to control actuality. So let us look closer at the relation between motor and theory. “Every theory of motion and time, every theory of movement as history, names and constructs a motor which is to power and drive such movement.”42 Here, Serres is in agreement with the point of view of thanatology : movement, theorized, is the quickness of death. Let me elaborate on Serres’s argument. A motor needs alimentation. If nothing were to exist outside or next to a motor—if, for example, we’d have a theory of motion and change that characterized life-ingeneral—then we’d have instituted a theory that governs eternity in actu : “If nothing exists except that which is moved, it can find its aliment only in that which it moves.”43 If we were to find the motor within that which it moves—and nothing else is the claim of history !—that is, after the collapse of colossality as a category that hosts fate and prevents the eternal from ever being fully actual, then the motor depends upon the reservoirs within the very element in which it exists and which it moves. “If the motor is within that which is moved, it functions by reserves, by stocks, by capital which it can find in there.”44 It is a motor that drives time as it takes place, and which constitutes space as things happen in it—an existential motor—by corrupting the very existence driven by it. It is a cannibalistic motor. Theory that feeds on theory. History that feeds on history. Science that feeds on science. “The reservoir—a concept that we find in usage from Carnot to Bergson—keeps producing the energetic surplus that the motor adds to its inert running. This surplus provides a continuation. This ‘additional more’ is a part that is taken from the whole, the reservoir, the capital. Thereby the entire question extends 41 Ibid., 97. 42 Ibid., 135. The German reads : “Jede Theorie der Bewegung und der Geschichte, der Bewegung der Geschichte, benennt oder konstruiert einen Motor, der diese Bewegung hervorbringen soll.” 43 Ibid., 136. 44 Ibid.

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to these parts : to the sum of the reservoir, to the consummation of its sum total.”45 Every attempt to measure the sum total of the reservoir meets at least three antinomies : that of space, that of time, and that of the unpredictability of that which can be exploited. “It is not enough to contest that what is moved be finite, that the reservoir be finite, because there are finite things that are of immense magnitude, practically impossible to enumerate, such that on a human and historical scale it comes to be equivalent with the infinite. One only needs to consider the sum of energy that exists in the sun.”46 But if measuring the reservoir is not a viable path to take, because it provides no ground for argumentation, then how to go about it ? “One needs to describe directly how the motor functions.”47 Let us then follow Serres’s description closely. Such a motor consists, he elaborates, in “the industrial complex at large, linked up with scientific research in its quasi-totality, whereby both are finalized through military application spectrums.”48 Such a motor, Serres continues, “is the most dynamic and most powerful that has ever been produced by history.”49 And yet, he pauses, it is first and foremost a motor, and it is so in several regards : (1) as “it is the product (this means the intersecting plane) of our most effective multiplicators (intervention, production, innovation), it produces an inexorable, steadily accelerating movement”; (2) “it grows exuberantly and occupies space : it keeps growing, autonomously, and spreads equably from limit to limit, without the diverse conditions, which reign here and there, affecting it in any recognizable manner”; (3) it subjects “a more and more capacious ensemble of material, economical, intellectual, human and political elements to its reign”; and, further, (4) it “mobilizes the most advanced innovation and produces the majority, the growing majority of new products and new services.”50 In short : “Propagation, movement, proliferation, expansion, control, novelty, all of these exist in this locus and through this locus.”51 That is, the locus proper to the motor. It is, finally, perhaps the motor per se, insofar as it, and this is the fifth point, “homogenizes the partitioning and represents the invariant through the diversity of its frames of reference.”52 Serres is careful to distinguish that all five points are nothing but a close description of how the motor works, and to sum them up and make any conclusions about them is a different matter. All of this description seems risky, but as long as the relation “between the exploit and the 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 136–37. 47 Ibid., 137. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid.

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remuneration product” is “partitive and move[s] between limits,”53 the risk seems to be fairly small. But, and this is the crucial point, “the new products are of a powerfulness that equals the global reservoir.”54 The motor produces what Serres calls world-objects : “objects with the dimensions of the world, in the precise sense of the dimensional equations : for space (ballistic rockets), for the speed of rotation (stationary satellites), for time (the durability of atomic waste), for energy and for heat.”55 We are no longer playing with percentages and partitives, but “with the totality of the available capital, and the game is, decisively so, finite.”56 This is what Serres means with his image of a collective suicidality. It is here that he points to the betrayal of life, of which he accuses thanatocracy. Continuing with generalizing representations of the universal, while the motor that drives literacy and history shows in a wholly unambiguous manner that its finality is nothing less than lethal, Serres maintains that “the totality of the product is geared toward the total destruction of the totality of the reservoir.”57 It is important to realize that the “madness of theory” of which Serres speaks does not identify a particular and unfortunate dysfunction. For Serres, it is a principle madness that characterizes all theory that does not consider its own measurements in terms of theatricality and dramatized activity. Theory that makes its own stage of abstraction transparent takes the triangle as an objective operator to measure what cannot be measured without specifying it—that is, without depriving it of its generic universality. It attempts to measure, directly, what is immense. Immense does not mean incommensurable, contradictory, irreconcilable—these characteristics apply only if we subject immensity to a metrical principle; if we see geometry as an axiomatic system that represents the universal. But how could we think about geometry differently ? Geometry can never give birth to what it measures except via physics, Serres maintains, and he insists on applying geometrical measures not in a relation of ideal reference and representation, but within the (algebraic) lawful terms of conserving physical quantities : in the so-called Laws of Conservation (named after Emmy Noether), quantities can be measured of which all that needs to be specified is that they remain invariant throughout any transformation that is possible within a system. Such systems may count as perfectly generic. The laws of conservation of mass energy would be an example of such a system, or the conservation of linear momentum, angular momentum, electric charge, color charge, or probability. In all these systems, no positive definition of the characters of the conserved quantities is needed. 53 Ibid., 139. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 141.

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Before we examine how Serres proposes to account for the character of the universal in terms of invariances, let us take these critical considerations on direct measuring and the role of the triangle while returning to Stiegler’s and Derrida’s point of view on ontology as thanatology. Lemma 5 : From Inventories to Apparatus. Categories, in the empirical tradition after Aristotle, govern all notions of order independent of the assumption of one highest kind or an abstract universal principle, like those of Unity, Beauty, Justness, and the like. Although, this is not accurate : arguably, the sun must be understood as a universal principle of the empirical tradition, because it casts shadows on all things equally and hence renders them comparable by geometrical measurement and description. If we measure the shadows, anywhere and at any point in time, we will receive the same description—if we do it systematically. Thus, by means of geometry, we can qualify a thing’s nature, make it distinguishable and integrable into a collective. For that, measuring (magnitude, asking how much) and counting (multitude, asking how many) were intimately related in a veritable philosophical grammar of quantity,58 the predecessor to modern mathematics as logical concepts of terms of sets. The outcome of categorial thought was the invention of inventories of pure forms that seek to comprehensively characterize all that is natural about natural beings. Aristotle distinguished ten different categories, among which we find quantity (e.g., four-foot), quality (e.g., white, grammatical), state (e.g., wearing shoes), date (e.g., yesterday, last year), and relation (e.g., double, half). Perhaps the crucial change that took place with the advent of experimental methods in science around the sixteenth century, as opposed to the Aristotelian empirical tradition, was with regard to the role of these inventories. In science as well as in governance, the new manner of working systematically gradually began to discredit the manners of counting things on the basis of inventories that were meant to classify entities. Rather, experimental manners of working systematically began to realize that those inventories can be reckoned against each other, with significant profit. What counted as means to qualify different species of beings according to their different natures gradually turned from indexing natural kinds of beings to indexing being-in-general. The modern notion of laws came to factor out the authority of categories and their tabular organization in inventories. Laws cease to count on the basis of particular inventories that claim to specify, as best possible, what is actually given. 58 For a detailed discussion on this distinction, see Howard Stein, “Eudoxos and Dedekind : On the Ancient Greek Theory of Ratios and Its Relation to Modern Mathematics,” Synthese 84 (1990) : 163–211. Especially the first paragraph entitled “The Philosophical Grammar of the Category of Quantity,” 163–66.

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The legitimacy of a description rests on the success of general schema, whose application in the description of a thing indicates what can be produced and reproduced. Let us say, somewhat hyperbolically, that metaphysics as the study of the natural distribution of properties has gradually given way to dynamics as the study of the transformable distribution of properties. A notion of logics in the service of dynamics rather than metaphysics does not yield a natural order of things, but an apparatus that provides the possibility to transform all naturally distributed properties in their particular values.59 For a logics that constitutes an apparatus, “everything begins with reproduction.”60 In the beginning, Derrida points out, we find “original prints,”61 not the plenty presence of speech or archetypes in full pureness. An apparatus’s logics (here Stiegler agrees with Derrida) can no longer count as a logic of what is—being, life. It can no longer constitute an ontology; instead, it must count as a logic of original default. When logics no longer constitutes competing inventories, but one collective apparatus, we find ourselves within a logics of generative transpositions within systems. What is being transposed, for Derrida, is purely generic speech in the form of phonetic writing that is characterized as “writing within writing.”62 In technical terms, it is linear algebra that provides the mathematics in whose terms everything that works can be described in how it operates. Within it, we can do computations in the transformability space of purely formal, and hence generic, quantities. Derrida’s position negates the reality of a mathematical space of purely formal quantities and insists on the in-existence of an original and literal code; as he maintains, this code is given only as a cipher for which no key can possibly exist. Serres, on the other hand, seeks to abstract from the sheer operativity of linear algebra (rather than banning it to an impotent kind of being-negative, as différance, circulating and distributing quantities of death as the very essence of life-in-general), and shifts focus to universal algebra. With this, the generic stream of sheer circulation turns into a generic breath that can be articulated in a universal manner—universal as corresponding to the universality that can be characterized by alphabets of code. We will come back to what this implies in a moment. For Derrida and Stiegler, as well as for Serres, the crucial point regards how we think about the nature of generic quantities in whose transformation space we find ourselves, once 59 Eventually, with electronics and information science, natural properties cannot only be transformed in their proper values; they can also be distributed among things in “unnatural” manners. With the rise of organic chemistry around 1900, from pharmaceutics to the doping of semiconductors, the original default of things is no longer its generic identity bare of all qualities, but the other way around : its generic identity as having virtually all qualities distinguishable and distributable. 60 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Yale French Studies 48 (1972) : 92. 61 Ibid., 92. 62 Ibid., 86.

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logics turns away from the questions of why it might work (metaphysics), and instead focuses exclusively on how it works. Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and Stiegler in the continuation of their thought, all thematize generic quantity in terms of a general energetics. It was clear already in the nineteenth century that such a notion of quantity cannot be understood as strictly physical, but that it must count as a symbolic. What this entails in philosophical terms has indeed been problematized by nearly all late nineteenth-century mathematically affine intellectuals—Boole, Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Ernst Cassirer, Husserl, Russell, and Whitehead—all of whose work is anchored to distinct problematizations of the question of algebraic quantity.63 Roughly speaking, the disputes unfolded around whether it ought to be addressed as logical or as psychological. In the case of the former, the point of dispute regarded whether logics ought to be addressed in terms of conserving knowledge, and accordingly through clarifying its “existential/semantical import” (Gottlob Frege), or in terms of mathematics as an art, in terms of conserving learning to know. Disputable about the latter perspective (regarding the activity of learning to know, as opposed to general representations that count as knowledge) is that the act of genuine learning cannot be mechanized. Even if procedures and methods are developed and provided, they resist universal applicability and depend upon a literacy that is more comprehensive than strictly mechanical, and that needs to be mastered individually (Boole, Peirce, Whitehead). In short, at stake in this dispute is once more the discarded metaphysical question of why mathematics works, beneath and above the sophistication of how it works. Lemma 6 : Intellectual Brightness Beneath the Light of the Sun, and the World as a Well-Tempered Milieu. Let us look more closely at how Stiegler frames this context as the “technicisation of mathematical thought by algebra, in terms of a technique of calculation” in his introduction to the first volume of Technics and Time.64 At stake is the idea that geometry is the barer of all meaning



63 George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories on Logics and Probabilities (1854); Charles Sanders Peirce : various contributions to the principles of philosophy, exact logics, and diagrammatic reasoning based on a triadic notion of signs (from 1867 onward); Ferdinand de Saussure : Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1879) (annotation : Saussure attempted to quantize/quantify the phonetic “materiality” of language in this treatise, which was to serve as the basis for a “general system of linguistics”); Edmund Husserl’s dissertation : Beiträge zur Theorie der Variationsrechnung (1882) as well as his habilitation : Über den Begriff der Zahl : Psychologische Analysen (1887); Bertrand Russell’s dissertation : An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897); Alfred North Whitehead : A Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications (1898); Ernst Cassirer : Descartes’ Kritik der mathematischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis (1899). 64 Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 2.

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insofar as we can consider it natural, objective, and bare of willfulness and instrumentalization. Stiegler continues the considerations brought forward by Husserl, according to which an arithmetization of geometry has lead “almost automatically to the emptying of its meaning. The actually spatio-temporal idealities, as they are presented first hand in geometrical thinking under the common rubric of ‘pure intuitions,’ are transformed, so to speak, into pure numerical configurations, into algebraic structures.”65 Numeration is considered, by Stiegler as well as by Husserl, as a loss of “originary meaning and sight.”66 Universal meaning, the meaning of nature as nature—meaning bare from intellectual distortions—renders itself, through the algebraic method that arithmetizes geometry, as symbolic meaning : “In algebraic calculation, one lets the geometric signification recede into the background as a matter of course, indeed one drops it altogether; one calculates, remembering only at the end that the numbers signify magnitudes. Of course one does not calculate ‘mechanically,’ as in ordinary numerical calculation; one thinks, one invents, one makes discoveries—but they have acquired, unnoticed, a displaced, ‘symbolic’ meaning.”67 With this emphasis on geometric signification, Husserl (and Stiegler and Derrida) remain attached to the sun as the universal “principle” central in the empirical tradition since Aristotle. All alphabetical characterization that can be given of things must be grounded in the uniform play of natural light and shadow. With its emphasis on direct measurement, the empirical tradition has always countered a tradition that we might summarize as conceptual, and which held the discreet character of the phonetic alphabet as the governing principle over the elementariness of geometrical forms. While the former sought to comprehend of the world in purely natural light, the latter credited its symbolical domination by intellectual brilliance. Central to it is the rejection that measurement be possible in any direct manner, and it proceeded and developed around the symbolization of this indirect or mediate nature of measurement. While such symbolization was of course appropriated as legitimating evidence for distributing privileges, in religious and mystical interpretations, it seems safe to maintain that algebra itself is bare of any such appropriations. It proceeds with symbols in a purely formal manner, and contributed all the major steps in abstraction that have allowed us to decipher nature through mathematics in increasingly general terms. In this sense, the algebraic method is a method of natural science on equal par with the geometric, while both have served 65 Ibid., 3. Stiegler cites Husserl from The Crises of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. John Barnett Brough (Chicago : Northwestern University Press, 1970 [1954]), 41. 66 Ibid., 3. 67 Ibid.; cited from Husserl, The Crises of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 44–45.

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ends that must be considered as not following the purely scientific interest of studying nature. Obviously, this is exactly what Husserl among many others in the nineteenth century would not grant; the insistence on “geometrical signification” discredits algebraic symbolization of any natural and non-vested legitimacy. But the geometric method and the algebraic method can be observed to have always challenged each other throughout the history of science. In antiquity, the algebraic method can be seen (however implicitly) at work in Plato’s Timeaus, and the role he ascribes therein to the triangle as a veritable geometric atom—capable of partitioning in due terms the physical elements of fire, water, earth, and air—which he conceived to be distributed proportionally among all sensible things. The triangle can partition the sensible, and mediate between it and the intelligible, because it is an “atomic ruler” extracted from the platonic solids in their pure regularity.68 In this setup, the triangle is not itself a pure and intelligible form, it is an “operator” which serves as a mediator between spheres (the intelligible and the sensible); in this sense, we must regard it not only as a form but also as an atom. Furthermore, Lucretius’s atomism can be read in this tradition as well, which Leibniz followed. And it has perhaps been most duly worked out in the latter’s dream of a mathesis universalis, a philosophical projection of the alphabet into a general order of the alphabetical. Leibniz conceives of the universal not through an inventory of pure forms and deduced from an axiomatic system, but through the infinitary articulation of an axiomatic system with the help of a characteristica universalis. Such a method appears to Husserl, Heidegger, and many others, as Stiegler rightly summarizes, as metaphysical. And indeed, there is plenty of reason for their caution, for it is not difficult to see Leibniz’s dream in the long historical context of assuming there to have been, once, an Original Language in pure form, a language before the tower of Babylon, an Adamitic language even before the Fall. In short, an innocent and virginal language where all meaning is unambiguous and immediately and equally transparent to everyone who speaks it; a language where neither lies nor poetry are possible (or necessary), where thinking needs not be guided by logics, nor has any use of sophistication, tactics, foresight, or planning.69 Any pursuit of such a language is deeply nested within the problematics of how to separate science from religion, and, ultimately, the question of how empowerment through learning (intellectual brilliance) can be affirmed through cruel narratives of salvation and apocalypse, understood in terms of necessary purification, absolution, and penitence. 68 Plato, Timeaus, trans. D. J. Zeyl (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA : Hackett Publishing & Co, 2000). 69 Umberto Eco has written a fantastic book on this subject : The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishing, 1995).

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Yet all this precaution disregards the infinitary mode of articulation that Leibniz was careful to attribute to his way of thinking about the character of the universal : he did not claim to have found a new alphabet, rather he raised the alphabet to the level of the alphabetical by treating its space of symbolization in a mechanical and operative manner. It must be distinguished from mechanical manners in their constructive sense because it works with the discreetness of coded forms. Here, Leibniz can introduce an infinitary way of proceeding by the “alphabetized” geometrical method. Lemma 7 : Two Traditions of Mathematical Reasoning, the Problematical and the Axiomatical. Thus, the caution regarding Leibniz’s dream need not lead hastily to its judgment and condemnation. What I will try to argue and work out in the following pages is a misunderstanding that seems to underlie the rejection of calling upon the universal in the operative terms that combine method with characteristics, rather than in descriptive terms that combine form and systems of rules. Indeed, we can pick up a distinction that goes back to Pappus of Alexandria in the sixth century, between two vectors of interest in how to think about the relation of mathematics to nature, namely as “problematics” and “axiomatics.”70 Dan W. Smith summarizes as follows : “The fundamental difference between these two modes of formalisation can be seen in their differing methods of deduction : in axiomatics, a deduction moves from axioms to the theorems that are derived from it, whereas in problematics a deduction moves from the problem to the ideal accidents and events that condition the problem and form the cases that resolve it.”71 We can characterize this distinction by profiling these two notions in light of each other : both relate mathematics to solving problems on the basis of experience already gained and documented, traditionally in the form of algorithmic tables.72 Now, while the former is more concerned with extracting more general procedures of how to pose problems such that they can be solved from such an experience, the latter is concerned with articulating systematical forms of organization that can integrate the diverse principles of how such experience based insight may be accommodated within a common body of knowledge. Viewed along these lines, I would characterize the tradition of problematics with primary interests in operations, thereby choosing one of two fairly bitter pills—here, the one of dealing with a diversity of manners of expression and formulation. The tradition of axiomatics, on the other hand, can be characterized with

70 See Jaakko Hintikka and Unto Remes, The Method of Analysis : Its Geometrical Origin and Its General Significance (Boston : D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1974). 71 Dan W. Smith, “Axiomatics and Problematics as Two Modes of Formalisation : Deleuze’s Epistemology of Mathematics,” in Virtual Mathematics : The Logic of Difference, ed. Simon Duffy (London : Clinamen Press, 2006), 145. 72 See James Ritter, “Babylon – 1800,” A History of Scientific Thought : Elements of a History of Science, ed. Michel Serres (Cambridge, MA : Blackwell Publishers, 1995); and James Ritter, “Measure for Measure : Mathematics in Egypt and Mesopotamia,” in ibid.

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primary interests in integrating particular applications of operations into a common compass, whose stability lives from unified manners of expression and formulation, choosing, in this case, another pill that is also fairly bitter—namely, that of ignoring from further consideration all that tends to obstruct the established hierarchical system that is meant to represent such a unified compass. The axiomatic tradition is what we came to call “theoretical mathematics,” while the computations of new general procedures is referred to as the heuristic and merely subservient “art of computing,” or “art of mechanics,” bearing on a sense of sight that belongs, so the accusation of modern morals, more to imagination than to theory.73 Still today this distinction of different senses of inner sight—literally allowing us to reach “insights” through thinking—is made reference to, even in common day conversations, as “intuition.” While intuition means for many some kind of singular and individual gut feeling, the notion has meanwhile also come to be used as a veritable flag word in the defense, or, respectively, the attack of the superiority of the axiomatic tradition. In this tradition, the sense of the concept (intuition) is quite different—it names a general and intersubjective, not singular and individually varying, sense of inner sight. The proponents of the axiomatical tradition always took great pride in allowing no operations other than those that can be carried out by compass and ruler—which is important to remember, if we try to understand how the irrational value that characterizes the diagonal of a square (the square root of 2) could be such an annoyance over centuries ! With the invention of infinitesimal calculus and the elaboration of a general science of dynamics, this restriction was no longer tenable—for no other reasons than the sheer pragmatic success of symbolic notations.74 In the narrative of Stiegler (following Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida), this is the beginning of techno-science : science that (1) arithmetizes (and hence discretizes) geometry; and (2) algebraizes (and hence symbolizes) arithmetics : “With the advent of calculation,” Stiegler writes, “which will come to determine the essence of modernity, the memory of originary eidetic intuitions, upon which all apodictic processes and meaning are founded, is lost.”75 73 As in engineering today, in its general sense of “inventor” or “designer,” derived from the Latin ingenium for “inborn qualities, talent.” 74 The famous Calculus War between Newton and Leibniz was related to this : other than Leibniz, who invented a particular system of notation (which we still, more or less, follow today), Newton insisted on what he called “the tangential method,” a method that allowed him to keep working with ruler and compass; accordingly, what to Leibniz were “infinitesimal numbers” (i.e., a fictitious multitude), was an elusive and nongraspable magnitude to Newton—he called them “fluxions.” 75 Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 3. Apodictic is a term from Aristotelian logics that means “capable of demonstration.” It is central for notions of logical certainty. For Aristotle, apodictic, meaning also “scientific knowledge,” contrasted with dialectic, which means merely “probable knowledge.” In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contrasted apodictic statements with other qualifications of them as assertoric and problematic. The former means that something can merely be asserted to be the case, and the latter asserts only the possibility for a statement to be true.

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Stiegler calls universality in relation to forms and rules that are deduced from how the forms can be combined eidetic intuitions. It corresponds to the sense of inner sight we have aligned, above, with the axiomatic tradition. What Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and Stiegler (among many others in mathematics and philosophy since the nineteenth century) mourn is the eidetic intuition of “actual spatio-temporal idealities,”76 to which we must add, in the axiomatic tradition, the “geometric significance,” of whose loss Husserl speaks and for which he makes the development of algebraic methods and its symbolic notations responsible. This concerns a notion of universality within the compass of a unified hierarchical system that allows for objective representation. It is significant within what we might call an approximated horizon, a horizon, hence, that is not actually a horizon, but one that is a represented horizon. Within it, geometry is appreciated as representing (however resistant to positivization it may be considered) what remains constant. As such, geometry is taken into service of a representation of the Originary Language, the language before the fall, where neither care must be given, nor responsibility must be taken, of how we speak and communicate—because all meaning is immediately transparent. In the service of representation, geometry appears to have the capacity of purifying what can be named from all subjective investment, by measuring it objectively. Lemma 8 : The idiosyncrasy of pure mathematics. Vis-à-vis such a dream, the heuristics of algebraic computations that seek to render its equations solvable on ever further levels of abstraction seems to ridicule the orders among the fields that have already been “purified” (conquered) and imprinted to one common plane of generality. This is how Stiegler can write : “The technicisation through calculation drives Western knowledge down a path that leads to a forgetting of its origin, which is also a forgetting of its truth. This is the ‘crisis of the European sciences.’”77 Algebra behaves, as it always has within the problematic tradition, idiosyncratically. And this to an extent that has rarely, if at all, been achieved before—perhaps not any more since Pythagoras, with regard to the irrationality of the number that counts the diagonal of a square. As was the case with Pythagoras’s irrationality of the diagonal, the two complementary ways of thinking about mathematics (axiomatics and problematics) were coarsely polarized in the nineteenth century into good and evil. Only with one complication : namely that this polarization, somewhat schizophrenically, regarded the symbolical as diabolic, because it rendered explicit a plurality of notations rather than keeping with the notation of one 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid.

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universal meta-language.78 Hermann Weyl has famously captured these sentiments in statement : “In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of each individual mathematical domain.”79 Despite this drastic statement, Weyl was certainly an intellectual who would have readily agreed in not condemning and judging Leibniz’s dream of a characteristica universalis too hastily. A rather singular voice between the two predominant camps at the time with regard to the role of algebra for reasoning (the intuitionists and the formalists), Weyl was eager to make explicit exactly the very same distinction that is crucial with regard to Leibniz as well : that the universal can be systematized alphabetically both in the operative terms of method and characteristics, and also in descriptive terms of conceptual form and numerical bodies of rules.80 For him, the placement of intuition (as the natural faculty for insight) could not be decided simply in terms of “naturally given” versus “intellectually achieved.” Rather, together they are irresolvable : In the Preface to Dedekind (1888) we read that “In science, whatever is provable must not be believed without proof.” This remark is certainly characteristic of the way most mathematicians think. Nevertheless, it is a preposterous principle. As if such an indirect concatenation of grounds, call it a proof though we may, can awaken any “belief” apart from assuring ourselves through immediate insight that each individual step is correct. In all cases, this process of confirmation—and not the proof—remains the ultimate source from which knowledge derives its authority; it is the “experience of truth.”81 Weyl does not position the algebraic procedures of proof against empirical procedures of induction, as many of his contemporaries suggested. Rather, he insisted that we need some kind of “inductiveness” at work within the abstract symbolic procedures—that is, an empirical approach within symbolic reasoning. In this, arguably, he might agree with Dedekind, and also with Boole, much more than he himself seems to believe in the above citation : both did not place algebra (proof procedures) under the regime of an axiomatic logics; rather, they both suggested that we need to always subject to empirical testing and questioning what may be perfectly substantiated by symbolical proof. Truth, according to this view, will never free itself and purify its statements from a certain 78 The Greek term for symbol derives from syn-ballein, literally meaning that which is thrown or cast together; dia-ballein, its opposite, means casting apart. The diabolical hence denotes the symbolical’s other, that which keeps from fitting and unifying, thus that which introduced discord and discrepancies. 79 Hermann Weyl, “Invariants,” Duke Mathematical Journal 5, no. 3 (1939) : 500. 80 See Herman Weyl, The Continuum : A Critical Examination of the Foundation of Analysis, trans. S. Pollard and T. Bole (Kirksville, MO : Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1987 [1918]). 81 Ibid., 119.

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deliberateness that corresponds to the amount of significance in which literacy is vaster than logics. It is in this sense that their algebraic philosophy was at odds with the apologetics of geometrical ideality. Serres has attempted to put Leibniz’s dream back into the context of this open issue. In a text entitled “Leibniz, Translated Back into the Language of Mathematics,”82 he maintains that what has not been understood sufficiently about Leibniz is that his philosophy must be regarded as systematic, of course, but in a manner that does not create one homogeneous system (an apparatus), but a two-fold one, an amphibolic one. Where this has indeed been noticed and accounted for— most prominently by Kant83—it has been taken as a flaw and mistake, a necessary absurdity that ought be avoided for the reasons just elaborated (relating to the algebraic quantity notion and the philosophical problems it entails). Serres’s ambition with “translating Leibniz back into the language of mathematics” is to show that this structural amphiboly is not a malfunction or failure inherent to Leibniz’s philosophy (insofar as it aspires to be systematic), but, inversely, that it is essential for it : “perhaps we ought to understand,” he suggests, “that Leibniz conceived (at least) two systems in one; for sure, we ought to assume that combinatorics, which initially was a technique for manipulation and which was eventually raised to the level of a universal doctrine, served Leibniz as a relational organ : an organ for relating a universal analytics with a universal aesthetics, for his system conceives firstly an analytics, and its morphology conceives an aesthetics.”84 For Leibniz, and this is Serres’s point, mathematics does not allow us to clear our language into universal purity—mathematics is the universal language in which nature expresses and articulates itself. This inverts the relation fundamentally : learning to be clear in how we express thoughts is still in the service of filtering away what only appears, but is not; but there is no state of reference to be approximated, and laid bare, by this filtering. Clear and precise formulations express manifestations of symbolic solidity. Mathematics as universal language is a language that does not describe reality, it speaks reality—it collects reality; it comprehends reality. Its articulations manifest things in their symbolic consistency and reasonability. Mathematical language, in its formality, saturates itself with reality : “Formalism is not opposing reality, if we ignore serious nonsense,” Serres maintains, “it is a technique of comprise, which is capable of saturating itself with a maximum of reality.”85 This, 82 Michel Serres, “Leibniz, in die Sprache der Mathematik rückübersetzt,” in Hermes III. 83 Kant, “Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection,” appendix to “The Transcendental Analytic” of Critique of Pure Reason. See the essay on Kant’s own approach to what he called “Transcendental Deliberation” by Andrew Brook and Jennifer McRobert, “Kant’s Attack on the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection,” Theory of Knowledge (August 1998), https ://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/TKno/TKnoBroo.htm. 84 Serres, “Leibniz,” 151. 85 Ibid.

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he continues, is “the comprehensive paradox of a mathematics that is of ideal purity and plenary applicability : a language at the threshold to monosemy, hence the certainty of communication that is almost perfect, and at the same time bursting with polysemy, hence the promise of manifold transport. We are never deceived or deluded in it, and yet it is capable of saying all.”86 We can think of this process of saturation perhaps best, if we consider the capturing process that it constitutes in analogy to how photovoltaics captures sunlight and is able to store it as electricity. However, we must bear in mind that this analogy works only one way : photovoltaics may help us understand Leibniz’s idea of how the real can infinitely saturate itself, yet Leibniz’s manner of thinking is insufficient in understanding how photovoltaics works. For this, we need the registers of quanta, as electro-dynamic units, and they must be considered as something different from Leibniz’s infinitesimals; in fact, it seems that they are inverse to each other : while Leibniz’s infinitesimals highlight continuity at work within discreetness, the quantum view highlights discreteness at work within continuity. Let’s make our analogy speak about the idea of saturation : there is a truly generic materiality to electricity, because its form remains indeterminate before it is translated into heat, pressure, impact, and so on. It is crucial to distinguish photovoltaics from other ways of capturing energy, because it is the only source that comes from a without of the planet’s ecosystem. Fossil energy, and also energy garnered from the weather like wind or tide, is different from solar : it merely shifts around the distributions within the overall balanced system. Solar, on the other hand, adds to the total amount as it is manifest in the whole. From this, we can also see more clearly that Leibniz’s universal language in no way forecloses the question of how we orient the development of intellectual power such that it turns out to be for the good; indeed, it complicates possible answers as they exist, because it prevents the comfort of ever settling in one form of organization. With this thinking, Leibniz introduces a new multitude to science—that of the infinitely small—and with it, also a new magnitude that will eventually constitute a notion of natural elements entirely dissolved into ratios of energy and matter, measurable in terms of heat, in thermodynamic systems. In Leibniz’s thinking about mathematical language capable of speaking real (algebraically) as immediately realizing what is spoken, the elementary units—the characters, we might say—are monads. Serres specifies : monads “are the true atoms of nature; in one word, they are the elements of all things being.”87 Further, he indicates how we might read this : “The monads are for the nature of things being, what notes are to combinatorics, what letters are for written or what sounds are 86 Ibid., 158. 87 Ibid., 154.

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for spoken language, what points are for geometry, what truths are for logics of certainty, and so on : stoikeia.”88 Yet, as he immediately points out, it would be a misunderstanding to think that monads were actually points, notes, atoms—rather, “they are elements of nature just like they are elements of languages, mathematics, music, and so on.”89 Again, think of quantities of electricity gathered through photovoltaics—they can come to manifest in anything, in any form and any materiality; they are not, originally, food or wood or water or wind. Let us bear with this analogy between quantities of (solar) energy and monads for a moment. Monads are supposed to be true elements, simple and original entities— a monad is what cannot be divided.90 And yet we must not think of them as elements that are naturally given. Leibniz does not argue for a literal interpretation of language in the sense that the reference relation be transparent and neutralized. For him, it is not the case that his language of monads would, miraculously, be capable of expressing things in an immediate manner. The two-foldedness of his thought on systems, the amphibolic nature of a system’s structure, is essential to his thinking : monads do not stand in for atomic elements, they count atomic elements by subjecting them to a symbolical order. The articulation of monads position and expose structures that may saturate themselves by capturing bits of indeterminate substance into the terms of the articulation : “Substantiae vel suppositi,” as Serres puts it.91 In our analogy we can say : the structure of exposition is symbolical, and arranged such that it may capture bits of the continuity of indeterminate substance—just like the semiconductors of photovoltaic cells are structures that expose a symbolical net that captures, through filtering out of the indeterminate stream of light, quanta of electricity. Again, it is with this analogy that we can understand better how formalisms, through being essentially saturateable, can speak real for Leibniz, as well as for Serres. Contrary to common views that think that system means state or stasis, Serres elaborates, what we can learn from Leibniz is the idea that “system means quickness (speed).”92 Analysis is amphibolic in the sense of being alphabetic, in a Leibnizian manner, and it counts universally insofar as it may take as its object anything at all—insofar as it is rendered into discrete and finite form. That is, it is alphabetic in all the manners in which anything at all can be listed and catalogued by inventories of coding. In the words of Serres : “alphabets of linguistic, musical, signaletic, numerical kinds, the comprehensive 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 155. 90 “The Monad, of which we shall here speak, is nothing but a simple substance, which enters into compounds. By ‘simple’ is meant ‘without parts.’” Gottfried Leibniz, La Monadologie, trans. Robert Latta (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1898 [1714]), 1. 91 Serres, “Leibniz,” 155. 92 Ibid., 158.

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project of the alphabet of human thought, calculated in its uttermost limits.”93 Intellect, from this point of view, is not a transcendent voice that can give us unproblematic authority; rather it is “the playground of the possible.”94 With this perspective, Leibniz frustrates the promise of comfort in order to gain insight into an orbit of eternal stasis, through the development of intellectual capacity; but at the same time, he provides important grounds for shattering the power structures in the pre-Enlightenment era of political and religious absolutism, which had instrumentalized and even monetarized just such hopes, and turned them into a veritable apparatus of oppression.95 Let us recapitulate briefly. Leibniz, in Serres’s reading, has raised mathematics to the level of self-awareness of its symbolic constitution : “The true presents itself with greater ease than the whole of reality, which remains for God’s view alone. […] The true is but elected out of a completion, whose totality remains elusive to us.”96 Analytical discovery and demonstration through proof do not depend upon exhaustive treatment of the real. If we think of mathematics as a language, and its grammaticality as that of the alphabetical (any alphabet in general), consisting of universal characteristics (monads as mathematical terms)97 and universal method (mathesis, equations as conservational laws), then technics is not the Other to natural beings. Technics can then be understood as what allows us to understand the nature of what we know. Serres describes what this perspective on algebra would change; let us quote two rather long passages in order to at least raise an idea of what is at issue : “We are in delay with a science of our own knowledge, just like with a science on the knowledge of an author.”98 He then asks, “Why is it that we still don’t have an articulate description of our spaces of perception […] no articulate description of gestures, of conaesthetics, of introspection (Innenschau), of proprioceptive capacity, of the schemata of our bodies, the practical ways of conduct in work and craftsmanship, our sportive and artistic activities, of all the pathological composures of the body vis-à-vis itself and its environment ?”99 Topology is, or contains, he maintains, an aesthetics, “just like the logical-algebraic complex contains an analytics.”100 Together 93 Ibid., 155. 94 Ibid., 154. 95 In the sense that people were promised, salvation can be bought from the representatives of the church—a veritable economical market offering “units of absolution” to be brought into circulation. 96 Ibid., 175. 97 Ibid. Serres writes for example : “The original is a term” (153), or “What might we understand by ‘system’ if not first and foremost a sum ?” (156). Or, in a passage that is most explicit in how the infinitary resolution of mathematical terms in systems of equations can be understood, he writes : “Only the written equation provides for the totality of the possible” (218). 98 Ibid., 164. 99 Ibid., 163. 100 Ibid., 164.

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they allow us to learn to understand the world according to a morphology of the forms in which we think as a diverse collective, and yet, because we can articulate thoughts in mathematical terms, also universally. The weaver does not plunge his hand in the same multiplicity as the mason, the athlete, or the pianist; the claustrophobic does not develop the same topicality within one and the same “space” as the actor, and so forth. How is it that we don’t know—even though we do know—that theory is mistaking things, even though it would actually be ready; that we are immersed in precisely describable and highly differentiated multiplicity; that the individual differs, without doubt, and perhaps even determined by a peculiar profile within such manifoldness, in utterances that are extrapolated from that which Leibniz has said about manifoldness’s topicalities ? I don’t see why these domains ought to be excluded from mathematical treatment.101 The morphology of the forms in which we think when we learn, when we exert mastership in craft and art or do science, let us relate to nature in its bursting quickness : “All of nature is full of life. Nature is full, everywhere. How to describe such fullness, such continuity, these invariants which are stable across steady and continuous variations, these geneses which are coupled to processes of conservation, these interactions which rest on recursion ?”102 The morphology of quick manifoldness contains an aesthetics, because aesthetics is the one realm of judgments that cannot exhaustively be reasoned. This is why in Leibniz’s double articulation of formalism and morphology, of analysis and aesthetics, of logical algebra and topology, never claims to exhaustively and comprehensively realize an accord (Einklang) between intellect and existence, between reason and liberty, monadology and monads, culture and nature. It contents itself with saying that it does realize one such accord : “Leibniz did not create a concluding mathematics of science, nor did he formulate a concluding metaphysics. This, he never claimed. He merely thinks that his two-fold philosophical system can realize such accord.”103 III Realism of Ideal Entities : Conceiving, Giving Birth to, and Raising Ideas on the Stage of Abstraction “Language faces a truly boundless realm, that of the thinkable. It must make an infinite use of a finite stock of means, and it can achieve this through the identity of the power that engenders thought as one and the same with that which 101 Ibid., 164–65. 102 Ibid., 163. 103 Ibid, 166.

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engenders language. Language is not to be treated as a dead something, engendered. It is not an oeuvre (ergon), but itself activity (energeia).”104 The nature of the universal, according to the perspective we owe to Leibniz (and Serres’s reading of Leibniz), can be separated neither from concrete sensible reality nor from the conceptual reality of that which is only intelligible. The nature of the universal is real, virtual, and dispersed, equally much throughout the intelligible as the sensible. The presence of what belongs to no thing in particular insists as the noisy confusion between the two spheres, and is hosted in nature’s comprehensive and bursting quickness of all that grows and decays. In the last two chapters of this text, I would like to return to the question with which we lead over to the lemmata discussed in the previous chapter : in what kind of world would we find ourselves if we began to consider that through information technology, universal algebra is de facto constitutive for nearly all domains in how we organize our living environments today ? Two things seem crucial : (1) we would have to assume that what we can calculate is not the necessary but the possible; and (2) theory must provide a basis for decision rather than relieving thought from the demand of “transcendental deliberation.”105 If we regard mathematics (algebra) as a language, we must assume that ideas are essentially problematical and dependent upon clarification. As a consequence, reasonable thought alone does not liberate us from the responsibility of power and the associated challenging task of dealing with moral value. Leibniz’s proposed system for philosophy suggests that we gain from it at once “an organon of intuition” as well as “an architectonics of formal idealities.”106 With this, we have a two-fold reality : organismic and capable of metabolism and affectivity, as well a political complement, that of an architectonics, which gives rise to the question of where such natural reality of intellectuality may be thought to reside. So let me counter the lemmata discussed within the framework of a possible theorizing of the universal that aspires to remain neutral on matters of believe with a brief and preliminary enunciation of how to dope such theorizing without the aspiration to remain neutral with regard to matters of belief—neutral, however, in a categorical sense, not in any specified one. 104 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus (Berlin : Druckerei der Königlichen Akademie, 1836), §13; my own translation. The original German : “Denn sie steht ganz eigentlich einem unendlichen und wahrhaft grenzenlosen Gebiete, dem Inbegriff alles Denkbaren gegenüber. Sie muss daher von endlichen Mitteln einen unendlichen Gebrauch machen, und vermag dies durch die Identität der Gedanken- und Sprache erzeugenden Kraft. Man muss die Sprache nicht sowohl wie ein totes Erzeugtes, sondern weit mehr wie eine Erzeugung ansehen. Sie selbst ist kein Werk (Ergon), sondern eine Tätigkeit (Energeia).” 105 Brook and McRobert, “Kant’s Attack on the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection.” 106 Serres, “Leibniz,” 165.

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Intellectuality has its natural residence in universal text whose corpus provides a collective body to think with and to reason in. Text is not the scene of writing that hosts life-in-general; rather we might see in it the body of universal genitality. This body is the residence of the mathematical principle, which is host to all things generic and pre-specific. It governs magnitude, multitude, and value—symbolically. It is the master of all things that are most unlikely to ever happen or turn real. Universal genitality, incorporated in the principle of mathematics, is capable of performing incredible acts—like giving multitude an extension in time that is subjected to the fullness of space (Aristotelian ontology); or magnitude an extension in the fullness of time without having one in space (Dynamics); or it can give multitude an extension in an abundant plenty of space, together with a distributed-yet-collected extension in time (probability amplitudes in quantum physics). Universal text is the body of an infinitely wealthy principle, its content is arithmetic and its form is restlessly generous; and yet it cannot give without demanding : it demands mastership in logics and in geometry by those who desire to receive what it has to give. Universal text as the natural residence of intellectuality is also the collective body to think in. It is genealogical without originarily determined pureness; it is corporeal and yet arcane; it is natural in the sense of being sexed and gendered, yet impredicatively so : universal text is universal genitality. The architectonics of formal ideality is neither constructed from ultimate elements nor does it grow according to ultimate morphological body plans, rather, we might say, perhaps it takes shape through blossoming. It cannot be decided whether the character of the principle that is master in this residence (mathematics) is a One or a Many. Rather, it is, symbolically, both at once : it collects and comprehends confluxes from many geneses. This principle, which masters the natural residence of collective intellectuality, demands of its subjects nothing more than reasoning in a manner that proceeds archly as well as utterly precise, such that it may provide auxiliary structures of symbolical stages for abstract thought to conceive and engender objective ideas. The elaboration of fantastic speculation out of which we might begin to dope the issues at stake in the lemmata described is an infinite task that can never be completed. But according to the suggested formulation above, we can at least begin to frame a preliminary answer to the main question of this text, namely, What is at stake with the notion of the universal ? What is at stake with enunciations of the notion of the universal, we might say, is the symbolical nature of the stage for abstract interplays between (1) the world as the entirety of the inhabited world (ecumenical movement); and (2) the state of public things in the world (republic). The promised reward of such a philosophical perspective should not be difficult to see—in a world whose marketplace extends

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globally, whose national governments are dependent upon each other, and whose cosmopolitical citizens communicate across all geographical, political, and professional boundaries. Even the mathematical and formal descriptions of things chemical, physical, or biological, are capable of manifold representation. Matter that is informed can be assumed to exist in universal and original form as little or as much as this can be assumed of language itself. This reverses the legendary confusion of speaking in many tongues, which is said to have come from Babylon. While the Babylonian confusion usually exhibits that we have many names for the same thing, the informability of matter inverses the situation : we now have many things for the same name. Hence, what I would like to suggest is a realist approach to the universal, which would consider it not as a space that gives room and passively hosts the extension to all things, insofar as they are pure and do not contradict each other. In a realist understanding, the form of comprehension that is proper to the universal is communicational, and its nature is vivid and of infinite capacity. Unlike a notion of space that hosts the extension of things, which is supposed to be only giving without ever demanding anything, the communicational nature of the universal must be considered as being equally giving as it is demanding : it gives everything that can be the object of intellection, and it demands to be received, spelled out, interpreted, formulated, and integrated into the architectonics of its formal ideality. It is a consequence of such communicational nature that nothing that corresponds to it—nothing that can be called universal—can ever be owned. But at the same time, it is not real unless it is being conquered and appropriated, intellectually. All communicational reasoning in the terms of universal text is archly reasoning; it is not reflective or projective reasoning. The nature of the universal is self-engendering; it does not, properly speaking, ever cease to take place or actually happen as long as its demand finds response and respect. We may think of it perhaps as an intermitting point, a moment that resides in its own lasting, or as a circle that desires to comprehend everything that it encompasses. All these circumscriptions, I would like to suggest, characterize the stage of abstraction from which a non-algebraic scene of writing, ultimately, accrues. Serres draws a portrait of Thales, and focused on his conception of the famous theorem at the foot of the pyramids, from which these ideas take much of their esprit.107 How can we face something impenetrable, immense, and ultimately arcane, Serres asks. What are we facing in the moments when we seek to elaborate symmetries through erected symbolical structures such that they are capable of conserving that of which all we can say is that (1) it must be considered invariant, and (2) that it 107 Michel Serres, “Was Thales am Fusse der Pyramiden gesehen hat,” in Hermes II : Interferenz, trans. Michael Bischoff (Berlin : Merve Verlag, 1992 [1972]), 212–39.

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can be passed on from one form to another form ? Thus, in the remaining parts of this text we shall approach an elaboration of this infinite task and its reservoir for doping in indirect and iterative terms, by following Serres through the account he gives of how the birth of pure geometry has never taken place.108 Homothesis as the Locus in Quo of the Universal’s Presence “Thales, who reads in the traces of the body, deciphers, ultimately, only one secret, that of the impossibility to enter the Arcanum of the solid body in which knowledge resides, buried forever, and out of which wells up, as if from a ceaselessly springing source, the infinite history of analytical progress.”109 1st Iteration (Acquiring a Space of Possibility) In Serres’s text, we find ourselves in the desert with Thales, facing, in the pyramid, an impenetrable constellation. We might well recognize the pyramid’s outline as a triangle, but we know not how to measure it. We are taken to accompany Thales on an adventure that is pure concentration, a tour during which we reach, eventually, in a circuitous manner, what is straightforwardly and directly inaccessible—a space in which measuring the pyramid becomes possible. It is an adventure in archly reasoning, reasoning that proceeds by an act of double duplication : on the one hand, we duplicate the situation in which we find ourselves, and on the other hand, simultaneously, we duplicate ourselves as we find ourselves comprehended in that situation. All that is left for us to do, if we follow Thales and Serres, is to give an account of how we proceed by aspiring to measure each repetitious step taken. The cunning that drives such reasoning never properly manifests itself, neither positively nor negatively. It establishes, through what I will call double duplication, a stage of abstraction that is capable of hosting a play of homothesis as the dramatizing establishment of “homology between the crafted and the craftsman.”110 The cunning by which we are driven manifests in no other way but in tending to its own continuation. Tended by his own cunning, Thales’s double duplication introduces a time that might remain, by giving way to the unlikeliness of finding an accord in which it (measuring what is overpowering, colossal, and immense) acquires a space of possibility, exposed from elaborating the soundness of the presumed accord by computing auxiliary structures in all of which the same invariant quantity is at work. The postulation before Thales’s 108 “If one were to understand by the birth of geometry the rise of absolute purity out of the grand ocean of these shadows, then we might as well, a few years after geometry’s death, say that it had never actually been born.” This is Serres’s answer to Husserl’s mourning in the end of his article. Ibid., 238–39. 109 Ibid., 232. 110 Ibid., 226.

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inner sight—a postulation in theory—of a module, from Latin modus, literally “a measure, extent, quantity, manner,” is enough to stage the invariant quantity at stake. This is what Serres tells us. But how to find this quantity ? All that there is to be contemplated, for finding an answer, so Serres tells us, is that Thales must find a unit of procedure, and that the quantity of this unit ought to be, if the procedure be feasible and valid, conserved by a structure. Thus, Thales must attempt to stage abstractly the very act of virtually “en-familiarizing” himself with what is colossal and immense. Thales knows that the interiority of the pyramid is inaccessible, that it would be an unworthy violation to force his access into it. Thus, Thales pays all due respect to that, and premises for his own symbolical double duplication that the interiority spaced out in it be inaccessible as well. He treats the size of his triangle purely structurally—without knowing, at first, anything about the structure nor how he could possibly apply his triangle for measuring. We thus learn that Thales begins this elaboration by building a stock of experience—Serres calls it a résumé, from Latin resumere, “take again, take up again, assume again.” Before Thales will be able to actually draw a circle, we learn, he has to actually go in circles. Many times. Learning to measure, even in theory, Serres maintains, is an operation of application. One has to “blossom into” the capability of doing it. Thus Thales keeps beginning, summing up what he finds along his iterations, and treats the sums he comes up with as a product of reciprocity, from reciprocus, “returning the same way, alternating.” Gradually, so we are told, he invents a scale of reproduction. How ? All that we can say in this first iteration is that Thales measures the pyramid by postulating—on grounds no more “solid” than the immateriality of a desire—that it be possible, and by striving to elaborate the conditions for his own postulation. 2nd Iteration (Learning to Speak a Language in which No One Is Native) One idea Thales substantiates in the course of the elaboration of his postulate—the postulate being that the inaccessible pyramid is measurable—is that the pyramid incorporates the principle of homothesis. Homothesis is, as we learn from Serres elsewhere, “the same way of being there, of being placed.”111 The space of homothesis is a space of dislocation, deferral, and adjournment, “with or without rotation,” as he puts it.112 Things that are governed by this principle, things that are tributary to the space of homothesis, are things that can be considered as equally bounded. In short, they can be considered as

111 Michel Serres, “Gnomon : The Beginnings of Geometry in Greece,” in A History of Scientific Thought, 88–89. 112 Ibid., 88.

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things that are commensurate. But what can be the source that sheds light onto such a space for abstract intellection, and hence open it up to our intuitive sight ? It is the sun that treats all things equally. Yet this equality, Serres warns us, cannot in any direct manner be found in the sun itself, as if it gave each thing its natural gloss immediately. Nevertheless, we are told, the sun facilitates that an abstract space may be engendered. The engendering of such an abstract space is, for Serres, the Greek miracle whose revelation eventually made possible what he calls the fabrication of a mathematical language, the sole language “capable of halting conflicts and which never needs translating.”113 The language spoken in such abstract space is the sole language in which there are no barbarians, because everyone speaks it as an immigrant, with no political obligations of conforming to the mother tongue spoken by natives.114 3rd Iteration (Setting the Stage for Thought to Comprehend Itself) This language allows articulations on the stage of abstraction, and for Serres, its possible articulations open up and constitute the scene of writing. Within a space governed by the principle of homothesis, the scene of writing is constituted around homology. For Serres, it is the Greek understanding of logos that will allow alphabetic writing to think of the cosmos no longer in terms of genesis and progeny, but in terms of a logics that comprehends the cosmos within the universe. Homology, he tells us, is threefold : number, relation, and invariance. Arithmetics, geometry, and physics. This fantastic premise of one universal logos, Serres maintains, allows Thales to see in the pyramid a manifestation of the homothetical principle. On this assumption, Thales can postulate the invariance of form to complement the variations of quantity. Armed with such thinking, the colossality of the pyramid becomes less daunting, and this without the need to divest its constitutive secret, its inaccessible interiority. The archly reasoning that supports such thinking is not the reasoning of an individual subject rising up against the principle that governs its own predication. In Thales circuitous thought, there is nothing revolutionary here whatsoever. The reasoning exerted in support of homology is an automatic reasoning, we are told, from autos, “self,” + matos, “thinking, animated.” As Serres puts it, it is the reasoning that happens as the world exerts itself upon itself,115 a world that thrusts forth and pushes out of itself, in order to adjoin to itself what happens to it. Serres calls this the reasoning of how the gnomon

113 Ibid., 77. 114 Ibid. “All the cultural hegemonies of the world are impotent against this community and against the universality of this teaching.” 115 From ex-, “out,” + serere, “attach, join.”

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counts, the reasoning that seeks to account for the objective ruler that sets the natural play of shadow and light in scene by collecting it with its own apparatus of capture. “Who knows ? Who understands ? Never did Antiquity ask these two questions,” Serres maintains.116 The gnomon allows to indicate time, but foremost it is an observatory that does not, like modern telescopes, bundle what gathers into something specifically for the sight of an individual subject. In the events the gnomon is capable of staging, Thales (and anyone else) participates as nothing more than as a pointer, an index or cursor, since “standing upright we also cast shadows, or as seated scribes, stylus in hand, we too leave lines.”117 But aware of this precise circumstance, Thales now sets out to reason about how the gnomon stages, as an apparatus of capture, the play of shadow and light. In his double duplication, Thales literally tries to catch up with the course of what he himself (as a gnomon) indicates, and hence makes observable. It is by trying to catch up with his own significance within the situation that Thales eventually begins to substantiate the concept of similarity as an invariance—or, to make Serres’s point more clear, as an idea contemplated by the world in its own automatic reasoning. Even though Thales is trying to catch up with his own significance within the situation, the active center of knowing resides outside of Thales himself : “The world renders itself visible to itself, and regards this rendering of itself : here resides the meaning of the word theoria. To put it more clearly : a thing—the gnomon—intermits the world through stepping in, such that the world may read on its own surface the writing it leaves behind on itself. Recognition : a purse, or a fold.”118 For Serres, the scene of writing is automatic too, as it is for Derrida as well. But unlike its characterization by Derrida, for Serres the scene of writing unfolds on the stage of abstraction, and is a dramatic, not a mystical, space. But it too is a space that knows no individual poets or playwrights. The dramas it puts forth are authored by a collective subjectivity that spells out the reasoning of a world that exerts itself upon itself. 4th Iteration (Intelligence That Is Immanent and Coextensive with the Universe) Such a collective subjectivity depends upon an artificial memory. Serres finds such a memory in the canonical lists and tabular organization of practical problems—the preparation of how certain results to certain problems may be found more easily, based on how problems of a same kind have already been resolved whenever they have imposed

116 Serres, “Gnomon,” 80. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. My translation here deviates from the proposed one, which suggests the following : “The world lends itself to be seen by the world that sees it : that is the meaning of the word theory. Even better : a thing—the gnomon—intervenes in the world so that it might read on itself the writing it traces on itself. A pocket or fold of knowledge” (86).

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themselves previously.119 The problems thereby treated are mainly economical problems; they revolve around how to count what is given—but not around how we might account for the manners in which we do count that which is given. The tables in which the treatment of these problems is organized must be ordered around a step-by-step procedure that will lead whomever follows it to the desired decision or solution. Such methodical, goal-oriented procedures are what Serres calls algorithms.120 They spell out how to reach all intermediary steps as one attempts to multiply quantities, to divide them, to raise them to a different power than that in which they are given, to extract the roots of a quantity or to sum up or divide them. The overall framework of these operations, one might say, consists in finding ways of counting, as exhaustively as possible, the possibilities hosted in a quantity’s reciprocal value—these possibilities are the very substance of economic thought.121 The methods of how such tabular organization is gained, is strictly algorithmic. An algorithm is made up of techniques or operations of how to count—what we today summarize as the operations of arithmetics. Its procedures in Babylonian science know three classes of numbers : the givens (data), the results, and the constants, which are the stepping stones from given to desired results.122 As long as possible manners of accounting for how what is given is counted by these tables, quantities lack a proper generality; they are always concrete and singular. Generality is not seen with regard to the things given, it applies to procedures only : an algorithm is an algorithm (and not an account of one’s experience, like a fable or a tale, for example) because it is a general rule that can be reproduced in its experiential value by anyone who follows its steps. Once a specific procedure is put in numerical form, one and the same algorithm can be applied arbitrarily to particular situations. Such algorithmic procedures usually end with the formulation : “Behold, one will do likewise for any fraction which occurs.”123 Against this background we can understand Serres’s admiration for archly reasoning that has not the particular economical interest of a people at its core, but that fantasizes a reasoning proper to the world itself. The homological dramas that unfold in his homothetical space of abstraction, and that are expressed in the scenes of writing that accrue from it, are full of brilliance; yet the intelligence that shines in it is not that of an extraordinary priest, king, or an official expert. Archly reasoning differs from algorithmic reasoning mainly in that it treats 119 Ibid., 86–87. 120 Ibid., 86. See footnote 10, p. 725 : “Algorithm : contrary to appearances, the word does not come from Greek but from Arabic and means a finite set of elementary operations for a computational procedure or the resolution of a problem.” 121 In these descriptions, I follow mainly the account given by James Ritter in his essay “Babylon,” 17–43, as well as “Measure for Measure,” 44–72. 122 Ritter, “Measure for Measure,” 62. 123 Ritter cites from the Rhind Papyrus, ibid., 69.

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the manners of accounting in which that which counts expresses its power, are being treated wittily, and challengingly. The brilliance that shines in the archly reasoning of a world that exerts itself upon itself, by double duplication, is the brilliance of a world that collects and discretizes itself in a genuinely public language (that of mathematics). For Serres, “intelligence is immanent and, probably, coextensive with the Universe.”124 The world owns a huge stock in forms, he tells us, “there is a vast objective intelligence of which the artificial and the subjective constitute small subsets.”125 The new economy that corresponds to the archly reasoning of the world feeds from the cornucopia of ideas that the world might recognize as its own, while trying to keep track, in its reasoning, with who and what it actually is. 5th Iteration (Inventing a Scale of Reproduction) So let us turn back to Thales, and how he gradually invents a scale of reproduction for measuring the colossal manifestation of the pyramid. Thales sees in the pyramid the eminence of a principle, we said, that of homothesis. But how can we learn to en-familiarize ourselves with the meaning of this ? What we can learn from Serres is that homothesis abstracts from the tabulatory accounts that preserve and collect, in their algorithmic tables, all that the gnomon indicates. One way to put it is to say that Thales steps out of the apparatus of capture’s reign, and that he dares to multiply the very principle of its regime. Let us recapitulate and see how Thales proceeds. Thales has no direct access to the object he wishes to measure, and sets out to establish the possibility of an indirect way, by double duplicating the situation and engendering the form of this double duplication as a reduced model. He proceeds to measure the pyramid by postulating that it be possible, and elaborating his own fantastic postulation before his inner sight, that is, in theory. He begins this elaboration by building a stock of experience—a résumé—or, as we might say now, by treating what appears to be a given as data to be organized in algorithmic tables. What appears as a given, he dares to think, is given by the gnomon and can count only as indexes to something that is not exhaustively given in what the gnomon collects. This something, he considers, must be of such a magnificent quantity that the form of reciprocity that hosts it also hosts the size of the pyramid as one of its possible variations. If one were to en-familiarize oneself with the dimensions of the monument, and hence be capable of measuring it, this magnificent quantity is what one would need to better comprehend. Thus, after having stepped out of the immediate reign of the gnomon’s apparatus, Thales gives way to a thrusting forth of his mind beyond what it is yet capable to encompass. He wants to learn. Following Serres in his account, we can 124 Ibid., 96. 125 Ibid.

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remind ourselves that before Thales will know, and be able to draw his famous circle in order to measure the pyramid, he has to iterate and go in circles, on grounds no more solid than his desire that it be possible. He has to assume a result that seems, from all he can know, beyond reach—and it is on the premise of its assumption that he must try to find an algorithm that will guide his way to the result whose solvability he presumes against all odds. Thus Thales gradually builds up his résumé. He continuously sums up what he finds along his iterations, and attempts to treat the sums he comes up with as values proper to his hypothetical form of reciprocity of a quantity so magnificent that it hosts the invariant quantity that makes the pyramid comparable to the reduced models he is trying to build. But from what stock of experience does he draw when attempting to build a model ? Going around in his circles, Thales regards the pyramid as an objective ruler. He begins by regarding it, as is the common manner of thinking, Serres suggests, as a sundial. He expects the pyramid to speak about the sun, and to indicate the hours of measuring. He marks the outlines of its shadows as time goes by, and faces a growing number of varying outlines, the longer he goes on. As he continues his circles, he begins to consider that the outlined shadows (which build his stock of experience, his résumé) must all be variations commensurate with one another by that module of which he knows nothing more than that he must proceed according to its proportionality in his attempted act of double duplication. The way how Thales eventually succeeds in abstracting from the idea of the gnomon, explains Serres, is by changing the real setting of his exercise into a formal setting in theory : instead of bringing the pyramid to speak about the sun, he can now ask the sun to speak about the pyramid.126 This perspective, which is now a theoretical one, no longer based on experience alone, does not, as before, require that the magnificent quantity, whose form of reciprocity hosts the invariance he seeks, be real and actually given; it may remain a secret—like those secrets, inherent to materials and to tools, which forever inspire the development of a craftsman’s mastership. Hence, we can imagine how Thales’s view gradually begins to change. He ceases to contemplate the variations he observes and registers, as he goes in circles, for the sake of finding in them a new “given,” from whose concrete shape he learns a general procedure. Yet with it, he cannot mechanically compute, as it was custom with the algorithmic way of thinking, what may count as constant and common throughout the transformations among all the outlined shadows. No, he begins to take the stance of the artistic craftsman—and he is well aware that what he attempts to craft must remain abstract. He sets out to craft a genuinely theoretical object, one that duplicates the objectivity of the ruler. Now, the variations begin to interest him because they must host, he thinks, the essence of an 126 Serres, “Was Thales am Fusse der Pyramiden gesehen hat,” 218.

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invariant quantity that, like a guest, can never appear in its familiarity as long as it is respected as a guest (and not subjected to the customs of one’s own home). Like a guest who is familiar and strange not due to willed disguise, but by lack of alphabetized commensurability, the invariant quantity must be treated in a space, and in a language, in terms of which the artistic craftsman too is an immigrant and a stranger. It cannot be the concretely objective space of collective memory that allows for the dramatic act of an inceptive conception, rather it must be an abstract space which is capable of staging the intuitive concreteness of collective memory. From now on, Thales strives to en-familiarize himself with the immenseness of the pyramid; he no longer hopes to succeed in subjecting it to an order that he would already be familiar with. He aspires to do so by expecting from that which changes ceaselessly (the shadows) that it be capable of speaking about what is stable in an abstract and non-concrete manner (the measured pyramid). He thinks about the setting in which he finds himself (at the foot of the pyramid, in the desert) as a formal setting, not as a real setting, and with this, Thales can find a trick to render—against all likeliness—the course of the sun permanent. He no longer participates in the dictate of the gnomon as a real ruler, where what it points to must belong to what is already given, but to what can be seen in what is given only by pointers to something whose magnitude is magnificent, and as such bound to remain immense, and barred from being directly experienced. With this leap into theory, Thales no longer uses space to indicate time; he arrests time through generalizing one particular, and real, moment—that when our shadows and our bodies have the same length. As Serres puts it : “He homogenizes the singularity of each day in favor of a general case— one has to stop time in order to evoke geometry.”127 In other words, Thales must symbolize a world in which he could relate to a monument of such awesome colossality and vastness, from the Latin colossus, “a statue larger than life.” Like this, Thales can think with all the cunning and conquering reason he is capable of, and yet without being disrespectful to the secret at the center of the pyramids. Such is the symbolical nature of intellection, Serres seems to be saying, an intellectual nature that is not at odds with an ethics of mutual respect. We can see in the birth of mathematical theory the unlikeliness of beginning to converse abstractly. 6th Iteration (The Formula, A Double-Articulating Application) Thales’s double-articulating application of the gnomon contemplates all possible variants of a triangle by inscribing them, theoretically, into a common compass : the course of the sun’s permanency. This is how Thales eventually succeeds in conserving, in his textual formula of rightangled triangles, a universal and formal concept of similarity. Its compass is



127 Ibid., 219.

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conceived by a reasoning that is proper to the world as it exerts itself upon itself—the course of the sun as collected by a duplication of the gnomon. Thales’s theorem states, as a means of conservation, that if A, B, and C are points on a circle where the line AC is a diameter of the circle, then the angle (  )ABC is a right angle. For Serres, as we will see in a moment, recounting what Thales might have seen at the foot of the pyramid is inevitably a text about originality. Like Thales himself, Serres is not interested in revealing the signification of this origin by claiming to be familiar with it, but instead he wants to postulate, again like Thales, further theorems of universal value. Let’s see what some of Serres’s own postulations are, and how he sets out to elaborate on them. IV.

the amorous nature of intellectual conception : Universal Text That Conserves the Articulations of a Generic Voice

1st Iteration (Marking All That Is Assumed to Be Constant with a Cypher) First we must see what is the object of Serres’s own double duplication. Thales, we said, double duplicated the algorithmic mode of iteration and established a textual formula that conserves an infinite amount of variations. As Thales puts the algorithmic mode of iteration in Babylonian science at stake in order to generalize from its custom, Serres puts Thales’s archly reasoning at stake, which he sees as consisting in duplicating the scene—in order to generalize from Thales’s custom. What happened in this “Thales moment” counts to Serres not so much as the origin of geometry (which is today’s customary association with this event), but as the inception of a stage for abstract thought. The inception of such a stage is necessary, he maintains, for developing proper alphabets of formal reasoning out of the formality of mathematical statements—alphabets that, like any alphabet, allow for expressing an infinity of articulations by a finite stock of elements. Thus, if Thales was capable of formulating his theorem by attending—theoretically—to the permanence of the sun’s course, Serres wants to reintroduce temporality and the vividness of real happenings into the formal settings established by Thales. If Thales questioned the principle of the gnomon by multiplying it, and thereby invented the space of theory (homothesis and homology, organized according to an abstract principle of similarity), Serres sets out to question the principle of theory by multiplying it, and to inventing an alphabetic view on the timeless space of formal theory. Such an alphabetic view is what to him counts as the birth of physics from the spirit of mathematics.128



128 See Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester : Clinamen Press, 2000 [1977]).

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Serres’s account sets out to speak about how the abstractness of an architectonics of formal ideality had been fabricated. The proposal is simple. What Thales realized, according to Serres, is threefold : 1 the possibility of reduction : Thales creates a model that extracts from the given situation a skeleton reduced from all singular context, and that is in favor of a general case; 2 Thales affirmed the idea of a module : that throughout different sizes and scales, the quantities at stake must be commensurate; 3 Thales conceived of the model in a general, not in an iconic, representational manner : he invented a scale of reproduction.129 These are the conditions that make the creation of a model possible, as an intellectual act of engendering. Yet, as conditions, they depend upon being bracketed and enciphered : Thales, trying to win the immense for a mutual encounter in a realm in which both are immigrants, all familiar constancy in terms of space, time, practice, perception must be questioned and marked with a cipher. Driven by his desire, Thales treats them as coefficients that must, in some way of which he knows he can never see in an immediate manner, be at work within what he seeks. And indeed, once Thales comes to measure the pyramid, each condition will be raised in their powers : space will host something that does not exist, a general model; time is arrested and one of its moments is rendered perennial; practice comes to envelop not a necessity, but something that appears necessary (a theory); measuring does not depend upon tactile perception, but upon visual sense. Thales, in the account Serres gives of him, invented the stage of abstract conception by conquering, without disgrace, what is, in its dignity, impenetrable : the arcanum of the pyramid’s lasting and unviolated immenseness. 2nd Iteration (Confluence of Multiple Geneses) Serres’s own double duplication of the Thales situation constitutes, in turn, a model. What he sees while tracing the conquering movement of Thales’s act of intellection, lets him face something that appears to him as immeasurable as the pyramid must have appeared to Thales—let us call it the graceful desire by which he sees Thales moved. The desire that desires the arcanum. The desire for revelation of what must remain, if one does not want to violate it, concealed. So what does Serres do, in his account of Thales ? He sees in the Thales situation a multiplication of originality in procedural, operative terms : algorithmic originality times gnomonic originality times formulaic originality times textual originality (the originality he adds to it when he reads Thales’s story as a story of origins).130 The multiplication of origins supports a multiplication of how we can account 129 Serres, “Was Thales am Fusse der Pyramiden gesehen hat,” 214. 130 Ibid., 219. As Serres literally puts it : “a multiplication of genetic procedures” and “the origin of geometry is a conflux of geneses.”

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with givens by rooting them in enciphered constants, and by symbolically domesticating the growth of what can be yielded from these roots (the variables in all possible variation) if we carefully tend to their tabular organization. The careful tending of such graceful desire consists in treating formulaic statements as theoretical fabrics, which aspire to caress the integrity of the colossal through offering dramatizations of possible rapports, in which the terms of such statements feature as protagonists, as actors on stage in texts of proper originality. In the plurality of such dramatized theoretical fabrics, we can render the givens comparable as things that remain, essentially, elusive and come to the world from an outer space of universal intellection. Like this, the “givens” must be regarded merely as pointers to a magnitude with which we can en-familiarize ourselves if we collect the indexical pointers that mark that magnitude, by integrating them into a commensurate compass; stating that what can be conserved into a formula depends upon abstract conception in a realm of theory, and this realm is, essentially, inexhaustible. More concretely, in his multiplication of originality, Serres faces an immense product, a result that integrates the streams that spring from all these different originalities, as the confluence of multiple geneses.131 The alphabetization of the theoretical space must attempt to draw balances from this immense product.132 So how does Serres imagine that the Greeks were able to conceive of the abstract stage of geometry ? Through a fourfold genesis, he suggests : 1 a practical genesis which consists in “producing a reduced model, coming up with the idea of a module, tracing back what is afar to what is near”; 2 sensorial genesis which consists in “organizing the visual representation of that which cannot be sensed immediately by touching”; 3 a civic or epistemological genesis which consists in “departing from astronomy and inverting the problem of the sundial”; 131 Ibid., 219–20. 132 In “Gnomon,” Serres writes : “And so it does not appear that the Ancients sought or thought of elements absolutely first or last : there are elements everywhere, in local tables” (112). He explains : “The term Elements, which translates into Latin and our modern languages the title used by Euclid and probably Hippocratus of Chios before him, originates from the letters L, M, N, in the same way as the alphabet spells the first Greek letters : alpha, beta, and the sol-fa sings the notes : sol, fa. The authentic title Stoicheia does indeed mean letters, understood as elements of the syllable or of the world” (111). And, further : “Again, what is an element ? This mark, this line, the dash, the hyphen, in general the note, as these words were used by Leibniz. And in the plural, a series of these notes, a series generally grouped in a table or a chart of points and lines, in well-ordered lines and columns. As far as I know, the Elements of geometry also consisted of points and lines that we have to learn to draw. Today, as in the past, everywhere we see similar tables : the letters of the different alphabets, numbers in all bases, axioms, simple bodies, the planets, markings in the sky, forces and corpuscles, the functions of truth, amino acids. […] Our memory preserves them so easily that they themselves constitute a memory in the triple sense of history—hence the commentaries—of automation and of algorithms” (113).

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4 a conceptual or aesthetic genesis which consists in “stopping time in order to measure space, swapping the functions of variability and invariance.” 133 3rd Iteration (The Residence of That which Is Genuinely Migrational) From within this insubordinate happening of confluent streams, which Serres recounts while contemplating what Thales might have seen, Serres identifies three conditions that will firmly support to gracefully appropriate a sense of inner sight (theory) by building schemata in the form of optical diagrams.134 Optical diagrams contain the essence of theory, he holds, yet this essence is an act : that of transportation.135 Theory, by sending whomever reasons theoretically on travels, allows him or her to grow more familiar with what manifests itself as immense. Let us recapitulate Serres’s reasoning. The sense of sight, and that which is seen, premises the following givens : position and angle, a source of light, and an object that is viewed as either dark or light.136 The confluent streams are treated as processes of transportation, and the questions to be asked, Serres maintains, are questions of where that which is caught up in transport properly resides : 1 “Where is the proper residence of position and angle ? Anywhere. Where the source of light resides. Application, relation, measurement are possible because field markers are brought into constellation; one can see the sun and the peak of the pyramid in constellation, or one can see the peak of the tomb and the uttermost end of the shadow in constellation.”137 2 “Where is the proper residence of the object ? Also the object must be transportable. And in fact it is transportable : either because of the shadow which it casts, or because of the model that emulates it.”138 3 “Where is the proper residence of the source of light ? It varies, one only considers the sundial. It transports the object in the appearance of the shadow. It resides within the object, this, we will call the miracle.”139 It is an enchanted world, the world in confluent streams of multiple geneses, and yet it is a world of objective reasoning. It is a world in which what testifies the immenseness of life and death can be encountered gracefully. Where a monument evokes a sense of tremendousness

133 Ibid., 219. 134 Serres, “Was Thales am Fusse der Pyramiden gesehen hat,” 221. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid., 219–20. 137 Ibid., 220. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid.

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and seems to demand subordination, Thales shows us (via Serres) how we can en-familiarize ourselves with it by considering abstractly and carefully superordinate concepts, hypernyms, by dramatizing them. To conceive of the world abstractly is a form of conquering that never annexes what it conquers but “coexists” with it. To conceive abstractly brings to work what one is familiar with from where one comes from in an altogether original manner, by treating what appears to be constant as ciphers that need to be rooted in symbolic domains yet unknown, to be engendered by no other way than by archly reasoning. 4th Iteration (Universal Genitality) On the stage of abstraction, all that features in it is immigrant. It is the stage on which to conceive of things in their genericness, and in their universal genitality. It is a theorematical stage, and it enables the unfolding of plays in the scene of writing : plays that perform the measurement of originality in theory. Nothing in these plays is native to their plotlines; everything that features in them is on travel. With regard to such measurement, no one can possibly be at home when he or she dares to make statements about what happens in a scene of originality. Such measurement depends upon one’s own en-familiarization with what is awe-inspiring—on the sole condition that we can count, if only the ways of conduct are not without grace, on the colossal’s hospitality : “The theatre of measurement performs how a secret may be deciphered, how an alphabet may be deciphered, and how a drawing may be read.”140 In Serres’s account of theory, mathematics is the key to history, not the other way around. A scene of originality cannot be witnessed, he insists.141 In it, something immense is posed at the discretion of a theory, and a theory is the dramatization of an arcanaum, a secret. Mathematics is archly reasoning that seeks to engender a circuit. Nothing more. It cannot be witnessed, it can only be actualized. If the essence of theory is transport, as Serres maintains, then theory is never about identifying with the revelation that takes place in abstract conceptions that are attributed to count as scenes of originality—like that of Thales and the inception of the theorem of angular measurement within a circle. It is not important whether Thales draws the circle around himself, or around a simple stick, as far as the statement of the scene in the form of a theorem is concerned. A theorem expresses a schema, an optical diagram, and the schema is a stable auxiliary construction that allows a thing to be transported. Such auxiliary constructions render all things mobile; they are vehicles.142 They facilitate within the reality of the universal the migrational activity of that about whose essence we can say nothing more than that it is im140 Ibid., 229. 141 Ibid., 221. 142 Ibid.

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mense, a crystallization between life and death, a being about which no one knows anything beyond what can be stated of it in the universal terms of mathematical agreement. As a thing stated like that, in its dramatized originality, one can tap into the circuit of activity that is organized in its statement. And this without, properly speaking, understanding it. But one needs to understand the theorem. And this involves, ever again, to “pay” ones coordination of familiarity, the elements of one’s world, “as a tribute” to the possibility of spelling out of the theorem. That is why mathematics, to Serres, is the key to history. What can be told by theorematical statements are dramatizations of an immense content, and in that, they are not much different from how the schemes in mythical tales work : a schema is what remains invariant regardless of the number of times a story is told. But the schema is not the origin of this invariance, it is its vehicle.143 Every mythical tale is the dramatization of a given content. The relation between a schema, and the mobilization of an original thing that the schema affords, is essential for a tale to become tradable. Mathematics is a language, but one can speak in it only in the terms of a private, unpublished story. Because what it expresses cannot be witnessed; it can only be actualized. Knowing a theorem means to have lived up to encounter the arcanum it hosts with grace. It can only be talked about from afar, through anecdote, on the relation between two ciphers that are, ultimately, not to be deciphered : “Thales’s geometry expresses, in the form of a legend, the relation between two blindnesses, that of the result of practice, and that of the subject of practice. It formulates and measures the problem yet without resolving it; it dramatizes the problem’s concept, yet without explaining it; it poses the question in admirable manner yet does not answer it; it recounts the relation between two cyphers, that of the mansion and that of the monument, yet it deciphers none of them.”144 5th Iteration (Mathematics Is the Electric Circuit of Cunning Reason) A theorem renders available certain techniques, because techniques envelop a theory. They are stable coatings that package the acts of archly reasoning in scenes of originality, in abstract conception. In order to take these practices and do something with them, in order to apply these techniques, one needs not know the theory that they envelop. But without knowing it, one doesn’t touch upon the question of originality. It cannot be separated from the pride of a craftsman who seeks to become masterful, in the sense of conquering his material without disgracing it. As Serres puts it : What is the status of knowledge that is contained in a technique ? A technique is always a practice that envelops a theory. The entire

143 Ibid. 144 Ibid., 225.

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question—in our case that of originality—reduces here to a question of mode, the modality of this envelop. If mathematics springs one day from particular techniques, it is without doubt because of an explication of such implicit knowledge. And if the arcanum (the secret) plays a certain role in the tradition of craft, then certainly because its secret is a secret for every one, including the master. There is a transparent knowledge that resides hidden in the hands of a craftsman and his relation to stone. It resides hidden, it is locked in by a double bar; it remains in the dark. It lies in the dark shadow of the pyramid. This is the scene of knowing, it is here that the possible, the dreamt, conceptualized origin is staged and put in scene. The secret of the architect and the stonemason, a secret for himself, for Thales and for us, this secret is the scene of shadow plays. In the shadow of the pyramid, Thales finds himself within the implicitness of knowledge, which the sun is supposed to render explicit from behind, in the absence of us.145 All things stated are artifacts, and artifacts conserve an implicit knowledge. Grasping how it is implied is the truly difficult thing, the impossible thing, because if one desires not to violate the secret, there will always be a remainder left. The circuit that can be established by archly reasoning cannot possibly exhaust its source. What reveals itself in scenes of originality, by abstract conception, is always impure. The universality of geometry resides in its application, and only there. In terms of purity, geometrical universality can never be born.146 In other words, it can never become physics, it can never be considered natural. Mathematics as language, on the other hand, allows us to consider all things natural. This is how Serres can claim that mathematics is the circuit of cunning reason, or archly staged scenes of conception. If originality is actualized in such scenes through theory, and if theory is transport and a theorem is a vehicle, then we can regard mathematical formulas as textual in a sense not unlike semiconductors are for electronics. This is indeed what Serres suggests : Measuring, the direct or indirect field survey, is an operation related to application. In the sense, evidently, in which a metrics, a metretics, relies on an applied science. In the sense that in most cases, measuring constitutes an application in its essence [Wesen der Anwendung]. But most of all in the sense of touching. A unit of measure or leveling rod is being applied to a thing which is to be measured, it is being laid alongside it, it touches, and this as many times as necessary. A direct or indirect measuring is possible or impossible when such application is possible. Inaccessible is, hence, what I cannot touch, where I cannot lay the leveling rod, what I cannot apply my measuring unit to. In such cases, so people 145 Ibid., 223. 146 Ibid., 238–39.

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say, we must go from practice to theory, we must come up with an artfulness and devise a replacement for those sequences that are inaccessible to my body, the pyramid, the sun, the ship at the horizon, the riverbank at the other side. Mathematics were, so considered, the quasi-electric circuit [Stromkreis] of these cunnings.147 6th Iteration (The Real as a Black Spectrum) However, to see in mathematics the quasi-electric circuit of cunning reason would be to underestimate the scope of practical activities. Because the established circuit is a bridge, archly, between tactility and sight. To theorize means to organize sight according to the quasi-tactility of a conceptual body that lives in the scenes that unfold on the stage of abstraction. Measuring puts two things in mutual relation, and a relation presumes a transport—of the levering rod, of the angle, of the things applied when measuring. There is an inexplicable intimacy between knowing and the problem such knowing lays out theoretically. Homothesis constitutes the stage of abstraction, and the homology—the variable equivalence—that can be expressed by the statements of homothesis belongs to the reality between product and producer. What is formulaically set up as equivalent is an invitation to read into what the formula states; it is not a question of addressing and answering. Reading mathematically means to stage a scene that supports trading the secret of the manifest body through scenes that are accessible only to an intellectual sense of sight. The anecdotes in which the origin of a theorem can be told imply a schema that feeds off of and lives on in the dramatizations it supports. The schema, the optical diagram, can be traded only in written form. It keeps what is enveloped by practices through not explicating it. In proceeding like this, the schema demarcates something real, something stable and lasting that belongs to the manifest body one seeks to measure : its arcanum, its secret. And it demarcates this secret by treating it as an invariance that can only be conceived abstractly, by attributing it a measure, as a manner of how to proceed. The stage of abstraction is the theater of measuring—what is being measured, by dramatization, is “the real as a black spectrum.”148 From the point of view of the craftsman who seeks to understand more about the origins implied in his material, the material’s original reality resides in the shadow cast by the sun. It is the shadow that bursts with spectral information : “Knowledge of things resides in the essential darkness of manifest bodies, in their compactness behind its faces.”149 Knowledge about the real is natural not despite but only because it is conceived and born abstractly. It is impure because it was conceived within the happenings of confluent streams of geneses, 147 Ibid., 215; my insertions. 148 Ibid., 232. 149 Ibid.

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whose pool of possibilities cannot possibly be exhausted. It is from the essential darkness of things that can be rendered apparent on the stage of abstraction, in the plays that unfold in the scene of writing, where knowledge of real things lies buried, Serres maintains. From its source springs the infinite history of analytical progress : “The body which can never be exhaustively described from analyzing its bounding surfaces retains in the safe depth of the bounding surfaces’ shadows a dark kernel.”150 Remembering the stage of abstraction that supports real knowledge allows us to see the purity of mathematics instead of an ideality of representations. The purity of mathematics is constituted by nothing more and nothing less than the presumption that there be contained, within manifest bodies, ever more that can be explicated in theory. To see ideality in the geometrical forms, as Plato did, instead of assuming purity in the mathematical theorems, means to dislocate homothetics and homology into the eternity of the one moment that Thales arrested when he wished that time—the epitome of change—might speak about the solidity of the thing he faces. It means that geometry is conceived yet cannot be born. It means to postulate that there be no reality to desiring conquest, that technics be either divine fate (Prometheus, Pandora, etc.) or the stigma of decadence. It holds that revelation be apocalyptic, purifying, in that it clears the spectrums of recognition into the whiteness of virginity. This white spectrality, which supposedly allows us to recognize the identity of things as they ideally are, behind their disturbed appearance in actual existence, constitutes the idea of pure intuition. By insisting on the essential darkness of things, Serres may well sound like a worried prophet; yet it would be the prophecy of a worldly nature and a natural sexuality that is driven by the desire to conquest and master what is never intended as possession : [But] when the moment has come and this postulation of the purity of geometrical form, inherited from the Platonic legacy, will die because nothing can be supported by intuition, when the theatre of representation has closed its doors, then we will see secrets, shadows and implication explode anew in the world beneath abstract forms, and before the eyes of surprised mathematicians—explosions which have been prefiguring long before these deaths. The line, the plane, the volume, their distances and regions will once more be viewed as chaotic, dense, compact […] entities, full of dark and secret angles. The simple and pure forms are not that simple nor that pure; they are no longer things of which we have, in our theoretical insight, exhaustive knowledge, things that are assumedly transparent without any remainder. Instead they constitute an infinitely entangled, objective-theoretical unknown, tremendous virtual noemata like the stones and the objects of the world, like our masonry and our artifacts. Form 150 Ibid.

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bears beneath its form transfinite nuclei of knowledge, with regard to which we must worry that history in its totality will not be sufficient for exhausting them, nuclei of knowledge which are profoundly inaccessible and which pose themselves as problems. Mathematical realism wins back in weight and re-adopts that compactness which had dissolved beneath the Platonic sun. Pure or abstract idealities will cast shadows once more, they are themselves full of shadows, they are turning black again like the pyramid. Mathematics unfolds, despite its maximal abstractness and the genuine purity which is proper to it, within the framework of a lexicon which results, partially, from technology.151 Technology manifests, as implicit ideality, that whose theorems are mobilized in the representations of its variables and coefficients, representations which are dramatized in myth and transported through language. Technology is bursting with implicit knowledge. Every technology is a text that hosts an account given about a scene of originality, of abstract conception. And this, following Serres, is no embrace of mysticism.

151 Ibid., 237.

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V Displacement : The impossible interlude between man and machine Georg Christoph Tholen I Technics as Organ Substitute and Thought Model : Anthropomorphic Mirror Games 180 · A) Projections of the Lived Body : Body and Life without End 182 · B) Fiction and Reality : a Doppelganger Fantasy 185 · c) Turing Machine and Imitation Games : Observation Ad Infinitum 186 — II Neither Message nor Prosthesis : Media as TransMission 190 — III Tillable Technics : Notes to a Leading Query 192 — IV The Empty Locus : About the Topology of the Symbolic 195 — V Who Loses, Wins : Displacement as a Chance 197

Georg Christoph Tholen is Professor of Media Science, with a focus on cultural philosophy, at the University of Basel. He studied philosophy, sociology, and psychology at the universities of Bonn, Cologne, Marburg, and Hanover. Between 1980 and 2000, among other things, he was manager and deputy director of the Scientific Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Kassel, and Lecturer in Cultural Philosophy and Media Theory at, among others, the universities of Berlin, Bremen, Frankfurt am Main, Kassel, Klagenfurt, and Lüneburg. Between 1980 and 2000, he was editor-in-chief of Fragmente: Schriftenreihe für Kultur-, Medien- und Psychoanalyse, and the online journal Zäsuren. Selected publications include : Die Zäsur der Medien: Kulturphilosophische Konturen (Suhrkamp, 2002); SchnittStellen (coedited with Sigrid Schade and Thomas Sieber, Schwabe, 2006); Mnêma: Derrida zum Andenken (coedited with Hans-Joachim Lenger, Edition Moderne Postmoderne, 2007); and Blickregime und Dispositive audiovisueller Medien (coedited with Nadja Elia-Borer and Samuel Sieber, transcript, 2011). Since 2008, he has been the series editor and publisher of MedienAnalysen from transcript.

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“Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange ?” Thomas Pynchon1

“The most complex machines are made […] of mere words.” Jacques Lacan2

The digitization age wants resituating of the question about the locus of technology and media. Going beyond the current categories of the technical—inasmuch as a means and instrument to already predecided ends, or as an extension or amputation of man—and along with the simulatability of the erstwhile media, 1 2

Thomas Pynchon, Die Enden der Parabel (Reinbek/Hamburg : Rowohlt, 1981), 407. Original : Gravity’s Rainbow (London : Cape, 1973). Jacques Lacan, “Das Ich in der Theorie Freuds und in der Technik der Psychoanalyse,” in : Das Seminar, vol. 2 (Olten/Freiburg : Walter, 1980), 64. (In English : “The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, vol. 2, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York : W. W. Norton, 1988).

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a language of digital difference is finding expression that escapes an anthropological and an instrumental definition alike. It outlines, ceaselessly renewed, an open and at once ­unfathomable scope of the symbolic, which oscillates between formature and form withdrawal. Intervention of the technical represents a disposing that is liable of self-disposition, at once groundless and abysmal. I Technics as Organ Substitute and Thought Model : Anthropomorphic Mirror Games In this age of digital media, the familiar paradigm of opposition between man and machine has grown brittle, and the erstwhile-guaranteed essential difference between them moot. The breaking point, however, is being collocated in different ways. In the current discourse about computer culture, the anthropological and instrumental localization is predominant, whence a pre-understanding of technics that in fine allows of nothing more than performance tests between rivals. Yet, identity and difference are unlikely to be apprehended by means of a measuring process that already compares functionally equivalent properties that were formerly considered human privileges, but now claimed to belong in no smaller—if not even far greater—measure to the realm of the electronic calculator. However, the merely technical representation of both perception and thinking in digital machines means nothing more than that an ontically preestablished continuum between man and machine is being implied, and hence the very schema of continuity as well. That principle requires perforce the notion of an ever already-executed, unbroken evolutionary

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(connecting) line between man and technics. This line—model of both progression and regression—while liable of extension (technics as an extension of man), is as such, however, immune from breaks, fissures, or leaps. Imagining it as a bipolar axis, as culture and technico-historical approaches always tend to do, man and machine may be placed on it at will at any proximity or distance. Their relation is of necessity symmetrical, the correlation of their properties or indeed their essential destinies mirror-like. Such circular permutation of gestalt is hardly up to taking the disjointed gestalt permutation of technical constellations seriously. Yet the very metamorphoses of digital technics—i.e. their being dependent upon the signs game that they simulate and substitute—pale the metaphors of the alleged antagonism or communion of the human and the technical. The tertium datur therefore is that man as well as technics are relegated to language—more precisely : to the symbolic order. This in turn—and with it the discourse analysis of technical media—quits the dual paradigm. For the originless and ontologically non-fixable disconnection of the symbolic articulates an in itself ever shiftable topic of differential circumstances that in turn keep each particular relation of both the symbol machines and talking entities to the topic itself indefinite, i.e. suspended. We are going to try to demonstrate that, without that principle of the ungrounded signifier, the modern notion of information itself would fail to mark any notable distinction from the notions preceding it—those of matter or energy. For without this break it would be unable to intervene as an epochal cæsura in the history of epistemes. Yet it is the very intercurrence of informations—i.e. their mediality, which needs to be specified timeand sign-theoretically—that thwarts the subsequent instrumental precept and the anthropomorphic mirror effect in the definitions of the technical. Within the present debate around the culture-inducing significance of the technical media, however, there is obstinate circulation of phantasms relating to attribution or dispossession of essential finalities to which man and machine remain subject. It is not rare that thereby, the metaphors of the natural and living (i.e. man) and of the artificial or, indeed, the dead (i.e. machine) blend into each other, in an imaginary short circuit between hostile accusation and specular harmony. But the very concepts of the more recent epistemology—constructivism, autopoiesis, and self-observation—occasionally perpetrate the inescapably ambiguous double meaning that is inherent to the underlying image of the automatic, to wit the indissoluble simultaneity between self-action as opposed to forcibility. Every schema of system or subject that presupposes self-referral for its existence jumps the gap without which there would be no interfaces between man and machine. Discourses such as that about alienation between subject

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and object,3 or about constructive operational closeness, follow a symmetrical logic of immanent interchangeability if they equate the computer with the brain or metaphorize technics as organ replacement, all the while ignoring the structure of replaceability as such. Musing in retrospect about the admittedly rather crude approaches of the psycho- and social-cybernetics that were afloat during the sixties and seventies, and their propounded isomorphism between man, machine, and society as the universal mode of self-reproducing problem solving,4 we find these days the discoursing style relating to the dealing with machines to have shifted5—seeing the computers’ almost unimaginable storage and processing capacity—to directly thematizing, in the postmodern technics paradigm, the fascinative of imaginary i.e. virtual subject building.6 Such “gestaltist ensnarings” (Lacan) then manifest themselves consistently in an air of shocked outrage, as simulation experiments step out of gene technology and bionics, and push, with the fifth generation of computers, into the allegedly genuinely human field of gestalt and speech recognition. What enunciative rules, then, inform the so-widespread figures of discourse that bemoan man’s lost sense, in the tradition-laden argument between vitalism and mechanism, while in the same breath restoring and repatriating it ? The discourse paradigm regarding information technology’s advent or future is, as we shall demonstrate, always dual and bipolar. Only the values of the respective antipoles vary. As well as the followingtheory models : a) Projections of the Lived Body : Body and Life without End Man’s image of his own body unifies the latter and holds it together. Thus the coherent body, and man along with it, imagine all motorial and intellectual functions, however partial and dissociate they might appear, to be integrable into the corporeal paradigm and, based on it, projectable. Because all parts, however unconnected they 3

4

5 6

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In Marxian gearing, for a time this sounded thus : that the man-machine interfaces be an “overdue and graspably close” socialization of means of production, hampered solely by a “capitalistic set-up of ownership.” As per Frieder Nake, “Schnittstelle Mensch– Maschine,” in Kursbuch 75 (Computerkultur), ed. Karl Markus Michel and Tilman Spengler (Berlin : Kursbuch Verlag/Rotbuch Verlag, 1984), 118. For an overview cf. my article “Ordnungsliebe und Selbsterhaltung : Vermutungen über das Dispositiv von Regelkreisen,” in Sabotage des Schicksals : Für Ulrich Sonnemann, ed. Gottfried Heinemann and Wolf-Dietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (Tübingen/Frankfurt am Main : Konkursbuchverlag C. Gehrke (Sova), 1982), 177–84. Cf. for fundamentals : Hans-Dieter Bahr, Über den Umgang mit Maschinen (Tübingen : Konkursbuchverlag, 1983). “Fascination is absolutely essential for the phenomenon of ego-constitution. Inasmuch as a fascinated one, the incoordinate, incoherent diversity of the erstwhile dismemberment gains its unity. Even reflection is fascination, blockage. This function of the fascination, nay, of horror I shall demonstrate to you under Freud’s pen, in particular regarding the constitution of the ego.” Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, here cited from the German edition : “Das Ich in der Theorie Freuds und in der Technik der Psychoanalyse,” 68.

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might appear, are considered parts of a whole without which the imaginary gestalt of unity would disintegrate. The living body being its own end, anything outside it is nothing but instrumental means as far as it is concerned. As it is the motor and end of any (indeed even technical) development, nothing can disturb or replace it, respectively just replace it. Thus every technical substitution of any organ obeys in organic fashion as it were the creative and comprehensive will of the body. The technical, thereby anthropologically reduced and deprived of a proper categorial register, may, inasmuch as a heteronomous entity, simply be dropped. The hammer replaces the arm : that’s the usual axiomatic outset of bodily projections. A classical example : “This close connection between technics and our corporeal, bodily condition holds also for modern technical achievements. All technical systems and procedures serve, in fine, the purpose of expanding our immediate physical—as well as, in the case of instruments, our sensorial—capacities; computers are indeed said to boost even our intellectual capabilities.”7 Even the technical invention of the wheel, or more precisely the cycloid, which is inconceivable without some symbolic register, explodes the imaginary, i.e. bi-univocal, frame of reference of corporeal functions and technical equipment. The more obstinate is the proliferation of phantasms of reconnecting the technical to the human body, as exemplified by two well-known media philosophers. Marshall McLuhan undoubtedly deserves the merit of disentangling us from superficial attribution of contentual or instrumental aspects to the media, and thus allowing us to grasp the historically unique break that the technical media represent and thanks to which these drive the “form of societal life”; yet he sticks unwaveringly to the anthropologic dilemma. Technical media, while to him exclusively relegated to transmitting their medial nature—i.e. to transmit—are said to be totally and fundamentally “extensions of man,”8 his senses, nay our Gesamtperson (whole person). The latter is elastic to the point of being able to absorb all things technical—from the railway through the aeroplane to telematics—as raw materials. However, the decisive crux of such ontological definitions of technical media as an externalization of part of man’s proprietary functions lies not just in the epistemological aporia that any technical phenomenon as such already include the anthropomorphous nature, or coincide indiscriminately with it, but likewise in the 7 Friedrich Rapp, “Die moderne Technik im Konflikt zwischen Entfaltung und Beschränkung,” in Technikverantwortung  : Güterabwägung, Risikobewertung, Verhaltenskodizes, ed. Hans Lenk and Matthias Maring (Frankfurt am Main/New York : Campus, 1991), 25. 8 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man (London : ARK, 1987), cited from the German version Die magischen Kanäle (Düsseldorf : Econ, 1968), 15, ch. 1 : “Das Medium ist die Botschaft.” McLuhan’s discovery—that only subsequent to the invention of electric speed did a media history become conceivable that was autochthonic instead of just plugging into the “already existent”—indeed remains innovative and topical. It might be dated as anticipatory of Virilio’s dromological genius at bringing legibility to the strictly relative archestruct of war logistics and media-related perception.

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historio-philosophical one that such coincidence mark man’s final limit. Thus the instrumentality of technics becomes, however cryptically, teleologically oriented : “All new media are extensions of man, which narcotize him up to where he is becoming the servo-mechanism of his gadgets.”9 In similar fashion, life and limb are the absolute point of reference in Vilém Flusser’s quest for the immediate future of the “life mood of the pure information society”10—vis-à-vis which we as late-moderners were feeling “unhinged”—based on which the step-laddered evolutionary media epochs are to be assimilated to epochs of mankind : after our start from nature man (first stage) we have by now reached, according to his model, the post-­historical zero-dimensionality of calculating and computing. Yet it is still man that raises, as a lordly subject, his hand (or indeed his fingertips = digitality) against the surrounding living world and thus creates technics and automation in a strictly anthropological context. Apparatuses are human products and therefore subject to human control; imaginations and pretechnical images to have arisen as “man distanced himself from his circumstance.”11 Man thus swings between his concrete-live body and the abstract-technical images opposite him : “Absurdly, we are in an absurd world.”12 Such existential gesture leap-frogs its own aporia of puffing gestics—one of the fundamentals of bodily creation—up to being the primary source of yet the most modern, most lifeless technology : “Informing is a negative gesture directed against the object. The gesture of an object-fighting subject.”13 Body, life, and mind make up the triad of a closed circuit between man and technics.14 The former is never in danger as long as the latter preserves 9

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Norbert Bolz, Die Welt als Chaos und Simulation (Munich : Fink, 1992), 134. Technical media, after being metaphorized into ersatz organs, are thus—by just standing the process on its head—turned into some passe-partout metaphor of all things organic : “In new-media circumstances, man turns from being a user of tools and apparatus into a factor within the media conglomerate. He enters organic constructs.” (ibid.) Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (Minneapolis : Minnesota University Press, 2011). Here cited from the German original : Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (Göttingen : European Photography, 1990), 8. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 41. Vilém Flusser and Mark Poster, Does Writing Have a Future ? (Minneapolis : Minnesota University Press, 2011). Here cited from the German original : Schrift : Hat Schreiben Zukunft ? 3rd ed. (Göttingen : European Photography, 1990), 15. That so eloquently silent living, the enigmatic evidence of which seems to be escaping from the philosophy of the mind to the sociology of the living world, regrettably shows up, together with its inevitable antipole (the dead), even in so demanding a study as that by Karl Leidlmair, Künstliche Intelligenz und Heidegger : Über den Zwiespalt von Natur und Geist (München : Fink, 1991). Thus Leidlmair does replace the living mind by mechanical apparatus, and the symbol-processing machines to him are the petrified form of the being-in-the-world : “Thus, the machine becomes prisoner of stereotypically compulsive repetition, having long ago lost that vitality and liveliness which originally used to be part of the make-up of an open-minded existence [existence open to the world]” (ibid., 207). But the affirmation that Heidegger be a far way from “recognizing an existence-independent reality” (ibid., 228) (whereas that was indeed one of Heidegger’s priorities, in order for him to think the ontic-ontological difference, against the metaphysics of being) is as questionable as the one that Heidegger left unattended : “the area of the ontic, real, and by man never quite exhaustible experience” (ibid., 230).

DOMESTICATING SYMBOLS — Metalithikum II

and safeguards his most intimate essence. If technics looks like departing or estranging itself from its underlying subject, it is met by apocalyptic discourse and often by Manichaean morals. Dressing technical media up as prosthetic orders of some self or we, i.e. as primary patrimony of man itself, doubles the anthropomorphic narcissism even at the point where its—wished-for or bemoaned—exit is being conjured.15 The unintended fetishism of the anthropological paradigm lies in the fiction that there be a proprietary self, dissociable from the material appearance of the technical, i.e. a deceitless and irreplaceable proprium on behalf of which any false pretence must needs dissolve. Such an immaculate ideal of pure transparency is the stuff of some anthropomorphic narcissism pining for confirmation of its self through either intuitive perspection or speculative canceling-out of the troublesome semblance. Hereby the self-referential thought figure cannot help being sliced up between present claim and anticipated future. The idea being that the live part of technics be brought to strip off its dead sleeve as it were, so as to remerge (again)—alienation once overcome—with itself as the original given. b) Fiction and Reality : a Doppelganger Fantasy Another no less dual concept, addressing the part of IT that is irritating to the discourse about man, would shunt it back to the familiar twin notions of reality and fiction (or first and second nature). Since Baudrillard’s Agony of the Real this approach unfailingly ends up in infinite regress : the hyper-real be obliterating simple reality, the erstwhile present (proletariat, subject, or history) be now absent, the erstwhile, or absolutely absent now ominously present. What, however—or so goes the first immanent objection—is then the reality of that hyper-reality to which clearly the capability of really and effectively dissolving the erstwhile reality must be granted ? “Yet we are rather confused,”16 admits e.g. Florian Rötzer, in Baudrillard’s footsteps, were, according to him, fiction and reality to “amalgamate,” since the computer “permeates” everyday life, the world be boiling down to “second nature” on the screen, and man to an information-process15 The sensus communis—i.e. that which interrupts and opens up the communication of a shared (common), communicating “we”—is neither preordained gestalt nor secure store, but it embodies the question about the problematic status of man, which status goes hand in hand with the question about the potential of technical communication technologies. “So long as we pretend that the new communication technologies are exclusively about the way we relate to things that are potentially risky or rewarding, we ignore that the most questionable aspect is the �we� in whose name we communicate in this fashion about communication.” Hans-Joachim Lenger, Konzeptthesen zur INTERFACE II (Hamburg : 1991, unpublished ms.). On the paradoxical trail of communication cf. also : Jean-Luc Nancy, Die undarstellbare Gemeinschaft (Stuttgart : Schwarz, 1988). 16 Florian Rötzer, “Einleitendes,” in Strategien des Scheins : Kunst—Computer—Medien, ed. Florian Rötzer and Peter Weibel (Munich : Boer, 1991), 11.

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ing system : “Technologies and media blot out the far-away, reveal the imaginary, and make the absent present.”17 The discourse pattern of these popular and intrinsically ambiguous statements follows the same imaginary register that already informed the concept of the idea within philosophy of consciousness : making the intelligible and the sensible coincide. However, the argument that presupposes adequacy between the two poles is circular. Verification may therefore not be reached without canceling out the contra-natural dissimilarity of semblance. The “age of simulation’s” rule of discourse is : oscillation between valuations of the implosion of fiction and/or reality where only the prefix is interchangeable. According to culture critics, electronic media derealize reality, growing therefore continuously more unreal. Designers in turn rejoice over the user interface, thanks to which simulation technologies at last be successful in establishing coincidence of the imaginary and the real : to them, the abovementioned idealistic concept program has been fulfilled. Within the imaginary mode of such attribution, penchants and attitudes merely switch their long-cherished gestalts. Their own exchangeability and detachability, i.e. the neither real nor imaginary condition of their exchange itself, drowns in a continuous (life) stream which per definitionem carries the world and its representation away with it. Nothing is impossible anymore between possibility and reality as they leapfrog each other : “Virtual reality is about to surpass and supplant reality’s reality.”18 The illusory of such affirmative critique is that of a shadowless presence in which it aspires ultimately to dissolve and find rest. c) Turing Machine and Imitation Games : Observation Ad Infinitum Operational model thinking believes itself free of speculative paradigmatic projection. Taking the self-description of the universal Turing machine, with its famous initial question whether machines are able to think like humans, as a starting point, operationalism would take the anthropological offense perpetrated by calculating machines seriously and sharpen it. However, is a model such as that of an automaton or artificial intelligence not by itself as self-contained as the all-comprehensive gestalt that defines the image of the body ?19 The 17 Ibid., 13. 18 Holger van den Boom, “Design und künstliche Intelligenz,” in Elektronische Medien und künstlerische Kreativität : INTERFACE 1, ed. Klaus-Peter Dencker (Hamburg : Hans-Bredow-Institute, 1992), 54. 19 The automaton’s eerie visions and mimetic versions that accompany literary history, from romantic tales through contemporary science fiction, reproduce the circular (world-)space of illusory reflections that come in handy—in view of emancipated body parts—for the endless (and delectable) dressing up of the threat to the imaginary self. On the irritational phantasmata in automata literature and theory, cf., e.g., Bernhard Dotzler, “Die Revolution der Denkart und das Denken der Maschinen : Kant und Turing,” in Diskursanalysen 1 (Medien), ed. Friedrich A. Kittler, Manfred Schneider, and Samuel Weber (Opladen : Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987), 150–63.

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breaking-down of cognitive functions into operational, i.e. imitable and decidable, acts does no more than depict something already effected : the cognitive function as such. Can a machine think ? The Turing machine, postulated to be capable of imitating any discrete-state machine whatsoever,20 explodes the circularity of the question—taken up not without irony by Alan M. Turing himself—as to whether and how machines and humans think; but only provided, however, that the algorithmic functional rules of the Turing machine are understood as the symbolic texture of a sign game whose aleatoric combinatorics may be halted, and transferred into decidable relations, i.e. into the constancy of describable switching states. Modeltheoretical reading however remains dependent upon the infinite behavioristic comparison coercion of specific power potentials or, inversely, to metaphysical determinations of conscience, which, as remnants of humanhood, elude machines. Put differently, only the time topicality of the sign-chaining effected by the paper tape—congenially conceived by Turing21—which is expressed through no more than the two alphabetically arbitrary symbols 0 and 1—or more precisely through their alternate presence or absence—is capable, as a meaning-deferring game of attribution, of frustrating any possible essential determination of machine and man. The chasm between time and sign is the unconditional empty field that determines each selective, i.e. decidable and locatable, locus of technical implementations of Turing machines.22 Yet, this interjection of time of the symbolic, deferring any operational closure and implicitly emphasized in the early drafts of probability and information theory,23 is being ignored in the more recent model-theoretical controversies around the imitation game, which Turing quite intentionally defined operationally. 20 Cf. Alan M. Turing, “Rechenmaschine und Intelligenz,” in Intelligence Service : Schriften, ed. Bernhard Dotzler and Friedrich A. Kittler (Berlin : Brinkmann und Bose, 1987), 149–82 (“Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, New Series 59, no. 236 (Oct 1950) : 433–60). 21 “The sign, respectively its absence, determine whether Turing machines retain or delete the sign, or, inversely, retain the space sign or replace it by the sign. Whereupon the program loop jumps back to read mode and so forth, ad infinitum.” Friedrich A. Kittler, “Die künstliche Intelligenz des Weltkriegs : Alan M. Turing,” in Arsenale der Seele : Literatur- und Medienanalyse seit 1870, ed. Friedrich A. Kittler and Georg Christoph Tholen (Munich : Fink, 1989), 195. 22 Cf. Alan M. Turing, “Intelligente Maschinen,” in Intelligence Service, 99. And, for solving the problem of proceeding, regardless of or after Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, to the machinization of decidable calculations, see his “The State of Art” (ibid., 183– 208). Likewise, and with reference to Lacan’s theory of the Symbolic, cf. Jens Schreiber, “Stop Making Sense,” in Computer als Medium, ed. Norbert Bolz, Friedrich Kittler, and Georg Christoph Tholen (München : Fink, 1994), 91–110. 23 E.g. when one, quantum-mechanically informed, takes into account the interferences of the time-related delay of electric circuits and neuronal networks. In this context cf. : John von Neumann, “Wahrscheinlichkeitslogik und der Aufbau zuverlässiger Organismen aus unzuverlässigen Bestandteilen,” in Studien zur Theorie der Automation, ed. Claude E. Shannon and John McCarthy (Munich : Rogner & Bernhard, 1974), 58. W. Ross Ashby, John McCarthy, and Claude Elwood Shannon, Automata Studies (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1956).

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The assumption of Turing’s test setup is that a machine be deemed capable of thinking if it answers a prepared sample of questions with a degree of pertinence sufficient for deceiving a human questioner (who evidently is ignorant about the real nature of his interlocutor).24 It gave rise to innumerable rejections as well as supportive reactions, either of which, however, remain hostage to the infinite regress of ontic determinations : the fact that a machine—as per some of the unevenly amusing examples of the imitation game—be no liker of strawberries and whipped cream, nor an enamourer, nor indeed an intuitive, or an understander of the categorical imperative, constitutes a foregone conclusion to a poser that disguises the symbolic, i.e. unstable, difference between man and machine. It is the way of dealing with the difference that distinguishes operational consistency from symbolic differentiality. Cognitive science, constructivism, and theories of self-observation are the modeling approaches that exemplify in particular how tying the art of differentiations back to some predetermined self-referentiality conjures away the difference that opens up references in the first place.25 According to constructivism, based upon metaphorics of biology, brains are relentlessly producing worlds in the process of viable paths. Thus, viability is the epistemological axiom, which implies that cognition keeps being read in the sense of classical equidistance between thinking and being, as a representation of an outside world,26 with the variance however that it be defined as a nonlinear, emergent—i.e. spontaneously concurring—process of situational adjustment to the ever changing environment or fellow man. This context-sensitive achievement of a connexionism that unceasingly recreates itself is, inasmuch as a pragmatically effected conscious act, natural, i.e. evolutionarily guaranteed and legitimated. Hence nothing unforeseen may happen to it, for through the subject the surroundings are already communicating themselves. Equating information with intelligence seems both ontogenetically and action-theoretically equally deducible, language and artificialities do not intervene, they do not branch toward but—in corporeal proximity— away from the acting subject. 24 For more detail, cf. : Oswald Wiener, “Turings Test : Vom dialektischen zum binären Denken,” in Kursbuch 75, ed. K. M. Michel (Berlin : Rotbuch Verlag, 1984), 12–13, as well as : Oswald Wiener, Probleme der künstlichen Intelligenz (Berlin : Merve, 1990), and completed by a comprehensive synopsis regarding artificial intelligence and its critics (H. L. Dreyfus, J. Searle, T. Winograd). Leidlmair, Künstliche Intelligenz und Heidegger. 25 “Theories of self-observation” refer explicitly to second-order cybernetics, so termed due to its dissociation from the restrictively applied formal logic in former cybernetics concepts. Cf. Ranulph Glanville, Objekte (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1988). Also the interesting and informative study : Dirk Bæcker and Ars Electronica, “Die Kunst der Unterscheidungen,” in Im Netz der Systeme (Berlin : Merve Verlag, 1990), 7–39. 26 Cf., in critical acknowledgment  : Francisco J. Varela, Kognitionswissenschaft, Kognitionstechnik : Eine Skizze aktueller Perspektiven (Frankfurt/M. : Suhrkamp, 1990), 89.

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The “differentiation-theoretical radicalized constructivism” on the other hand shifts the iterative process of observable and observing actions within their uninterrogated scope. The world, or so the basic tenet goes, is one of observers, and every observation be a differentiation that creates both, the observer and the observed. This differentiation, however, posed by Gregory Bateson and George Spencer Brown as already intentional acts, and utilized by an observer for his observing, be—according to difference-theoretical self-criticism—the “blind spot of his observation. He is unable in the first place to see the differentiation that would let him see anything at all.”27 The sheer infinity of this, ocularly fixed, specifying of the differentiation lies simply in that the differentiation is already predetermined, i.e. its self-referential content replicates—without interspace—continuously from differentiation to differentiation (from observation to observation). It is, being an identified difference, all at once itself and its alter ego, seeing that the self and the other are undissociated by any difference but, as reflexive poles of mutual contemplation, already positioned. They don’t get lost.28 Their having jumped the difference constitutes their blind spot, the cause of operational consistency. Idem for the more recent attempt at a strictly empirically oriented introspection of internal models from Oswald Wiener,29 on the strength of which he would prove that man’s machinelike intelligence may be collocated, as a “Turing machine of Turing machines,” within the deliberate and rule-driven “folding of sign chains” :30 the dilemmatic facet of his model’s construct—e.g. when defining creativity—lies in the fact that an ever pre-inferred consciousness is being privileged as a pre-determined frame of reference of intentionality, and that in the process non-intentional, unconscious thinking simply gets defined away (e.g. in the familiar conscience-psychologically foreshortened statement that “dream activity” be “conscious”), or, what amounts to the same, is equated with some merely latent, “directional” consciousness. For Wiener, consciousness is always preexistent “running environment” : “I believe, and have indicated several reasons for it, that there is no constructing of new models in the subconscious. Of course, this does not mean that extant models be exclusively capable of running ‘consciously,’ but it does mean that those famous insights 27 Baecker, “Die Kunst der Unterscheidungen,” 8. 28 In this respect neither—as Baecker in system-theoretical reading surmises—The Differend : Phrases in Dispute by Lyotard nor Derrida’s Differance are “precisely this distinction that never manages to grasp itself, because it gets—on the detour via that which does mark itself—lost in tautology, as it does, in paradoxy, on the detour via what it marks off” (Baecker, “Die Kunst der Unterscheidung,” 17). The paradoxical of the difference dismisses the presence-metaphysically presupposed position of bipolar terms such as identity and difference, system and environment. Its topic is locusless, not a space-like fixed limit. 29 Wiener, Probleme der künstlichen Intelligenz, 14f. 30 That the being of signs may not be “assumed to be the indentical one being” is stressed in an early and informative text by Max Bense, “Information und Entropie,” in Aesthetica : Einführung in die neue Ästhetik (Baden-Baden : Agis, 1965), 156.

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abruptly popping up from nowhere are not the results of an unconscious construction but outgrowths of an unconsciously arrived-at constellation of extant models : the structures preexisted.”31 Discourses, in so far as they stick to the notion of functional mappings, i.e. unambiguous equivalence of objects and images, anthropomorphize technics as well as man. Their metaphorics sprouts, as Heinz von Foerster ironically remarked, “astonishing blooms” which he calls “anthropomorphia inversa,” and “homuncula mysteriosa.”32 They are complementary. The following sections propose to outline how beyond dually standardized models the world of the symbolic is indeed intertwined with that of the technical. They look at the swap of loci that the discourses presented so far about man and machine claimed to have taken up. II Neither Message nor Prosthesis : Media as Trans-Mission Immateriality of information is neither a deplorable manipulation of innocent things nor some postmodern fraud scheme dressed up as muddlement. Its non-intuitiveness transcends the scientific horizon of matter and energy, and indeed marks a far-reaching discursive difference behind which, akin to the thermodynamic one, there is no getting back. As, e.g., in physics since Maxwell—but no later than since the advent of quantum mechanics, nuclear theory, and uncertainty relation—the destruction of objective substance (an electron is no simple material object) graduates to becoming the new cogitative space, the categoriality of the nonbeing mutates, which now joins the being and now assigns a place to it.33 The nonbeing or the void spot, scene of the place swap itself, is the symbolic field of language and mathematics which defies any phenomenology of the visible.34 31 Wiener, Probleme der künstlichen Intelligenz, 131. 32 Heinz von Foerster, “Wahrnehmung,” in Philosophien der neuen Technologie, ed. Ars Electronica (Berlin : Merve, 1989), 33. 33 On the dissociation of theoretical communication technology from physics inasmuch as “sole provider of models” and war-induced (external) control of information and telecommunication technologies, cf. the informative, scientific-sociological study, Friedrich-Wilhelm Hagemeyer, Die Entstehung von Informationskonzepten in der Nachrichtentechnik : Eine Fallstudie zur Theoriebildung in der Technik in Industrie- und Kriegsforschung (PhD diss., FU Berlin, Department of Philosphy and Social Studies, 1979) [The Origin of Information Concepts in Telecommunication Technology: A Case Study about Formation of Technological Theories in Industrial and War Research]; cf. further, in exact reconstruction of the path of Turing’s thought—which may not be properly appreciated without his war-decisive contribution to decision-logic machines—the guiding biography by Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing : Enigma (Berlin : Kammerer & Unverzagt, 1989), esp. 281–361. In English : Alan Turing : The Enigma (London : Burnett, 1983). 34 With reference to Merleau-Ponty, Lacan specifies hereto that the articulation respectively the erosion (hollowing-out ?) of the significant—which as such is unreflectible and shapeless—revert to their very phenomena. Cf. Jacques Lacan and Norbert Haas, “Maurice Merleau-Ponti,” in Schriften 3 (Olten [et al.] : Walter, 1980), 245–46. (Ecrits : The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink [New York : W. W. Norton & Co., 2006]); further, among others, Ulrich A. Müller and Georg Christoph Tholen, “Editorial : Zwischen Leib und Seele,” in Schnittstelle Körper – Versuche über Psyche und Soma (Fragmente 31) (Kassel : Wissenschaftliches Zentrum II, 1989), 5–16.

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If now the nonsignificant substitutability—proof of the distance from signs to things, and among themselves—becomes apparent and takes technical shape in modern symbol machines, then the state of that which is not but ek-sists changes. Under computer conditions—or so say discourse-analytical findings—that which is not becomes technically positivizable and “the ‘no’ a machine state.”35 Immateriality of information is language-turned technics and technics-turned language—taken in its dimension of “appetitionless combinatorics.”36 There is no physical analogy to this complex sign situation. The crypto-analytic and war-innovative function of such combinatorics, namely to substitute in a message data and instructions by periodic polyalphabetic systems and then to be able, thanks to Turing’s machinable switching algebra, to automate it in digital computers with internal memory,37 is technique- and discourse-creative. By mathematically defining the machine as universally discrete the symbolic becomes the model for the nondiscursive, in discursive as well as in nondiscursive formations. The symbolic, as such untranslatable, while translating itself is hereby however not completely transferred into the technical. It differentiates itself in relation to itself, i.e. it “specifies” itself in an operative model that remains symbolic-referential. The relation of the place-value-like arrangement of the symbolic denies itself to both itself and any definite model of its own function. This way only it becomes legible as the primary origin which enables the origin of communication technology to be determined, i.e. the radical parenthesization of the question about the meaning of communications. The epochal epoché that lies in Claude E. Shannon’s definition of the message as the “distinction of the syntactic minimum yes/no from the white sound in the channels” is the message of the Signifier which precisely therein withholds itself.38 It is left to its differential articulation to state that technical transmission is passed on as and in channels : “Information technology and 35 Friedrich A. Kittler, “Fiktion und Simulation,” in Ars Electronica, Philosophien der neuen Technologie, 64. Cf. ibid. on simulation as an effect of technical implementation of exchangeable significants thanks to which the symbolic may only—as syntax of commands and algorithms—process within the real, “while affirmation only approves that which is, and negation only disproves that which is not, simulation means approving what is not, and dissimulation disproving what is … For reaching today’s technical level, negation just had to emigrate : from the mouths and papers of people to the electronic gates of Boolean algebra.” 36 Jens Schreiber, “Word-Engineering. Informationstechnologie und Dichtung,” in Das schnelle Altern der neuesten Literatur, ed. Jochen Hörisch and Hubert Winkels (Düsseldorf : Claassen, 1985), 303. 37 Cf. Hodges, Alan Turing, part 1, chap. 4, “Relais-Rennen” (The Relay Race), 187–280. 38 Schreiber, “Word-Engineering,” 289. The discourse analysis of technical media and the corresponding definition of information are essentially dependent on the difference between the physical-analogous and the conjectural-symbolic : “Only as system elements are given the chance of being either here or there, either present or absent, either open or closed, the system generates information. Thence combinatorics originated on the basis of cubes […] and computer technology on the basis of endlessly repeated gates.” Friedrich A. Kittler, “Signal – Rausch – Abstand,” in Materialität der Kommunikation, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt/M. : Suhrkamp, 1988), 344.

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theory phases out anything interpretable […] and phases in the transmission space of the lost letters that nobody hid. Communication, information, message, news tell nothing about what is being transmitted, but just that something is being transmitted.”39 This epochal break of the formless40 information technology jibs at technic-immanent description in the sense of some sort of self-evident genesis of the instrumentally defined situation that consists in the universal discrete machine’s ability to simulate in this very function all storage and transmission media that precede it, and thus to dissociate itself from them. The operative description of the behavior of the programmable machine—the transposing of unspecified communications connections into mathematic algorithms or semiconductor technology—is, taken by itself, historically correctly reckoned but as yet hardly historically reflected. However, the same situation behaves in a totally different fashion decisively, if the focus is placed upon the conditions of the possibility of trans-­mission and meaning-shifting substitutability, in so far as they impose and consolidate themselves with the digital technics. Because hereby the understanding of technics and its historical precedence transforms radically. The anthropological or instrumental pre-understanding concealed another that—stealthily—precedes it : only with the advent of disappearance, which scans the machine world as well as that of the symbolic, technics as the possibility of unconditional conjuring-up of technics become legible. And only hereby discourse analysis and its departure from the myth of the human being become able to indicate that the literature subject is being “relieved” by that of the machine. But even such a statement, quite like the one asserting that the symbolic be identical with computer code, would collapse, if the relegation of the symbolic—i.e. the dissociable rendezvous with the real as such—were to be linearized into the sequent paradigm of technic stages capable of mutually canceling themselves out. The advent of different media rests on the medium of difference that intervenes : cleavage of the technical which displaces the discourses of man and machine. III Tillable Technics : Notes to a Leading Query Technical media are neither prostheses nor pro-legs of man.41 Nor are they mere things, appliances, or apparatus. But what is it that deter39 Schreiber, “Word-Engineering,”290. 40 Thus Manfred Fassler’s fine and accurate term in his remarkable study of the aporias inherent in sociological theory formation, in view of the discourse formation of information technology that is not apprehensible in terms of the Fabrikgesellschaft (i.e. factorial society) : “Gestaltlose Technologien ?,” in Inszenierungen von Informationen : Motive elektronischer Ordnung, Parabel, Schriften des Ev. Studienwerks Villigst, vol. 15 (Giessen : Focus, 1992), 12–52 [Shapeless Technologies? Staging of Information: Motives of Electronic Order]. 41 Friedrich A. Kittler, “Synergie von Mensch und Maschine : Ein Gespräch mit Florian Rötzer,” in Kunstforum, vol. 98 (Ästhetik des Immateriellen ? Das Verhältnis von Kunst und neuer Technologie, part 2) (Cologne : Kunstforum intern., 1989), 115. [Synergy of Man and Machine: A Talk with Florian Rötzer. Aesthetics of the Immaterial? The Relationship between Art and New Technology]

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mines the faculty for treating the nature or evolvement of the technical as a transhuman and immemorial event that steps out of the scope of subject and object, of means and end ?42 The Heideggerian technics question is motivated by the situating of modern technics as a fostering unconcealment not itself grounded in “human action”43, as it is only just challenging it. In connection with his question What Is a Thing ?44 a non-localizable topic may be circumscribed that helps in appreciating technical artifacts as artifacts. A thing—or so Heidegger opens his quest—is ever an issue, something that depends upon how other issues stand in regard to it. That which grounds the thing while being un-thing-like itself, cannot but be an indeterminate. This in turn—or so Heidegger demonstrates on the strength of the increasingly hollow period in the history of physics from Galilei through Newton to Heisenberg—is historically variable. In other words : the conditional is unconditionally variable. With Kant, that ever questionable distance between the thing and its determinants radicalizes and sublimates. It mutates to the non-experienceable X, i.e. “a thing that does not exist.”45 Anticipating the theory of the Signifier,46 Heidegger deciphers this chorisis of the unconditioned, which is functioning only as an abyssal withdrawal of itself, as being the mathematical. This however is not—as is generally, and specifically in the ideology-critical reading of Kant (e.g. in Dialectic of Enlightenment) presumed—the numerical. Rather the other way round. The mathematical is not only in an extended sense determined as the teachable and learnable as such, but also as the manner of how and the mode of what is being grasped of things, in what they are taken for. The mathematical is thus the forever newly added, the supervening. It is a “draught of the thingness overleaping the things, as it 42 “For a thinking that pursues the Appropriation can still only surmise it, and yet can experience it even now in the nature of modern technology, which we call by the still strange-sounding name of Framing (Ge-Stell). Because Framing challenges man, that is, provokes him to order and set up all that is present being as technical inventory, Framing persists after the manner of Appropriation, specifically by simultaneously obstructing Appropriation, in that all ordering finds itself channeled into calculative thinking and therefore speaks the language of Framing. Speaking is challenged to correspond in every respect to Framing in which all present beings can be commandeered. Within Framing, speaking turns into information.” Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York : Harper & Row, 1982), 132–33. For the German original, cf. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen : Günther Neske, 1959), 263. 43 Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze, 6th ed. (Pfullingen : Günther Neske, 1990), 22. In English: The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York : Harper & Row, 1977). 44 Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding : Zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsätzen, 3rd ed. (Tübingen : M. Niemeyer, 1987). In English : What Is a Thing ? trans. W. B. Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago : H. Regnery Co., 1968). 45 Ibid., 69. 46 On the relationship between psychoanalysis and mathematics cf. the seminal study by Hans-Joachim Metzger, “Play it again, Sam !,” in Der Wunderblock : Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse [Berlin] 4 (1980) : 3–34.

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were—the draught that only opens up the expanse in which the things, i.e. the facts, come into view.”47 The basic premise of thinking therefore is the mathematical as the leap setting itself up in every draft as that which dares a draft : “The draft is axiomatic.”48 Every ground rule, i.e. every axiom, owes itself to the ground-idea or, respectively, the ground-plan of the setting action, which—if it is to be at all possible—has nothing lying before it. Such differential axiomatics alone is capable of indicating that, and how, technicized axiomatics replaces the structure of erstwhile technical thingdeterminations that the universal Turing machine irrevocably shifts. Something similar applies to the determination of the stratagem, i.e. the war-innovative and existence-safeguarding functions of technics :49 the warlike and its by-products (consumption and services) may only be understood as mutually interfering strategies. In this case, this means : the civilian effects point—for doing well—to a primal origin that does not go into the warfaring conditions. Only thus the effects of power and their antagonistic interceptions are possible.50 Unlike in What Is a Thing ?, in The Question Concerning Technics— for all the likeness of the problem—the mathematical, respectively the symbolic-chiastic, takes second stage. Regardless of all Heidegger’s precision en route toward language, defining modern technics as an endangering and dangerous aptitude for unconcealment that be, by its very information-guiding and existence-safeguarding nature, the “historically prior” in respect of the preceding “power machines,” the schema of naturalness versus artificialness dominates in his reflection of the information and nuclear age. For it is not “nature” that “reports and remains tillable as a system of informations.”51 Rather, it is the epochal caesura of the weapons-technological escalations of two world wars that is determinant, from the transmission and storage media such as radio and film to the explosion-wave-calculating vonNeumann machines and encryption-analytical decoding machines. 47 Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding, 71. 48 Ibid., 71. 49 Avital Ronell deciphers how and why Heidegger, even while giving his definition of technology, occults the World War II military-technological decisions that irritated and secretly informed his thinking. She does so by interpreting with media-analytical precision the Heideggerian Gewissensruf as “German desaster” in “The Difference of Man,” Diacritics 19, nos. 3/4 (“Heidegger : Art and Politics”) (1990) : 63–75. She expands in her article “Eurozeit” [Eurotime], in Zeit-Zeichen, Aufschübe und Interferenzen zwischen Echtzeit und Endzeit, ed. by Georg Christoph Tholen and Michael O. Scholl (Weinheim : VCH Acta Humaniora, 1990), 201–20. [Time Signals, Reprieves, and Interferences between Real Time and End Time] 50 Cf., seminal Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Hermann Kocyba (Frankfurt/M. : Suhrkamp, 1987), 99–130; (esp. the chapter “Die Strategien oder das Nicht-Geschichtete : Das Denken des Aussen (Macht).” “Strategies or the Non-Stratified : The Thought of the Outside (Power),” Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 51 Ibid., 26.

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Yet, Heidegger generalizes it war-neutrally to some “time-marking reporting of survival resources” in which, according to him, the metaphysics of technics be obliviously fulfilling itself und thus—while abandoning the “natural” language—misjudges the untillable. Still, Heidegger’s question about the fissure of the technical in man must be given credit for the decisive insight that, along with modern technics, man essentially “ek-sists” within the realm of “reported advice, wherefore he is never capable of meeting exclusively himself.”52 It marks the Kantian X—the unconditioned—which, as a structural topic, hosts what needs to be thought. IV The Empty Locus : About the Topology of the Symbolic It is finally thanks to the dual paradigm of reality and fiction that the outlined anthropologic discourses cannot but close in the technical in the circular-logical metaphorics of dedication or dispossession. This paradigm itself just replicates thoughtlessly—as we are now pointedly going to show—that very position in classical philosophy that in contemporary discourse, in view of computer culture, after all often passes as outdated and overcome. While the universal claim of metaphysics did aim at grasping the real in its verity—i.e. as being at one with itself—as opposed to the dualizing semblance of the imaginary (through which the imaginary indeed got constituted as the duplicating image of the real), contemporary anthropologic discourse relies simply on the duplicating effects of the imaginary itself, true to the classical fiction of coincidence between reality and fiction, the sensory and the intelligible. The conception, complementary in itself albeit antipolar, that technics were up to either expanding man or dissolving him, lets reality and fiction merge even before claiming or conjuring such merging as being media-induced. Thus both the thesis of universal implosion (Baudrillard) and the assumption of infinite extensions of man (McLuhan, Flusser) rest on a place-value system with two—only temporarily separated—poles. For the precept of their substantial similarity lets them tendentially converge into one position : “Because the real, of itself, is not separable from a certain ideal of uniformization or totalization : the real strives towards unifying, it is one in its ‘truth’. The moment we see two in ‘one’, as soon as we dualize, the imaginary shows up.”53 52 Ibid., 31. 53 Gilles Deleuze, “Woran erkennt man den Strukturalismus ?,” in Geschichte der Philosophie VIII (Das XX. Jahrhundert), ed. and trans. François Châtelet (Frankfurt/M., Berlin, Vienna : Ullstein, 1975), 272. In French : Histoire de la philosophie, idées, doctrines. 8 : Le XXe siècle, ed. François Châtelet et al. (Paris : Hachette, 1972). (In English: Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism ?,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1972 (Los Angeles : Semiotext(e), 2004), 197–219.

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Thus dualization is the name of the dispositive of the mirror game that must lose itself in projectional and identificational differentiations. Due to the offer of strict equivalence these identifications turn into their own doublets. Imaginary assimilation means the merging of two loci into one. Tertium non datur. But the very examples of the embodied projections of the technical (e.g. brains = computer) prove that the shiftable figures that uniforming imagination is moving from the essential to the transposed, in turn rest on locusless combinatorics of shift that itself may neither be imaginary nor real. Because circulation of positions and transpositions presupposes, as a third momentum, the place-value game of the symbolic. Yet this is not another locus beside the real and the imaginary, since it is not, as a locus, perdurable. Thus the third moment—the combinatorics of the symbolic—does not figure as form or content, not as a functional model or intelligible being. It originates only from the strictly relational positions that it itself issues. The symbolic placement, spatially unlocalizable, is to be called topologic, i.e. its abode is an “undimensioned, pre-extensive room, pure spatium,”54 neither void nor sated. Inasmuch as a non-occupiable, i.e. purely differentially determinable order, the symbolic is not in contradiction with the occupancies and meanings the circulations and validations of which it originates. The pure logic of relations between content-wise non-qualified elements is not only pointing (referring ?) to the findings of linguistics (phonemes) or ethnology (parantemes) but likewise to the mathematical axiomatics of differential calculus, as Deleuze points out : “Rather, the mathematical origin of structuralism is to be found on the side of differential calculus, and particularly in its interpretation by Weierstrass and Russell […] which frees differential calculus for good of any reference to the infinitely small and integrates it in a pure logic of relations.”55 The symbolic order is referenceless. And as a field bereft of its own origin that allocates changing loci, it is never present with itself. Because in order to be able to shift in respect to itself, it is the only locus the voidness of which must be integrally preserved. The paradoxy of the empty field means, as Deleuze points out, that the 54 Ibid., 274. 55 Ibid., 278. Sybille Krämer’s excellent study about the dissociation of differential symbolism from whatever referential substantiation provides an example of such mathematico-historical reconstruction. Not only that : the author proves how, in the history of mathematics, the long-lived illusion of the referential misunderstanding of mathematical symbolics—or, more to the point, the establishment of its consistency through an ontological, respectively denotative referentiality to a pre-set order of extant objectness—contributed to the misunderstanding of Leibniz’s idea of operative use of mathematical symbols, by “calculicizing” infinitesimal calculus. Whereas it is precisely in this un-referentiality and operationality that resides the universiality of infinitesimal calculus as the precept and technical efficiency of its iteratability. In this context cf. Sybille Krämer, “Zur Begründung des Infinitesimalkalküls durch Leibniz,” Philosophia naturalis 28, no. 2 (1991) : 117–46.

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symbolic as object X presupposes self-withdrawal. This interdicted void of the structural shift is not a contentual, given ens of the negative, but (and here discourse analysis and metapsychology intersect) the positive ens of the problematic. Rightly Deleuze, along with Foucault, recalls to mind that this void must not be anthropologically misinterpreted as the end of man, but must be topologically collocated.56 In the same sense, every presence of technical configurations points to an a-present techné, remaining uncatchable and precursory, and representing the only starting point from which to collect evidence from the problematical field of differential technic circumstances. How else would it otherwise be at all possible to speak of a topology of technical might, i.e of the censoring possibility of choosing and excluding possibilities ? The link between the machine world and the symbolic world is the locus that is missing in its own locus : the swapping of places—“detached from anything real.”57 V Who Loses, Wins : Displacement as a Chance What is our gain when we lose ? The meaning of this paradoxicalsounding question is as multilayered as its possible answer. What are we standing to gain if we lose sight of the going insinuation that in the computertechnology age man was going to lose himself or even disappear altogether ? Kissing good-bye to such imaginary models of the human being and his technics might at least get us closer to a symbolical self-loss opening up the technics question as one about an untenable difference between man and machine. The absence of being—binding force between talking man and symbolic machine—orphans the wont places on which the sweet home of man and technics pretendedly was going to install itself. The ontical continuum that faked the unbroken genealogy of ownness turned out to be the stock-preserving effect of some credulous placing that assimilated what was unfamiliar and historically new of the technical artifacts, to the bodily image world of man in expansion. The intervention of the symbolic dissociates itself, as a non-buildable locus, from this posturing gesticulation of reciprocal correspondence to which the imaginary faithfully sticks. The law of the symbolic gets in between—also regarding the history of thinking and technics. Its 56 “In our day, it is no longer possible to think other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things : An Archæology of the Human Sciences (New York : Pantheon, 1971), 342. Originally quoted from Die Ordnung der Dinge : Eine Archäologie der Humanwissenschaften (Frankfurt/ M. : Suhrkamp, 1971), 412. 57 Jacques Lacan, Das Ich in der Theorie Freuds, 380.

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paradoxical figure is being completed by the notion of information, which does not exhaust itself in phenomena. The irruption of the symbolical register, in itself imageless, takes leave, when it materializes in digital technics, of any analogical, i.e. figuratively imaginable definition of both media and man. The constructional logic of information machines leaves the world-images in which the relationship of the subject to itself as well as to technics appeared to be modellable. But from this novel elective affinity between the world of the symbolic and that of machines there is no re-deriving a model according to which the subject were irretrievably gone.58 Rather, heterotopy of subject and machine means placelessness applying to both of them and to their relation with each other. The situating of their—abyssal—relationship as a non-precedable interface between Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics is the, possibly decisive, motive to the genesis of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, the media-analytical importance of which is going to orient our present read.59 Science of the unconscious means the capability of now situating the Advance in Intellectuality— which, according to Freud, consists in the switch from the myth of man’s origin to the law of his significant intertwinement—also, or even essentially, within the progress from the mechanic machine model toward the logical syntax of its sign function. And to boot : if cybernetics may be called the astounded realization of rediscovering language as one that decenters man and “vibrates” as of itself in endless program loops and control-cycle machines,60 this then means a stroke of luck that produces an automatical which, as an intentionless period of reiteration, knows how, step by step, to combine and dissociate language and machine games. Far off from the anthropological delusion that man be entirely in man, and beyond the culs-de-sac of vitalism and mechanism,61 the paradoxical message of cybernetics is : the articulation of a suit of signs, insofar as it can be traced back to 0 and 1, absence and presence, functions with58 “This is very important, the models. Not that this would mean anything—it means nothing. But that’s the way we happen to be—this is our animalish weakness—we crave images. And with images wanting, it may happen that symbols fail to emerge. In general however it is sooner symbolic deficiency that weighs. The image turns up from an essentially symbolic creation, i.e. from a machine, from the modernest machine, one that is much more dangerous for man than the nuclear bomb : the calculating machine.” Ibid., 116–17. 59 At the moment of writing his eponymous lecture, 1955, Lacan was well aware of the extant limits of first-order cybernetics, an amalgam of political and economic game and communication theory. He explicitly mentions Norbert Wiener and Claude E. Shannon. He was, however, leading in addressing—with respect to engineering efforts toward economizing on redundancy in information transmission in the various channels—the conjectural dimension of nonsignificant transmission itself : the logic of shifting places. Cf. Jacques Lacan, “Kybernetik und Psychoanalyse oder von der Natur der Sprache” [Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics or On the Nature of Language], in Das Ich in der Theorie Freuds, 373–414. 60 Ibid., 154. 61 “A mutation of the machine function is underway that overtakes by far all those that still halt at the critique of the old mechanism.” Ibid., 45.

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out signification. But it is not the meaningless sequence of signs that is the novelty which confers significance to the aleatoric combinatorics of signs, but rather the alternating oscillation or scansion of their combination in which that sequence disappears. Indeed, the alternating scansion that enables the rendez-vous between presence and absence cannot itself be either present or absent. It is not a given, but joining in. Put differently : it remains—as the distantiation of the non-ens from the ens in abeyance. Thus, as the a-present structure of the symbolic materializes in the machine, it jeopardizes its time modulation that it brings into play. Thanks to the connotation of presence and absence, which may be loaded by 0 or 1 in random exchangeability, we are not only technically in a position to represent all that turns up, but, inversely, at the same time referred to the topology of the Signifier which enables that : “What is a message inside a machine ? It is something that happens through opening or non-opening, just as an electric lamp through on and off. It is something articulated, of the same order as the fundamental oppositions of the symbolic register. At a certain moment that something that spins must come or not come into play. It is always ready to come up with an answer and to complete itself in this same act, in order to answer, i.e. cease to function as an isolated and spinning cycle, ready to enter into a generic game. This quite resembles that which we may comprehend as coercion, as compulsive repetition.”62 For sure, the world of the modern machine is the world of the symbolic. But the discourse-analytical ascertainment—namely that the machine dissociate the symbolic,63 itself already decentering the subject, from any human activity—becomes legible only if this dissociation is not merely perceived as a simple sequence of steps in an ontically preordained development, but is in itself taken seriously as a place swap, because it is the reason that prior attributions of real and symbolic shift irretrievably : “Thus we face the problematic situation that in short there is a reality of signs within which there exists a world of truth that is completely deprived of subjectivity, and that on the other hand there is a historic progress of subjectivity that is clearly oriented towards recovery of the truth that dwells in the order of symbols.”64 The de-anthropologizing progress, enabled by the advent of the conjectural science of the cybernetic, as opposed to the exact science of 62 Ibid., 117–18. Thus the question of the symbolic insists in the technics question even where there is surmise that it be turned over to substancelessness as soon as the symbolic be transferable to digital machines : “It is a symbol, since they put a question to a machine the structure of which must indeed have a certain relationship with the symbolic order, and this is precisely whence it is a game machine, a strategic machine.” Ibid, 232. 63 Cf., exemplarily : Friedrich A. Kittler, “Die Welt des Symbolischen – Die Welt des Realen,” in Literatur in einer industriellen Kultur, ed. Götz Grossklaus and Eberhard Lämmert (Stuttgart : J. G. Cotta, 1989), 521–36. 64 Lacan, Das Ich in der Theorie Freuds, 362.

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nature, consists in the appearance of the locus as a void spot, as something that may or may not occur. This existence of something that is strictly equivalent to its nonexistence does not indicate some contingency or calculus of happenstance in nature, but rather the longed-for and looked-for chance of coincidence with itself : “Thus the science of that which is forever refindable in the same place gets supplanted by the science of the combination of places as such—this in an orderly register that certainly presumes the notion of pull, i.e. that of scansion.”65 This unsharpness relation of a non-warrantable concourse was, as Lacan shows, already covertly included in the ideal of the real, to which exact science kept adhering. Indeed so because the sense of the real as something that one refinds always, and absolutely unaltered in its place regardless of whether one had been present or not, is neither thinkable nor expressible without mediation of the symbolic : “If the ens were just what it is, then there would not even be the room to speak of it.”66 The fact that the symbolic was not, indeed never, glued to the real, articulates only through the conjectural combinatorics of shiftable places. To man, this is of twofold concern : the decentering offense that the order of the symbolic does not accrue to him as his own but comes up to him like an open-ended wager, gets aggravated when the symbolic fetters the real to some syntax that, as a functional sign-and-machine world—meaningless and automatable—sets up a binary order beyond man. But the very correlation of absence and presence, of access and closure, to a number of plus/minus, varies in the same fashion as man and machine refer to it. The order of the symbolic scans stepwise the distance between presence and absence, which consists in nothingness : formal machines demand nothing. Running within the real, they last on, and are not buried in the play of presence and absence, because the sheer idea of a mere hideout within the real is lunatic. People, on the other hand, prefer nothing more than to make claims to the nothingness of the symbolic. They bet, and await : may it turn up, as wholly as possible, and gain duration—whence the recurring insistent question of desire : “The wager is in the centre of every radical question as it involves symbolic thinking. Everything is about that to be or not to be, about the choice between that which will result, or won’t. About the primordial couple of plus and minus. But both presence and absence connote possible presence or absence. As soon as the subject itself attains being, it owes it to a certain non-being atop of which it installs its being. And if it isn’t, if it isn’t a something, then it testifies to some absence while forever remaining beholden to this absence. 65 Ibid., 379–80. 66 Ibid., 284. The notion of an absolute real, without caesura or rift, hearkens to the notion of whatever reciprocal holism, since it reduces the difference between inner world and outer world, fellow world and environment, to which it remains stuck, to nothing more than a phenomenal transition within one world.

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I mean to say that it has to produce evidence for the absence, since it is unable to produce evidence for the presence.”67 The historically new dimension that sets in with cybernetics as a science of conjecture does not exclusively consist of the driving forces of happenstance, chances, games, and war that—detached from anything real—intervene in it. Rather, it is the expectation of the impossible rendez-vous as the void locus that is decisive in determining the encounter. No child’s play, as evoke the numerous child’s plays and purloined letters which Lacan repeatedly paraphrases in order to demonstrate that the desiring subject wins as it loses, through recovering the primary loss that does not exist.68 Thus all isn’t about a merit or flaw of man vis-à-vis the machine, or vice versa, but rather about the paradox of the hasty anticipation of arriving at oneself—an arriving that is reserved or denied to the subject. But precisely this unreflectible and asymmetrical articulation of presence and absence, of 0 and 1, makes up that chiastic construct of appearance and disappearance that resurges in the three-digit-ness of the—now technically switchable—digital machine. Thus cybernetics leads to the understanding of both the closed and the open door : “This triangularity […] is in some way the very structure of the machine. It is that from which the machine as such steps forth. If we hold 0 and 1, then there is something that follows behind. It is a sequence out of which the independence of 0 and 1 may be construed, the symbolic generation of presence-absence connotations. I have indicated that the logical product, the logical sum are always made up of three columns. In this margin, 0 and 1 will equal 1, in that margin they will equal 0. Put differently, three-digit-ness is of the essence for the machine structure.”69 A door, whether taken as real or transposed into the electrical impulse of on and off, is either open or closed. But the door that scans this state is nothing entirely real, but inversely—inasmuch as motion—the Signifier’s symbolic void that is opening up the state of the open or shut door in the first place, by a cross-over :70 “There is a dissymmetry 67 Ibid., 244. Looked at it that way, then, the real is the impossible, i.e. the inconstant stay between imaginary and symbolic : placeless desire : “Desire, the central function of every human experience, is desire for nothing nameable […] The ens reaches existence right in dependence on this deficiency. Dependent on this deficiency in the experience of desire, the ens acquires a sense of itself in respect of being. From the pursuit of this beyond that is nothing, it returns to the sense of a self-aware being that is nothing but its own reflection in the world of things. For it is the companion to ones that are, that are prior to it, and who indeed are unknowing of themselves.” Ibid., 284. 68 “The trait that here distinguishes Freud from all authors […] is the notion that the object of human striving is never a refound object in the sense of remembrance. The subject is not primarily refinding previously laid tracks of its natural relationship with the outside world. The human object always constitutes itself through the mediation of a primary loss. Nothing particularly fertile can happen to man otherwise than through mediating a loss of the object.” Ibid., 176. 69 Ibid., 401–2. 70 Cf. Jean Périn, “Les portes / Die Türen,” Der Wunderblock : Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse [Berlin] 17 (1987) : 32. Périn describes with great precision the topology of the Möbius strip standing for the symbolic void of the door.

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between the opening and the closing—if the door-opening regulates the access, the door, when shut, closes the circuit. The door is a veritable symbol, a symbol par excellence, the symbol through which the transit of man to somewhere will reveal itself, by the cross that it indicates by crossing the access and the closure. From the moment of gaining the possibility of folding the two features into one and contrive from the closure the circuit, i.e. something in which there is flow when it’s closed and where there is none when it’s open—from that moment the science of conjecture has passed into the realizations of cybernetics.”71 The desiring subject handles the impossible dual possibility of presence or absence, by replicating as a loss, and then shifting the relation entertained to the biological cleft that precedes it as an alienating deficiency, while closing in. The famous and enigmatic fort-da game mentioned by Freud testifies to that chiastic construction of presence and absence that configures the world of signs.72 The alterity of appearance and disappearance is akin to those endless machines that know of no origins. Deciphering the cybernetic program as the innominable, chiastic X of language may appear as outdated and corny as the words themselves.73 But what is not missed from its place, treads on the spot.

71 Lacan, Das Ich in der Theorie Freuds, 382–83. 72 Cf. Ralf Lukas, Michael O. Scholl, and Georg Christoph Tholen, “Die verbotene Zeitreise : Zäsuren und Zensuren des Unbewußten,” in Zeitreise : Bilder – Maschinen – Strategien – Rätsel, ed. Georg Christoph Tholen, Michael Scholl, and Martin Heller (Zurich, Basel, Frankfurt/M. : Museum für Gestaltung, Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993), 253–72. 73 At the end of his seminar, Lacan swings from cybernetics back to the Scriptures and reads the biblical In the beginning was the Word (in principio erat verbum) in an inverse and unacquitted sense that eludes tradition : “It is about a sequence of absences and presences or, rather, about presence on the ground of absence, of an absence that is constituted through the fact that a presence may exist. There is no absence in the real. There is absence only if you assume there is presence there where there is none. I suggest the Word be located inside in principio, seeing it creates the opposition, the constrast. This is the primal antithesis : that of 0 and of 1.” Lacan, Das Ich in der Theorie Freuds, 396.

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VI Media Code — Dialogues on Digital Society christian doelker

I SCRIPT 206 — II Section 1 : Aperçus of Media Society  207 — III Section 2 : Media Code – Constituent Parts of Media Presentations 213

Christian Doelker is Professor of Media Pedagogy at Zurich University (Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research). Previously, he has taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich; and has been a visiting professor at the University of Fribourg; lecturer at F+F School of Art and Media Design; a member of the research group Media Pedagogy in Science and Education organized by the Bavarian Ministry for Education, Culture, Science, and Art; and a faculty member of the European Journalism Academy. His main areas of research are the theory and pedagogy of images, a theory of television, cultural techniques, media reality, philosophy of information, and media critique. www.medienpaedagogik.ch

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Could this be possible : to study digital society from the outside ? Or are we too involved, too close, too intertwined, to adequately assess its potentials and risks ? How then to achieve the necessary distance ? Escaping to a desert island would be mere running away. Trying to cobble up a virtual island amid the raging digital flood, through denial of media, would prove illusory. There is but one possibility : not to give in to online-communication pressure. To stem media aggression by putting up a barrier made of values that have always been mainstays of our cultural and intellectual history. That’s what the present text is about.

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I Script Nevermind what gushes in through the air or the Net, claiming priority because of its “live” or “news” status, it must be denied it, for the benefit of being appropriately sifted and circumspectly dealt with. Media-philosophical reflections, which in this text take the guise of discussions broadcast on a fictitious radio station, are meant to be of some guidance. They go on between representative figures from our intellectual and cultural history, and are presented by José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), who introduces the first transmission’s following guests : Marilyn Monroe 1926–1962, an American screen actress Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, a French Impressionist painter Charles Darwin 1809–1882, an English naturalist John Amos Komenský (a.k.a. Comenius) 1592–1670, a Czech theologian and educationalist Plato 427–347 BCE, a Greek philosopher The first two out of four fictional sections are thus given to examining the present overwhelmingly complex informational world. Along with it, one may (through fictitious links) probe deeper into certain topics. The second two sections will be presented in the next volume of this series. Section 1 : Aperçus of Media Society Each speaker gives their view regarding the characteristics and pertinent risks attaching to media society. Section 2 : Media Code – Constituent Parts of Media Productions Whichever the producers, whichever the provenience, whichever the data medium carrying media performances, these are coded in one or several of the word, picture, and sound sign categories, and structured according to a formalizable body of rules. That media code spans all media and formats and its mastery is prerequisite, and forms the access key to any appearance in information society.

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II Section I : Aperçus of Media Society José Ortega y Gasset Dear audience ! And, with a view to future publication, dear readers ! My cordial greetings to you, on this occasion of Radio ABC’s opening, today finally on the air for the first time, after much hassle. It may be understandable, to a degree, that the Radio ABC moniker for Akasha Broadcasting Corporation raised some eyebrows, as seemingly calling up some esoteric connotation. Akasha, however, is simply meant as an indication that we are the only station boasting code capable of staging figures of the past. Not in the sense of so-called channelings, but by physically welcoming stars of bygone cultural eras in our studio. Thus I am proud to introduce to you a number of renowned historic personalities from science and culture, in the order they lived : from the fourth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Plato; from the seventeenth century CE, John Amos Comenius, the father of pedagogics and didactics; from the nineteenth century, the English naturalist, Charles Darwin, the initiator of the theory of evolution; then, from the same century, the French Impressionist painter, Berthe Morisot; and, from last century, Marilyn Monroe, the film star. We had invited yet another guest to this round who, however, had to excuse himself, Dante Alighieri; he is sorry, but he is currently on a planetary trek and therefore unable to attend … Interjection from Plato About time he got down to something like this, or he’d have gotten stuck in his geocentricity. O.y.g. pursues We are all the more appreciative, dear guests, that all of you could make it. Dante, in his excuse, wrote, “I should have dearly wished to be with you, if for nothing else than to relaunch my Divina Commedia trilogy as a commedia umana. As you may remember, in Florence in my day it took half my life before I could embark on my trip through Hell …” Marilyn Monroe and John Amos Comenius start almost at the same time “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita …” Berthe Morisot and Charles Darwin join in per una selva oscura …”

“… mi ritrovai

O.y.g. Visibly, Dante would have made a fine fit for our round. Let me go on : “… and these days even a child can bring up any old hell circle by just pushing a button or juggling a remote control.” P.

Oh, the screen as a monitor of the netherworld ! Not bad.

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M.m. A real pity Dante can’t be here, but then Beatrice should have been invited as well. I always dreamed about meeting her some day. O.y.g. Dear folks, while the makeup of our round does reach as far back as antiquity, everybody here has been asked along as a figure of the present, as a contemporary, grounded in today’s language, understanding, and knowledge. I’d therefore like to start by getting everybody’s view about today’s information society. So, may I ask each of our guests to give a short introductory statement on it ? Just one or two points that struck you particularly while para-jumping into our present world. Sir Plato, you as representing philosophy … P. Even leaving seniority aside, it seems fitting that I should open the debate, considering the present man/media situation and, along with it, my reputation as the inventor of the cinematic projection technique–no doubt due to my allegory of the cave and its popularity of sorts. As you may remember, in it, people are tied up in a cave, their faces immovably turned toward the cave wall, with a blazing fire at a distance behind them, and between them and the fire, unbeknownst to them, are artifacts being carried past, the shadows of which are thrown upon the cave wall; the implication being that the relationship between visible things and the actually real entities, i.e. ideas, is similar to that between the shadows on the cave wall and the concrete objects at their origin. Even a cursory glance into present-day offices, schools, and living rooms amusingly reveals that more or less everybody has cobbled together their own—unallegoric—little Platonic cave, as it were. A grand flat screen takes the place of the rear wall, and man, in a thrall, is facing it. And so beholden is he to his setup that he recreates it no matter when and where, with the help of his smartphone or tablet. Staying or walking, his eyes are glued to the mini-silicon-wall of his mobile contraption. Rather unlike a chap of my time wandering detachedly and a free man about the Attic countryside. O.y.g. Indeed a subject worth going into. Things, and virtual things—crying out for the Platonic reference system. If the things in your parable are just the shadows of actual, higher reality, viz. the ideas, then their screen reflections cannot be anything but shadows of shadows. Or can they ? P. Indeed, almost automatically an epistemological discourse springs up. However, a second point hits the eye of whomever visits that present time of yours. I mean politics. When using your digital cave wall for latching onto the various countries, I discover those same quarrels as beset us in Athens. Of course, we

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did invent democracy, but considering the unrelenting infights proper to that system, I thought of an alternate one, creating the ideal state, in which the leadership is conferred, after long and hard training, to those found the best and ablest. There should be transcending of democracy, and, instead, the rule of wisdom, sophocracy. But what is it I am finding now ? Mediacracy—all power to the media. O.y.g. And mediacracy easily translates into mediocracy. Charles Darwin, you speak for the sciences, and in particular for the the theory of evolution … C.d. Just another word about the cave allegory and the portable silicon cave. It reminded me straightaway of the olm, which too retired into caves, albeit underwater. And what was the upshot ? Those caves are of course in total darkness, which led to degeneration of the eyes the unhappy olm had indeed developed in the preceding evolutionary stages. So much for folks that feel more comfortable wallowing in dull somnolence than letting themselves be driven by a wide-awake mind. But that is not my real subject. What strikes me is the apparent applicability of my concept of survival of the fittest—of course mutatis mutandis—to today’s media society. Except for the fact that the environment requiring adjusting to is no longer a natural one; it is an artificial, manmade, technical environment, with the media making up the dominant part of it. Thanks to their omnipresence, they have become a continuum. Wherever we go, we are steeped in images of the world, i.e. not in the world itself. Just as water forms the medium for the fish to swim in, the media have become the medium in which man splashes about. Which raises the question of how man adjusts to this media environment, and of the direction evolution is going to take. Will it proceed ascending, along the line fish–reptile–mammal–man ? Or will it be regressive, à la olm, with the mental organs gradually getting duller and more primitive ? Or is man—worst of all—in for succumbing to his own self-made technical environment ? O.y.g. That would be a suitable case for Comenian universal education. What do you have to say about this, Mr. Komenský, as our expert for pedagogics and didactics ? M.m. (interrupting) Just a second, Mr. Presenter, let me remind you of your own rules : ladies first. If Radio ABC aspires to be exemplary, our culturological excursion can’t go on as an exclusively male exercise … O.y.g. Oh, I am awfully sorry. Please forgive me. One can’t help relapsing into old behavioral patterns all the time …

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J.a.c. Of course, I owe apologies as well. In my books I continuously addressed boys only, lamentably disregarding the girls. So here is my public mea culpa, with the hope I may be forgiven. M.m. (turning to B.m.) You are forgiven alright, isn’t he, Berthe ? Is it alright with you if I pursue ? Of course, even in your day you were too modest and self-effacing. B.m. word …

That’s OK. Art is my thing, and art will always have the last

M.m. Well then, folks, I am glad I am finally given a chance to touch up my image. The media invariably depicted me as a sexy nitwit, conveniently ignoring I got top marks in my philosophy tests in high school. So then, media as a consistent medium, a new, artificial environment— great concept, and I couldn’t agree more. In my time, films were single, exceptional features one went to the movies to see, or distinct TV or radio programs to listen-in to or to watch, but not this all-pervasive mish-mash surround. My remarks, however, are in a general way less about quantity than quality of media output. Dammit, in my day a take was redone up to thirty times, before the best was then picked, and there were cutting rules and aesthetic benchmarks. And clear ideas about style. And quality standards. And respect for the viewer. Talk about medium ! How it all changed, how it all went down the drain … J.a.c.

Not all of it though …

M.m. (interrupting) In a second, dear John. We being a dream team, it is not about who happens to be speaking at any point. I’d just add another thought about that quality catchword. In contrast to quality of content, technical quality has of course improved. First hi-fi sound quality, and now high-definition imaging, and so on. But what irks me is the way technical excellence is used to cover up lousy content. A gullible public falls for it and takes the message to be tops just because it is wrapped up in top-notch picture and sound quality. Con-trickery, that’s what it is. J.a.c. Sure, sure. But now for the shoe on the other foot. Because as for me, I am indeed delighted at the exceptional quality of present pictorial and sound documents. Just think, in my time I depended, for my Orbis Sensualium Pictus, upon woodcuts or copperplate engravings, and sound rendering was not even a remote dream. Furthermore, I am grateful that thanks to information technology, the second tenet of my fundamental postulate in Didactica Magna has now become materially feasible as well. The first one of course—demanding

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that “stand-ins” be provided for objects not directly displayable or manifestable in class—having been actualized for some time already through earlier audiovisual techniques. (I used “stand-ins” for want of today’s term “media.”) It is only since the Internet, however, that those media can be at hand anytime, anywhere, as proposed in the second part. Earlier, limitations of physical data carriers caused hindrances, or at least delays … O.y.g. … whereas today everything is available with a simple click or tap, via Google & Co. J.a.c. Indeed. Any sort of data files are on tap from online data services or through open access, current material no less than historical stuff from archives. But most gratifying, even visuals are finally available en masse. That really makes my orbis pictus, the “visible world,” current. O.y.g. But not without bringing your Didactica Magna up to date as well, seeing that a user-friendly combination of picture, script, word, and sound entails the need for some particularly well-thoughtout dramaturgy. May I lead on with another question regarding your Great Didactics ? You mention there an overriding objective, a final educational goal : wisdom … M.m.

Oh gosh ! That one is rather out these days.

O.y.g. Today the talk is sooner of the knowledge society or, more generally, the information society. Knowledge seems to have been decoupled from wisdom. J.a.c. With attendant consequences for society. Therefore we must complement didactics today with a novel information philosophy, yet to be worked out. O.y.g. Which brings us to the question of overstimulation and leads us straight to you, Ms. Morisot, as representing art in our circle, seeing Impressionism has prominently dealt with perception, and stimulus processing. B.m. Yes, so it did. The term “Impressionism” actually points to that. Impression sets in at the very point where world hits the human eye. We Impressionists resolutely turned away from the preceding generation of artists, inasmuch as we got busy with the actual perception process itself. Consequently, we painted the world not as an orbis pictus—to take up your expression, Jean—but as an orbis perceptus, or even an orbis sensus, a sensed world. One might object that

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this introduces subjectivization of art. I think not, quite the contrary. For representing reality perforce is at bottom subjective, being conditioned, amongst other things, by the mental structure of the beholder. If, however, impression were to be taken as implying desultoriness, I must vehemently object. Quite the opposite. We feel we are standing, not necessarily consciously, in your succession, Sir Plato. Behind the fleeting appearance, we identify the idea. After all, Impressionism is, by its innermost impulse, directed towards the light. Hence it is precisely in the position of the prisoner that sheds the shackles in the cave, and turns towards the light source … P. sense.

Bingo ! I myself have always understood Impressionism in this

B.m. That’s really the nicest possible feedback to me. But I am entitled to a second remark, and should like to note that today, the bulk of contemporaneous art runs in the opposite direction. I don’t mean to badmouth anybody, or generalize certain trends, but there are remarkable quantities of junk and litter lying about that are trying to sell for art. As my dear friend Manet used to say : “There is no baking cakes from shit.” O.y.g.

I didn’t realize Manet was such a plain speaker.

B.m. Well, not everything always gets down to posterity. But what enrages me today is the art mafia’s impudence in using our tribulations surrounding the Salon des refusés as reflecting upon, and thereby for promoting, their own stuff. Whenever some abomination gets rejected by the public, Monet and Cézanne are being adduced : their paintings too to have been misunderstood by their contemporaries. As though people in centuries to come are likely to queue up in front of museums in order to watch today’s junk. O.y.g. Evidently, the Salon des refusés argument must not be turned on its head. As though rejection of any production in itself were proof of artistic value. Now everybody has had their say once. I waited for that to have happened, so we might determine the further complexion to give to our conversation. I had imagined—and I seem to have been borne out by this first go-round—that a first part of it should be given to an overview of the media elements through which our present world is being captured. M.m.

Or, more simply, the elements that make up the media code ?

O.y.g. Agreed. And in the second part, we’ll put ourselves into the shoes of the chap at the receiving end, who is faced with coping

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with the information environment, or (in Marilyn Monroe’s direction), more simply, we’ll take a look at media literacy, and at problems and possibly shortcomings that we might make out. Is this OK with everybody ? M.m. (toward O.y.g.) Some sort of media meditations, somehow on the line of your Meditations on the Hunt and your Essays on Intellectual Love … O.y.g. So let’s wrap this first act up. Curtain. On the air, however, the curtain will be replaced by—commercials. (Publicity cut out in the print version.) III Section 2 : Media Code – Constituent Parts of Media Presentations M.m. Considering that not even at Radio ABC we are able to have a talk without commercials, and that publicity proves to be omnipresent, I begin to doubt whether today’s society shouldn’t be labelled PR society rather than information society. O.y.g. We’ll return to this question in a minute. Beforehand, I’d just like to address a preliminary remark to our listeners—you may call that publicity, too. Indeed, folks, the concept of these programs does include interactive sections as well. That means that you may call in, ask questions, or provide complementary information and opinions, which then will be analyzed during a further part of our proceedings. All this is to ensure that in our discussions, we may touch upon everything relevant, free of theoretical dead weight. To me, this way of proceeding should be the right one for a society boasting to be an information society. However, that’s precisely the term that was questioned a moment ago, so I am throwing it back at my colleagues. B.m. Of course, there is advertising and advertising. Some PR for this station won’t hurt anybody; rather it is an interesting option in the eyes of many. A tree, e.g., is also attracting attention, through its bloom. C.d.

That would then be a PR message for the bees.

J.a.c. Well, one might also say that with the tree in blossom, God is advertising the beauty of his creation.

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M.m. Right. Such so-called persuasive aspects are part of communication. Appeal worked as early as Adam and Eve : Eve plugging Adam for her cognition-promoting fruit. “Advertising society” implies not just quantitative growth and excessive weight of advertising messages in media products, but quite as much dependency of information upon advertising, since commercial broadcasters are exclusively funded by commercials. And one more thing, the term “advertising society” would indicate that, due to the systemic crowding-out competition proper to the market economy, advertising has steadily grown more aggressive. Not just the spots and trailers, but the programs themselves have, as they must continuously make sure that their viewers won’t zap away. C.d. This is a further pointer to the new, media-ized environment to which we must revert when talking about evolution. O.y.g. We are with conceptuality still. I would Mr. Komenský in particular said a few words about the notion of information society. J.a.c. I’d rather go for media society. The simple fact that a large segment of the economy is presently busy producing, processing, distributing, and disposing of information, seems to me insufficiently relevant for making information society, after the hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies, an adequate replacement of industrial society. Ours is still, in my opinion, the industrial society, even if industrial production and distribution of information has become part of it. By narrowing it down to media society—as one expression of industrial society, forgive my repeating myself—I mean to point out that mediateness (as opposed to media-ness) must be seen as a constituent characteristic of present-day communication and environment. Generally speaking, we are less and less faced with the thing, but more and more with its description. Or with the image instead of the original. I ought to know, since my Orbis Sensualium Pictus set it all in motion. Excepting that what I was pursuing there was The Visible World … M.m. … which happened also to be termed the first illustrated Duden dictionary of our cultural history … J.a.c. … but which, as a forerunner of the illustrated Duden, wants putting in perspective. I meant to use pictures, i.e. signs of things, as pointers to the things themselves. In media society, however, the image flood has turned into an end in itself, into some sort of reality in itself. That reality is even flimsier than that of Plato’s shadow character, in whom the referential function is still existent : the shadow cannot be cut off from its original. At the same time, pictorial reality, being

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self-referential, is more than mere shadow world, since it emerges autonomously, without being tied to a referential system. B.m. Yet, in art, autonomous pictorial reality does provide true added value. My painting of a tree in blossom—to stay with my example—is more than, and goes beyond the original object, which is subject to change, and whose blooms may already have fallen to the ground the next day. The painting gives a higher kind of reality : the very idea of a blooming tree. P. Thank you, Berthe, for playing the ball back at me. It appears that at this point there is no getting around some ontological updating, e.g. dealing with the familiar question “How real is reality ?” J.a.c. There, your influence throughout the Middle Ages was immense, Sir Plato. From a Christian angle—which is largely coincident with that of your followers—things themselves possess that above­said referential property. Things are signs of higher realities—words and clauses in God’s book, as it were. Creation is understood as God’s book. This of course implies that the realness of things is not in question; it is just consigned to a hierarchically lower level, on which things are at the same time real, while acting as signs of higher, spiritual worlds. O.y.g. A subsequent sequence will be devoted to how these signs, or indeed things, are to be read. At this point, however, I think constructivism should be mentioned, which goes as far as calling in question the very reality of things. P. I cannot help a little smirk here. Obviously the fathers of constructivism, Messrs. Varela, Maturana, et al., have never come in contact with a brick dropping on their heads, or they might have been less doubtful of a massive thing’s realness. Stating the appearance of things to depend on the structure of our perception is one thing, and since our friend Kant’s working = out of the distinction between the thing-in-itself, and its appearance dependent upon our perceptual equipment, relativity of thingness is undisputed, nay trivial. What matters, however, is reality content of a thing, as indeed indicated by etymology : reality comes from the Latin res, i.e. thing. M.m. Quick question : aren’t the notions of the Platonic idea and the Kantian thing-in-itself somehow coincident ? P. Prudently, I’d answer “yes and no.” Both notions share at most the fact that the superficial aspect of things as present to our senses is not tantamount to all of reality. But the idea as I understand it means

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in fact an “ideal” archetype from which the fleeting appearance of the really being—i.e. nevertheless really existing—is merely derived as a variant aspect. O.y.g.

How exciting to hold “virtual reality” against it.

B.m. But the issue in the first place is still about the basic question whether things are in reality existing, independently of some perceiving conscience, or whether they merely exist—as postulated by radical constructivism—in our head as a construct, as a contrivance of our brain, inexistent in reality, be it either as things-in-themselves or ideas. This reminds me of a completely contrary view, from my own cultural circle, which vests things with “existence” as their sole quality. That’s at least what existentialism maintains. Jean-Paul Sartre indeed endows things with so much existence that, in his view, they not just “are” but “are in excess,” sont de trop as he puts it. P. They are superfluous, precisely because they are but themselves, without the idea behind them. Thus they are just fortuitous, and might as well not be. B.m. Quite. And Sartre describes this very fortuity or gratuité with the key term of contingency : everything is bare of inherent reason, purely arbitrary. Exister to him means merely “to be there,” to be present, être là, is his term. C.d. Well, up to this point, the pragmatic fact of their existence, of some naked existence as it were, is undisputed. A clear contradiction between existentialism and constructivism. But if things are merely themselves, utterly undefined, distinguishable not even through differing functions, they are, in fine, indiscriminate—and such a reality has a totally different complexion again. B.m. Sartre’s novel Nausea exemplifies this nicely. Antoine Roquentin, the hero, crucially has indeed this very experience : the various surrounding things he had still been perceiving a moment ago are losing their distinctly thingy character and are amalgamating into a mushy, monstruous mass, an amorphous mash. So much then for your Orbis Pictus, dear John, and also for your multitudinous species, dear Charles … M.m. Since you were named, John and Charles—for both of you Plato was playing some sort of a part, too. Or didn’t he ? In your Orbis Pictus : the house, the tree, man—isn’t there an underlying idea ? And in your case, dear Charles, how were the various species to have originated

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if there were not a representative of each species living notionally in our imagination ? P. Take it easy ! The upshot of our conversation—isn’t it that existence without some kind of mental background is emptied of sense ? And even Sartre shows some indications of openness in that direction. He does not say that even a higher form of being, such as man, is necessarily confined to sheerest existence. He only says existence precedes essence and its specification, in some way turning my model on its head, according to which the idea, or specification of essence, takes place on a higher level, in precedence to any concrete existence. In consequence of this inversion, specification of essence is not preordained but must continuously be reconstructed anew. Sartre says man is that into what he makes himself. In this sense, if I may say so, existentialism’s non-material background is purely constructivistic. J.a.c. Well, in the Middle Ages, specification of the essence was a given, a gift of and assignment by God, and according to you, Charles, it is, so to speak, determined by nature, or on the basis of evolution, continually manifested in corresponding existential forms. C.d. According to the theory of evolution, biological species comes about as a function of survival strategies, whereas creationism is taking off from Platonic road maps, as it were, according to which creation is getting implemented. Which shows most clearly in the familiar passage “God created man in his own image”—hence there is a prior model : a Platonic plan. P. Another remark regarding Sartre. He too contains a grain— forgive my being self-referential—of Platonic reality. For Roquentin, his hero, is in for a second crucial experience, when visiting a coffee bar. Again, he is first hit by the heaviness, bloatedness, and obscenity of his surroundings. The same carnality attaches to the voice of a singer sounding from a Wurlitzer. But the scatching of the needle sets something in motion in Anthony’s interior. He realizes that the melody remains entirely unaffected by the screetching. I downloaded the passage to my iPad tablet, and cannot help reading it to you and our listeners. It says, regarding that melody, It is far away—far beyond. I now understand : the record is getting scratched and worn, the singer might be dead; I myself am about to take the train. But behind the existent [myself I might perhaps have said : above the existent] tumbling from one present into the next, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds that day after day burst, disintegrate, and slide towards death—there remains the melody, untouched, young and firm, like a witness without pity. Well ? !

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O.y.g. An unexpected discovery, indeed. My question is now how the notions “to exist,” “being existent,” or “being” might be unleashed from rigorous yes-no structures and be differentiated. In the media context in particular, multiple modes of existence must be distinguished—I am reverting to the virtual-reality term. In a next step, it might make sense to examine this differentiated idea of reality from the semiotics angle, and then turn to the different kinds of varieties of text that are found in media products. C.d. Hold it. One more remark regarding the Nausea text. Something in the passage quoted by Bertha struck me. This account of perceiving primary reality does anticipate—has it really gone unnoticed by everybody ?—media perception. Isn’t the dissolution and mashing up of things, as mentioned there, a spitting image of what happens on our telly ? On-screen things come up haphazardly, incoherently, redundantly—contingently. I’d even dare say the triumphant progress of the media can be put down to some prior perceptory change, in the Sartrean sense, having occurred, and to the media offerings then having merely gone to meet the resulting demand. Sartre, with his mode of experiencing reality, was actually anticipating a certain kind of media usage. J.a.c. Not bad, such an inversion. What I find appealing in this assumption is the fact that technical evolution is second to change of perception, and not, as usual, declared to be the forerunner. And things being worked into a mash in the brains of media consumers—that’s very likely what happens. O.y.g. Yet, there remains the basic epistemological question whether these things, mashed-up or still distinguishable, exist in our consciousness only, or also outside of it … B.m. Quite so. And it is well we came back to that point. Memories, for example, are such contents of our consciousness as exist, at the moment of recall, exclusively there, in our consciousness; yet they are indeed traces of things previously preceived in reality. P. Precisely. And from there, there goes a link to dreams. In a dream, too, memories show up sometimes, as a share of the past. But dreams are also capable of astonishing us with visions, previews of potential futures. And this in turn bears a relation to so-called virtual reality : virtuality as potential futurity. Many dream contents, however, are mere fancies and devoid of any bearings either of a lived past or an anticipated future. O.y.g. That will do for content. But form may actually present a reference to reality inasmuch as certain contents may indeed be couched

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in reality-related code. This brings us to the point where literary theory distinguishes between varieties of text, e.g. reality and fiction. M.m. Of course. Documentaries and features. If both types are coded in real images one has no formal criteria for distinguishing the varieties. Unless one brings in fictionality signals, such as, e.g., background music. Or animation. Then, of course, we are dealing with coding in generated images. O.y.g. You are referring to various technical forms that are capable of making up so-called strands of information. Let us state with dogged systematicness : script, or alphanumeric signs, belong to technical forms, as do the spoken word, sound, and, as mentioned, music. Let us, however, return to the real-image example, which may either reproduce discovered reality, as so-called documentary text, or invented reality, as fictional text. M.m. Well, evidence of documental approach is provided by the solid and verifiable link to some existing reality. Reality, however, may be shown in a feature film, too, leaving open whether reality as shown really exists, or ever existed. P. (slightly irritated) Well, I do admit that truth may be expressed by fictional texts alright, albeit not as verity but literality of events. But there are plenty of media productions in which improbability is so blatant that there is no great puzzling over the text variety they belong to. And don’t forget the nonsense department, utterly uncoupled even from a hint of reality. It is not without reason that in my day, I voiced reservations in Greece even on behalf of theater with declaredly serious intentions. B.m. Here the “art-or-no-art” status kicks in. I remember eminent works of surrealism—both in literature and painting—that by their very definition are disconnected from reality. J.a.c. Another criterion from literary theory : regarding documentary texts, such as documentary films, factual reports, and news, referentiality is unambiguous; they refer to verifiable or at least theoretically checkable factuality. Whereas with fictional texts, as e.g. feature films, or literary ones, such as stories or novels, referentiality or, signtheoretically speaking, the referent is uncertain. Which means that, as Marilyn already pointed out, these works may, but don’t have to, refer to an existent reality. O.y.g. With the term “referent” you are introducing another forward-leading keyword : on its strength we may now—and that’s where

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I was tending to—break the text variety question down to the microlevel of semantics. And the thrilling part of it is that here too there are various basic sign models. P. What a song and dance. I find our erstwhile model of the semiotic triangle has not lost any of its appeal, and it remains still useful, especially against the backdrop of the present discussion. Additionally to the sensorily manifest sign body, it provides the very distinction between the really existent thing, the aforementioned referent, and its mental imagination, i.e. the significance. M.m. Am I right in understanding that a thing may not only mean a concrete, tangible object but likewise something abstract as love, credibility, bravery, etc., values that are lived by human society and therefore are—one may say—really existent ? J.a.c. I agree. But may also be nonexistent, as the case may be. For by dissociating the sign from the thing—and that is the crunch—one forgoes any guarantee of its actually existing. Let me give an example that occurred in the Orbis Pictus. On the “wild animals” page there are illustrations of, along with a stag and a wild boar, also a unicorn. According to the then prevailing lights one presumed a species “unicorn” actually existed. Applied to the semiotic triangle : the sound or character sequence “unicorn” (or, in German Einhorn, in French licorne) is the sign body or indeed the visual depiction of a unicorn; the respective mental representation or sign significance is the second element, and the third, the thing or referent, is actually nonexistent in this case. In consequence, the dissociation of the sign from the thing, in fine, renders the thing itself dispensable. This very circumstance provides the premise for the different kinds of varieties of text, and from this comes the possiblity of fiction, virtuality, of untruth and lie in general. B.m. Dispensability of reference in the end allows to simplify the sign model down to where it becomes reductible to the two quantities of sign body and significance. The Geneva linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, is well known for having proposed such a dyadic model which won recognition far beyond the French-speaking cultural area. Even his slightly exotic word creations, signifiant for sign body and signifié for significance, made it to the top of the hit parade. The English translations are “signifier” and “signified.” Identical but for a “r” or a “d.” J.a.c. Showing how intimately both notions or aspects hang together; Saussure says, “as the two sides of a coin.”

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O.y.g. So much then for the two most important sign models. Of course they are open to completion by pages of comments and explanations. But let’s now leave the sign and finally get to the sign sequence, the text. We have already talked about varieties of text, but the idea of text wants attention now. P. Well, the Latin word textum means “fabric” or “assemblage”; it is derived from texere, which means “to weave, to put together.” Thus, instead of contriving a “textile” assemblage, it is possible to concatenate signs and strings of signs, e.g. into pictographic writing that is made up of pictorial signs with determined meanings, or into alphabetic writing which renders the sounds of the spoken language. Apart from these verbal texts, images and pictures may be termed texts, too : visual texts; and sounds, auditory texts. J.a.c. Yea, and so as to complete the enumeration, there are even further combinations, such as skeining information strands together into socalled integral texts, e.g. combinations of word and writing, or picture and sound. TV programs in general consist of such picture-word-sound texts. O.y.g. These multi-stranded texts, which no longer correspond to natural perceptive situations, in the end lead to a reading problem. And to our passing to the next broadcast. M.m. Easy ! Hold it ! Or I am losing my depth. I thought in this second program we were to itemize the surrounding world, including media products. Whereas we went off into discussions such as : are real things really real, etc., or aren’t they rather just appearances and, if so, what sorts of appearances … I’d positively advocate some systematic summing-up before we go ahead. O.y.g. Fine. Always fine with me. It will probably be simplest if we begin with the real world in the sense of “visible world,” John Amos … P. B.m. P. B.m.

Stop ! What’s most important, the ideas, is invisible … You are ignoring art ! But thoughts too are invisible ! You are skipping literature !

J.a.c. No problem. “Visible world” was meant to signify “readable” as well, and of course audible, tangible, smellable—in short, the whole world accessible through all the senses.

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P. Precisely, and everything supersensory and transsensory is then left by the wayside. Yet, folks, I’ll go along, for didactic reasons, as it were—et pour rendre hommage à Jean—with a pragmatic approach. Therefore, in my lingo : the world is made up of the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, man, and society … J.a.c. … and, since the time that technical means exist, of the respective descriptions and notes … C.d. … and, hence, of texts, various types of text, different varieties of text, various text categories … O.y.g. … and the texts made of strands of information, and the strands of signs. Ultimately, however : signs carry significances—and the deciphering of significances will be, as said before, our next instalment’s topic. (Commercials not included in the printed version.)

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image references All websites were last accessed on June 2, 2014. We have taken great care to identify all rights owners. In the unlikely event that someone has been overlooked, we would kindly ask that person to contact the publisher. Fig. 1 : Électricité de France, advertising movie, 2009 � Fig. 2 : Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, UK, http://www.shopcurious.com/curious-trends/Cabinets-of-curiosityrevived.aspx � Fig. 3 : Gerhard Richter, Meadowland, 1985 � Fig. 4 : Ludger Hovestadt, 2009 � Fig. 5 : SFB “AquaDiva.” Image source : http://www.uni-jena.de/uni_journal_06_2013_forschungsprojekte.htm � Fig. 6 : Federico Fellini, La Dolce Vita, 1960 � Fig. 7 : Marlboro, Philip Morris Inc. � Fig. 8 : Lol Coxhill. Image source : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lol_Coxhill-3. jpg � fig. 9 : David Bowie. Image source : http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/apr/04/ cracked-actor-david-bowie � Fig. 10 : realities united, CRYTAL MESH, 2009. Image source : http:// realities-united.de/#WORK,7,1 � Fig. 11 : Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty heading for her wedding venue in Khandala � Fig. 12 : Peter Fischli/David Weiss, 800 Views of Airports, 2012 � Fig. 13 : Ludger Hovestadt, 2009 � Fig. 14 : Image source : http://eriks.nl/documentatie/algemeen/eriks-magazinetopics/topics-22.pdf � Fig. 15 : Image source : http://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2010/05/28/ elbphilharmonie-hamburg-by-herzog--de-meuron.html � Fig. 16 : Image source : https://www. flickr.com/photos/selva/3891907490/ � Fig. 17 : Image source : http://www.imdb.com/media/ rm3084553216/tt0454921. Photo by Zade Rosenthal – © 2006 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. � Fig. 18 : Ludger Hovestadt, 2011. � Fig. 19 : Image source : http://mayacologne.canalblog. com/archives/2009/04/24/13498268.html � Fig. 20 : Image source : http://jhjung.tumblr.com/ post/20068991001/konrad-wachsmann � Fig. 21 : Image source : http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/ bitstream/handle/2027.42/62189/Buckminster-Fuller-20--Helicopter.jpg?sequence=12 � Fig. 22 : Federico Fellini, 8 1/2, 1963, Marcello Mastroianni. Image source : http://forums.filmnoirbuff. com/viewtopic.php?id=8744 � Fig. 23 : Douglas C. Engelbart, 1968. Image source : http://sloan. stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html � Fig. 24 : Image source : http://fr.academic.ru/pictures/ frwiki/84/Think_different_-_Hitchcock.jpg � Fig. 25 : Franz Karl Basler-Kopp (1879–1937), Image source : http://lexitv.de/themen/natur_phaenomene/nordsee/gegen_den_strom � Fig. 26 : Image source : http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81KuKBQqvRL._SL1500_.jpg � Fig. 27 : Aries Images/Michael Tötter. Image source : http://www.computerbild.de/fotos/Bilder-zum-FilmDie-Schimmelreiter-4357913.html � Fig. 28 : Image source : http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~cline/ P235/Hurricane_Katrina_August_28_2005crop.jpg � Fig. 29 : Image source : http://www. shapegrammar.org/ifip/SGIFIPSubmitted.pdf � Fig. 30 : David Hilbert, Über die stetige Abbildung einer Linie auf ein Flächestück, 1890 � Fig. 31 : Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, 1982 � Fig. 32 : Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, 1982 � Fig. 33 : YouTube‚ Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky � Fig. 34 : Image source : http://wordlesstech.com/2012/05/14/15-years-ago-the-computer-beat-the-world-chesschampion-video/ � Fig. 35 : Image source : http://www.kurzweilai.net/photos � Fig. 36 : Image source : https://www.flickr.com/photos/streamofconsciousness/145980903/ � Fig. 37 : Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, The Matrix, 1999 � Fig. 38 : Sergei M. Eisenstein, Stachka, 1925. Image source : https://eclecfreak.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/stachka-1925/ � Fig. 39 : Image source : http:// packedhead.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/ASC_0047.jpg � Fig. 40 : Image source : http:// abriefhistoryoflife.com/category/bateson/ � Fig. 41 : Image source : http://psychbrain.bnu.edu. cn/EGI_files/2007-12-19-633336808652656250.jpg � Fig. 42 : James Cameron, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991 � Fig. 43 : Creatures - Albian Years, VITREX � Fig. 44 : Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove, 1964 � Fig. 45 : Andrew Stanton, Wall-E, 2008 � Fig. 46 : Philipp von Hilgers and Wladimir Velminski (eds.), Andrej A. Markov, Berechenbare Künste, 2007 � Fig. 47 : Greenpeace/ Daniel Beltrá. Image source  : http://www.greenpeace.org/switzerland/de/Themen/Wald/ was-wir-tun/Urwalder-weltweit/ � Fig. 48 : Image source : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Urban_sprawl_as_seen_from_Tokyo_tower_towards_West.jpg � Fig. 49 : Image source : http://www.transhumana.ch/amerikablog/2007_10_01_archive.html � Fig. 50 : Image source : http://www.alifewortheating.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/alain-ducasse-a-hotel-plazaathenee-les-viennoiseries.jpg

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