The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity, and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism
... more The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity, and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism SFSIA 2024 | Paris in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme September 30 – October 5
In cognitive capitalism, the brain and the mind are the new factories of the twentieth and twenty-first century. We are no longer proletariats using our muscular bodies to labor on assembly lines in industrial sheds to produce physical products, but cognitariats (or mental laborers) using our brains and minds in front of screens to produce data. In our post-pandemic era, characterized by excessive engagement with social media and corporate owned search engines, this accumulated data is not only passively collected and organized as statistics in order to mediate public opinion and encourage online shopping, but through siloed online engagement actively shapes the brain’s materiality by sculpting its neural plastic potential and normalizing its innate variability; in turn, producing an easily governed people and subjugating the multitude. Instead of finger clicks, this late-stage of cognitive capitalism will focus on brain waves to surf the web and interact with social media. New cognitive-based technologies such as the “wired brain” and optogenetics will directly and indirectly act upon the brain's materiality and put both our conscious and unconscious thoughts to work. Like other resource extraction models, our basic mental capacities are insidiously externalized one by one by neural extractivism trending us towards a senile population. This technological escalation has repercussions for both our modes of individuation and forms of subjectification, and climate collapse is one consequence. This year’s Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Paris, organized in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'homme, will convene to both understand these new forces of algorithmic tyranny as well as how we might participate in an ontological turn from Homo sapiens towards the production of Planetary Sapiens. We humans have coevolved with the biosphere and therefore must continue to embrace the deep ecological thinking that it requires. Instead of generating technologies that poison, destroy and ravage the environment, we must embrace technics (or anti-technics) that care for it. We must give up the Anthropocentric dyad of globalization and sustainability, with its historical relation to the acceleration of capitalism, and replace it with that of the planetary, which includes all species and epistemologies, and habitability, which focuses on what is best for the continued existence of complex and diverse life on this planet. As Achille Mbembe suggests, habitability is not concerned with power or might but with life and the possibility of a radical openness. Planetarity requires decolonization and the production of cognitive justice. Towards these goals, we will retrace the body without organs (BwO), a phrase originating in the writings of Antonin Artaud and expanded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), upon a notion of the brain. The brain without organs (BrwO) is dependent upon two important epistemological frameworks: Jean Pierre Changeux’s work on the epigenesis of neuronal networks by the selective stabilization of synapses and Bernard Stiegler's concept of exosomatic organogenesis which emphasizes the role played by the evolution of technics in the developing brain. The brain without organs releases the biological brain from the organizing capacities of the endosomatic genetic code subsumed by the despotic, exosomatic, capitalist-driven techno-socio-political milieu which secondarily sculpts the brains’ neural plasticity as well as normalizing its variation creating a neurotypical population of citizens. BrwO rejects behaviorist and computational approaches to the mind and brain and understands it rather as a becoming intra-extracranial complex sculpted by the social, political, linguistic, cultural and ecological milieu in flux over deep time. Bernard Stiegler’s theory of exosomatic organogenesis describes the expansion of the frontal cortex from Homo habilis to Homo erectus as a mirroring, or maieutics, through human time. In other words, our maieutics has been constituted by Anthropocenic technics over the past two million years and thus we are burdened with an Anthropocenic brain and its thoughts. Eco-agnosia, or climate denial, is one such result. In this way, cognitive-based technologies such as ChatGPT can be understood as the most recent Anthropocenic (and Capitalocenic) technologies to join fire, spear points, social hunting, slash and burn agriculture, the steam engine and the atomic bomb, that threaten our environment and ourselves. The implications of this exploration are grand and broad. Through “The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity, and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism,” we aim to understand the potential of planetary and ecocentric transformers that adhere to the tenants of deep ecology, as understood by Arne Næss, to lead the charge against Anthropocenic logic including its inherent biases and the neural-material consequences so beautifully illustrated in the recent sci-fi movie Don't Look Up (2021). With this new thinking, we might discover the tools with which to devise these new methods and, as Isabelle Stengers has suggested, new forms of emancipating planetary governmentalities which together promote peaceful organs of cosmotechnical consciousness.
–Warren Neidich, founding director
Faculty Gabriel Alonso, Nicolas Bourriaud, Yves Citton, Emanuele Coccia, Igor Galligo, Agnieszka Kurant, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Anna Longo, Geert Lovink, Antonia Majaca, Amna Malik, Yann Moulier Boutang, Warren Neidich (founder/director), Sinziana Ravini, Laurent de Sutter, Jennifer Teets, Tiziana Terranova, Aline Wiame, and Charles Wolfe. Applications Applications for SFSIA 2024 Paris are open to students, practitioners and scholars from the fields of art (including video, photography, installation and multimedia), ecology, science and technology studies, philosophy, design, architecture, critical theory, cultural studies, film and media studies, and beyond. Please see our application for more information. About SFSIA Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is a nomadic, intensive summer academy with shifting programs in contemporary critical theory that stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art and politics. SFSIA originated in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in 2015 and then migrated to Berlin, Germany where it has been hosted by Import Projects (2016) and Spike (2017-2019). Additional programs have been hosted by Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Performance Space New York, The Brooklyn Rail, and sonsbeek20→24 in Arnhem, The Netherlands. SFSIA was founded and is directed by Warren Neidich. Sarrita Hunn is the assistant director. About Maison Suger Since its creation, Maison Suger has been seen as a hub of social exchange, fostering the sharing of approaches, methods, and knowledge. Every year, some 200 researchers cross paths within its walls. Paving the way for cross-sectional discussion, Maison Suger offers the opportunity to confront interdisciplinary issues and encourage collaboration. Maison Suger regularly hosts scientific meetings (workshops, regular seminars, conferences, and summer schools) organized by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) and its partner institutions. It also encourages encounters organized by residents as part of their activities in Paris (monthly meetings, residents' seminar, etc.).
About Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) Created in 1963 by the historian Fernand Braudel, the Fondation Maison des Science de l’Homme (FMSH) supports innovative and international research in the humanities and social sciences, and disseminates knowledge to the greatest number of people. For sixty years, the foundation has been advancing knowledge in the humanities and social sciences to better understand the complexity of the world and explore the common challenges facing our societies. By supporting nearly 400 researchers each year from around the world each year and ensuring the dissemination of a wide range of scientific resources, the FMSH is the largest humanities and social sciences foundation in France. Please see our website or contact info@sfsia.art for more information.
Les philosophies des techniques, ISTE éditions, 2023
Anna Longo, "Machines prédictives et dépassement de la métaphysique". in
Charolles, V., Lamy-Rest... more Anna Longo, "Machines prédictives et dépassement de la métaphysique". in Charolles, V., Lamy-Rested, E. (2023). Les philosophies des techniques: un levier pour l'action. United Kingdom: ISTE éditions.
In order to think of philosophy after automation, we have to ask if there is more in philosophy t... more In order to think of philosophy after automation, we have to ask if there is more in philosophy than the process of learning what philosophy is by inducing, from actual inferential practices, the future possible moves that are believed to produce philosophical truths. In the same way as the production of scientific hypothesis has been automated like a self-updating process which entails schemas of decisions and actions, philosophy itself, once conceived as a game where the truth of the statements is measured with respect to the social reproduction of inferential moves, could be automated as well.
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLII | Number 2 | 2021 | 281–303 | doi: 10.3986/fv.42.2.13, 2022
In the chapter “How the ‘true world’ finally became a fable” in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche ... more In the chapter “How the ‘true world’ finally became a fable” in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche enumerates the steps that led from the belief in the accessibility of the true world beyond the illusory world of appearances to the dismissal of this metaphysical myth. However, Nietzsche deems that the elimination of the “true world” brought about the obliteration of the apparent world as well: “The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? ... But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one!” In this paper, I will suggest that the philosophical hypothesis that we might live in a simulation can be considered to be the last and most nihilistic episode in the series of narrations about the true and apparent worlds that Nietzsche sketched.
Balkan Journal of philosophy - Vol 15, Issue 11, 2023
Balkan Journal of Philosophy, Volume 15, Issue 1, 2023. Special Issue Creativity After Automation... more Balkan Journal of Philosophy, Volume 15, Issue 1, 2023. Special Issue Creativity After Automation. https://www.pdcnet.org/bjp/content/bjp_2023_0015_0001_0013_0022 Algorithms and automated learning systems have been successfully applied to produce images, pieces of music, or texts that are appealing to humans and that are often compared to artworks. Computational technologies are able to find surprising and original solutions–new patterns that humans cannot anticipate– but does this mean we ascribe to them the kind of creativity that is expressed by human artists? Even though AI can successfully detect humans’ preferences as well as select the objects that satisfy taste, can we ascribe to them the capacity of recognizing the intrinsic value of artworks? To answer these questions, I am first going to explain the kind of creativity that is expressed by contemporary predictive systems, then, in the second part of this paper, I will try to show the difference between the creativity of algorithms and the creativity of artists by expanding on Deleuze’s reflections.
Pour faire face à la progressive dégradation des conditions de la vie sur Terre, Il est évident... more Pour faire face à la progressive dégradation des conditions de la vie sur Terre, Il est évident qu’il faudrait accélérer la résolution des insuffisances du système économique actuel pour le dépasser vers une nouvelle phase post-capitaliste : événement annoncé depuis longtemps, toujours en train d’arriver et qu’on n’a plus le temps d’attendre. Cependant, si pour certains c’est le progrès technologique qui nous permettra de résoudre les problèmes, pour d’autres c’est la technocratie et son idéal de croissance illimitée qu’il s’agit de contester. D’un côté, il serait question de se libérer, par le développement technologique, des actuelles limites posées à la production et à la satisfaction des besoins ; de l’autre, il s’agirait de sortir du paradigme destructeur de l’innovation par lequel le manque est reproduit à travers la consommation à outrance. Pour certains, le progrès est indissociable de la croissance économique ; pour d’autres l’émancipation est indissociable de la décroissance.
Bien que la philosophie de Deleuze et Guattari soit souvent utilisée pour justifier les propos des technocrates, il me semble au contraire qu’elle fournit le cadre théorétique permettant d’expliquer pourquoi la décroissance est compatible avec la créativité et l’épanouissement du plus grand nombre, thèse qui peut paraitre paradoxale à première vue. Dans ce qui suit, je vais d’abord introduire les arguments par lesquels Ray Kurzweil soutient l’impératif de la croissance via l’accélération du progrès technologique, et je montrerai ensuite comment Nick Land se sert de L’Anti-Œdipe pour appuyer des conclusions semblables. Enfin, j’expliquerai pourquoi les théories des fondateurs de l’écologie politique – Ivan Illich, Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen et André Gorz – sont compatibles avec l’ontologie proposée par Deleuze et Guattari.
Dans cet article, nous voudrions questionner plus précisément la nature de l’incertitude croissan... more Dans cet article, nous voudrions questionner plus précisément la nature de l’incertitude croissante à laquelle on est exposé aujourd’hui, pour montrer qu’il ne s’agit pas simplement d’une conséquence indésirable du développement technologique, mais de la condition fonctionnelle de ce dernier dans le cadre d’un marché compétitif où l’information est devenue le bien le plus rentable. Il s’agit ici d’examiner les effets collatéraux des nouveaux dispositifs techniques à la lumière de l’utilisation du calcul de la probabilité, et notamment du théorème de Bayes, en ce qu’il influe sur la théorie de la décision. Dans le cours de l’argumentation nous relierons la dimension politique de l’innovation technique à la question épistémique de l’agrégation de la croyance et de la préférence en économie, développée dans une première partie, avant d’approfondir dans une deuxième partie la question politique concernant l’extraction des données et l’utilisation de l’information dans les sociétés capitalistes. RL : https://www.cairn.info/revue-rue-descartes-2022-2-page-115.htm
L’information est aujourd’hui à la fois le bien de consommation le plus rentable et la ressource ... more L’information est aujourd’hui à la fois le bien de consommation le plus rentable et la ressource qu’on ne cesse de produire à travers son utilisation. Le cercle aujourd’hui très lucratif de l’économie de l’information s’alimente de l’incertitude continuellement reproduite par la disparité d’accès à l’information et par la privatisation des agences de production et diffusion. Le projet Automédia, la création d’une plateforme indépendante et visant à diffuser des informations normalement exclues des médias officiels et des réseaux sociaux plus fréquentés, est surement une solution qui peut contribuer à corriger l’asymétrie des connaissances. Comme indiqué par Callon et Muniesa, un tel projet peut offrir la possibilité d’inclure dans le calcul des informations provenant d’acteurs dont les expériences et le point de vue aident à dévoiler les stratégies manipulatoires des médias officiels ainsi que leur alliance avec le pouvoir politico-économique. Cependant, il me semble qu’un tel projet ne devrait pas négliger que l’inégalité des chances de plus en plus frappante est liée à l’incertitude causée par l’excès d’information industriellement fabriquée aujourd’hui, c’est-à-dire le bruit et l’ambiguïté provoquée par la diffusion des signaux apparemment contradictoires.
The Being of Negation in Post-Kantian Philosophy, Gregory S. Moss (ed.), Springer, 2023
Infinite judgments have been known since antiquity, yet they have been forgotten since the establ... more Infinite judgments have been known since antiquity, yet they have been forgotten since the establishment of modern logic. Infinite judgements are meant to address non-being not as a negation of being but as the determinable and undetermined ground for determination. Infinite judgments had a central role in transcendental logic where they were used to indicate the genetic conditions for the givenness of sensible matter that is suitable for the conceptual construction of phenomenal reality. This paper offers a short historical introduction to infinite judgments and an insight on their function in German idealism before seeing how they inform Deleuze's philosophy.
Multitudes 2023/2 (n° 91) 2023/2 (n° 91), Dossier Conspirations hors complots, p. 110 à 114.
htt... more Multitudes 2023/2 (n° 91) 2023/2 (n° 91), Dossier Conspirations hors complots, p. 110 à 114. https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2023-2-page-110.htm Anti-)Conspiracy Theories and the Ecological Diagonal From the point of view of cognitive logic, it is not as easy as one might think to challenge the rationality of conspiracy theories. The denouncers of conspiracy theories often share the same simplistic conception of truth with those they believe they oppose. This article suggests that it is rather on the side of a radical ecological bifurcation that we can find a real alternative to the turnstile in which conspiracy theorists and anti-conspiracy theorists are caught together.
Du point de vue de la logique cognitive, il n’est pas si facile qu’on le croit de récuser la rationalité des théories du complot. Les dénonciateurs du conspirationnisme partagent souvent une même conception simpliste de la vérité avec ceux auxquels ils croient s’opposer. Cet article suggère que c’est plutôt du côté d’une bifurcation écologique radicale qu’on pourra trouver une alternative réelle au tourniquet dans lequel sont pris ensemble conspirationnistes et anti-conspirationnistes.
The Ethos of Digital Environments - Routledge, 2021
According to classic economic theory, the market agents are fully rational Bayesian optimizers wh... more According to classic economic theory, the market agents are fully rational Bayesian optimizers who can easily calculate the best strategy to be played with respect to the strategies of the others. However, such an idealized model does not match the real market conditions where agents do not behave according to the supposed norm of rationality giving rise to far from equilibrium phenomena. This chapter discusses algorithmic simulations, evolutionary models study the dynamic of interaction among agents endowed with null cognitive capacities to show how conventional organizations can emerge spontaneously without being rationally anticipated or planned. However, such computational predictions of agents’ behavior are used to introduce deviant second order strategies which produce disparity of chances and increased uncertainty.
Construction Site for Possible Worlds - Edited By A. Beech and R. Mackay, Urbanomic 2020, 2020
We have at our disposal today the most advanced predictive technologies, and yet we are also expo... more We have at our disposal today the most advanced predictive technologies, and yet we are also exposed to unprecedent uncertainties. Risk no longer consists of a finite number of calculated dangers against which we may deploy precise measures for prevention, according to an attitude of control. As new risks constantly emerge unpredictably, forcing us into an attitude of resilience whereby plans, means, and ends can be modified at any moment, our practices are liable to lead to unsatisfactory or undesirable results rather than to the expected benefits. The uncertainty we are experiencing today is that of a situation where the risk estimation of a future decision is modified by the very activity of improving the efficacy of predictive hypotheses-an activity which, like the evolution of scientific knowledge, cannot be forecast.
The infinite judgement has long been forgotten and yet, as I am about to demonstrate, it may be u... more The infinite judgement has long been forgotten and yet, as I am about to demonstrate, it may be urgent to revive it for its critical and productive potential. An infinite judgement is neither analytic nor synthetic; it does not produce logical truths, nor true representations, but it establishes the genetic conditions of real objects and the concepts appropriate to them. It is through infinite judgements that we reach the principle of transcendental logic, in the depths of which all reality can emerge in its material and sensible singularity, making possible all generalization and formal abstraction.
«Differential calculus…is the algebra of pure thought» (Deleuze 1994:181-2). Here, in an often-ov... more «Differential calculus…is the algebra of pure thought» (Deleuze 1994:181-2). Here, in an often-overlooked passage of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze presents the model of his philosophy of difference inexplicit terms. In this context, calculus is not a simple mathematical tool but the model for the genesis of every actual reality, including thought. This model makes it possible to explain the working of the mind on the basis of sensory experience in order to produce its determinations while also grounding knowledge on a non-phenomenal reality: ideas as differentials of thought. This article will begin by clarifying how Deleuze draws from modern analysis in order to formulate the paradigm that allows him to ground knowledge on "real conditions of thought", that is, pre-individual genetic conditions rather than a priori, subjective conditions. Each engendered domain, in which dialectical Ideas of this or that order are incarnated, possesses its own calculus.
We are in the process of moving from a biopolitical society of control, where the goal was protecting and modulating the life of consumers, to a risk society. Risk here is to be understood in the sense in which it is used in games of chance where the goal is to decide how much to invest in oneself today in order to sell oneself at the best price tomorrow, all the while knowing that nothing is more volatile than value and that knowledge only expresses this degree of uncertainty with regard to the future, or, more precisely, to all calculable futures. It is through an analysis of the way romantic, intimate, and sexual relationships are constructed today on dating sites and social networks that I will attempt to show, in what follows, how we have progressively moved from control to risk.
Imagination and Potentiality: The Quest for the Real, 2020
in Open Philosophy Volume 3 (2020): Issue 1 (Jan 2020)
IMAGINATION AND POTENTIALITY: THE QUEST FO... more in Open Philosophy Volume 3 (2020): Issue 1 (Jan 2020) IMAGINATION AND POTENTIALITY: THE QUEST FOR THE REAL
We are today agents of a peculiar reality, the global network or the system for automated information production. Our condition in the global network is that of agents of the real, since we all contribute to the coproduction of this ever-evolving process. Nevertheless, I will argue, this reality is but the effect of the adoption of a notion of instrumental pragmatic rationality which denies the existence of any other possible reality as the actualization of different determinations of Reason.
This paper compares Gilles Deleuze’s and Quentin Meillassoux’s strategies for overcoming Kant’s a... more This paper compares Gilles Deleuze’s and Quentin Meillassoux’s strategies for overcoming Kant’s a priori limitation of possible experience. The former aims to account for the genesis of new concepts, while the latter aims to account for the impossibility of grounding them on any efficient cause. We will see that these two strategies depend on different mathematical backgrounds – analytical geometry and set theory – and that each of them implies a particular notion of the virtual.
in : Le paradoxe de la finitude, A. Feneuil, A. Longo, B. Trentini (ed.), éditions Mimesis, Mila... more in : Le paradoxe de la finitude, A. Feneuil, A. Longo, B. Trentini (ed.), éditions Mimesis, Milan 2019.
Un jugement infini n’est ni analytique, ni synthétique, il ne produit ni des vérités logiques, ni des représentations vraies, mais il établit les conditions de genèse d’objets réels et de concepts qui leurs sont appropriés. C’est par le jugement infini que nous accédons au principe de la logique transcendantale. Je vais commencer par une courte introduction historique du jugement infini qui nous permettra d’en comprendre le rôle central chez Kant et, surtout, chez les postkantiens Salomon Maïmon et Johann G. Fichte. J’expliquerai, par la suite, comment Hegel se voit contraint de réduire ce jugement à un non-sens afin de faire de la logique formelle un organon et de sa compréhension l’accès à l’absolu. Pour finir, je montrerai comment Gilles Deleuze revient au jugement infini et à la logique transcendantale pour refuser la dialectique hégélienne
Azimuth X - Intersections : At the Technophysics of Space , 2017
In Azimuth X (2017)
In the following we argue that a proper notion of abstract space was articul... more In Azimuth X (2017)
In the following we argue that a proper notion of abstract space was articulated, in parallel, by J.G. Fichte and F.W.J. Schelling at the beginning of the 19th century. Two obvious remarks could be make which we wish to deflect – that any notion of space in the post-Kantian tradition was merely a form of apperception, and secondly, that such a statement is unsurprising given the influence of Kant on Fichte, and Fichte on Schelling. However, we wish to argue that both Fichte and Schelling sought to more deeply ground abstract space, albeit in different means, than Kant would allow. Furthermore, Fichte and Schelling’s articulation of such a concept of space occurs during, as well as after, their intellectual split. Focusing on Schelling’s “Universal Deduction of the Dynamic Process” (1800) and Fichte’s “Erlangen Logic” (1805), we wish to argue that abstract space is the space of an original activity (natural or rational) which produces or establishes the conditions of representation of objective space: it is the real condition of the production of the a priori concept (schema) of space (following Kant). Schelling’s attempt to find the basic principles by which one could claim to construct matter dovetails productively with Fichte’s attempt to outline a geometry that would ground the Euclidean system. Here, following Jules Vuillemin (La philosophie de l’algebre), and with respect to Kant's genetic approach to geometry (the standard pre-modern way of conceiving of geometry's development by trying to find empirical solutions, i.e. drawing (imagining) geometrical figures in a pre-given space) Fichte and Schelling anticipate the structural approach that allows for the development of modern mathematics and geometry in terms of the forces of vectorial geometry (for Schelling and Grassmann) and the infinite points of projective geometry (for Fichte and Franz Kline). Thus, idealism defines space as unavoidably virtual.
The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity, and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism
... more The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity, and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism SFSIA 2024 | Paris in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme September 30 – October 5
In cognitive capitalism, the brain and the mind are the new factories of the twentieth and twenty-first century. We are no longer proletariats using our muscular bodies to labor on assembly lines in industrial sheds to produce physical products, but cognitariats (or mental laborers) using our brains and minds in front of screens to produce data. In our post-pandemic era, characterized by excessive engagement with social media and corporate owned search engines, this accumulated data is not only passively collected and organized as statistics in order to mediate public opinion and encourage online shopping, but through siloed online engagement actively shapes the brain’s materiality by sculpting its neural plastic potential and normalizing its innate variability; in turn, producing an easily governed people and subjugating the multitude. Instead of finger clicks, this late-stage of cognitive capitalism will focus on brain waves to surf the web and interact with social media. New cognitive-based technologies such as the “wired brain” and optogenetics will directly and indirectly act upon the brain's materiality and put both our conscious and unconscious thoughts to work. Like other resource extraction models, our basic mental capacities are insidiously externalized one by one by neural extractivism trending us towards a senile population. This technological escalation has repercussions for both our modes of individuation and forms of subjectification, and climate collapse is one consequence. This year’s Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Paris, organized in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'homme, will convene to both understand these new forces of algorithmic tyranny as well as how we might participate in an ontological turn from Homo sapiens towards the production of Planetary Sapiens. We humans have coevolved with the biosphere and therefore must continue to embrace the deep ecological thinking that it requires. Instead of generating technologies that poison, destroy and ravage the environment, we must embrace technics (or anti-technics) that care for it. We must give up the Anthropocentric dyad of globalization and sustainability, with its historical relation to the acceleration of capitalism, and replace it with that of the planetary, which includes all species and epistemologies, and habitability, which focuses on what is best for the continued existence of complex and diverse life on this planet. As Achille Mbembe suggests, habitability is not concerned with power or might but with life and the possibility of a radical openness. Planetarity requires decolonization and the production of cognitive justice. Towards these goals, we will retrace the body without organs (BwO), a phrase originating in the writings of Antonin Artaud and expanded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), upon a notion of the brain. The brain without organs (BrwO) is dependent upon two important epistemological frameworks: Jean Pierre Changeux’s work on the epigenesis of neuronal networks by the selective stabilization of synapses and Bernard Stiegler's concept of exosomatic organogenesis which emphasizes the role played by the evolution of technics in the developing brain. The brain without organs releases the biological brain from the organizing capacities of the endosomatic genetic code subsumed by the despotic, exosomatic, capitalist-driven techno-socio-political milieu which secondarily sculpts the brains’ neural plasticity as well as normalizing its variation creating a neurotypical population of citizens. BrwO rejects behaviorist and computational approaches to the mind and brain and understands it rather as a becoming intra-extracranial complex sculpted by the social, political, linguistic, cultural and ecological milieu in flux over deep time. Bernard Stiegler’s theory of exosomatic organogenesis describes the expansion of the frontal cortex from Homo habilis to Homo erectus as a mirroring, or maieutics, through human time. In other words, our maieutics has been constituted by Anthropocenic technics over the past two million years and thus we are burdened with an Anthropocenic brain and its thoughts. Eco-agnosia, or climate denial, is one such result. In this way, cognitive-based technologies such as ChatGPT can be understood as the most recent Anthropocenic (and Capitalocenic) technologies to join fire, spear points, social hunting, slash and burn agriculture, the steam engine and the atomic bomb, that threaten our environment and ourselves. The implications of this exploration are grand and broad. Through “The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity, and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism,” we aim to understand the potential of planetary and ecocentric transformers that adhere to the tenants of deep ecology, as understood by Arne Næss, to lead the charge against Anthropocenic logic including its inherent biases and the neural-material consequences so beautifully illustrated in the recent sci-fi movie Don't Look Up (2021). With this new thinking, we might discover the tools with which to devise these new methods and, as Isabelle Stengers has suggested, new forms of emancipating planetary governmentalities which together promote peaceful organs of cosmotechnical consciousness.
–Warren Neidich, founding director
Faculty Gabriel Alonso, Nicolas Bourriaud, Yves Citton, Emanuele Coccia, Igor Galligo, Agnieszka Kurant, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Anna Longo, Geert Lovink, Antonia Majaca, Amna Malik, Yann Moulier Boutang, Warren Neidich (founder/director), Sinziana Ravini, Laurent de Sutter, Jennifer Teets, Tiziana Terranova, Aline Wiame, and Charles Wolfe. Applications Applications for SFSIA 2024 Paris are open to students, practitioners and scholars from the fields of art (including video, photography, installation and multimedia), ecology, science and technology studies, philosophy, design, architecture, critical theory, cultural studies, film and media studies, and beyond. Please see our application for more information. About SFSIA Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is a nomadic, intensive summer academy with shifting programs in contemporary critical theory that stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art and politics. SFSIA originated in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in 2015 and then migrated to Berlin, Germany where it has been hosted by Import Projects (2016) and Spike (2017-2019). Additional programs have been hosted by Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Performance Space New York, The Brooklyn Rail, and sonsbeek20→24 in Arnhem, The Netherlands. SFSIA was founded and is directed by Warren Neidich. Sarrita Hunn is the assistant director. About Maison Suger Since its creation, Maison Suger has been seen as a hub of social exchange, fostering the sharing of approaches, methods, and knowledge. Every year, some 200 researchers cross paths within its walls. Paving the way for cross-sectional discussion, Maison Suger offers the opportunity to confront interdisciplinary issues and encourage collaboration. Maison Suger regularly hosts scientific meetings (workshops, regular seminars, conferences, and summer schools) organized by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) and its partner institutions. It also encourages encounters organized by residents as part of their activities in Paris (monthly meetings, residents' seminar, etc.).
About Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) Created in 1963 by the historian Fernand Braudel, the Fondation Maison des Science de l’Homme (FMSH) supports innovative and international research in the humanities and social sciences, and disseminates knowledge to the greatest number of people. For sixty years, the foundation has been advancing knowledge in the humanities and social sciences to better understand the complexity of the world and explore the common challenges facing our societies. By supporting nearly 400 researchers each year from around the world each year and ensuring the dissemination of a wide range of scientific resources, the FMSH is the largest humanities and social sciences foundation in France. Please see our website or contact info@sfsia.art for more information.
Les philosophies des techniques, ISTE éditions, 2023
Anna Longo, "Machines prédictives et dépassement de la métaphysique". in
Charolles, V., Lamy-Rest... more Anna Longo, "Machines prédictives et dépassement de la métaphysique". in Charolles, V., Lamy-Rested, E. (2023). Les philosophies des techniques: un levier pour l'action. United Kingdom: ISTE éditions.
In order to think of philosophy after automation, we have to ask if there is more in philosophy t... more In order to think of philosophy after automation, we have to ask if there is more in philosophy than the process of learning what philosophy is by inducing, from actual inferential practices, the future possible moves that are believed to produce philosophical truths. In the same way as the production of scientific hypothesis has been automated like a self-updating process which entails schemas of decisions and actions, philosophy itself, once conceived as a game where the truth of the statements is measured with respect to the social reproduction of inferential moves, could be automated as well.
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLII | Number 2 | 2021 | 281–303 | doi: 10.3986/fv.42.2.13, 2022
In the chapter “How the ‘true world’ finally became a fable” in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche ... more In the chapter “How the ‘true world’ finally became a fable” in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche enumerates the steps that led from the belief in the accessibility of the true world beyond the illusory world of appearances to the dismissal of this metaphysical myth. However, Nietzsche deems that the elimination of the “true world” brought about the obliteration of the apparent world as well: “The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? ... But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one!” In this paper, I will suggest that the philosophical hypothesis that we might live in a simulation can be considered to be the last and most nihilistic episode in the series of narrations about the true and apparent worlds that Nietzsche sketched.
Balkan Journal of philosophy - Vol 15, Issue 11, 2023
Balkan Journal of Philosophy, Volume 15, Issue 1, 2023. Special Issue Creativity After Automation... more Balkan Journal of Philosophy, Volume 15, Issue 1, 2023. Special Issue Creativity After Automation. https://www.pdcnet.org/bjp/content/bjp_2023_0015_0001_0013_0022 Algorithms and automated learning systems have been successfully applied to produce images, pieces of music, or texts that are appealing to humans and that are often compared to artworks. Computational technologies are able to find surprising and original solutions–new patterns that humans cannot anticipate– but does this mean we ascribe to them the kind of creativity that is expressed by human artists? Even though AI can successfully detect humans’ preferences as well as select the objects that satisfy taste, can we ascribe to them the capacity of recognizing the intrinsic value of artworks? To answer these questions, I am first going to explain the kind of creativity that is expressed by contemporary predictive systems, then, in the second part of this paper, I will try to show the difference between the creativity of algorithms and the creativity of artists by expanding on Deleuze’s reflections.
Pour faire face à la progressive dégradation des conditions de la vie sur Terre, Il est évident... more Pour faire face à la progressive dégradation des conditions de la vie sur Terre, Il est évident qu’il faudrait accélérer la résolution des insuffisances du système économique actuel pour le dépasser vers une nouvelle phase post-capitaliste : événement annoncé depuis longtemps, toujours en train d’arriver et qu’on n’a plus le temps d’attendre. Cependant, si pour certains c’est le progrès technologique qui nous permettra de résoudre les problèmes, pour d’autres c’est la technocratie et son idéal de croissance illimitée qu’il s’agit de contester. D’un côté, il serait question de se libérer, par le développement technologique, des actuelles limites posées à la production et à la satisfaction des besoins ; de l’autre, il s’agirait de sortir du paradigme destructeur de l’innovation par lequel le manque est reproduit à travers la consommation à outrance. Pour certains, le progrès est indissociable de la croissance économique ; pour d’autres l’émancipation est indissociable de la décroissance.
Bien que la philosophie de Deleuze et Guattari soit souvent utilisée pour justifier les propos des technocrates, il me semble au contraire qu’elle fournit le cadre théorétique permettant d’expliquer pourquoi la décroissance est compatible avec la créativité et l’épanouissement du plus grand nombre, thèse qui peut paraitre paradoxale à première vue. Dans ce qui suit, je vais d’abord introduire les arguments par lesquels Ray Kurzweil soutient l’impératif de la croissance via l’accélération du progrès technologique, et je montrerai ensuite comment Nick Land se sert de L’Anti-Œdipe pour appuyer des conclusions semblables. Enfin, j’expliquerai pourquoi les théories des fondateurs de l’écologie politique – Ivan Illich, Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen et André Gorz – sont compatibles avec l’ontologie proposée par Deleuze et Guattari.
Dans cet article, nous voudrions questionner plus précisément la nature de l’incertitude croissan... more Dans cet article, nous voudrions questionner plus précisément la nature de l’incertitude croissante à laquelle on est exposé aujourd’hui, pour montrer qu’il ne s’agit pas simplement d’une conséquence indésirable du développement technologique, mais de la condition fonctionnelle de ce dernier dans le cadre d’un marché compétitif où l’information est devenue le bien le plus rentable. Il s’agit ici d’examiner les effets collatéraux des nouveaux dispositifs techniques à la lumière de l’utilisation du calcul de la probabilité, et notamment du théorème de Bayes, en ce qu’il influe sur la théorie de la décision. Dans le cours de l’argumentation nous relierons la dimension politique de l’innovation technique à la question épistémique de l’agrégation de la croyance et de la préférence en économie, développée dans une première partie, avant d’approfondir dans une deuxième partie la question politique concernant l’extraction des données et l’utilisation de l’information dans les sociétés capitalistes. RL : https://www.cairn.info/revue-rue-descartes-2022-2-page-115.htm
L’information est aujourd’hui à la fois le bien de consommation le plus rentable et la ressource ... more L’information est aujourd’hui à la fois le bien de consommation le plus rentable et la ressource qu’on ne cesse de produire à travers son utilisation. Le cercle aujourd’hui très lucratif de l’économie de l’information s’alimente de l’incertitude continuellement reproduite par la disparité d’accès à l’information et par la privatisation des agences de production et diffusion. Le projet Automédia, la création d’une plateforme indépendante et visant à diffuser des informations normalement exclues des médias officiels et des réseaux sociaux plus fréquentés, est surement une solution qui peut contribuer à corriger l’asymétrie des connaissances. Comme indiqué par Callon et Muniesa, un tel projet peut offrir la possibilité d’inclure dans le calcul des informations provenant d’acteurs dont les expériences et le point de vue aident à dévoiler les stratégies manipulatoires des médias officiels ainsi que leur alliance avec le pouvoir politico-économique. Cependant, il me semble qu’un tel projet ne devrait pas négliger que l’inégalité des chances de plus en plus frappante est liée à l’incertitude causée par l’excès d’information industriellement fabriquée aujourd’hui, c’est-à-dire le bruit et l’ambiguïté provoquée par la diffusion des signaux apparemment contradictoires.
The Being of Negation in Post-Kantian Philosophy, Gregory S. Moss (ed.), Springer, 2023
Infinite judgments have been known since antiquity, yet they have been forgotten since the establ... more Infinite judgments have been known since antiquity, yet they have been forgotten since the establishment of modern logic. Infinite judgements are meant to address non-being not as a negation of being but as the determinable and undetermined ground for determination. Infinite judgments had a central role in transcendental logic where they were used to indicate the genetic conditions for the givenness of sensible matter that is suitable for the conceptual construction of phenomenal reality. This paper offers a short historical introduction to infinite judgments and an insight on their function in German idealism before seeing how they inform Deleuze's philosophy.
Multitudes 2023/2 (n° 91) 2023/2 (n° 91), Dossier Conspirations hors complots, p. 110 à 114.
htt... more Multitudes 2023/2 (n° 91) 2023/2 (n° 91), Dossier Conspirations hors complots, p. 110 à 114. https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2023-2-page-110.htm Anti-)Conspiracy Theories and the Ecological Diagonal From the point of view of cognitive logic, it is not as easy as one might think to challenge the rationality of conspiracy theories. The denouncers of conspiracy theories often share the same simplistic conception of truth with those they believe they oppose. This article suggests that it is rather on the side of a radical ecological bifurcation that we can find a real alternative to the turnstile in which conspiracy theorists and anti-conspiracy theorists are caught together.
Du point de vue de la logique cognitive, il n’est pas si facile qu’on le croit de récuser la rationalité des théories du complot. Les dénonciateurs du conspirationnisme partagent souvent une même conception simpliste de la vérité avec ceux auxquels ils croient s’opposer. Cet article suggère que c’est plutôt du côté d’une bifurcation écologique radicale qu’on pourra trouver une alternative réelle au tourniquet dans lequel sont pris ensemble conspirationnistes et anti-conspirationnistes.
The Ethos of Digital Environments - Routledge, 2021
According to classic economic theory, the market agents are fully rational Bayesian optimizers wh... more According to classic economic theory, the market agents are fully rational Bayesian optimizers who can easily calculate the best strategy to be played with respect to the strategies of the others. However, such an idealized model does not match the real market conditions where agents do not behave according to the supposed norm of rationality giving rise to far from equilibrium phenomena. This chapter discusses algorithmic simulations, evolutionary models study the dynamic of interaction among agents endowed with null cognitive capacities to show how conventional organizations can emerge spontaneously without being rationally anticipated or planned. However, such computational predictions of agents’ behavior are used to introduce deviant second order strategies which produce disparity of chances and increased uncertainty.
Construction Site for Possible Worlds - Edited By A. Beech and R. Mackay, Urbanomic 2020, 2020
We have at our disposal today the most advanced predictive technologies, and yet we are also expo... more We have at our disposal today the most advanced predictive technologies, and yet we are also exposed to unprecedent uncertainties. Risk no longer consists of a finite number of calculated dangers against which we may deploy precise measures for prevention, according to an attitude of control. As new risks constantly emerge unpredictably, forcing us into an attitude of resilience whereby plans, means, and ends can be modified at any moment, our practices are liable to lead to unsatisfactory or undesirable results rather than to the expected benefits. The uncertainty we are experiencing today is that of a situation where the risk estimation of a future decision is modified by the very activity of improving the efficacy of predictive hypotheses-an activity which, like the evolution of scientific knowledge, cannot be forecast.
The infinite judgement has long been forgotten and yet, as I am about to demonstrate, it may be u... more The infinite judgement has long been forgotten and yet, as I am about to demonstrate, it may be urgent to revive it for its critical and productive potential. An infinite judgement is neither analytic nor synthetic; it does not produce logical truths, nor true representations, but it establishes the genetic conditions of real objects and the concepts appropriate to them. It is through infinite judgements that we reach the principle of transcendental logic, in the depths of which all reality can emerge in its material and sensible singularity, making possible all generalization and formal abstraction.
«Differential calculus…is the algebra of pure thought» (Deleuze 1994:181-2). Here, in an often-ov... more «Differential calculus…is the algebra of pure thought» (Deleuze 1994:181-2). Here, in an often-overlooked passage of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze presents the model of his philosophy of difference inexplicit terms. In this context, calculus is not a simple mathematical tool but the model for the genesis of every actual reality, including thought. This model makes it possible to explain the working of the mind on the basis of sensory experience in order to produce its determinations while also grounding knowledge on a non-phenomenal reality: ideas as differentials of thought. This article will begin by clarifying how Deleuze draws from modern analysis in order to formulate the paradigm that allows him to ground knowledge on "real conditions of thought", that is, pre-individual genetic conditions rather than a priori, subjective conditions. Each engendered domain, in which dialectical Ideas of this or that order are incarnated, possesses its own calculus.
We are in the process of moving from a biopolitical society of control, where the goal was protecting and modulating the life of consumers, to a risk society. Risk here is to be understood in the sense in which it is used in games of chance where the goal is to decide how much to invest in oneself today in order to sell oneself at the best price tomorrow, all the while knowing that nothing is more volatile than value and that knowledge only expresses this degree of uncertainty with regard to the future, or, more precisely, to all calculable futures. It is through an analysis of the way romantic, intimate, and sexual relationships are constructed today on dating sites and social networks that I will attempt to show, in what follows, how we have progressively moved from control to risk.
Imagination and Potentiality: The Quest for the Real, 2020
in Open Philosophy Volume 3 (2020): Issue 1 (Jan 2020)
IMAGINATION AND POTENTIALITY: THE QUEST FO... more in Open Philosophy Volume 3 (2020): Issue 1 (Jan 2020) IMAGINATION AND POTENTIALITY: THE QUEST FOR THE REAL
We are today agents of a peculiar reality, the global network or the system for automated information production. Our condition in the global network is that of agents of the real, since we all contribute to the coproduction of this ever-evolving process. Nevertheless, I will argue, this reality is but the effect of the adoption of a notion of instrumental pragmatic rationality which denies the existence of any other possible reality as the actualization of different determinations of Reason.
This paper compares Gilles Deleuze’s and Quentin Meillassoux’s strategies for overcoming Kant’s a... more This paper compares Gilles Deleuze’s and Quentin Meillassoux’s strategies for overcoming Kant’s a priori limitation of possible experience. The former aims to account for the genesis of new concepts, while the latter aims to account for the impossibility of grounding them on any efficient cause. We will see that these two strategies depend on different mathematical backgrounds – analytical geometry and set theory – and that each of them implies a particular notion of the virtual.
in : Le paradoxe de la finitude, A. Feneuil, A. Longo, B. Trentini (ed.), éditions Mimesis, Mila... more in : Le paradoxe de la finitude, A. Feneuil, A. Longo, B. Trentini (ed.), éditions Mimesis, Milan 2019.
Un jugement infini n’est ni analytique, ni synthétique, il ne produit ni des vérités logiques, ni des représentations vraies, mais il établit les conditions de genèse d’objets réels et de concepts qui leurs sont appropriés. C’est par le jugement infini que nous accédons au principe de la logique transcendantale. Je vais commencer par une courte introduction historique du jugement infini qui nous permettra d’en comprendre le rôle central chez Kant et, surtout, chez les postkantiens Salomon Maïmon et Johann G. Fichte. J’expliquerai, par la suite, comment Hegel se voit contraint de réduire ce jugement à un non-sens afin de faire de la logique formelle un organon et de sa compréhension l’accès à l’absolu. Pour finir, je montrerai comment Gilles Deleuze revient au jugement infini et à la logique transcendantale pour refuser la dialectique hégélienne
Azimuth X - Intersections : At the Technophysics of Space , 2017
In Azimuth X (2017)
In the following we argue that a proper notion of abstract space was articul... more In Azimuth X (2017)
In the following we argue that a proper notion of abstract space was articulated, in parallel, by J.G. Fichte and F.W.J. Schelling at the beginning of the 19th century. Two obvious remarks could be make which we wish to deflect – that any notion of space in the post-Kantian tradition was merely a form of apperception, and secondly, that such a statement is unsurprising given the influence of Kant on Fichte, and Fichte on Schelling. However, we wish to argue that both Fichte and Schelling sought to more deeply ground abstract space, albeit in different means, than Kant would allow. Furthermore, Fichte and Schelling’s articulation of such a concept of space occurs during, as well as after, their intellectual split. Focusing on Schelling’s “Universal Deduction of the Dynamic Process” (1800) and Fichte’s “Erlangen Logic” (1805), we wish to argue that abstract space is the space of an original activity (natural or rational) which produces or establishes the conditions of representation of objective space: it is the real condition of the production of the a priori concept (schema) of space (following Kant). Schelling’s attempt to find the basic principles by which one could claim to construct matter dovetails productively with Fichte’s attempt to outline a geometry that would ground the Euclidean system. Here, following Jules Vuillemin (La philosophie de l’algebre), and with respect to Kant's genetic approach to geometry (the standard pre-modern way of conceiving of geometry's development by trying to find empirical solutions, i.e. drawing (imagining) geometrical figures in a pre-given space) Fichte and Schelling anticipate the structural approach that allows for the development of modern mathematics and geometry in terms of the forces of vectorial geometry (for Schelling and Grassmann) and the infinite points of projective geometry (for Fichte and Franz Kline). Thus, idealism defines space as unavoidably virtual.
Le Paradoxe de la finitude : représentations, conditions, dépassements, dir. A. Feneuil, A. Longo, B. Trentini, Milan, Éditions Mimesis, 2019., 2019
Cet ouvrage présente une pluralité de réflexions qui attestent la centralité du paradoxe de la fi... more Cet ouvrage présente une pluralité de réflexions qui attestent la centralité du paradoxe de la finitude, figure centrale ou schème structurant de ce que certains identifient aujourd’hui, dans le champ philosophique aussi bien qu’esthétique, comme un retour à la spéculation. Et c’est parce que ce paradoxe a acquis aujourd’hui cette centralité nouvelle qu’il est possible de porter un regard neuf sur la tradition philosophique, d’en déceler les marques antérieures, mais aussi d’aller chercher dans cette tradition de quoi penser et féconder les développements actuels.
Anna Longo and Sarah De sanctis editors.
It seems that the time has come for philosophy to break... more Anna Longo and Sarah De sanctis editors.
It seems that the time has come for philosophy to break the spell of correlationism. But how? The present book gathers essays by philosophers and younger scholars sharing an interest in the recent speculative turn and contemporary forms of realism. They discuss possible strategies to access a subject-independent reality, proposing original insights and alternative solutions. The contributors include Erik Bordeleau, Gabriel Catren, Fabio Gironi, Paul Ennis, Liam Sprod, Luca Taddio, Sjoerd Van Tuinen & Matthijs Kouw, Ben Woodard, Andrea Zhok. The book also features interviews with Lee Braver, Maurizio Ferraris, Tristan Garcia and Graham Harman.
Mimesis international 2014
http://mimesisinternational.com/breaking-the-spell-contemporary-realism-under-discussion/
Send me a message if you want to get the whole book
Quentin Meillassoux and Anna Longo.
Time without Becoming is the text of a lecture Quentin Meill... more Quentin Meillassoux and Anna Longo.
Time without Becoming is the text of a lecture Quentin Meillassoux gave at the Middlesex University in May 2008. He makes a summary of the arguments he employed in After Finitude to overcome correlationism from the inside and to dismiss philosophies of becoming, such as absolute idealism and vitalism. In particular, he explains the specificity of his “speculative materialism” by supporting the thesis of the reciprocal exteriority of matter and mind. In her contribution, Anna Longo challenges this perspective taking into account the issue of the genesis of the transcendental in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy.
Anna Longo and Roberto Masiero editors.
Texts by Brian Massumi, Quentin Meillassoux, Isabelle St... more Anna Longo and Roberto Masiero editors.
Texts by Brian Massumi, Quentin Meillassoux, Isabelle Stengers, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Cary Wolfe, R. L. Rutsky, Adrian MacKenzie, Dominique Lestel.
edited issue of
CAHIERS CRITIQUES DE PHILOSOPHIE
N 19 - 2018
- Cezary WODZIŃSKI : Pourquoi (n’)y... more edited issue of CAHIERS CRITIQUES DE PHILOSOPHIE N 19 - 2018
- Cezary WODZIŃSKI : Pourquoi (n’)y a-t-il rien plutôt que quelque chose… Projet d’ontologie apophatique - Humberto GIANNINI IŇÍGUEZ : Sur le pardon que l’on demande et le pardon que l’on donne... - Alain BADIOU ET Ben WOODARD : Entretien à propos du réalisme spéculatif - Ben WOODARD : L’échelle de la nature : mesurer la Conceptualisation entre Brassier et Grant - Louis MORELLE : Spéculation et comparaison : sur les formes contemporains de l’ontologie - Anna LONGO : Une esthétique spéculative est-elle possible ? - Yann SCHMITT : Si la contingence est absolue, le désespoir aussi -Pierre-Alexandre FRADET : Sortir du cercle corrélationnel : un examen critique de la tentative de Quentin Meillassoux - Laurent BARONIAN : Le sujet de la science dans le matérialisme (V2) - Carlos LEMA : Propédeutique du réalisme spéculatif : de la résistance corrélationnelle à la réalité transfinie, ou comment penser un absolu non-dogmatique - Rahma KHAZAM : De l’objet à l’hyper-objet : l’art après le « New Art History » - Patrick VAUDAY : Passages : être philosophe ou faire de la philosophie ?
Modern probability theory, in particular Bayesian methods, cannot be separated from decision theory. This is evident in the work of the mathematicians that elaborated the paradigm of Bayesian inductive reasoning in the first half of the 20th Century: Frank Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti and Leonard Savage. In particular, Savage established the model of the rational agent that grounds Friedman’s economic theory. It is this same model that informs contemporary AI. To clarify the relation between rational decision theory and the learning paradigm that allows contemporary AI to develop predictive theories almost autonomously, I will introduce the first attempt to automatize inductive reasoning by referring to the Bayesian Ray Solomonoff’s theory of algorithmic probability. This will help me to deal with Ray Kurzweil’s theory of technological singularity and to explain why he claims that AI’s learning process leads to increasing order and complexity while being an unpredictable process the results and the effects of which cannot be anticipated.
http://www.mg-lj.si/en/events/1917/conference-concepts-hegels-aesthetics/
PANEL 2 | Art and Freed... more http://www.mg-lj.si/en/events/1917/conference-concepts-hegels-aesthetics/ PANEL 2 | Art and Freedom | Anna Longo: Freedom, Reason, and Art: Fichte vs. Hegel; Stefan Hölscher: Hegel on Painting: Subjects Hiding behind Surfaces; Rok Benčin: Beggars of the Ideal: Ranciere’s Hegel; chair: Martin Hergouth
L’architecture est traditionnellement considérée comme un art de l’espace. Cependant, aujourd’hui... more L’architecture est traditionnellement considérée comme un art de l’espace. Cependant, aujourd’hui, les technologies computationnelles sont en train d’introduire le temps dans l’architecture, des construire des monuments comme des espace-temps eux même variables, muables, vivants. De plus, il me semble que les techniques computationnelles permettent de sortir du paradigme platoniciens des formes idéales et éternelles pour penser une genèse processuelle impliquant les notions de différence et devenir.
The Genesis of the Transcendental, Symposium, February 12th and 13th 2016, Université Paris 1, C... more The Genesis of the Transcendental, Symposium, February 12th and 13th 2016, Université Paris 1, Centre St. Charles.
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Papers by Anna Longo
SFSIA 2024 | Paris
in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme
September 30 – October 5
Priority deadline: July 28
Final deadline: August 18
Course is in English
Apply here:
https://sfsia.art/2024-paris/2024-paris-application/
In cognitive capitalism, the brain and the mind are the new factories of the twentieth and twenty-first century. We are no longer proletariats using our muscular bodies to labor on assembly lines in industrial sheds to produce physical products, but cognitariats (or mental laborers) using our brains and minds in front of screens to produce data. In our post-pandemic era, characterized by excessive engagement with social media and corporate owned search engines, this accumulated data is not only passively collected and organized as statistics in order to mediate public opinion and encourage online shopping, but through siloed online engagement actively shapes the brain’s materiality by sculpting its neural plastic potential and normalizing its innate variability; in turn, producing an easily governed people and subjugating the multitude. Instead of finger clicks, this late-stage of cognitive capitalism will focus on brain waves to surf the web and interact with social media. New cognitive-based technologies such as the “wired brain” and optogenetics will directly and indirectly act upon the brain's materiality and put both our conscious and unconscious thoughts to work. Like other resource extraction models, our basic mental capacities are insidiously externalized one by one by neural extractivism trending us towards a senile population. This technological escalation has repercussions for both our modes of individuation and forms of subjectification, and climate collapse is one consequence.
This year’s Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Paris, organized in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'homme, will convene to both understand these new forces of algorithmic tyranny as well as how we might participate in an ontological turn from Homo sapiens towards the production of Planetary Sapiens. We humans have coevolved with the biosphere and therefore must continue to embrace the deep ecological thinking that it requires. Instead of generating technologies that poison, destroy and ravage the environment, we must embrace technics (or anti-technics) that care for it. We must give up the Anthropocentric dyad of globalization and sustainability, with its historical relation to the acceleration of capitalism, and replace it with that of the planetary, which includes all species and epistemologies, and habitability, which focuses on what is best for the continued existence of complex and diverse life on this planet. As Achille Mbembe suggests, habitability is not concerned with power or might but with life and the possibility of a radical openness. Planetarity requires decolonization and the production of cognitive justice.
Towards these goals, we will retrace the body without organs (BwO), a phrase originating in the writings of Antonin Artaud and expanded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), upon a notion of the brain. The brain without organs (BrwO) is dependent upon two important epistemological frameworks: Jean Pierre Changeux’s work on the epigenesis of neuronal networks by the selective stabilization of synapses and Bernard Stiegler's concept of exosomatic organogenesis which emphasizes the role played by the evolution of technics in the developing brain. The brain without organs releases the biological brain from the organizing capacities of the endosomatic genetic code subsumed by the despotic, exosomatic, capitalist-driven techno-socio-political milieu which secondarily sculpts the brains’ neural plasticity as well as normalizing its variation creating a neurotypical population of citizens. BrwO rejects behaviorist and computational approaches to the mind and brain and understands it rather as a becoming intra-extracranial complex sculpted by the social, political, linguistic, cultural and ecological milieu in flux over deep time. Bernard Stiegler’s theory of exosomatic organogenesis describes the expansion of the frontal cortex from Homo habilis to Homo erectus as a mirroring, or maieutics, through human time. In other words, our maieutics has been constituted by Anthropocenic technics over the past two million years and thus we are burdened with an Anthropocenic brain and its thoughts. Eco-agnosia, or climate denial, is one such result. In this way, cognitive-based technologies such as ChatGPT can be understood as the most recent Anthropocenic (and Capitalocenic) technologies to join fire, spear points, social hunting, slash and burn agriculture, the steam engine and the atomic bomb, that threaten our environment and ourselves.
The implications of this exploration are grand and broad. Through “The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity, and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism,” we aim to understand the potential of planetary and ecocentric transformers that adhere to the tenants of deep ecology, as understood by Arne Næss, to lead the charge against Anthropocenic logic including its inherent biases and the neural-material consequences so beautifully illustrated in the recent sci-fi movie Don't Look Up (2021). With this new thinking, we might discover the tools with which to devise these new methods and, as Isabelle Stengers has suggested, new forms of emancipating planetary governmentalities which together promote peaceful organs of cosmotechnical consciousness.
–Warren Neidich, founding director
Faculty
Gabriel Alonso, Nicolas Bourriaud, Yves Citton, Emanuele Coccia, Igor Galligo, Agnieszka Kurant, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Anna Longo, Geert Lovink, Antonia Majaca, Amna Malik, Yann Moulier Boutang, Warren Neidich (founder/director), Sinziana Ravini, Laurent de Sutter, Jennifer Teets, Tiziana Terranova, Aline Wiame, and Charles Wolfe.
Applications
Applications for SFSIA 2024 Paris are open to students, practitioners and scholars from the fields of art (including video, photography, installation and multimedia), ecology, science and technology studies, philosophy, design, architecture, critical theory, cultural studies, film and media studies, and beyond. Please see our application for more information.
About SFSIA
Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is a nomadic, intensive summer academy with shifting programs in contemporary critical theory that stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art and politics. SFSIA originated in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in 2015 and then migrated to Berlin, Germany where it has been hosted by Import Projects (2016) and Spike (2017-2019). Additional programs have been hosted by Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Performance Space New York, The Brooklyn Rail, and sonsbeek20→24 in Arnhem, The Netherlands. SFSIA was founded and is directed by Warren Neidich. Sarrita Hunn is the assistant director.
About Maison Suger
Since its creation, Maison Suger has been seen as a hub of social exchange, fostering the sharing of approaches, methods, and knowledge. Every year, some 200 researchers cross paths within its walls. Paving the way for cross-sectional discussion, Maison Suger offers the opportunity to confront interdisciplinary issues and encourage collaboration. Maison Suger regularly hosts scientific meetings (workshops, regular seminars, conferences, and summer schools) organized by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) and its partner institutions. It also encourages encounters organized by residents as part of their activities in Paris (monthly meetings, residents' seminar, etc.).
About Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH)
Created in 1963 by the historian Fernand Braudel, the Fondation Maison des Science de l’Homme (FMSH) supports innovative and international research in the humanities and social sciences, and disseminates knowledge to the greatest number of people. For sixty years, the foundation has been advancing knowledge in the humanities and social sciences to better understand the complexity of the world and explore the common challenges facing our societies. By supporting nearly 400 researchers each year from around the world each year and ensuring the dissemination of a wide range of scientific resources, the FMSH is the largest humanities and social sciences foundation in France.
Please see our website or contact info@sfsia.art for more information.
Charolles, V., Lamy-Rested, E. (2023). Les philosophies des techniques: un levier pour l'action. United Kingdom: ISTE éditions.
Algorithms and automated learning systems have been successfully applied to produce images, pieces of music, or texts that are appealing to humans and that are often compared to artworks. Computational technologies are able to find surprising and original solutions–new patterns that humans cannot anticipate– but does this mean we ascribe to them the kind of creativity that is expressed by human artists? Even though AI can successfully detect humans’ preferences as well as select the objects that satisfy taste, can we ascribe to them the capacity of recognizing the intrinsic value of artworks? To answer these questions, I am first going to explain the kind of creativity that is expressed by contemporary predictive systems, then, in the second part of this paper, I will try to show the difference between the creativity of algorithms and the creativity of artists by expanding on Deleuze’s reflections.
Bien que la philosophie de Deleuze et Guattari soit souvent utilisée pour justifier les propos des technocrates, il me semble au contraire qu’elle fournit le cadre théorétique permettant d’expliquer pourquoi la décroissance est compatible avec la créativité et l’épanouissement du plus grand nombre, thèse qui peut paraitre paradoxale à première vue. Dans ce qui suit, je vais d’abord introduire les arguments par lesquels Ray Kurzweil soutient l’impératif de la croissance via l’accélération du progrès technologique, et je montrerai ensuite comment Nick Land se sert de L’Anti-Œdipe pour appuyer des conclusions semblables. Enfin, j’expliquerai pourquoi les théories des fondateurs de l’écologie politique – Ivan Illich, Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen et André Gorz – sont compatibles avec l’ontologie proposée par Deleuze et Guattari.
RL : https://www.cairn.info/revue-rue-descartes-2022-2-page-115.htm
https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2023-2-page-110.htm
Anti-)Conspiracy Theories and the Ecological Diagonal
From the point of view of cognitive logic, it is not as easy as one might think to challenge the rationality of conspiracy theories. The denouncers of conspiracy theories often share the same simplistic conception of truth with those they believe they oppose. This article suggests that it is rather on the side of a radical ecological bifurcation that we can find a real alternative to the turnstile in which conspiracy theorists and anti-conspiracy theorists are caught together.
Du point de vue de la logique cognitive, il n’est pas si facile qu’on le croit de récuser la rationalité des théories du complot. Les dénonciateurs du conspirationnisme partagent souvent une même conception simpliste de la vérité avec ceux auxquels ils croient s’opposer. Cet article suggère que c’est plutôt du côté d’une bifurcation écologique radicale qu’on pourra trouver une alternative réelle au tourniquet dans lequel sont pris ensemble conspirationnistes et anti-conspirationnistes.
We are in the process of moving from a biopolitical society of control, where the goal was protecting and modulating the life of consumers, to a risk society. Risk here is to be understood in the sense in which it is used in games of chance where the goal is to decide how much to invest in oneself today in order to sell oneself at the best price tomorrow, all the while knowing that nothing is more volatile than value and that knowledge only expresses this degree of uncertainty with regard to the future, or, more precisely, to all calculable futures. It is through an analysis of the way romantic, intimate, and sexual relationships are constructed today on dating sites and social networks that I will attempt to show, in what follows, how we have progressively moved from control to risk.
IMAGINATION AND POTENTIALITY: THE QUEST FOR THE REAL
https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/opphil/opphil-overview.xml?format=INT&tab_body=latestIssueToc-78033
Abstract
We are today agents of a peculiar reality, the global network or the system for automated information production. Our condition in the global network is that of agents of the real, since we all contribute to the coproduction of this ever-evolving process. Nevertheless, I will argue, this reality is but the effect of the adoption of a notion of instrumental pragmatic rationality which denies the existence of any other possible reality as the actualization of different determinations of Reason.
Un jugement infini n’est ni analytique, ni synthétique, il ne produit ni des vérités logiques, ni des représentations vraies, mais il établit les conditions de genèse d’objets réels et de concepts qui leurs sont appropriés. C’est par le jugement infini que nous accédons au principe de la logique transcendantale. Je vais commencer par une courte introduction historique du jugement infini qui nous permettra d’en comprendre le rôle central chez Kant et, surtout, chez les
postkantiens Salomon Maïmon et Johann G. Fichte. J’expliquerai, par la suite, comment Hegel se voit contraint de réduire ce jugement à un non-sens afin de faire de la logique formelle un organon et de sa compréhension l’accès à l’absolu. Pour finir, je montrerai comment Gilles Deleuze revient au jugement infini et à la logique transcendantale pour refuser la dialectique hégélienne
In the following we argue that a proper notion of abstract space was articulated, in parallel, by J.G. Fichte and F.W.J. Schelling at the beginning of the 19th century. Two obvious remarks could be make which we wish to deflect – that any notion of space in the post-Kantian tradition was merely a form of apperception, and secondly, that such a statement is unsurprising given the influence of Kant on Fichte, and Fichte on Schelling. However, we wish to argue that both Fichte and Schelling sought to more deeply ground abstract space, albeit in different means, than Kant would allow. Furthermore, Fichte and Schelling’s articulation of such a concept of space occurs during, as well as after, their intellectual split. Focusing on Schelling’s “Universal Deduction of the Dynamic Process” (1800) and Fichte’s “Erlangen Logic” (1805), we wish to argue that abstract space is the space of an original activity (natural or rational) which produces or establishes the conditions of representation of objective space: it is the real condition of the production of the a priori concept (schema) of space (following Kant). Schelling’s attempt to find the basic principles by which one could claim to construct matter dovetails productively with Fichte’s attempt to outline a geometry that would ground the Euclidean system. Here, following Jules Vuillemin (La philosophie de l’algebre), and with respect to Kant's genetic approach to geometry (the standard pre-modern way of conceiving of geometry's development by trying to find empirical solutions, i.e. drawing (imagining) geometrical figures in a pre-given space) Fichte and Schelling anticipate the structural approach that allows for the development of modern mathematics and geometry in terms of the forces of vectorial geometry (for Schelling and Grassmann) and the infinite points of projective geometry (for Fichte and Franz Kline). Thus, idealism defines space as unavoidably virtual.
SFSIA 2024 | Paris
in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme
September 30 – October 5
Priority deadline: July 28
Final deadline: August 18
Course is in English
Apply here:
https://sfsia.art/2024-paris/2024-paris-application/
In cognitive capitalism, the brain and the mind are the new factories of the twentieth and twenty-first century. We are no longer proletariats using our muscular bodies to labor on assembly lines in industrial sheds to produce physical products, but cognitariats (or mental laborers) using our brains and minds in front of screens to produce data. In our post-pandemic era, characterized by excessive engagement with social media and corporate owned search engines, this accumulated data is not only passively collected and organized as statistics in order to mediate public opinion and encourage online shopping, but through siloed online engagement actively shapes the brain’s materiality by sculpting its neural plastic potential and normalizing its innate variability; in turn, producing an easily governed people and subjugating the multitude. Instead of finger clicks, this late-stage of cognitive capitalism will focus on brain waves to surf the web and interact with social media. New cognitive-based technologies such as the “wired brain” and optogenetics will directly and indirectly act upon the brain's materiality and put both our conscious and unconscious thoughts to work. Like other resource extraction models, our basic mental capacities are insidiously externalized one by one by neural extractivism trending us towards a senile population. This technological escalation has repercussions for both our modes of individuation and forms of subjectification, and climate collapse is one consequence.
This year’s Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Paris, organized in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'homme, will convene to both understand these new forces of algorithmic tyranny as well as how we might participate in an ontological turn from Homo sapiens towards the production of Planetary Sapiens. We humans have coevolved with the biosphere and therefore must continue to embrace the deep ecological thinking that it requires. Instead of generating technologies that poison, destroy and ravage the environment, we must embrace technics (or anti-technics) that care for it. We must give up the Anthropocentric dyad of globalization and sustainability, with its historical relation to the acceleration of capitalism, and replace it with that of the planetary, which includes all species and epistemologies, and habitability, which focuses on what is best for the continued existence of complex and diverse life on this planet. As Achille Mbembe suggests, habitability is not concerned with power or might but with life and the possibility of a radical openness. Planetarity requires decolonization and the production of cognitive justice.
Towards these goals, we will retrace the body without organs (BwO), a phrase originating in the writings of Antonin Artaud and expanded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), upon a notion of the brain. The brain without organs (BrwO) is dependent upon two important epistemological frameworks: Jean Pierre Changeux’s work on the epigenesis of neuronal networks by the selective stabilization of synapses and Bernard Stiegler's concept of exosomatic organogenesis which emphasizes the role played by the evolution of technics in the developing brain. The brain without organs releases the biological brain from the organizing capacities of the endosomatic genetic code subsumed by the despotic, exosomatic, capitalist-driven techno-socio-political milieu which secondarily sculpts the brains’ neural plasticity as well as normalizing its variation creating a neurotypical population of citizens. BrwO rejects behaviorist and computational approaches to the mind and brain and understands it rather as a becoming intra-extracranial complex sculpted by the social, political, linguistic, cultural and ecological milieu in flux over deep time. Bernard Stiegler’s theory of exosomatic organogenesis describes the expansion of the frontal cortex from Homo habilis to Homo erectus as a mirroring, or maieutics, through human time. In other words, our maieutics has been constituted by Anthropocenic technics over the past two million years and thus we are burdened with an Anthropocenic brain and its thoughts. Eco-agnosia, or climate denial, is one such result. In this way, cognitive-based technologies such as ChatGPT can be understood as the most recent Anthropocenic (and Capitalocenic) technologies to join fire, spear points, social hunting, slash and burn agriculture, the steam engine and the atomic bomb, that threaten our environment and ourselves.
The implications of this exploration are grand and broad. Through “The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity, and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism,” we aim to understand the potential of planetary and ecocentric transformers that adhere to the tenants of deep ecology, as understood by Arne Næss, to lead the charge against Anthropocenic logic including its inherent biases and the neural-material consequences so beautifully illustrated in the recent sci-fi movie Don't Look Up (2021). With this new thinking, we might discover the tools with which to devise these new methods and, as Isabelle Stengers has suggested, new forms of emancipating planetary governmentalities which together promote peaceful organs of cosmotechnical consciousness.
–Warren Neidich, founding director
Faculty
Gabriel Alonso, Nicolas Bourriaud, Yves Citton, Emanuele Coccia, Igor Galligo, Agnieszka Kurant, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Anna Longo, Geert Lovink, Antonia Majaca, Amna Malik, Yann Moulier Boutang, Warren Neidich (founder/director), Sinziana Ravini, Laurent de Sutter, Jennifer Teets, Tiziana Terranova, Aline Wiame, and Charles Wolfe.
Applications
Applications for SFSIA 2024 Paris are open to students, practitioners and scholars from the fields of art (including video, photography, installation and multimedia), ecology, science and technology studies, philosophy, design, architecture, critical theory, cultural studies, film and media studies, and beyond. Please see our application for more information.
About SFSIA
Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is a nomadic, intensive summer academy with shifting programs in contemporary critical theory that stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art and politics. SFSIA originated in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in 2015 and then migrated to Berlin, Germany where it has been hosted by Import Projects (2016) and Spike (2017-2019). Additional programs have been hosted by Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Performance Space New York, The Brooklyn Rail, and sonsbeek20→24 in Arnhem, The Netherlands. SFSIA was founded and is directed by Warren Neidich. Sarrita Hunn is the assistant director.
About Maison Suger
Since its creation, Maison Suger has been seen as a hub of social exchange, fostering the sharing of approaches, methods, and knowledge. Every year, some 200 researchers cross paths within its walls. Paving the way for cross-sectional discussion, Maison Suger offers the opportunity to confront interdisciplinary issues and encourage collaboration. Maison Suger regularly hosts scientific meetings (workshops, regular seminars, conferences, and summer schools) organized by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) and its partner institutions. It also encourages encounters organized by residents as part of their activities in Paris (monthly meetings, residents' seminar, etc.).
About Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH)
Created in 1963 by the historian Fernand Braudel, the Fondation Maison des Science de l’Homme (FMSH) supports innovative and international research in the humanities and social sciences, and disseminates knowledge to the greatest number of people. For sixty years, the foundation has been advancing knowledge in the humanities and social sciences to better understand the complexity of the world and explore the common challenges facing our societies. By supporting nearly 400 researchers each year from around the world each year and ensuring the dissemination of a wide range of scientific resources, the FMSH is the largest humanities and social sciences foundation in France.
Please see our website or contact info@sfsia.art for more information.
Charolles, V., Lamy-Rested, E. (2023). Les philosophies des techniques: un levier pour l'action. United Kingdom: ISTE éditions.
Algorithms and automated learning systems have been successfully applied to produce images, pieces of music, or texts that are appealing to humans and that are often compared to artworks. Computational technologies are able to find surprising and original solutions–new patterns that humans cannot anticipate– but does this mean we ascribe to them the kind of creativity that is expressed by human artists? Even though AI can successfully detect humans’ preferences as well as select the objects that satisfy taste, can we ascribe to them the capacity of recognizing the intrinsic value of artworks? To answer these questions, I am first going to explain the kind of creativity that is expressed by contemporary predictive systems, then, in the second part of this paper, I will try to show the difference between the creativity of algorithms and the creativity of artists by expanding on Deleuze’s reflections.
Bien que la philosophie de Deleuze et Guattari soit souvent utilisée pour justifier les propos des technocrates, il me semble au contraire qu’elle fournit le cadre théorétique permettant d’expliquer pourquoi la décroissance est compatible avec la créativité et l’épanouissement du plus grand nombre, thèse qui peut paraitre paradoxale à première vue. Dans ce qui suit, je vais d’abord introduire les arguments par lesquels Ray Kurzweil soutient l’impératif de la croissance via l’accélération du progrès technologique, et je montrerai ensuite comment Nick Land se sert de L’Anti-Œdipe pour appuyer des conclusions semblables. Enfin, j’expliquerai pourquoi les théories des fondateurs de l’écologie politique – Ivan Illich, Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen et André Gorz – sont compatibles avec l’ontologie proposée par Deleuze et Guattari.
RL : https://www.cairn.info/revue-rue-descartes-2022-2-page-115.htm
https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2023-2-page-110.htm
Anti-)Conspiracy Theories and the Ecological Diagonal
From the point of view of cognitive logic, it is not as easy as one might think to challenge the rationality of conspiracy theories. The denouncers of conspiracy theories often share the same simplistic conception of truth with those they believe they oppose. This article suggests that it is rather on the side of a radical ecological bifurcation that we can find a real alternative to the turnstile in which conspiracy theorists and anti-conspiracy theorists are caught together.
Du point de vue de la logique cognitive, il n’est pas si facile qu’on le croit de récuser la rationalité des théories du complot. Les dénonciateurs du conspirationnisme partagent souvent une même conception simpliste de la vérité avec ceux auxquels ils croient s’opposer. Cet article suggère que c’est plutôt du côté d’une bifurcation écologique radicale qu’on pourra trouver une alternative réelle au tourniquet dans lequel sont pris ensemble conspirationnistes et anti-conspirationnistes.
We are in the process of moving from a biopolitical society of control, where the goal was protecting and modulating the life of consumers, to a risk society. Risk here is to be understood in the sense in which it is used in games of chance where the goal is to decide how much to invest in oneself today in order to sell oneself at the best price tomorrow, all the while knowing that nothing is more volatile than value and that knowledge only expresses this degree of uncertainty with regard to the future, or, more precisely, to all calculable futures. It is through an analysis of the way romantic, intimate, and sexual relationships are constructed today on dating sites and social networks that I will attempt to show, in what follows, how we have progressively moved from control to risk.
IMAGINATION AND POTENTIALITY: THE QUEST FOR THE REAL
https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/opphil/opphil-overview.xml?format=INT&tab_body=latestIssueToc-78033
Abstract
We are today agents of a peculiar reality, the global network or the system for automated information production. Our condition in the global network is that of agents of the real, since we all contribute to the coproduction of this ever-evolving process. Nevertheless, I will argue, this reality is but the effect of the adoption of a notion of instrumental pragmatic rationality which denies the existence of any other possible reality as the actualization of different determinations of Reason.
Un jugement infini n’est ni analytique, ni synthétique, il ne produit ni des vérités logiques, ni des représentations vraies, mais il établit les conditions de genèse d’objets réels et de concepts qui leurs sont appropriés. C’est par le jugement infini que nous accédons au principe de la logique transcendantale. Je vais commencer par une courte introduction historique du jugement infini qui nous permettra d’en comprendre le rôle central chez Kant et, surtout, chez les
postkantiens Salomon Maïmon et Johann G. Fichte. J’expliquerai, par la suite, comment Hegel se voit contraint de réduire ce jugement à un non-sens afin de faire de la logique formelle un organon et de sa compréhension l’accès à l’absolu. Pour finir, je montrerai comment Gilles Deleuze revient au jugement infini et à la logique transcendantale pour refuser la dialectique hégélienne
In the following we argue that a proper notion of abstract space was articulated, in parallel, by J.G. Fichte and F.W.J. Schelling at the beginning of the 19th century. Two obvious remarks could be make which we wish to deflect – that any notion of space in the post-Kantian tradition was merely a form of apperception, and secondly, that such a statement is unsurprising given the influence of Kant on Fichte, and Fichte on Schelling. However, we wish to argue that both Fichte and Schelling sought to more deeply ground abstract space, albeit in different means, than Kant would allow. Furthermore, Fichte and Schelling’s articulation of such a concept of space occurs during, as well as after, their intellectual split. Focusing on Schelling’s “Universal Deduction of the Dynamic Process” (1800) and Fichte’s “Erlangen Logic” (1805), we wish to argue that abstract space is the space of an original activity (natural or rational) which produces or establishes the conditions of representation of objective space: it is the real condition of the production of the a priori concept (schema) of space (following Kant). Schelling’s attempt to find the basic principles by which one could claim to construct matter dovetails productively with Fichte’s attempt to outline a geometry that would ground the Euclidean system. Here, following Jules Vuillemin (La philosophie de l’algebre), and with respect to Kant's genetic approach to geometry (the standard pre-modern way of conceiving of geometry's development by trying to find empirical solutions, i.e. drawing (imagining) geometrical figures in a pre-given space) Fichte and Schelling anticipate the structural approach that allows for the development of modern mathematics and geometry in terms of the forces of vectorial geometry (for Schelling and Grassmann) and the infinite points of projective geometry (for Fichte and Franz Kline). Thus, idealism defines space as unavoidably virtual.
It seems that the time has come for philosophy to break the spell of correlationism. But how? The present book gathers essays by philosophers and younger scholars sharing an interest in the recent speculative turn and contemporary forms of realism. They discuss possible strategies to access a subject-independent reality, proposing original insights and alternative solutions. The contributors include Erik Bordeleau, Gabriel Catren, Fabio Gironi, Paul Ennis, Liam Sprod, Luca Taddio, Sjoerd Van Tuinen & Matthijs Kouw, Ben Woodard, Andrea Zhok. The book also features interviews with Lee Braver, Maurizio Ferraris, Tristan Garcia and Graham Harman.
Mimesis international 2014
http://mimesisinternational.com/breaking-the-spell-contemporary-realism-under-discussion/
Send me a message if you want to get the whole book
Time without Becoming is the text of a lecture Quentin Meillassoux gave at the Middlesex University in May 2008. He makes a summary of the arguments he employed in After Finitude to overcome correlationism from the inside and to dismiss philosophies of becoming, such as absolute idealism and vitalism. In particular, he explains the specificity of his “speculative materialism” by supporting the thesis of the reciprocal exteriority of matter and mind. In her contribution, Anna Longo challenges this perspective taking into account the issue of the genesis of the transcendental in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy.
Texts by Brian Massumi, Quentin Meillassoux, Isabelle Stengers, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Cary Wolfe, R. L. Rutsky, Adrian MacKenzie, Dominique Lestel.
http://www.ladeleuziana.org/2020/06/01/11-differential-heterogenesis/
CAHIERS CRITIQUES DE PHILOSOPHIE
N 19 - 2018
- Cezary WODZIŃSKI : Pourquoi (n’)y a-t-il rien plutôt que quelque chose… Projet d’ontologie apophatique
- Humberto GIANNINI IŇÍGUEZ : Sur le pardon que l’on demande et le pardon que l’on donne...
- Alain BADIOU ET Ben WOODARD : Entretien à propos du réalisme spéculatif
- Ben WOODARD : L’échelle de la nature : mesurer la Conceptualisation entre Brassier et Grant
- Louis MORELLE : Spéculation et comparaison : sur les formes contemporains de l’ontologie
- Anna LONGO : Une esthétique spéculative est-elle possible ?
- Yann SCHMITT : Si la contingence est absolue, le désespoir aussi
-Pierre-Alexandre FRADET : Sortir du cercle corrélationnel : un examen critique de la tentative de Quentin Meillassoux
- Laurent BARONIAN : Le sujet de la science dans le matérialisme (V2)
- Carlos LEMA : Propédeutique du réalisme spéculatif : de la résistance corrélationnelle à la réalité transfinie, ou comment penser un absolu non-dogmatique
- Rahma KHAZAM : De l’objet à l’hyper-objet : l’art après le « New Art History »
- Patrick VAUDAY : Passages : être philosophe ou faire de la philosophie ?
Dialogues in Philosophy and Technology
Research Seminar V
Anna Longo: Predictive Technology vs. Prophetic Techne
In dialogue with Yuk Hui
Wed, 19 January 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx7BN1gn6BE&ab_channel=AestheticsandPolitics
https://www.foreignobjekt.com/post/anna-longo-probability-and-decision-theory
Modern probability theory, in particular Bayesian methods, cannot be separated from decision theory. This is evident in the work of the mathematicians that elaborated the paradigm of Bayesian inductive reasoning in the first half of the 20th Century: Frank Ramsey, Bruno de Finetti and Leonard Savage. In particular, Savage established the model of the rational agent that grounds Friedman’s economic theory. It is this same model that informs contemporary AI. To clarify the relation between rational decision theory and the learning paradigm that allows contemporary AI to develop predictive theories almost autonomously, I will introduce the first attempt to automatize inductive reasoning by referring to the Bayesian Ray Solomonoff’s theory of algorithmic probability. This will help me to deal with Ray Kurzweil’s theory of technological singularity and to explain why he claims that AI’s learning process leads to increasing order and complexity while being an unpredictable process the results and the effects of which cannot be anticipated.
PANEL 2 | Art and Freedom | Anna Longo: Freedom, Reason, and Art: Fichte vs. Hegel; Stefan Hölscher: Hegel on Painting: Subjects Hiding behind Surfaces; Rok Benčin: Beggars of the Ideal: Ranciere’s Hegel; chair: Martin Hergouth