Benjamin Bratton

This is a text I wrote last Fall to gather together and review the ideas from Benjamin Bratton's recent essays and interviews (with DIS Magazine and the design group Metahaven). It covers the significance of computation, correspondences with Nick Land's thinking, Accelerationism, machinic vision and prototypes from the future. It's not a review of his recent book, The Stack, but can be considered a primer for reading that text, which I recommend.

I wanted to take a moment to say "Thank you!" for "We need to talk about TED" (http://www.bratton.info/projects/talks/we-need-to-talk-about-ted/). Someone I care about was recently invited--and under fairly arbitrary and little-vetted circumstances--to give a TEDx talk (http://www.ted.com/). I was immediately suspicious, in part because I have worked--indeed, fought--for years to keep the humanities at my institution from being suffocated by TED-like substitutes for substantive, engaging, pedagogy--the sort you wished could go on lots longer than 18 minutes. I have taught philosophy at Bloomsburg University for nearly 21 years--and being witness to the erosion of the liberal arts in higher education has led many of my generation of academics to wonder whether the humanities education necessary to equip citizens to do the hard work of a democracy is simply dying on the vine--or was more mythology to begin with.

I tend to the latter.

The paper attempts to stress the concept of immanence, as it has been developed by Deleuze and Guattari through Spinoza, in order to provide a critique of the so called platform capitalism. The digital dimension of economy and politics in fact represents a sort of a counterattack versus Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical perspective of emancipation and the goal of the paper becomes to reactivate such a perspective by reading the works of two important contemporary scholars: Frédréric Lordon and Antoinette Rouvroy. While Lordon represents a powerful way to reactivate Spinoza's immanence in order to provide a new affirmative politics, Rouvroy shows to what degree contemporary capitalism, through its «algorithmic governmentality», is short-circuiting some of the concept developed by the French Theory (from Simondon's transinvidual to Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome and plan of immanence). With the help of these authors and of Benjiamin Bratton, the paper finally shows Immanence's symptoms of weakness in front of such a capitalism, and it attempts to recharge or reload the very immanence taking care of " ingenium " , conceived as the fundamental concept of a new micropolitics.

Thinkers of the 20th century prominently defined the archive’s capacity in relation to "first the law of what can be said" (Foucault, 1969). That means, what or who has access to the archive is operated through the capacity to speak the law's language, which always is the language of the law of the father, the patri-arch. But, why on earth should a daughter—or someone otherwise inhabiting the life of a daughter—submit to a language that forces everyone who is non-father-like to rehearse a vocabulary that imposes, a priori, a set of principles that are not hers? Twenty-first-century​ archive-theory-without-Theory reformulates the potential of speculation as an onto-epistemological drive. It is an uncategorized or deschooled theory that emerges below the calculating faculties of capital-T Theory because the daughter does not want to limit her knowledge by subscribing to the prescription, description, and inscription of regulative systems, i.e., the father's law, that would limit her monstrous unpredictability of thought.

Une archéologie de notre avenir La mise en place de ce réseau des réseaux numériques intitulée « Internet » au cours des cinq dernières décennies constitue à l'évidence une transformation anthropologique majeure dans l'évolution de nos humanités. Elle s'inscrit bien entendu non seulement dans une « histoire », mais tout autant dans une « archéologie » bien plus anciennes. En remontant en deçà des fameuses machines de Charles Babbage ou d'Alan Turing, et des algorithmes d'Ada Lovelace ou de Joan Clarke sans lesquels ces machines n'avaient guère à nous apporter, il faut en voir émerger les éléments composants dans la superposition de révolutions permanentes qui accompagnèrent le déploiement des ressources indissociablement communicationnelles et computationnelles mise au jour à travers le téléphone, le télégraphe, l'électricité, le chemin de fer, le relai des postes, l'imprimerie et l'écriture elle-même. Tout en nous sensibilisant à un certain « déterminisme technologique » basé sur l'évidence que, pour paraphraser Friedrich Kittler, les media conditionnent notre situation, une approche archéologique des media nous appelle à la méfiance envers les téléologies implicites qui orientent nos visions de l'histoire 1. Nos tout nouveaux « téléphones intelligents »-qui sont en réalité des condensés de télégraphes, écrans TV, appareils radio, microphones, lampes de poche, cameras, ordinateurs, balladeurs et bracelets de surveillance-seraient « supérieurs » aux caméscopes et autres pigeons-voyageurs des anciens temps parce qu'ils accompliraient « mieux » les mêmes fonctions (plus vite, plus fidèlement, plus simplement, à plus bas coût). Le regard archéologique nous invite à concevoir une telle « supériorité », moins en termes de « perfectionnement » et de « succession » (historique), expliquant que le nouveau remplace l'ancien (même s'il y a aussi de cela), qu'en termes de « superposition » (archéologique) : les nouveaux media rajoutent une couche de complexité par-dessus les anciens, qui s'en trouvent bien davantage enfouis que substitués. Ils restent présents de façon sous-jacente, souterraine, underground, non sans continuer généralement à conditionner de plus loin nos gestes de surface qui pourtant les ignorent. L'ouvrage de Benjamin Bratton s'inscrit dans cette sensibilité archéologiste même s'il est presque exclusivement consacré à l'analyse de notre présent le plus récent, analyse indispensable pour nous positionner envers notre futur proche et lointain. Comme son titre l'indique, c'est bien une superposition de couches-un stack, à savoir un « empilement » de strates-qu'il met en lumière dans la structure d'internet. Cette superposition archéologique 1 Voir sur ces questions Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), Dijon, Presses du réel, 2017, ainsi que Jussi Parikka, Qu'est-ce que l'archéologie des media ? (2012), Grenoble, UGA Editions, 2017.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the relations between democratic political life and technoscientific configurations that model the current way of living. This work will host the question
about a new nomos and it will be based on a case study about the 2016 United States presidential
election. This case comes as extremely appropriate because it allows us to think about the way in
which data companies and social networks enter to the political arena during the whole campaign.
As we could identify, these new configurations of politics can promote democratic participation,
deliberately affect circulation of information, increase or diminish engagement to candidates as
well as modify electoral behavior of the citizens. Also, it implies evaluating the conditions of
existence that the technological totality proposes and needs from the human beings to develop itself.
Even though we may not declare that the reason of Donald Trump’s triumph was related to these
new actors in politics, the case assisted us in the task of illustrating how the democratic ways of
governing in the present times intertwine with a new political configuration of political life.
Although it may not bring out a new political order, this question addresses the theoretical-political
question about the structure of the world, i.e., the question about a new nomos.

The history of the internet in China can be re-treaded as an exponentially growing economy of attention moving from infrastructure to platforms. For more than a decade, China's accelerated ICT development has been portrayed in infrastructural terms, a matter of technological standards, geopolitical trust, and promising market opportunities. As the popularization of internet connectivity brought increasing numbers of people online, policy choices and market economy have supported the adoption of the new communication medium of wangluo, ‘the network’: from universities, through private homes, to mobile access; from urban centers to the countryside; from a pioneering youth to older generations of users; from nerdy pastime to everyday life. In more recent years, as homegrown software, websites and apps such as Tencent QQ, Baidu, Sina Weibo, Youku and WeChat make headlines for their massive userbases and dominance of local internet markets, the attention of analysts and scholars shifts from infrastructure to platforms and their socio-technical implications. Far from the predicted dismantling of the Chinese Communist Party by the (supposedly) inherently democratizing forces of the Internet, the momentous development of ICT infrastructure and digital media platforms in the country outline important questions for media and communication studies worldwide.
The so-called “Chinese Internet”, a shorthand term obscuring its layering of infrastructure and platforms, is often depicted through metaphors of enclosure: a walled garden, a gilded cage, a surveillance fishbowl surrounded by the Great Firewall of censorship and control. While it is undeniable that Chinese authorities keep refining their protectionist gatekeeping capabilities and perfecting their control over content dissemination, the CCP has also actively worked towards consolidating a vibrant Internet industry while pushing for its own vision of internet governance with global aspirations. The internet is an increasingly central protagonist of official policy documents and China’s case for cyber-sovereignty is repeated at the yearly World Internet Conference held near Shanghai. While platforms like WeChat accrue dominance over multiple layers of access to interaction, information and commerce, manufacturers such as Huawei and Xiaomi design their first smartphone processors, moving innovation away from shanzhai copycatting to nationalized control over computation.
As infrastructure and platforms become recursively layered and embedded over existing and imagined territories, Benjamin Bratton’s geopolitical metaphor of “the stack” provides a promising starting point to rethink the current state and future prospects of the internet in China. In a recent essay, Tiziana Terranova draws on Bratton to outline a proposal for a post-capitalist computational nomos that she terms “the Red Stack” – a “machinic infrastructure of the commons” emerging from the layering of virtual currencies, social networking and bio-hypermedia. The present article provides a portrait of everyday life inside a “red stack” less aspirational and more concrete: digital media and ICTs in the People’s Republic of China. This red stack is indeed a new nomos bounded by infrastructural sovereignty and platform protectionism, but it also exists materially in telecom cables, server farms, wireless signals and mobile devices, hosting the everyday activities of almost seven hundred million users. How is Chinese everyday digital media life at the front-end interface of the red stack? How do users inhabit and move across its geo-technical layers? Which pragmatic strategies, narratives and solutions do they adopt to make sense of their architectural experiences with?