As urbanization assumes planetary scales under variegated market regimes, spaces and opportunities for collective provisions of care are constrained. Long honed relational skills and the use of heterogeneous relationships for economic opportunity are disentangled in favor of intensely individuated adaptations to precarious livelihoods. Urban life increasingly becomes a continuously updated series of interoperable standardizations and probabilistic calculations. Yet endurance for large numbers of urban residents remains predicated on indifference to and acts of detachment from prevailing modes of urban power, in (...) operations of stealth and supplement long embodied by blackness, and Black Power. A notion of generic blackness is explored as conveying both the logic exhibited to define and contain the unbounded and errant forces shaping urban life and the opacities elaborated by residents of a lower-working-class district in Jakarta. (shrink)

This article suggests that Facebook embodies a new logic of capitalist governance, what has been termed the ‘social logic of the derivative’. The logic of the derivative is rooted in the now dominant financial level of the capitalist economy, and is mediated by social media and the algorithmic processing of large digital data sets. This article makes three precise claims: First, that the modus operandi of Facebook mirrors the operations of derivative financial instruments. Second, that the algorithms that Facebook uses (...) share a genealogy with those of derivative financial instruments – both are outcomes of the influence of the ‘cyber sciences’ on managerial practice in the post-war years. Third, that the future potential of Facebook lies in its ability to apply the logic of derivatives to the financial valuation of ordinary social relations, thus further extending the process of financialization of everyday life. (shrink)

This article draws upon recent theorising of the ‘becoming topological’ of space– specifically, how new social spaces are constituted through relations rather than physical locations – to explore how standardised data, and specifically test data, have influenced teachers’ work and learning. We outline the varied ways in which teacher practices at a primary school in Queensland, Australia, were actively constituted through processes of ‘tracking data’ and ‘keeping data on-track’, and how teachers were simultaneously being disciplined, or ‘tracked’, by these very (...) same data. Our analyses suggest that what appear to be more ‘technical’ activities and tasks of ‘using’ data are, in fact, actively constituted modes of governance, enabled through and deployed by ongoing practices of comparison and topological respatialisation. (shrink)

Aesthesis, the classical term for sensing and perceiving, is at the heart of innumerable problems that plague global society. The purpose of this article is to open a conversation on aesthesis. We survey the roots and relevance of aesthesis as a direct albeit contested relation and engagement with the world and with Others. From its pre-Socratic origins, aesthesis has been both a pragmatic, somatic concept, prompting a re-evaluation of the distinction between experience and abstraction. We trace its ongoing repression from (...) Plato through ‘western’ theories of formal Aesthetics. Drawing on a relational interpretation of Protagoras’ aesthesis, we argue that modern pragmatists and radical empiricists, as well as more contemporary critics of the ‘colonization’ of aesthesis (Mignolo and Vasquez) by formal Aesthetics recognize and develop the relational and ethical aspects of aesthesis. We consider the role of the body, affect, and of the intangible or virtual qualities of aesthesis. The ethics of obligations (Weil) in the polis (Arendt) shows how aesthesis informs politics despite its repression in favour of moral and legal norms. We argue this is relevant to contemporary crises such as xenophobia and ecocidal climate warming. (shrink)

Accounts of big data practices often assume that they target individuals. Personalization, with all the risks of discrimination and bias it entails, has been the critical focus in accounts of consumption, government, social media, and health. This paper argues that personalization through models using large-scale data is part of a more expansive change in probabilization that, in principle, is not reducible to individual or ‘personal’ attributes and actions. It describes the ‘personalization’ of an online grocery shopping recommender system to list (...) a small number of grocery items of personal relevance for each of the millions of online grocery shoppers at a major UK supermarket chain. Drawing on a theory of probability proposed by the philosopher of science Karl Popper and anthropological work on shopping, it suggests that the attempt to generate personalized predictions necessarily incorporates impersonal relations to others and things. Using a mixture of discourse analysis and code-based reconstruction of key elements of the recommender system, it suggests that personalization is one facet of an open-ended weave of propensities associated with people and things in contemporary big data configurations. The paper explores how, in the context of recommender systems, the constitutive incompleteness of shopping lists, their propensity to expand or change, might be more important than their capacity to be personalized. (shrink)

Biennials – periodic, independent and international exhibitions surveying trends in visual art – have with startling speed become key nodes in linking production, distribution and consumption of contemporary art. Cultural production and consumption have been typically separated in research, neglecting phenomena, like biennials, sitting in between. Biennials have become, however, key sites of both the production of art’s discourse and where that discourse translates into practices of display and contexts of appreciation. They are, this article argues, key sites of art’s (...) symbolic production. Symbolic production is what makes a work, an artist, or even a genre visible and relevant, providing its sense in a system of classifications and, in an exhibition like a biennial, literally giving it a place in the scene. This article proposes a cultural analysis of biennials, focusing on the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 and the first of the genre, through which we can trace biennials’ rise and transformations. (shrink)

In light of the structural role of computational technology in the expansion of modern global finance, this essay investigates the ontology of contemporary markets starting from a reformulation of liquidity—one of the tenets of financial trading. Focusing on the nexus between financial and algorithmic flows, the paper complements contemporary philosophies of the market with insights into recent theories of computation, emphasizing the functional role of contingency, both for market trading and algorithmic processes. Considering the increasing adoption of advanced computational methods (...) in automated trading strategies, this article argues that the event of price is the direct manifestation of the incomputability at the heart of market exchange. In doing so, it questions the ontological assumptions of “flow” and “fluidity” underpinning traditional conceptions of liquidity and challenges the notion of rationality in market behavior. Ultimately, the paper gestures toward some of the social and political consequences of this reformulation. (shrink)

Recent arguments asserting a topological turn in culture also identify a range of topologically informed interventions in social and cultural theory. Talk of a topological turn evokes both the enduring interest that the field of mathematics presents and the business of analysis in the cultural sphere. This article questions the novelty of this ‘becoming topological of culture’ and digs into a deeper historicity in order to identify the trends that may be said to support the development of topology in the (...) current situation. It also examines the relationship between mathematics considered ontologically and mathematics considered epistemologically, in order to better grasp the significance of the practical abstractions that mathematics as technics manifests. Discussions of Cantor, Russell, Poincaré, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and others address the background of contemporary mathematical topology. The article goes on to examine Alain Badiou’s principle that mathematics is ontology and concludes with a discussion of the mathematics of Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

This article turns towards the spatial life of ‘digital infrastructures’, i.e. code, protocols, standards, and data formats that are hidden from view in everyday applications of computational technologies. It does so by drawing on the version control system Git as a case study, and telling the story of its initial development in order to reconstruct the circumstances and technical considerations surrounding its conception. This account engages with computational infrastructures on their own terms by adopting the figure of the ‘stack’ to (...) frame a technically informed analysis, and exploring its implications for a different kind of geographic inquiry. Drawing on topology as employed by Law and Mol, attention is given to the multiplicity of spatialities and temporalities enrolled in digital infrastructures in general, and Git specifically. Along the lines of the case study and by reading it against other literatures, this notion of topology is expanded to include the material performation of fundamentally arbitrary, more-than-human topologies, as well as their nested articulation, translation and negotiation within digital infrastructures. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é associar a lógica de abdução de Peirce à cibernética de sistemas vivos. Sistemas vivos não podem ser entendidos através de uma epistemologia causalista, pois se comportam conforme os efeitos e não conforme as causas. A cibernética analisou o modo pelo qual máquinas não triviais se movem através de retroação, ou circuito de retorno: a cada etapa, o sistema corrige a etapa anterior, dependendo de até onde a etapa anterior pode ir em relação a um possível (...) equilíbrio. A dinâmica implica uma possível inibição da energia excessiva seguida de um possível aumento da energia insuficiente. Cada uma dessas condições é um erro que se corrige automaticamente, atingindo um estado temporário de homeostase. A auto-correção significa que é preciso adicionar à saída um impulso adicional “criativo” que seja singular e imprevisível. A lógica que é capaz de fazer sentido dessa dinâmica é a abdução de Peirce, também chamada retrodução, onde o ato inferencial retroage sobre um fato incompreensível, um “erro” epistemológico, inventando sua causa. O pensar e a auto-poiesis de sistemas vivos percorrem o mesmo caminho, substituindo estratégias ocasionais por causas universais atemporais. A abdução é a evidência de que é possível atingir uma condição de “conhecimento” sem apelar para causalidade. A possibilidade que as “leis da natureza”, possa seguir este caminho conclui o ensaio ao adicionar a noção do físico Lee Smolin do “princípio de precedência”, conforme foi inspirado pela ideia de Peirce da evolução das leis da natureza e seu caráter temporal, ou seja, contingente. (shrink)