Technology is therefore social before it is technical (or I am a programmer!)

“What is it that Foucault call a machine, be it abstract or concrete (he speaks of the machine-prison, but equally of the machine-school, the machine-hospital, and so on)? The concrete machines are the two-form assemblages or mechanism, whereas the abstract machine is the informal diagram. In other words, the machines are social before being technical. Or, rather, there a human technology which exists before a material technology. No doubt the latter develops its effects within the whole social field; but in order for it to be even possible, the tools or material machines have to be chosen first of all by a diagram and taken up by assemblages. Historian have often been confronted by this requirement: the so-called hoptile armies are part of the phalanx assemblage; the stirrup is selected by the diagram of feudalism; the burrowing stick, the hoe and the plough do not form a linear progression but refer respectively to collective machines which vary with the density of the population and the time of the fallow. In this respect, Foucault shows how the rifle exists as a tool only in the sense that is 'a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or the immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible (and composable] segments.

Technology is therefore social before it is technical" Deleuze Foucault p.34

...

“The history of forms, the archive, is doubled by an evolution of forces, the diagram. The forces appear in 'every relation from one point to another': a diagram is a map, or rather several imposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. Thus there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. It is on the basis of the 'struggles' of each age, and the style of these struggles, that we can understand the succession of diagrams or the way in which they become linked up again above and beyond the discontinuities. For each diagram testifies to the twisting line of the outside spoken of by Melville, without beginning or end, an oceanic line of passes through all points of resistance, pitches diagrams against one another, and operates always as the most recent. And what a strange twist of the line was 1968, the line with a thousand aberrations! From this we can get the triple definition of writing: to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: 'I am a cartographer'.” Deleuze Foucault p.37-38

From this we can get the triple definition of programming: to program is to struggle and resist; to program is to become; to program is to draw a map: 'I am a programmer!'.

Connect, Conjugate, Continue

"You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying... If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata with out taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow of conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small pot of new land at all times. it is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole 'diagram', as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs"

Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1987) A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum, London p.160-161

a Trojan horse without any Soldier

"I think the technology serves as a Trojan horse all right, but in the real story of the Trojan horse, it wasn't the horse that was effective, it was the soldiers inside the horse. And the technology is only going to be effective in changing education if you put an army inside it which is determined to make that change once it gets through the barrier.

Unfortunately, the easier way to get the technology to the school, if you're a vendor, for example, is to open it up and say, "Look, there's no army inside here. It's fine. It suits your purpose. It's not going to be subversive, and so it's a Trojan horse without any soldiers, and that's not a very effective way of doing it.""

Seymour Papert

lost-in-space workshop

A one and a half day interdisciplinary workshop, to be held on 2nd and 3rd December 2010,

in which participants will debate and cross-fertilise ideas and notions of space. The purpose is to provide a platform from which typically disparate disciplines considering spatial issues may ‘find’ one another in order to discuss, debate and develop ideas on space.

The event is aimed towards research and PhD students studying in the UK, focusing on how they think about space, how space influences their work and on what properties of space they draw to shape their work.

It is organised by a PhD student group spanning departments in UCL from the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience and the University of East London.

Participants will be PhD candidates from across the UK and a panel of invited guests.

for more details please visit:

http://www.lostinspaceworkshop.co.uk/

the ineffable

"Loss is inevitable in the story of each person. Losing your wallet, losing your job, losing your home, your family, your city—the degree of loss escalates from the inconvenient to the inconceivable, and with it the experience of the ineffable. Loss, however, is necessary in order for us to change, not only in our habits, but also in our understandings and beliefs. As long as we cling comfortably to what we are and know, we cannot learn, or create. If design is to be a creative act, it must take on the most difficult situations in our lives. It must offer more than comfort and reassurance. It must confront the unspeakable—the ineffable—and become a means by which we can transcend it. This means that we—as individuals and as architects—must, as the Existentialist poet Nikos Kazantzakis once put it, “build the affirmative structure of our lives over an abyss of nothingness.” A heroic—probably too heroic—task, it is true. Except for those who have no choice."

Lebbeus Woods

Dangerous Knowledge

Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, a thin thread of thinking that gradually reveals the power of uncertainty. Four mathematicians that profoundly changed the course of the history by laboriously working on the paths of the uncertain.

So Gödel after Turing's death set the profound question "how the mind could reach truth outside logic and what it could mean if it couldn't?"

Greg Chaitin adds in his concluding touch to this brilliant documentary:"You do not want to solve the problem, it is more fun to live with the problem and create... it is much more creative".

It is not therefore about solving the problem, it is about living and creating within the problem.

So indeed, "logic has revealed the limitations of logic and the search for certainty revealed uncertainty"

It is about time though to question, as the documentary invite us to do, how different is our world from Cantor's. Why we haven't learned to live with uncertainty, and to transport our thinking to social science, political theory and economics, it is time to question how all these established realities have affect the way we understand and reject uncertainty. Why have we stopped being creative?

unknown unknowns

>after this the unknown unknown has been forever aligned with the inability of one to imagine utopia but only dystopia. The image of the future becomes the image of death, fear and terrorism. This whole idea of this double negation can also be explored through the banned "kinder chocolate eggs" in 1960's. It was from the unknown unknowns that the youth should be protected... A whole society wasn't able to confront surprise... and unfortunately this surprise in the contemporary world has been aligned with FEAR!

hypertrophic state

why those two approaches are so politically different?

creativity and experimentation are to be discussed...

but what does it mean to overlay one system on top of another without any intrinsic communication between the two and what does it mean to exploit a system? The failure of the system is its success. They did manage to push the system in a hypertrophic state... to maximize its virtual states, to push it beyond of what is meant to be. It is this possibility to think the impossible that marks the second example as political resistive.

I would like to close this post with what E. Dijkstra said in 1972:

“I have the feeling that one of the most important aspects of any computing tool is its influence on the thinking habits of those that try to use it.”

now replace computing tools with any technological machine and you would have them opened into a machinic field. Experimentation becomes the mode to generate and acquire knowledge.

algorithmic text as beyond text

"today to write theory means to write code"

Galloway & Thacker, The Exploit

theorization and its mode of experimentation. I will come back on this shortly, it is a field that we would like to exploit by putting forward an interdisciplinary web platform. The goal is not to destroy IT but to push IT into a hypertrophic state, further than IT is meant to go... this is resistance through an active experimentation

confront the unexpected

"Many people refuse to be absorbed by something they don’t know. Žižek talks about Kinder eggs. Kinder eggs were forbidden in California in the mid-1960s because it was a total disruption of American life where everything needed to be predictable, and here you didn’t know what was inside. You could buy cocaine but not Kinder eggs because they thought it could corrupt the young. Kinder eggs were made by the Germans after the war to reconnect to the unknown and to force the kids away from the lazy period where everything was free. It’s a beautiful articulation of knowledge."

Francois Roche in a conversation with graphic novelist Warren Ellis, moderated by blogger Geoff Manaugh, at the Architectural Association, London, 29 May 2009.

innovation and creativity in Post-Fordist Capitalism

There is no point to expand on the whole critique that Shaviro develops for Boutang's latest book Le Capitalisme cognitif, But I would like to focus on a very crucial point that Shaviro makes clear in his text: "we shouldn't buy uncritically on the current capitalist mythology of "innovation" and "creativity"- without thinking through what it might mean to detach these notions from their association with start-ups and marketing plans and advertising campaigns (and how this might be done)". Shaviro will bring into the discourse the work by Whitehead and Deleuze which I also find very important in order to re-conceptualize innovation and creativity.