Sam Hind

lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK.

sam.hind@manchester.ac.uk

  • New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (2012)

    New title in Harman and Latour’s New Metaphysics series. It’s available to download from the Open Humanities website, here. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin are the authors, both in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. The first half comprises of interviews with Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux, whilst the second half is devoted to the ‘cartographies’ of a new materialism. There seems to be an obsession at the moment with using cartography as a metaphor for new ways of thinking in philosophy. I’m kind of interested in folding all that work back into the study of digital mapping technology itself.

    On another note, here’s a section from the interview with DeLanda where he talks about his rejection of Marx, and yet retains a commitment to leftist, and thoroughly-materialist work (40-41):

    Q3:…In several of your writings and interviews… you mentioned various problems with Marx’s thinking. You consider yourself to be left-wing, but you do not share many of the dogmas, institutional preferences and economic solutions offered by the Left, premised on Marxism. In terms of economics your interest seems to be much more in institutional or evolutionary economics (think of the writings of Donald now Deirdre McCloskey and Phil Mirowski) and the way in which they now reread Adam Smith (especially his Theory of Moral Sentiments from 1759). Nevertheless, what you do take from Marx is his interest in the oppressed, that is, his anti-Aristotelianism that allows us to conceptualize the self-organizing power of “matter” without the “meaning” that should overcode it. Combining your rejection of Marx and your appraisal of materialism, could we then label your new materialist thinking as a non-humanist and even nonanthropocentric materialism?

    MD: The political economy of Marx is entirely a priori. Although he was sincerely interested in historical data (and hence, in creating an a posteriori theory) the actual amount of information available to him was extremely limited. Today we have the opposite situation thanks to the work of Fernand Braudel and his school. In addition, the old institutional school of economics (perhaps best represented by the work of John Kenneth Galbraith) as well as the neo-institutionalist school, offer new models that go beyond classical economics. (The two authors you mention, though, are mostly useless, being meta-economists and non-materialist.) It is our duty as Leftists to cut the umbilical cord chaining us to Marx and reinvent political economy. Deleuze and Guattari failed miserably in this regard. Marx’s theory of value was indeed anthropocentric: only human labor was a source of value, not steam engines, coal, industrial organization, et cetera. So in that sense the answer is yes, we need to move beyond that and reconceptualize industrial production. In addition, Marx did not see trade or credit as sources of wealth, but Braudel presents indisputable historical evidence that they are.

    Delanda goes on to talk of how ecologists are ‘well placed’ (41) to help re-formulate a left-leaning materialism; one that does away with some of Marx’s humanistic assumptions, and re-distributes some of the energy to other things. DeLanda is perhaps equally well-placed to theorize these kinds of moves too.

    P.S. Check out Tammy Lu’s work. Her artwork adorns the cover of Dolphijn and van der Tuin’s book, as it did for Bryant’s Democracy of Objects too.

  • An introduction to futures

    I’m having a read through Alexander Galloway’s pamphlet series ‘French Theory Today‘ (2010), that resulted from a set of seminars in New York. The series explores a number of contemporary French theorists – Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Quentin Meillassoux, and François Laruelle – who are relatively new for English speakers. I’ll admit that this is the first time I’ve come across Malabou or Kacem, but Meillassoux and Laruelle I know. I like to think I’ve got Stiegler fairly well covered too. The second pamphlet has a piece entitled ‘Bernard Stiegler, or Our Thoughts Are With Control’ by Galloway.

    There’s a nice introduction to the Stiegler dictionary: grammatization, pharmacological, psychopower, transindividual, organology in there at the start (and in a glossary at the end), and then a conversation that brings in Deleuze and Guattari and finally some questions from participants. One question and answer struck me as notable (18-19):

    [Participant 6] For Stiegler, it seems that machines, computers, and text messaging, for instance, are part of the culture industry, and as such, they are primarily negative in that they mechanize the moment of human interaction and recognition. I’m wondering if these machines are directly responsible for the waning of desire and its transformation into drive as he describes it? Moreover, why doesn’t he recognize the possibility that these machines might have the potential to produce something different?

    [Galloway] For Stiegler, the relationship between us and our devices, us and techne, typically rests in equilibrium. At any given moment in history, humans will settle into balance with the many technical devices arrayed around them—even simple technologies like fabric (clothing), tools, media, writing materials (pencil, paper), or writing itself. But at certain points in history, the introduction of new devices so disrupts the equilibrium that a new balance cannot be established fast enough. That’s the answer in short. It’s a way to move beyond the problem of saying that certain technologies are normatively good, while others are normatively bad; pencils are good, but cell phones are bad. Instead, it’s an historical relationship. One hundred years from now, cell phones might be perfectly sewn in to the phenomenological life world of the human in a way that is not unhealthy, but by then, a different, negative influence will probably have emerged.

    I find the moralistic tone of Stiegler that Galloway enlightens the reader with a little unsettling, although he admits this is difficult to hear in some of his more notable books (presumably Galloway means the Technics series). The issue really revolves around the attention of technology, and whether such an example cultivates rather than destroys attention. But this, for Stiegler (as Galloway points out) is a historical question, one that eludes a transcendental definition. Cell phones for Stiegler aren’t meant to be unendingly ‘bad’, just at a specific moment in time. I’d like to do some more reading  so I could ascertain whether Stiegler believes we can shackle this process into doing what we want it to, say, in re-settling the equilibrium faster than previous technological disruptions. His work on industrial time and our submission to technical systems of space-time suggest we might have some difficulty in doing so, at least individually. Also, Galloway answers another question (20) on what he thinks Stiegler’s response to hackers and open-source programming would be (I do love this kind of question, I mean, the guy’s alive for god sake, I’m sure he’s intimated his view on such a thing!), to which he supposes he wouldn’t a priori think it’s a good or bad thing, but would depend on whether it produces a ‘new subject position’ attentive to care and attention.

  • Digital Human

    I’ve just come across a BBC Radio 4 series called ‘Digital Human’ hosted by technology journalist Aleks Krotoski. The first series broadcast in May/June of this year and the second series is currently airing. Episode 3 is on today at 4.30pm UK time and Krotoski asks ‘how digital devices are changing our memories’. Series 1 cut across love, religion, privacy, serendipity and control, so there should be some new, maybe less predictable, themes popping up in Series 2. They’re all available to listen to online over at the Radio 4 page, here.

  • Parody Maps

    Just when Apple thought they’d had it all. Via Mad Magazine.

  • The monad and the digital dataset

    After a late lunch-break I got onto some of Latour’s more recent work again. Namely his MACOSPOL (Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics) project. Lots of cartographical metaphors being slung about here. The paper I read was a joint one accepted by the British Journal of Sociology, alongside Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin and Dominique Boullier, entitled ‘The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts: A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads’. Just as the preceding three texts, this is also available on Latour’s website. The paper’s a little tricky to boil down to just the single extract, so I’d suggest you just read it together with some accompanying videos, sites and texts (this really is what the article’s about). His CSISP talk on the same subject is here, some further work on ‘issue mapping’ (or controversy mapping, issues of concern etc.) is discussed on the CSISP blog here too. And to end, here’s another quote:

    ‘If we take into account the experience of digital navigation, what happens to the notion of ‘whole’? When we navigate on a screen, zooming in and out, changing the projection rules, aggregating and disaggregating according to different variables, what stands out is what remains constant through the shifting of viewpoints (Gibson, 1986). This is our ‘whole’. As expected, its size has shrunk considerably! Instead of being a structure more complex than its individual components, it has become a simpler set of attributes whose inner composition is constantly changing. The whole is now much smaller than the sum of its parts. To be part of a whole is no longer to ‘enter into’ a higher entity or to ‘obey’ a dispatcher (no matter if this dispatcher is a corporate body, a sui generis society, or an emergent structure), but for any given monad it is to lend part of itself to other monads without either of them losing their multiple identities.’

    Latour et al. (2012: 13-14; forthcoming in BJS)