Journal Articles by Geoffrey Hondroudakis
Technophany: A Journal for Philosophy and Technology, 2023
Technofeminism has long known that it must be a multi-scalar feminism, that is, able to think, en... more Technofeminism has long known that it must be a multi-scalar feminism, that is, able to think, encounter, and negotiate the scalar complexity of our increasingly technically mediated forms of life. In this paper, we examine two recent technofeminist formations, "new materialism" and "xenofeminism," from the perspective of contemporary theorisations of scale. We find that neither of these forms of technofeminism can, however, adequately think multi-scalarity-each fall into respective versions of what theorist of scale Zachary Horton has termed "scalar collapse," a reduction in the last instance to a "master-scale" or trans-scalar logic that subsumes scalar difference and multiplicity. We claim that a multi-scalar feminism would, conversely, be able to both mediate across complex and non-hierarchical scalar topologies of difference, and do justice to the real and insuperable differences, disjunctions, rifts, and cuts between scalar domains. Such a desire is shared by xenofeminists, though we query whether their neo-rationalist account of rational mediation can adequately account for the form of difference we take to be necessary for a multi-scalar approach. This form of difference has been described by contemporary theorists of scale as a difference of "at least two," a figure for which we find crucial resources in the philosophies of Luce Irigaray and Gilbert Simondon. Against readings of Irigaray's concept of sexuate difference as reductive or essentialist, we deploy Simondon's account of individuation to understand this sexuate "at least two" as ontogenetic-that is, as a claim to a generative limit that enables scalar becomings to unfold in indeterminate ways. This allows us to fulfil the requirements we take to be necessary for any multi-scalar account: to have fidelity to the real differences between scalar domains without forgoing their mediation; and to mediate those differences without relying upon one determining ground or totalising form of transitivity. A multi-scalar feminism would not only be able to better negotiate multi-scalar phenomena, but ultimately realise a new form of mediation - one that does not determine the world in its image but is rather open to and makes possible an opening toward radical indeterminacy and transformation.
Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, 2022
Editorial for Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, Issue 9.1, "Visuality: Truth and Poli... more Editorial for Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, Issue 9.1, "Visuality: Truth and Politics
Australian Literary Studies, 2018
The rise of steampunk – speculative-fiction works set in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian world ma... more The rise of steampunk – speculative-fiction works set in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian world marked by steam-powered technology – has led to a range of debates about what the genre is, what it does, and, more significantly for this paper, what it fails to do. Drawing on a range of steampunk works set in Australia, we explore the extent to which steampunk is able to grapple with coloniality, both in the Victorian period from which it draws and in the colonial present in which it is set. Is steampunk condemned to limit itself to a western-technocratic teleology or is it capable of critiquing or even circumventing colonial pasts? After setting out steampunk’s adherence to the problem-spaces of Euro-modernity, we focus closely on works by D.M. Cornish, Meljean Brook, and Dave Freer to highlight three ways in which authors writing Australian steampunk highlight non-hegemonic subjectivities and settings: secondary worlds and their historical distance, the mediated spaces of alternate histories, and the foregrounding of colonial brutalities in a traditional steampunk setting.
Conference Papers by Geoffrey Hondroudakis
Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Conference, 2022
Recent developments in deep learning image-generation have prompted much popular interest, with c... more Recent developments in deep learning image-generation have prompted much popular interest, with commentary on systems such as DALL-E tending to focus on the novel capacities of such technologies and their potential to alter art practices and economies. In this paper, I pursue a different question, by taking these developments as a useful example for examining the relationship of systematicity and contingency in aesthetics. Broadly, I take generative models like DALL-E as an instance of a broader cosmotechnics that privileges a specific mode of computational aesthetics, whereby contingent variation is recursively reincorporated into a larger cybernetic logic of systematization. This is a model of systematicity that actively requires and accounts for contingency in its production of a generalised aesthetic framework. I draw on Yuk Hui’s Art and Cosmotechnics (2021) and Recursivity and Contingency, and M. Beatrice Fazi’s work on computational aesthetics (2018) to argue for this systemic-logical view of how technical systems mediate the particular and the general in aesthetics. I contend that this understanding of systematicity can aid in the interpretation of not only computational art, but art practices that are now inevitably situated within this context.
ASCP Conference 2022, 2022
This paper tracks recent philosophical renewals of structural modes of thought. For some time now... more This paper tracks recent philosophical renewals of structural modes of thought. For some time now, continental philosophy and theory have been stuck in a paradigm of deflationary critique, wherein systematic metaphysics and epistemology are seen as troubled by one or another form of aporia, excess, or constitutive multiplicity. The post-structuralist criticisms of structuralist systematicity - via Derrida, Foucault, or other thinkers - have precluded more totalising impulses that sought to posit identifiable structural constraints or frames. More recent moves towards 'speculative' realisms have also foundered, their attempts at escaping the post-Kantian situation being too naïve or too reliant on mystagogical poetics. More recently, though, there has been a turn to revive structural modes of thought that incorporate and overcome the constitutive epistemic constraints of aporia and inconsistency, often by showing how these are already incorporated within structural concepts. This can be observed in several trajectories, including Yuk Hui or Beatrice Fazi's interest in computational aesthetics, the turn to Simondon from Deleuze, or the Marxist and philosophy of mind denouements of Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani. Ultimately, I identify this neo-structural turn as a revival of determinate conceptual hierarchies and formalisations via a robust engagement with what I call inconsistent systematicity.
Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference, 2021
It is now clear that the mediation of scale is a crucial question for the philosophy of science, ... more It is now clear that the mediation of scale is a crucial question for the philosophy of science, technology, and politics. This mediation is a question of abstraction: how phenomena visible at one level stretch and warp out to form more complex structures. The way abstractions scale, then, is implicit but inadequately theorised in the competing movements of contemporary philosophy. New materialisms couch abstractions in the language of assemblages: matter as such retains sole real effectivity, producing contingent arrangements of ever-evolving relations such that abstractions always remain shorthand for a dense network of more specific materialities. Historical materialisms prefer an opposition between the concrete and the abstract: a dialectic of abstract regulation of concrete specificities that serves as the accumulation-crisis-expansion circuit of capital. Neo-Rationalist philosophers contend the singular effectivity of abstract relations: intelligibility and structure above all else. Anarchist epistemologies aver the coercive biopolitical falsity of such computational creativity.
To sift through all this, I argue that the concept of scale must be better incorporated into our philosophical apparatus. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler's call for a 'hyper-epistemology of hyper-matter', Gilbert Simondon's account of individuating systems, and a range of contemporary thinkers of abstraction, I show that the mediation of complexity requires a scale-conscious understanding of fundamental relations. Too often neglected in favour of fundamentalist reductionism or hierarchy-phobic multiplicity, scale provides a conceptual anchor by which different orders and levels can be distinguished. By applying this hyper-materialist epistemology to the analysis of technicity, we can derive useful, generalisable insights regarding the scale-bound nature of mediation as such, where scale operates as the individuation of abstract structures. Scale, taken as fundamental to abstraction and immanent to material organisation, should be added to the philosophical lexicon, serving as a useful supplement for intervening in contemporary debates surrounding materialism, intelligibility, and complex systems.
Book Chapters by Geoffrey Hondroudakis
SPLM: Society for the Propagation of Libidinal Materialism, 2021
In this chapter, I sketch two eschatologies prevalent in contemporary technological imaginaries: ... more In this chapter, I sketch two eschatologies prevalent in contemporary technological imaginaries: that of the 'Desert' and the 'Tomb'. Each eschatology aligns with a tendency towards dissolution and to stagnation, respectively. These are the apocalyptic imaginaries that correlate to wider speculations regarding technological tendencies, towards de/re-territorialisation, consolidation or fracturing, monolithic institutionalism or disordered collapse.
Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image, 2021
The study of memes, as they circulate on the Internet, must move beyond the dichotomy of semiotic... more The study of memes, as they circulate on the Internet, must move beyond the dichotomy of semiotic surfaces and asignifying networks. Yet this requires theorising how the affective and semantic responses that drive meme exchange and production relate to the larger economies of information and culture. This article conceives of Internet memes as instances of real abstraction functioning to mediate between the scales of informatic/cultural infrastructures and the molecular scale of the affective. I draw on theories of scale developed by philosophers of technology and science, in which different levels within systems are considered by their disjunctive (but sometimes overlapping) frames of abstraction and legibility. This allows me to draw a distinction between the scale of large-scale structures of culture and information, and the minute affective responses these elicit in individuals. I then argue for a conception of the meme as a practice of formal circulation serving to take a derivative of collective affective responses to major cultural/informatic events and conditions. This occurs because the formal genesis and later innovation or abandonment of memes hinges on responses to their perceived circulation and exchange. The meme takes shape and gains affective resonance by virtue of its success in exchange - at the same time, its very success eventually becomes its failure as increased circulation causes the meme to become stale. Given the high degree to which affective response hinges largely on the facts of circulation, memes necessitate a way of thinking abstractions of form and meaning that situate them in the moment of (cultural) exchange. I therefore draw on Marxist theories of Real Abstraction, as articulated by Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Alberto Toscano, to describe the meme's generation of meaning via circulation. In such theories, the reality (in the sense of their material effectivity) of certain abstract formal and semantic constructs is premised upon their generation in the moment of exchange. Thus, the meme's genesis and evolution mediates to and from the scale of the informatic/cultural infrastructures, and the affective economies of online circulation, by virtue of a process of real abstraction. The meme, therefore, cannot be thought except via an economy of its circulation, expressed via its affective resonance in exchange and recognition.
Thesis Chapters by Geoffrey Hondroudakis
MA Thesis, University of Melbourne, 2023
Scale and scaling techniques have become crucial to handling the constitutive limits of systemati... more Scale and scaling techniques have become crucial to handling the constitutive limits of systematicity – that is, scale involves a revision of the systematic itself, within, through, and beyond its own limits.
While recent media-theoretical work has made great strides in thinking the functions and nature of scale, its precise philosophical status and situation within larger ontological and epistemological debates still requires clarification. Taking scale as a core question for media philosophy, this thesis argues that scale must be read in the register of what I call the ‘transsystematic’: the multifarious attempts to think and work through the constitutive partiality, contingency, and plurality of
systematicity itself. The transsystematic indexes various contexts, legible across mathematics, engineering, the sciences, politics, literature, and philosophy, where systematicity runs up against its own limits, but functions through and across those limits nevertheless. Scale becomes a key way such problems are situationally navigated: as such, it functions as a deep and nonarbitrary feature of any conceivable systematicity and their interrelation. To demonstrate how scale emerges as problem and
solution in this way, I trace the antinomic functions of scale across contemporary theorisations of climate, capital, and – centrally – computation, observing how scale continually emerges as a crucial
means for handling the impasses between collapse and difference, completeness and contingency, determination and the indeterminable that irrupt in these contexts. Scale functions here as both more
and less than an ontological or epistemological concept, neither inhering in objects, nor being adequately understood as an arbitrary cognitive artifice. To account for its antinomic functions, I argue that scale is transcendental to systematicity, a necessary condition of any possible individuation and mediation. Understood via this transsystematic revision of the transcendental, scale is the fundamental conceptual term for the structures of localisation and generalisation that mediate between
the poles of totalising collapse and irreducible difference. Ultimately, I suggest that thinking scale in this way lets us better address the transsystematic dimensions of contemporary media.
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Journal Articles by Geoffrey Hondroudakis
Conference Papers by Geoffrey Hondroudakis
To sift through all this, I argue that the concept of scale must be better incorporated into our philosophical apparatus. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler's call for a 'hyper-epistemology of hyper-matter', Gilbert Simondon's account of individuating systems, and a range of contemporary thinkers of abstraction, I show that the mediation of complexity requires a scale-conscious understanding of fundamental relations. Too often neglected in favour of fundamentalist reductionism or hierarchy-phobic multiplicity, scale provides a conceptual anchor by which different orders and levels can be distinguished. By applying this hyper-materialist epistemology to the analysis of technicity, we can derive useful, generalisable insights regarding the scale-bound nature of mediation as such, where scale operates as the individuation of abstract structures. Scale, taken as fundamental to abstraction and immanent to material organisation, should be added to the philosophical lexicon, serving as a useful supplement for intervening in contemporary debates surrounding materialism, intelligibility, and complex systems.
Book Chapters by Geoffrey Hondroudakis
Thesis Chapters by Geoffrey Hondroudakis
While recent media-theoretical work has made great strides in thinking the functions and nature of scale, its precise philosophical status and situation within larger ontological and epistemological debates still requires clarification. Taking scale as a core question for media philosophy, this thesis argues that scale must be read in the register of what I call the ‘transsystematic’: the multifarious attempts to think and work through the constitutive partiality, contingency, and plurality of
systematicity itself. The transsystematic indexes various contexts, legible across mathematics, engineering, the sciences, politics, literature, and philosophy, where systematicity runs up against its own limits, but functions through and across those limits nevertheless. Scale becomes a key way such problems are situationally navigated: as such, it functions as a deep and nonarbitrary feature of any conceivable systematicity and their interrelation. To demonstrate how scale emerges as problem and
solution in this way, I trace the antinomic functions of scale across contemporary theorisations of climate, capital, and – centrally – computation, observing how scale continually emerges as a crucial
means for handling the impasses between collapse and difference, completeness and contingency, determination and the indeterminable that irrupt in these contexts. Scale functions here as both more
and less than an ontological or epistemological concept, neither inhering in objects, nor being adequately understood as an arbitrary cognitive artifice. To account for its antinomic functions, I argue that scale is transcendental to systematicity, a necessary condition of any possible individuation and mediation. Understood via this transsystematic revision of the transcendental, scale is the fundamental conceptual term for the structures of localisation and generalisation that mediate between
the poles of totalising collapse and irreducible difference. Ultimately, I suggest that thinking scale in this way lets us better address the transsystematic dimensions of contemporary media.
To sift through all this, I argue that the concept of scale must be better incorporated into our philosophical apparatus. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler's call for a 'hyper-epistemology of hyper-matter', Gilbert Simondon's account of individuating systems, and a range of contemporary thinkers of abstraction, I show that the mediation of complexity requires a scale-conscious understanding of fundamental relations. Too often neglected in favour of fundamentalist reductionism or hierarchy-phobic multiplicity, scale provides a conceptual anchor by which different orders and levels can be distinguished. By applying this hyper-materialist epistemology to the analysis of technicity, we can derive useful, generalisable insights regarding the scale-bound nature of mediation as such, where scale operates as the individuation of abstract structures. Scale, taken as fundamental to abstraction and immanent to material organisation, should be added to the philosophical lexicon, serving as a useful supplement for intervening in contemporary debates surrounding materialism, intelligibility, and complex systems.
While recent media-theoretical work has made great strides in thinking the functions and nature of scale, its precise philosophical status and situation within larger ontological and epistemological debates still requires clarification. Taking scale as a core question for media philosophy, this thesis argues that scale must be read in the register of what I call the ‘transsystematic’: the multifarious attempts to think and work through the constitutive partiality, contingency, and plurality of
systematicity itself. The transsystematic indexes various contexts, legible across mathematics, engineering, the sciences, politics, literature, and philosophy, where systematicity runs up against its own limits, but functions through and across those limits nevertheless. Scale becomes a key way such problems are situationally navigated: as such, it functions as a deep and nonarbitrary feature of any conceivable systematicity and their interrelation. To demonstrate how scale emerges as problem and
solution in this way, I trace the antinomic functions of scale across contemporary theorisations of climate, capital, and – centrally – computation, observing how scale continually emerges as a crucial
means for handling the impasses between collapse and difference, completeness and contingency, determination and the indeterminable that irrupt in these contexts. Scale functions here as both more
and less than an ontological or epistemological concept, neither inhering in objects, nor being adequately understood as an arbitrary cognitive artifice. To account for its antinomic functions, I argue that scale is transcendental to systematicity, a necessary condition of any possible individuation and mediation. Understood via this transsystematic revision of the transcendental, scale is the fundamental conceptual term for the structures of localisation and generalisation that mediate between
the poles of totalising collapse and irreducible difference. Ultimately, I suggest that thinking scale in this way lets us better address the transsystematic dimensions of contemporary media.