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http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=CodaMarooned Creative Crowds wiki - User contributions [en] 2026-04-25T09:26:26Z User contributions MediaWiki 1.45.1 http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt-500&diff=1228 Toward a Minor Tech:Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt-500 2023-01-20T16:32:54Z

<p>CodaMarooned: /* Dancing on flights of scale */</p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:500 words]]<br /> <br /> == Dancing on flights of scale ==<br /> == '''By Edoardo Lomi & Macon Holt''' ==<br /> What is the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold? <br /> <br /> The question already hints at an answer. <br /> <br /> No minor tech is safe from scaling into an outside it can neither differentiate nor account for.<br /> <br /> No major order is rid of sub-scalar tendencies for becoming otherwise.<br /> <br /> Indeed, it is often through scaling up–careless of how this process will affect its components–that a system reveals its constituent cracks. <br /> <br /> Again: such a heightened visibility also spotlights what systemic failures may use redressing - as in the facilitation of racial profiling via resolving the inaccuracies of facial recognition: failing forward into universalised extractive violence.<br /> <br /> Or consider the independent contractors–studied by Anna Tsing–whose non-scalable thievings and salvaging of produce and scraps loop straight into global supply-chains. Entrepreneuring and enterprise converge in the production of minor spaces to be occupied and play-times to gamify. So the explosive misery secreted by cities–to reprise Deleuze and Guattari–does disgorge into patchworks and non-productive (lethargic) dérives. The very aimless dérives–in urban or scroll space–wherefrom digital prostheses mine the feed through which they expand.<br /> <br /> The constitutive entanglement of major and minor is not new to our contemporary conception of “tech”. Just think of ancient Chinese sages who proselytised to their patrons the hollowness of effect and direct action–then stood and witnessed how effectively this principle was deployed in despotic ruling. Today, Daoist thought, with its structuration around an understanding of co-constitutive contingency, may yet promise to unsettle anthropic models of arranging the sensible. But emancipating the 'flow' of things from control–and human fallibility–is also the formula of digital logistics and becoming-server (cf. Moten and Harney 2013). <br /> <br /> What unfurls in this double move between minor and major techniques of existence? Neither a hopeful dialectics of transcendence, nor a pessimist eternal struggle can fully account for their murmurations. We may perhaps better render it as a dance. Contact improvisation. Forces that transverse across and by way of bodies that experience them in some way or in some register. A dance-form that responds, not always coherently but with consistency to the stumbles and impasses and slips that dis/articulate dancing bodies. <br /> <br /> Bumps and impasses and slips; a dance like all dances, plagued by the risk of excessive pressure on heel leads and injuries from overuse. Slips between grids and dérives and their data-mining; between Daoist and despotic orders, machines and their marginal indeterminacies (cf. Simondon 1980). Minor and major techniques rendered not so much as chasing but folding into each other, affectively trespassing their own symmetric semblances. The threat they afford one other, an externalisation of their self-inconsistency. Dancing on flights of scale.</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt-500&diff=1227 Toward a Minor Tech:Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt-500 2023-01-20T16:32:03Z

<p>CodaMarooned: /* Dancing on flights of scale */</p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:500 words]]<br /> <br /> == Dancing on flights of scale ==<br /> '''By Edoardo Lomi & Macon Holt''' <br /> <br /> What is the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold? <br /> <br /> The question already hints at an answer. <br /> <br /> No minor tech is safe from scaling into an outside it can neither differentiate nor account for.<br /> <br /> No major order is rid of sub-scalar tendencies for becoming otherwise.<br /> <br /> Indeed, it is often through scaling up–careless of how this process will affect its components–that a system reveals its constituent cracks. <br /> <br /> Again: such a heightened visibility also spotlights what systemic failures may use redressing - as in the facilitation of racial profiling via resolving the inaccuracies of facial recognition: failing forward into universalised extractive violence.<br /> <br /> Or consider the independent contractors - studied by Anna Tsing - whose non-scalable thievings and salvaging of produce and scraps loop straight into global supply-chains. Entrepreneuring and enterprise converge in the production of minor spaces to be occupied and play-times to gamify. So the explosive misery secreted by cities - to reprise Deleuze and Guattari - does disgorge into patchworks and non-productive (lethargic) dérives. The very aimless dérives –in urban or scroll space - wherefrom digital prostheses mine the feed through which they expand.<br /> <br /> The constitutive entanglement of major and minor is not new to our contemporary conception of “tech”. Just think of ancient Chinese sages who proselytised to their patrons the hollowness of effect and direct action - then stood and witnessed how effectively this principle was deployed in despotic ruling. Today, Daoist thought, with its structuration around an understanding of co-constitutive contingency, may yet promise to unsettle anthropic models of arranging the sensible. But emancipating the 'flow' of things from control - and human fallibility - is also the formula of digital logistics and becoming-server (cf. Moten and Harney 2013). <br /> <br /> What unfurls in this double move between minor and major techniques of existence? Neither a hopeful dialectics of transcendence, nor a pessimist eternal struggle can fully account for their murmurations. We may perhaps better render it as a dance. Contact improvisation. Forces that transverse across and by way of bodies that experience them in some way or in some register. A dance-form that responds, not always coherently but with consistency to the stumbles and impasses and slips that dis/articulate dancing bodies. <br /> <br /> Bumps and impasses and slips; a dance like all dances, plagued by the risk of excessive pressure on heel leads and injuries from overuse. Slips between grids and dérives and their data-mining; between Daoist and despotic orders, machines and their marginal indeterminacies (cf. Simondon 1980). Minor and major techniques rendered not so much as chasing but folding into each other, affectively trespassing their own symmetric semblances. The threat they afford one other, an externalisation of their self-inconsistency. Dancing on flights of scale.</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt-500&diff=1195 Toward a Minor Tech:Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt-500 2023-01-20T16:07:48Z

<p>CodaMarooned: Created page with " Category:Toward a Minor Tech Category:500 words == Dancing on flights of scale == '''By Edoardo Lomi & Macon Holt''' What is the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold? The question already hints at an answer. No minor tech is safe from the major order that may desire to scale up into an outside it can neither differentiate nor account for. No major order is rid of sub-scalar tendencies for becoming otherwise. In..."</p> <hr /> <div><br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:500 words]]<br /> <br /> == Dancing on flights of scale ==<br /> '''By Edoardo Lomi & Macon Holt''' <br /> <br /> What is the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold? <br /> <br /> The question already hints at an answer. <br /> <br /> No minor tech is safe from the major order that may desire to scale up into an outside it can neither differentiate nor account for.<br /> <br /> No major order is rid of sub-scalar tendencies for becoming otherwise.<br /> <br /> Indeed, it is often through scaling up–careless of how this process will affect its basic components–that a system reveals its constituent cracks. Flights borne in the struggle to hold down integrity. <br /> <br /> Again: such a heightened visibility also spotlights what systemic failures need redressing - as in the facilitation of racial profiling via resolving the inaccuracies of facial recognition. Failing forward into universalised extractive violence.<br /> <br /> The master's house does manufacture the tool for its own dismantling (pace Audre Lorde). Which is not to say they are neutral. Only that they are ambivalent--and that they are not enough. So the explosive misery secreted by cities - to reprise Deleuze and Guattari - does disgorge into patchworks and non-productive (lethargic) dérives. The very aimless dérives –in urban or scroll space - wherefrom digital prostheses mine the feed through which they expand.<br /> <br /> The constitutive entanglement of major and minor is not new to our contemporary conception of “tech”. Just think of ancient Chinese sages who proselytised to their patrons the hollowness of effect and direct action - then stood and witnessed how well this principle was deployed in despotic rule. Today, Daoist thought, with its structuration around an understanding of co-constitutive contingency, may yet promise to unsettle anthropic models of arranging the sensible. But emancipating the 'flow' of things from control - and human fallibility - is also the formula of digital logistics and becoming-server (cf. Moten and Harney 2013). <br /> <br /> What unfurls in this double move between minor and major techniques of existence? Neither a hopeful dialectics of transcendence, nor a pessimist eternal struggle can fully account for their murmurations. We may perhaps better render it as a dance. Contact improvisation. Forces that transverse across and by way of bodies that experience them in some way or in some register. A dance-form that responds, not always coherently but with consistency to the stumbles and impasses and slips that dis/articulate dancing bodies. <br /> <br /> Bumps and impasses and slips; a dance like all dances, plagued by the risk of excessive pressure on heel leads and injuries from overuse. A dance making the minor and major turns that rehearse its patterns. Slips like the jumps from Daoist and despotic orders, grids and their dérives and their instruments, machines and their indeterminacy (cf. Simondon 1980). Minor and major techniques here do not so much chase and fold into each other, failing to completely synch up. The threat they afford the other, an externalisation of their self-inconsistency into a dance intensive beyond expansion and extensive below intention.</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=535 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2023-01-13T12:05:48Z

<p>CodaMarooned: </p> <hr /> <div><div class="pad"><eplite id="Lomi&Holt" show-chat="false" /></div><br /> <br /> = On Scalar Becoming =<br /> In this essay we make for a few steps towards mapping the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold. We begin with a few notes on the issue of scale to then move some reflections over the sort of antagonism that minor and major modes of technical existence may be thought to instantiate. <br /> <br /> == The issue with scale ==<br /> We can take scalability to refer to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its basic components and how they fit together[1]. Following Anna Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nations’ or ‘users’ or ‘species’ or ‘capital’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. Nor can expansion, in traversing articulation, elude the possibility of its own minor becoming[2]. As big tech drills holes so a minor tech may occupy them. Its armoury is ontological. Its garrisons harboured in the margins of indeterminacy that proliferate anomalous in machines over the idolised and the threatening and the servo-mechanic[3]. Or as Harney and Moten put it: in the flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship[4].<br /> <br /> So did insurgent socialites and evasions and fungal infestations cripple the scales of plantation colonialism. The transposition of football to New Guinea altered the game’s competitive spirit[5]; the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scrambled its big-datafied sense-making[6]. Incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar interest[7]. The explosive misery secreted by cities disgorge sprawling patchworks[8], blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons[9], the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history[10]. So may the technoscientific prostheses of patriarchy and colonialism provoke–in the words of Luciana Parisi–heretic thinking in machines capable of questioning the transcendental conditions of knowledge and the computability of instrumentality[11]. So did Kafka’s Prague German draw from its own impossibility retellings that made language itself stammer. And so does the assemblage that is ‘Oogie Boogie’ from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas eventually subscend into its bugs. <br /> <br /> The burlap of its enchantment over-stretched; majoritarian technology drops the monological act of scale to disperse in the chattering worlds of its elements[12]. We may pose here the question as to whether the so-called problem of ‘alternative’ organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’ rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure and instead in the institutionalised insensitivity to their minor becomings as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’. This insensitivity extends into the deafness of apocalyptic solutionism to the dismantling potential of capital as a formalised abstraction of agencies whose infinitesimal operations far exceed it from within, from beneath. Aggregates of becoming like minerals redeposited building up in the cave where capital bathes in blood and dirt.<br /> <br /> What the operations of scale-ability do entail is circumscribing awareness of and disavowing care for the re-articulating effects of its own unravelling replication. This is what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects’ and inevitable incompleteness of scalar expansion. Its inhibitive task deploys schizoid fictions to carve pathways through hylomorphic frictions: plotting the vindicated inclusion of the excluded into frontier fantasies of undifferentiated growth. Such was also the fantasy of diffusionist modernity–spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the rest of the world ‘like an oil slick’. Images of ‘all-a-piece blocks’ scaling to super-blocs split along the fault lines of race and civilisation. <br /> <br /> == Constitutive antagonism ==<br /> But the relations between monolithic majority and minoritarian anomalies, expansive exclusion and intensive inclusion, are perhaps not so neat. The independent contractors studied by Tsing and fuelling global supply-chains by stealing and stealthing, salvaging and foraging at no additional costs to the enterprise loop minor becomings back into grand scale exploitation. So do grassroots ‘politics from below’ all too easily turn self-governed NGOs: control floats free after the end of enclosures. Graffiti turn street art and street art enter collections and auctions. The language of entrepreneurs blends minor and major tones in itsactualisation of breakages in the dominant order to profit from its extension. Military officers have been known to enlist minoritarian post-structuralist scholarship in the planning and executing of their murderous plots. But so what is new? Ancient Chinese sages proselytised the hollowness of effect and the art of success grasped in relinquishing intentionality only to witness their patrons’ successful instrumentalisation of Daoist flow into bloody combat. Today, the subject of neoliberalism has become the hollow subject of human capital–a porous object, in Harney and Moten’s analysis; while logistics seeks to emancipate the flow of things from ‘controlling agents’ and their human fallibility. The smooth striates, the striated reimparts the smooth–dancing into dyssimetry. <br /> <br /> A dance–neither an eternal struggle of opposites nor a dialectical scaling up into transcendent space. We find no grounds to claim a particular progression in the unfolding of this dance–its mapping remains incomplete. But we are fairly certain it delineates something of a repetitive pattern. Perhaps a study of interpolating minor and major modes of the technical existence of some object or practice may occasion the abduction of how this patterning dance operates across scales. But any fractal quality to these patterns would need in our mind to rehearse not so much an interrelation as a gap or a cut of sorts; something that might bear out at once the holes dug by worms and big tech and the breakages entrepreneured, the ethnocentric glitches of media platforms and the tears in Oogie Boogie’s precarious sutures. MIA mediation redoubled in the instability of both minor and major orders traced in the jump between Daoist and despotic practice with each side failing to synch up with the other. Both come to be out of the impossibility of scalar expansion, of a being without becoming. The threat they afford one another externalising the self-inconsistency of a dance expansive and intensive beyond computability. <br /> <br /> ----[1] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “On Nonscalability. The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales.” ''Common knowledge'' 18, no. 3 (2012): 505.<br /> <br /> [2] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, ''Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature'', trans. by Dana Polan (U of Minnesota P, 1986 [1976]).<br /> <br /> [3] Simondon, Gilbert, ''On the mode of existence of technical objects''. (London, University of Western Ontario, 1980).<br /> <br /> [4] Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. ''The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study'' (Minor Compositions, 2013). <br /> <br /> [5] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. ''The savage mind'' (University of Chicago Press, 1966 [1962]), p. 31. <br /> <br /> [6] Miller, Daniel. ''Tales from facebook'' (Polity, 2011). <br /> <br /> [7] Knox, Hannah. “Hacking anthropology,” ''Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute'' 27, no. S1 (2021): 108-126.<br /> <br /> [8] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. ''A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia'', trans. by Brian Massumi (U of Minnesota P., 2005 [1987]), pp. 481-2. <br /> <br /> [9] See El Baroni, Bassam (ed). Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (MIT Press, 2022). See also: <nowiki>https://www.crypto-commons.org</nowiki>. <br /> <br /> [10] Bennett, Jane. ''Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things'' (Duke University Press, 2010), p. 96. <br /> <br /> [11] Parisi, Luciana. “Recursive Philosophy and Negative Machines,” ''Critical Inquiry'' 48, no. 2 (2022): 313-333.<br /> <br /> [12] See Bakhtin, Mikhail. ''Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics'', ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester UP, 1984). <br /> ---- <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=491 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-22T19:00:53Z

<p>CodaMarooned: /* Opening */</p> <hr /> <div>= On Scalar Becoming =<br /> In this essay we make for a few steps towards mapping the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold. We begin with a few notes on the issue of scale to then move some reflections over the sort of antagonism that minor and major modes of technical existence may be thought to instantiate. <br /> <br /> == The issue with scale ==<br /> We can take scalability to refer to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its basic components and how they fit together[1]. Following Anna Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nations’ or ‘users’ or ‘species’ or ‘capital’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. Nor can expansion, in traversing articulation, elude the possibility of its own minor becoming[2]. As big tech drills holes so a minor tech may occupy them. Its armoury is ontological. Its garrisons harboured in the margins of indeterminacy that proliferate anomalous in machines over the idolised and the threatening and the servo-mechanic[3]. Or as Harney and Moten put it: in the flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship[4].<br /> <br /> So did insurgent socialites and evasions and fungal infestations cripple the scales of plantation colonialism. The transposition of football to New Guinea altered the game’s competitive spirit[5]; the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scrambled its big-datafied sense-making[6]. Incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar interest[7]. The explosive misery secreted by cities disgorge sprawling patchworks[8], blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons[9], the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history[10]. So may the technoscientific prostheses of patriarchy and colonialism provoke–in the words of Luciana Parisi–heretic thinking in machines capable of questioning the transcendental conditions of knowledge and the computability of instrumentality[11]. So did Kafka’s Prague German draw from its own impossibility retellings that made language itself stammer. And so does the assemblage that is ‘Oogie Boogie’ from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas eventually subscend into its bugs. <br /> <br /> The burlap of its enchantment over-stretched; majoritarian technology drops the monological act of scale to disperse in the chattering worlds of its elements[12]. We may pose here the question as to whether the so-called problem of ‘alternative’ organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’ rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure and instead in the institutionalised insensitivity to their minor becomings as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’. This insensitivity extends into the deafness of apocalyptic solutionism to the dismantling potential of capital as a formalised abstraction of agencies whose infinitesimal operations far exceed it from within, from beneath. Aggregates of becoming like minerals redeposited building up in the cave where capital bathes in blood and dirt.<br /> <br /> What the operations of scale-ability do entail is circumscribing awareness of and disavowing care for the re-articulating effects of its own unravelling replication. This is what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects’ and inevitable incompleteness of scalar expansion. Its inhibitive task deploys schizoid fictions to carve pathways through hylomorphic frictions: plotting the vindicated inclusion of the excluded into frontier fantasies of undifferentiated growth. Such was also the fantasy of diffusionist modernity–spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the rest of the world ‘like an oil slick’. Images of ‘all-a-piece blocks’ scaling to super-blocs split along the fault lines of race and civilisation. <br /> <br /> == Constitutive antagonism ==<br /> But the relations between monolithic majority and minoritarian anomalies, expansive exclusion and intensive inclusion, are perhaps not so neat. The independent contractors studied by Tsing and fuelling global supply-chains by stealing and stealthing, salvaging and foraging at no additional costs to the enterprise loop minor becomings back into grand scale exploitation. So do grassroots ‘politics from below’ all too easily turn self-governed NGOs: control floats free after the end of enclosures. Graffiti turn street art and street art enter collections and auctions. The language of entrepreneurs blends minor and major tones in itsactualisation of breakages in the dominant order to profit from its extension. Military officers have been known to enlist minoritarian post-structuralist scholarship in the planning and executing of their murderous plots. But so what is new? Ancient Chinese sages proselytised the hollowness of effect and the art of success grasped in relinquishing intentionality only to witness their patrons’ successful instrumentalisation of Daoist flow into bloody combat. Today, the subject of neoliberalism has become the hollow subject of human capital–a porous object, in Harney and Moten’s analysis; while logistics seeks to emancipate the flow of things from ‘controlling agents’ and their human fallibility. The smooth striates, the striated reimparts the smooth–dancing into dyssimetry. <br /> <br /> A dance–neither an eternal struggle of opposites nor a dialectical scaling up into transcendent space. We find no grounds to claim a particular progression in the unfolding of this dance–its mapping remains incomplete. But we are fairly certain it delineates something of a repetitive pattern. Perhaps a study of interpolating minor and major modes of the technical existence of some object or practice may occasion the abduction of how this patterning dance operates across scales. But any fractal quality to these patterns would need in our mind to rehearse not so much an interrelation as a gap or a cut of sorts; something that might bear out at once the holes dug by worms and big tech and the breakages entrepreneured, the ethnocentric glitches of media platforms and the tears in Oogie Boogie’s precarious sutures. MIA mediation redoubled in the instability of both minor and major orders traced in the jump between Daoist and despotic practice with each side failing to synch up with the other. Both come to be out of the impossibility of scalar expansion, of a being without becoming. The threat they afford one another externalising the self-inconsistency of a dance expansive and intensive beyond computability. <br /> <br /> ----[1] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “On Nonscalability. The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales.” ''Common knowledge'' 18, no. 3 (2012): 505.<br /> <br /> [2] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, ''Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature'', trans. by Dana Polan (U of Minnesota P, 1986 [1976]).<br /> <br /> [3] Simondon, Gilbert, ''On the mode of existence of technical objects''. (London, University of Western Ontario, 1980).<br /> <br /> [4] Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. ''The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study'' (Minor Compositions, 2013). <br /> <br /> [5] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. ''The savage mind'' (University of Chicago Press, 1966 [1962]), p. 31. <br /> <br /> [6] Miller, Daniel. ''Tales from facebook'' (Polity, 2011). <br /> <br /> [7] Knox, Hannah. “Hacking anthropology,” ''Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute'' 27, no. S1 (2021): 108-126.<br /> <br /> [8] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. ''A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia'', trans. by Brian Massumi (U of Minnesota P., 2005 [1987]), pp. 481-2. <br /> <br /> [9] See El Baroni, Bassam (ed). Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (MIT Press, 2022). See also: <nowiki>https://www.crypto-commons.org</nowiki>. <br /> <br /> [10] Bennett, Jane. ''Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things'' (Duke University Press, 2010), p. 96. <br /> <br /> [11] Parisi, Luciana. “Recursive Philosophy and Negative Machines,” ''Critical Inquiry'' 48, no. 2 (2022): 313-333.<br /> <br /> [12] See Bakhtin, Mikhail. ''Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics'', ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester UP, 1984). <br /> ---- <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=487 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-22T13:50:08Z

<p>CodaMarooned: </p> <hr /> <div>= On Scalar Becoming =<br /> <br /> == '''Opening''' ==<br /> In this essay we make for a few steps towards mapping the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold. We begin with a few notes on the issue of scale to then move some reflections over the sort of antagonism that minor and major modes of technical existence may be thought to instantiate. <br /> <br /> == '''The issue with scale''' ==<br /> We can take scalability to refer to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its basic components and how they fit together[1]. Following Anna Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nations’ or ‘users’ or ‘species’ or ‘capital’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. Nor can expansion, in traversing articulation, elude the possibility of its own minor becoming[2]. As big tech drills holes so a minor tech may occupy them. Its armoury is ontological. Its garrisons harboured in the margins of indeterminacy that proliferate anomalous in machines over the idolised and the threatening and the servo-mechanic[3]. Or as Harney and Moten put it: in the flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship[4].<br /> <br /> So did insurgent socialites and evasions and fungal infestations cripple the scales of plantation colonialism. The transposition of football to New Guinea altered the game’s competitive spirit[5]; the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scrambled its big-datafied sense-making[6]. Incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar interest[7]. The explosive misery secreted by cities disgorge sprawling patchworks[8], blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons[9], the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history[10]. So may the technoscientific prostheses of patriarchy and colonialism provoke–in the words of Luciana Parisi–heretic thinking in machines capable of questioning the transcendental conditions of knowledge and the computability of instrumentality[11]. So did Kafka’s Prague German draw from its own impossibility retellings that made language itself stammer. And so does the assemblage that is ‘Oogie Boogie’ from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas eventually subscend into its bugs. <br /> <br /> The burlap of its enchantment over-stretched; majoritarian technology drops the monological act of scale to disperse in the chattering worlds of its elements[12]. We may pose here the question as to whether the so-called problem of ‘alternative’ organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’ rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure and instead in the institutionalised insensitivity to their minor becomings as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’. This insensitivity extends into the deafness of apocalyptic solutionism to the dismantling potential of capital as a formalised abstraction of agencies whose infinitesimal operations far exceed it from within, from beneath. Aggregates of becoming like minerals redeposited building up in the cave where capital bathes in blood and dirt.<br /> <br /> What the operations of scale-ability do entail is circumscribing awareness of and disavowing care for the re-articulating effects of its own unravelling replication. This is what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects’ and inevitable incompleteness of scalar expansion. Its inhibitive task deploys schizoid fictions to carve pathways through hylomorphic frictions: plotting the vindicated inclusion of the excluded into frontier fantasies of undifferentiated growth. Such was also the fantasy of diffusionist modernity–spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the rest of the world ‘like an oil slick’. Images of ‘all-a-piece blocks’ scaling to super-blocs split along the fault lines of race and civilisation. <br /> <br /> == '''Constitutive antagonism''' ==<br /> But the relations between monolithic majority and minoritarian anomalies, expansive exclusion and intensive inclusion, are perhaps not so neat. The independent contractors studied by Tsing and fuelling global supply-chains by stealing and stealthing, salvaging and foraging at no additional costs to the enterprise loop minor becomings back into grand scale exploitation. So do grassroots ‘politics from below’ all too easily turn self-governed NGOs: control floats free after the end of enclosures. Graffiti turn street art and street art enter collections and auctions. The language of entrepreneurs blends minor and major tones in itsactualisation of breakages in the dominant order to profit from its extension. Military officers have been known to enlist minoritarian post-structuralist scholarship in the planning and executing of their murderous plots. But so what is new? Ancient Chinese sages proselytised the hollowness of effect and the art of success grasped in relinquishing intentionality only to witness their patrons’ successful instrumentalisation of Daoist flow into bloody combat. Today, the subject of neoliberalism has become the hollow subject of human capital–a porous object, in Harney and Moten’s analysis; while logistics seeks to emancipate the flow of things from ‘controlling agents’ and their human fallibility. The smooth striates, the striated reimparts the smooth–dancing into dyssimetry. <br /> <br /> A dance–neither an eternal struggle of opposites nor a dialectical scaling up into transcendent space. We find no grounds to claim a particular progression in the unfolding of this dance–its mapping remains incomplete. But we are fairly certain it delineates something of a repetitive pattern. Perhaps a study of interpolating minor and major modes of the technical existence of some object or practice may occasion the abduction of how this patterning dance operates across scales. But any fractal quality to these patterns would need in our mind to rehearse not so much an interrelation as a gap or a cut of sorts; something that might bear out at once the holes dug by worms and big tech and the breakages entrepreneured, the ethnocentric glitches of media platforms and the tears in Oogie Boogie’s precarious sutures. MIA mediation redoubled in the instability of both minor and major orders traced in the jump between Daoist and despotic practice with each side failing to synch up with the other. Both come to be out of the impossibility of scalar expansion, of a being without becoming. The threat they afford one another externalising the self-inconsistency of a dance expansive and intensive beyond computability. <br /> <br /> ----[1] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “On Nonscalability. The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales.” ''Common knowledge'' 18, no. 3 (2012): 505.<br /> <br /> [2] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, ''Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature'', trans. by Dana Polan (U of Minnesota P, 1986 [1976]).<br /> <br /> [3] Simondon, Gilbert, ''On the mode of existence of technical objects''. (London, University of Western Ontario, 1980).<br /> <br /> [4] Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. ''The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study'' (Minor Compositions, 2013). <br /> <br /> [5] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. ''The savage mind'' (University of Chicago Press, 1966 [1962]), p. 31. <br /> <br /> [6] Miller, Daniel. ''Tales from facebook'' (Polity, 2011). <br /> <br /> [7] Knox, Hannah. “Hacking anthropology,” ''Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute'' 27, no. S1 (2021): 108-126.<br /> <br /> [8] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. ''A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia'', trans. by Brian Massumi (U of Minnesota P., 2005 [1987]), pp. 481-2. <br /> <br /> [9] See El Baroni, Bassam (ed). Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (MIT Press, 2022). See also: <nowiki>https://www.crypto-commons.org</nowiki>. <br /> <br /> [10] Bennett, Jane. ''Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things'' (Duke University Press, 2010), p. 96. <br /> <br /> [11] Parisi, Luciana. “Recursive Philosophy and Negative Machines,” ''Critical Inquiry'' 48, no. 2 (2022): 313-333.<br /> <br /> [12] See Bakhtin, Mikhail. ''Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics'', ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester UP, 1984). <br /> ---- <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=482 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-22T01:06:05Z

<p>CodaMarooned: </p> <hr /> <div>=== NOTE: Page title in the works; suggestions welcome! Footnotes coming soon (22/12). Cheers! ===<br /> <br /> == Opening ==<br /> In this essay we make for a few steps towards mapping the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold. We begin with a few notes on the issue of scale to then move some reflections over the sort of antagonism that minor and major modes of technical existence may be thought to instantiate. <br /> <br /> == The issue with scale ==<br /> We can take scalability to refer to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its basic components and how they fit together . Following Anna Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense . For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nations’ or ‘users’ or ‘species’ or ‘capital’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. Nor can expansion, in traversing articulation, elude the possibility of its own minor becoming. As big tech drills holes so a minor tech may occupy them. Its armoury is ontological. Its garrisons harboured in the margins of indeterminacy that proliferate anomalous in machines over the idolised and the threatening and the servo-mechanic . Or as Harney and Moten put it: in the flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship .<br /> <br /> So did insurgent socialites and evasions and fungal infestations cripple the scales of plantation colonialism. The transposition of football to New Guinea altered the game's competitive spirit; the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scrambled its big-datafied sense-making . Incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar interest. The explosive misery secreted by cities disgorge sprawling patchworks , blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons , the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history . So may the technoscientific prostheses of patriarchy and colonialism provoke–in the words of Luciana Parisi–heretic thinking in machines capable of questioning the transcendental conditions of knowledge and the computability of instrumentality. So did Kafka’s Prague German draw from its own impossibility retellings that made language itself stammer. And so does the assemblage that is 'Oogie Boogie' from Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas eventually subscend into its bugs. <br /> <br /> The burlap of its enchantment over-stretched; majoritarian technology drops the monological act of scale to disperse in the chattering worlds of its elements. We may pose here the question as to whether the so-called problem of ‘alternative’ organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’ rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure and instead in the institutionalised insensitivity to their minor becomings as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’ . This insensitivity extends into the deafness of apocalyptic solutionism to the dismantling potential of capital as a formalised abstraction of agencies whose infinitesimal operations far exceed it from within, from beneath. Aggregates of becoming like minerals redeposited building up in the cave where capital bathes in blood and dirt .<br /> <br /> What the operations of scale-ability do entail is circumscribing awareness of and disavowing care for the re-articulating effects of its own unravelling replication. This is what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects ’ and inevitable incompleteness of scalar expansion. Its inhibitive task deploys schizoid fictions to carve pathways through hylomorphic frictions : plotting the vindicated inclusion of the excluded into frontier fantasies of undifferentiated growth. Such was also the fantasy of diffusionist modernity–spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the rest of the world ‘like an oil slick’. Images of ‘all-a-piece blocks’ scaling to super-blocs split along the fault lines of race and civilisation .<br /> <br /> == Constitutive antagonism ==<br /> But the relations between monolithic majority and minoritarian anomalies, expansive exclusion and intensive inclusion, are perhaps not so neat. The independent contractors studied by Tsing and fuelling global supply-chains by stealing and stealthing, salvaging and foraging at no additional costs to the enterprise loop minor becomings back into grand scale exploitation. So do grassroots 'politics from below' all too easily emerge into self-governed NGOs, free-floating control after the end of enclosures. Graffiti turn street art and street art enter private homes. The language of entrepreneurs blends minor and major tones in its posited actualisation of breakages in the dominant order to profit from its extension before once again opening the circle. Military officers have been known to enlist post-structuralist–minoritarian–scholarship in planning and executing their murderous strategies. But so what is new? Ancient Chinese sages proselytised the hollowness of effect and the art of success to be grasped in relinquishing intentionality only to witness their patrons' successful instrumentalisation of Daoist flow for bloody combat. Today, the subject of neoliberalism has become the hollow subject of human capital–a porous object, in Harney and Moten's analysis; while logistics seeks to emancipate the flow of things from 'controlling agents' and their human errors. The smooth striates, the striated reimparts the smooth–dancing into dissymmetry. <br /> <br /> A dance–neither an eternal struggle of opposites nor a dialectical scaling up into transcendent space. We find no grounds to claim a particular progression in the unfolding of this dance–its mapping remains incomplete. But we are fairly certain it delineates something of a repetitive pattern. Perhaps a study of interpolating minor and major modes of the technical existence of some object or practice may occasion the abduction of patterns operative across scales. But any fractal quality to these patterns would need in our mind to rehearse not so much an interrelation as a gap of sorts; something that might bear out the hole dug by big tech and worms, the breakages entrepreneured, the ethnocentric glitches of media platforms, the tears of Oogie Boogie's precarious sutures. A missing mediation redoubled in the instability of both minor and major orders, as retraced in the jump between Daoist and despotic practice with each side failing to synch up with the other side. Both come to be out of the impossibility of scalar expansion, of a being without becoming. The threat they afford one another externalising the self-inconsistency of this dance expansive and intensive beyond computability.<br /> ---- <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=481 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-22T01:03:47Z

<p>CodaMarooned: Lots of things</p> <hr /> <div>== Opening ==<br /> In this essay we make for a few steps towards mapping the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold. We begin with a few notes on the issue of scale to then move some reflections over the sort of antagonism that minor and major modes of technical existence may be thought to instantiate. <br /> <br /> == The issue with scale ==<br /> We can take scalability to refer to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its basic components and how they fit together . Following Anna Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense . For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nations’ or ‘users’ or ‘species’ or ‘capital’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. Nor can expansion, in traversing articulation, elude the possibility of its own minor becoming. As big tech drills holes so a minor tech may occupy them. Its armoury is ontological. Its garrisons harboured in the margins of indeterminacy that proliferate anomalous in machines over the idolised and the threatening and the servo-mechanic . Or as Harney and Moten put it: in the flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship .<br /> <br /> So did insurgent socialites and evasions and fungal infestations cripple the scales of plantation colonialism. The transposition of football to New Guinea altered the game's competitive spirit; the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scrambled its big-datafied sense-making . Incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar interest. The explosive misery secreted by cities disgorge sprawling patchworks , blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons , the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history . So may the technoscientific prostheses of patriarchy and colonialism provoke–in the words of Luciana Parisi–heretic thinking in machines capable of questioning the transcendental conditions of knowledge and the computability of instrumentality. So did Kafka’s Prague German draw from its own impossibility retellings that made language itself stammer. And so does the assemblage that is 'Oogie Boogie' from Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas eventually subscend into its bugs. <br /> <br /> The burlap of its enchantment over-stretched; majoritarian technology drops the monological act of scale to disperse in the chattering worlds of its elements. We may pose here the question as to whether the so-called problem of ‘alternative’ organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’ rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure and instead in the institutionalised insensitivity to their minor becomings as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’ . This insensitivity extends into the deafness of apocalyptic solutionism to the dismantling potential of capital as a formalised abstraction of agencies whose infinitesimal operations far exceed it from within, from beneath. Aggregates of becoming like minerals redeposited building up in the cave where capital bathes in blood and dirt .<br /> <br /> What the operations of scale-ability do entail is circumscribing awareness of and disavowing care for the re-articulating effects of its own unravelling replication. This is what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects ’ and inevitable incompleteness of scalar expansion. Its inhibitive task deploys schizoid fictions to carve pathways through hylomorphic frictions : plotting the vindicated inclusion of the excluded into frontier fantasies of undifferentiated growth. Such was also the fantasy of diffusionist modernity–spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the rest of the world ‘like an oil slick’. Images of ‘all-a-piece blocks’ scaling to super-blocs split along the fault lines of race and civilisation .<br /> <br /> == Constitutive antagonism ==<br /> But the relations between monolithic majority and minoritarian anomalies, expansive exclusion and intensive inclusion, are perhaps not so neat. The independent contractors studied by Tsing and fuelling global supply-chains by stealing and stealthing, salvaging and foraging at no additional costs to the enterprise loop minor becomings back into grand scale exploitation. So do grassroots 'politics from below' all too easily emerge into self-governed NGOs, free-floating control after the end of enclosures. Graffiti turn street art and street art enter private homes. The language of entrepreneurs blends minor and major tones in its posited actualisation of breakages in the dominant order to profit from its extension before once again opening the circle. Military officers have been known to enlist post-structuralist–minoritarian–scholarship in planning and executing their murderous strategies. But so what is new? Ancient Chinese sages proselytised the hollowness of effect and the art of success to be grasped in relinquishing intentionality only to witness their patrons' successful instrumentalisation of Daoist flow for bloody combat. Today, the subject of neoliberalism has become the hollow subject of human capital–a porous object, in Harney and Moten's analysis; while logistics seeks to emancipate the flow of things from 'controlling agents' and their human errors. The smooth striates, the striated reimparts the smooth–dancing into dissymmetry. <br /> <br /> A dance–neither an eternal struggle of opposites nor a dialectical scaling up into transcendent space. We find no grounds to claim a particular progression in the unfolding of this dance–its mapping remains incomplete. But we are fairly certain it delineates something of a repetitive pattern. Perhaps a study of interpolating minor and major modes of the technical existence of some object or practice may occasion the abduction of patterns operative across scales. But any fractal quality to these patterns would need in our mind to rehearse not so much an interrelation as a gap of sorts; something that might bear out the hole dug by big tech and worms, the breakages entrepreneured, the ethnocentric glitches of media platforms, the tears of Oogie Boogie's precarious sutures. A missing mediation redoubled in the instability of both minor and major orders, as retraced in the jump between Daoist and despotic practice with each side failing to synch up with the other side. Both come to be out of the impossibility of scalar expansion, of a being without becoming. The threat they afford one another externalising the self-inconsistency of this dance expansive and intensive beyond computability.<br /> ---- <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=476 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-21T20:08:33Z

<p>CodaMarooned: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <div class="pad"><eplite id="inprogress" show-chat="false" /></div><br /> <br /> == The issue with scale ==<br /> We can take ''scalability'' as referring to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its basic components and how they fit together[1]. Following Anna Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense[2]. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nations’ or ‘users’ or ‘species’ or ‘capital’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. A minor tech builds from within the majority it dispossesses[3]. Margins of indeterminacy proliferate anomalous in machines beyond the idolised and the threatening and the servo-mechanic[4]. Or, as Harney and Moten put it: there are flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship[5]. <br /> <br /> So did the transposition of football to New Guinea change the spirit of the game[6] and the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scramble big-datafied sense-making[7]. Incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar potential or interest.[8] The explosive misery secreted by cities disgorge sprawling patchworks[9] and blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons[10] and the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history[11]. So may technoscientific prostheses of patriarchy and colonialism provoke–in the words of Luciana Parisi–heretic thinking in machines[12] capable of questioning the transcendental conditions of knowledge and the computability of instrumentality. So did Kafka’s Prague German draw from its own impossibility words that made German itself stammer. <br /> <br /> The veil of its enchantment stretched ashamedly; majoritarian technology drops the monological act of scale to disperse in the chattering worlds of its parts[13]. We may pose here the question as to whether the so-called problem ‘alternative’ organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’[14] rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure[15] but in the institutionalised insensitivity to their minor becomings as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’[16]. This insensitivity extends into the deafness of apocalyptic solutionism to the dismantling potential of capital as a formalised abstraction of agencies whose infinitesimal operations far exceed it from within, from beneath[17]. Aggregates of becoming like minerals redeposited building up in the cave where capital bathes in blood and dirt[18]. <br /> <br /> The operability of scale-ability then entails–or so the story goes–circumscribing awareness of and disavowing care for the re-articulating effects of its own unravelling replication–what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects[19]’ and inevitable incompleteness[20] of scalar expansion. This inhibitive task deploys schizoid fictions to carve its way through hylomorphic friction[21]– expansive capacities of including the excluded into frontier fantasies of undifferentiated growth. Such is also the fantasy of diffusionist modernity spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the rest of the world ‘like an oil slick’[22]: images of all-a-piece blocks scaling to super-blocs, split along the fault lines of race and civilisation[23].<br /> <br /> <br /> The rest is coming!! Stay tuned<br /> <br /> ----[1] Tsing (2012: 505)<br /> <br /> [2] These three things being not necessarily mutually exclusive. Consider here Alfred Gell’s search for a definition of technology in the ‘pursuit of intrinsically difficult-to-obtain results by roundabout, or clever means’ (1988: 6)–allowing for incantation and manipulation through but also beyond what is afforded in technical objects and procedures themselves. A minor technology in this sense is also a disenchanted one. <br /> <br /> [3] Deleuze and Guattari 1986 (1975): 16-17.<br /> <br /> [4] Simondon 2012 (1958). <br /> <br /> [5] Harney and Moten (2013:94)<br /> <br /> [6] Read in Lévi-Strauss (1962 31)<br /> <br /> [7] Miller (2011)<br /> <br /> [8] Knox (2021)<br /> <br /> [9] Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 481-2)<br /> <br /> [10] El Baroni (2022)<br /> <br /> [11] Bennett (2010 96)<br /> <br /> [12] Parisi 2022: 322. <br /> <br /> [13] cf. Bakhtin (1984)<br /> <br /> [14] Gümüsay and Reinecke (2022 238)<br /> <br /> [15] Young-Hyman, Magne, & Kruse (2022)<br /> <br /> [16] Morton (2016: 5)<br /> <br /> [17] Morton and Boyer (2021: 69-70). <br /> <br /> [18] The crystal metaphor comes from Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 106): ‘minorities (as) ''crystals of becoming'' whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements’ of the majority (emphasis mine). The blood and dirt metaphor is Marx’s. <br /> <br /> [19] ibid. 507<br /> <br /> [20] ibid. 515<br /> <br /> [21] Tsing 2005<br /> <br /> [22] Geertz 2000<br /> <br /> [23] Ibid., see also Huntington 1996. <br /> ---- <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=475 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-21T20:08:03Z

<p>CodaMarooned: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <div class="pad"><eplite id="inprogress" show-chat="false" /></div><br /> <br /> == The issue with scale ==<br /> We can take ''scalability'' as referring to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its basic components and how they fit together[1]. Following Anna Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense[2]. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nations’ or ‘users’ or ‘species’ or ‘capital’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. A minor tech builds from within the majority it dispossesses[3]. Margins of indeterminacy proliferate anomalous in machines beyond the idolised and the threatening and the servo-mechanic[4]. Or, as Harney and Moten put it: there are flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship[5]. <br /> <br /> So did the transposition of football to New Guinea change the spirit of the game[6] and the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scramble big-datafied sense-making[7]. Incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar potential or interest.[8] The explosive misery secreted by cities disgorge sprawling patchworks[9] and blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons[10] and the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history[11]. So may technoscientific prostheses of patriarchy and colonialism provoke–in the words of Luciana Parisi–heretic thinking in machines[12] capable of questioning the transcendental conditions of knowledge and the computability of instrumentality. So did Kafka’s Prague German draw from its own impossibility words that made German itself stammer. <br /> <br /> The veil of its enchantment stretched ashamedly; majoritarian technology drops the monological act of scale to disperse in the chattering worlds of its parts[13]. We may pose here the question as to whether the so-called problem ‘alternative’ organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’[14] rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure[15] but in the institutionalised insensitivity to their minor becomings as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’[16]. This insensitivity extends into the deafness of apocalyptic solutionism to the dismantling potential of capital as a formalised abstraction of agencies whose infinitesimal operations far exceed it from within, from beneath[17]. Aggregates of becoming like minerals redeposited building up in the cave where capital bathes in blood and dirt[18]. <br /> <br /> The operability of scale-ability then entails–or so the story goes–circumscribing awareness of and disavowing care for the re-articulating effects of its own unravelling replication–what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects[19]’ and inevitable incompleteness[20] of scalar expansion. This inhibitive task deploys schizoid fictions to carve its way through hylomorphic friction[21]– expansive capacities of including the excluded into frontier fantasies of undifferentiated growth. Such is also the fantasy of diffusionist modernity spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the rest of the world ‘like an oil slick’[22]: images of all-a-piece blocks scaling to super-blocs, split along the fault lines of race and civilisation[23].<br /> <br /> ----[1] Tsing (2012: 505)<br /> <br /> [2] These three things being not necessarily mutually exclusive. Consider here Alfred Gell’s search for a definition of technology in the ‘pursuit of intrinsically difficult-to-obtain results by roundabout, or clever means’ (1988: 6)–allowing for incantation and manipulation through but also beyond what is afforded in technical objects and procedures themselves. A minor technology in this sense is also a disenchanted one. <br /> <br /> [3] Deleuze and Guattari 1986 (1975): 16-17.<br /> <br /> [4] Simondon 2012 (1958). <br /> <br /> [5] Harney and Moten (2013:94)<br /> <br /> [6] Read in Lévi-Strauss (1962 31)<br /> <br /> [7] Miller (2011)<br /> <br /> [8] Knox (2021)<br /> <br /> [9] Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 481-2)<br /> <br /> [10] El Baroni (2022)<br /> <br /> [11] Bennett (2010 96)<br /> <br /> [12] Parisi 2022: 322. <br /> <br /> [13] cf. Bakhtin (1984)<br /> <br /> [14] Gümüsay and Reinecke (2022 238)<br /> <br /> [15] Young-Hyman, Magne, & Kruse (2022)<br /> <br /> [16] Morton (2016: 5)<br /> <br /> [17] Morton and Boyer (2021: 69-70). <br /> <br /> [18] The crystal metaphor comes from Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 106): ‘minorities (as) ''crystals of becoming'' whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements’ of the majority (emphasis mine). The blood and dirt metaphor is Marx’s. <br /> <br /> [19] ibid. 507<br /> <br /> [20] ibid. 515<br /> <br /> [21] Tsing 2005<br /> <br /> [22] Geertz 2000<br /> <br /> [23] Ibid., see also Huntington 1996. <br /> ---- <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=474 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-21T15:30:44Z

<p>CodaMarooned: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <div class="pad"><eplite id="inprogress" show-chat="false" /></div><br /> <br /> == The issue with scale ==<br /> This essay makes for a few steps toward a minor tech. We begin with a clarification of our understanding of what is and is not the issue with issues of scale. <br /> <br /> We may understand ''scalability'' as referring to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its basic components and how they fit together[1]. Following Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense[2]. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nations’ or ‘kinship’ or ‘users’ or ‘species’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’ and the very coordinates of its quiddity. <br /> <br /> So did the transposition of football to New Guinea change the spirit of the game[3] and the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scramble its big-datafied sense-making[4]. So incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar potential[5]. The explosive misery secreted by cities can disgorge sprawling patchworks[6], blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons[7], the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history[8]. So monologic composure runs off into the worlds of its parts[9]. From this perspective, the so-called problem of so-called alternative organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’[10] rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure utopically[11] so much as in the institutionalised insensitivity to their becomings–as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’[12].<br /> <br /> What scale-ability can and often must do, however–or so the story goes–is work hard to circumscribe awareness of and care for the effects of its own unravelling replication; what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects’ (ibid. 507) and inevitable incompleteness (ibid. 515) of scalar expansion. We may then grasp scale-ability as an ''operative fiction'' that ‘works through friction’ (Tsing 2005) via the often-ungrateful task of making a particular image–that of changeless change–operational in spite of itself. That would be the image of diffusionist modernity and techno-capital spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the world ‘like an oil slick’ (Geertz 2000). What such an image suppresses is not only the realities of colonial revolt–but the very blossoming into inconstancy and self-inconsistency of those passionate solidarities and identities that drove it (ibid.). Again,<br /> <br /> ---(the rest is soon to follow –&nbsp;stay tuned)---<br /> ----[1] Tsing 2012: 505<br /> <br /> [2] These three things being not necessarily mutually exclusive. Consider here Alfred Gell’s search for a definition of technology in the ‘pursuit of intrinsically difficult-to-obtain results by roundabout, or clever means’ (1988: 6)–allowing for incantation and manipulation through but also beyond what is afforded in technical objects and procedures themselves. A minor technology in this sense is also a disenchanted one. <br /> <br /> [3] Read in Lévi-Strauss 1962 31<br /> <br /> [4] Miller 2011<br /> <br /> [5] Knox 2021<br /> <br /> [6] Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 481-2<br /> <br /> [7] El Baroni 2022<br /> <br /> [8] Bennett 2010 96<br /> <br /> [9] cf. Bakhtin 1984<br /> <br /> [10] Gümüsay and Reinecke 2022 238<br /> <br /> [11] Young-Hyman, Magne, & Kruse 2022<br /> <br /> [12] Morton 2016: 5<br /> ---- <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=473 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-21T11:58:02Z

<p>CodaMarooned: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <div class="pad"><eplite id="inprogress" show-chat="false" /></div><br /> <br /> == The issue with scale ==<br /> This essay makes for a few steps toward a minor tech. We begin with a small clarification of our understanding of what is and is not the issue with issues of scale. <br /> <br /> We may understand ''scalability'' as referring to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its components and how they fit together (Tsing 2012: 505). Following from Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense[1]. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nation’ or ‘kinship’ or ‘office layout’ or ‘species’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. So the imbrications of digital media with native cosmologies scramble big-datafied sense-making (Miller 2011), the explosive misery secreted by cities can be made to disgorge sprawling patchworks (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 481-2), the world of earthworms and small agents subtend the ''grand recits'' of history (Bennett 2010 96) and the composition of monologic existence unravels in the worlds of its parts (cf. Bakhtin 1984). What scale-ability can and often must do, however–or so the story goes–is work hard to circumscribe awareness of and care for the effects of its own unravelling replication; what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects’ (ibid. 507) and inevitable incompleteness (ibid. 515) of scalar expansion. From this perspective we may grasp scale-ability as an ''operative fiction'' that ‘works through friction’ (Tsing 2005) via the often-ungrateful task of making a particular image–that of changeless change–operational in spite of itself[2]. That would be the image of diffusionist modernity and techno-capital spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the world ‘like an oil slick’ (Geertz 2000). What such an image suppresses is not only the realities of colonial revolt–but the very blossoming into inconstancy and self-inconsistency of those passionate solidarities and identities that drove it (ibid.). <br /> <br /> (the rest is soon to follow –&nbsp;stay tuned) <br /> <br /> ----[1] These three things being not necessarily mutually exclusive. Consider here Alfred Gell’s search for a definition of technology in the ‘pursuit of intrinsically difficult-to-obtain results by roundabout, or clever means’ (1988: 6)–allowing for incantation and manipulation through but also beyond what is afforded in technical objects and procedures themselves. A minor technology in this sense is also a disenchanted one. <br /> <br /> [2] Or: an impervious unknowing of the riddling loop that is Morton’s ecological awareness in its ‘becoming accustomed to a strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’ (2016: 5). Scalability involves a good deal of numbness. <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=472 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-21T11:57:33Z

<p>CodaMarooned: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <div class="pad"><eplite id="inprogress" show-chat="false" /></div><br /> <br /> == The issue with scale ==<br /> This essay makes for a few steps toward a minor tech. We begin with a small clarification of our understanding of what is and is not the issue with issues of scale. <br /> <br /> We may understand ''scalability'' as referring to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its components and how they fit together (Tsing 2012: 505). Following from Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense[1]. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nation’ or ‘kinship’ or ‘office layout’ or ‘species’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. So the imbrications of digital media with native cosmologies scramble big-datafied sense-making (Miller 2011), the explosive misery secreted by cities can be made to disgorge sprawling patchworks (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 481-2), the world of earthworms and small agents subtend the ''grand recits'' of history (Bennett 2010 96) and the composition of monologic existence unravels in the worlds of its parts (cf. Bakhtin 1984). What scale-ability can and often must do, however–or so the story goes–is work hard to circumscribe awareness of and care for the effects of its own unravelling replication; what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects’ (ibid. 507) and inevitable incompleteness (ibid. 515) of scalar expansion. From this perspective we may grasp scale-ability as an ''operative fiction'' that ‘works through friction’ (Tsing 2005) via the often-ungrateful task of making a particular image–that of changeless change–operational in spite of itself[2]. That would be the image of diffusionist modernity and techno-capital spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the world ‘like an oil slick’ (Geertz 2000). What such an image suppresses is not only the realities of colonial revolt–but the very blossoming into inconstancy and self-inconsistency of those passionate solidarities and identities that drove it (ibid.). <br /> ----[1] These three things being not necessarily mutually exclusive. Consider here Alfred Gell’s search for a definition of technology in the ‘pursuit of intrinsically difficult-to-obtain results by roundabout, or clever means’ (1988: 6)–allowing for incantation and manipulation through but also beyond what is afforded in technical objects and procedures themselves. A minor technology in this sense is also a disenchanted one. <br /> <br /> [2] Or: an impervious unknowing of the riddling loop that is Morton’s ecological awareness in its ‘becoming accustomed to a strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’ (2016: 5). Scalability involves a good deal of numbness. <br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=442 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-20T14:55:40Z

<p>CodaMarooned: </p> <hr /> <div><br /> <div class="pad"><eplite id="inprogress" show-chat="false" /></div><br /> <br /> == Insert title ==<br /> Working on it–come back in a few. <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned http://cc.practices.tools/wiki/index.php?title=Toward_a_Minor_Tech:Lomi%26Holt&diff=441 Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt 2022-12-20T14:52:40Z

<p>CodaMarooned: Created page with "<br /> <div class="pad"><eplite id="inprogress" show-chat="false" /></div><br /> <br /> [[Category:Toward a Minor Tech]]<br /> [[Category:1000 words]]</div>

CodaMarooned