The recent emergence of generative AI software as viable tools for use in the cultural and creative industries has sparked debates about the potential for “creativity” to be automated and “augmented” by algorithmic machines. Such discussions, however, begin from an ontological position, attempting to define creativity by either falling prey to universalism (i.e. “creativity is X”) or reductionism (i.e. “only humans can be truly creative” or “human creativity will be fully replaced by creative machines”). Furthermore, such an approach evades addressing (...) the real and material impacts of AI on creative labour in these industries. This article thus offers more expansive methodological and conceptual approaches to the recent hype on generative AI. By combining (Csikszentmihalyi, The systems model of creativity, Springer, Dordrecht, 2014) systems view of creativity, in which we emphasise the shift from “what” to “where” is creativity, with (Lievrouw, Media technologies, The MIT Press, 2014) relational-materialist theory of “mediation”, we argue that the study of “creativity” in the context of generative AI must be attentive to the interactions between technologies, practices, and social arrangements. When exploring the relational space between these elements, three core concepts become pertinent: creative labour, automation, and distributed agency. Critiquing “creativity” through these conceptual lenses allows us to re-situate the use of generative AI within discourses of labour in post-industrial capitalism and brings us to a conceptualisation of creativity that privileges neither the human user nor machine algorithm but instead emphasises a relational and distributed form of agency. (shrink)

Noise is said to disturb, disorient, and confuse, but this article looks specifically at the figure of noise “striking” – rather than, say, a rumbling or murmuring disquiet – us to examine its potential to unsettle European liberal hegemonic norms of ordering society and the inequalities they produce. In particular, it focuses on noisy protest, rebellion, and riot which might “awaken” citizens to these injustices and efforts to suppress them. Drawing on work of Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Lauren Berlant, Fred (...) Moten, Jacques Derrida, and Catherine Malabou, this article replays and dislodges the long-standing distinction between noise and logos by examining the transformative capacity of noise as something differential that inserts inconvenience into non-relational forms of sovereignty. (shrink)

The expression “AI” has become as commonplace as “computer.” While many people have a relatively clear idea of what an AI system or a computer does or can do, fewer have an idea of how precisely th...

A quiet revolution in genetics is increasingly rendering our milieu strange and artificial. Epigenomics, informatic cousin of epigenetics, is a xenoforming process, giving birth to an alien milieu, replacing the natural with the technical. If epigenetics is understood as the heritable changes in gene expression that do not alter DNA sequence, epigenomics takes as object the set of epigenetic modifications. Environmental, social, even political aspects of life’s variability are re-understood digitally in epigenomic profiles, the previous categories computationally accounted for as (...) potential triggers of epigenesis. Following Gilbert Simondon, the xenoforming procedures of epigenomics can be understood as the concretization and adaptation processes of a technical object, the invention of which gives birth to a technogeographic milieu. In this article, the author examines Simondon’s work, especially, ‘On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects’, alongside contemporary scholarship on epigenetics. (shrink)

In its hegemonic definition, biopolitical governmentality is characterised by a seemingly infinite capacity of expansion, susceptible to colonise the landscape and timescape of the living present in the name of capitalistic productivity. The main trait of biopower is its normative, legal and political plasticity, allowing it to reappropriate critiques and resistances by appealing to bioethical efficacy and biological accuracy. Under these circumstances, how can we invent rebellious forms-of-life and alternative temporalities escaping biopolitical normativity? In this essay, I interrogate the theoretical (...) presuppositions of biopolitical rationality. I provide a deconstruction of the conceptual and temporal structures upholding the notion of biopolitics, in view of laying the ground for new forms of resistance. The articulation between life and power has a long philosophical history, which has been largely ignored by social theorists and political thinkers using biopolitics as an interpretative model. I re-inscribe this model within the tradition of critical materialism, by articulating Foucault’s ‘critical ontology’ to recent philosophical works on biological plasticity (Malabou). In these discourses, the logic of biopower depends on a representation of life – ‘the living’ – as living present. Biopower finds itself anchored in the authority of the present, that is to say, of being-as-presence (ontology); it sustains presentist definitions of life and materiality, be it under the form of a ‘plastic’ ontology. By drawing on Derrida’s notions of ‘spectrality’ and ‘life-death’ and Francesco Vitale’s work on ‘biodeconstruction’, I deconstruct these discourses on life and materiality and attempt to dissociate them from their ontological grounding, in order to suggest new paths of resistance to biopower. In particular, I follow the tracks of “the monster” in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Malabou. Foucault tells us that the monster is a singular figure, parasitic and subversive, beckoning a life beyond life, at once organic and non-organic, located at the limit between the normal and the exceptional, and exceeding the scope of biopolitical normativity in both theoretical and practical terms. It exists at the intersection of what Foucault names “the symbolics of blood” and “the analytics of sex”. As such, it materialises a self-transformative dimension of the living which remains, I argue, inadequate to Malabou’s representation of plasticity. The monstrous is a self-deconstructive motif calling for another biopolitical rationality, before or beyond ontological reductions or reconstructions. (shrink)

An important but easily forgotten moment in the history of film-philosophy is Jean Epstein's assertion that cinema, more than merely thinking, has a kind of intelligence. If it is a newfound conception of rationality that is needed for any contemporary ethical relation to the world, as thinkers from Reza Negarestani and Pete Wolfendale to feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks have espoused in their respective neo-rationalist projects, then cinema as a thinking thing must be interrogated in its relation to reason. A somatophilia (...) of purely affective and phenomenological approaches in film theory alongside micropolitical injunctions to undermine common-sense and liberate one's desire in extremity can fall limp in view of such calls for universal thinking around rationality. To understand cinema's specific form of intelligence, this article will explore Luc Besson's Lucy as an instance of how film is able to represent intelligence. Besson's film provides a site where Western cultural anxieties and assumptions around intelligence are manifested. This will allow an explication of contemporary approaches to intelligence in philosophy whilst confronting these discourses with the insidious problematics of gender and race that undergird the film. I argue that Lucy shares many of its ambitions with the emerging vectors of thought associated with the neo-rationalist perspective in its engaging with a rethinking of universal values and the Promethean possibilities of human action. Reading the film through these philosophies will help position the ethical stakes it sets up, but also to distinguish it from a trend of contemporary “posthuman” films that it finds itself in company with. While it is certainly true that posthuman themes, as well as transhumanist fantasies, seem to permeate Besson's film, this article will incorporate another neologism, taken from neo-rationalist thinkers, in order to emphasise moments that can be productive from the standpoint of a philosophical account of intelligence: “rationalist inhumanism.”. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the relationship betweenperformativity, as it appears in Judith Butler's work, andplasticity, as it appears in the work of Catherine Malabou. I argue that these concepts are isomorphic. Butler and Malabou both hold that resistance to contemporary forms of power, or “insubordination,” is contingent on a subject's ability to become other than what it is; Butler articulates this ability in terms of performativity, and Malabou articulates it in terms of plasticity. I reveal the social-constructivist dimension of (...) Malabou's work while also making apparent the extent to which Butler's work, contrary to her own way of conceptualizing it, and hence surprisingly and uneasily, presupposes a biologically basic capacity for change. Plasticity is this biologically basic capacity. Both thinkers affirm the idea that insubordinate forms of transformation can be impeded by the discourse that conditions what a subject can think. I suggest that this is an insight that must be heeded, even as I seek to affirm a form of plasticity beyond discourse. (shrink)

Initially coined by Weizenbaum in 1976, ‘alien' thought refers to the radical difference with which ‘thinking machines’ approach the process of thinking. The contemporary paradox of over-determination and indeterminacy—caused largely by algorithmic decision-making in the civic realm—makes these differences both more entangled and more difficult to navigate. In this essay, I trace over-determination to Leibniz and Turing’s axiomatic procedures and to instrumental rationality, and I trace indeterminacy to the mid-twentieth century co-development of computers and neurosciences to advance the following proposition: (...) understanding alien thought requires understanding incomputability, temporal swarming, and inscriptive-significational errance. Understanding these phenomena in turn requires understanding thinking by doing, distributed thinking, and ontological indeterminacy. All are present in machinic operations as well as in the twentieth century experimental artistic practices of artists such as Duchamp, Cage, and Xu. These practices rely on indeterminate procedures and function as diagrammatic machines. A diagrammatic machine is neither abstract nor particular; neither an idea that is determining in the supreme instance, nor an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance, but rather instantiates a real yet to come (Deleuze and Guattari in A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia: Trans. Massumi B, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987). In this essay, indeterminate artistic practices are used as an entry into alien thought and its correlates—infinity and complexity—by way of aesthetic analogy. (shrink)

This article historicizes a single stage in how the contemporary obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) category was built. Starting from the position that the two central components which make up OCD are ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, it illustrates how these concepts were taken apart by a small group of clinical psychologists working at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in south London in the early 1970s, and why compulsions were investigated whilst obsessions were ignored. The decision to distinguish the previously (...) undifferentiated symptoms is attributed to the commitment amongst psychologists at the Maudsley, most notably Stanley Rachman, to an empirical conception of science which emphasized observability. Two aspects of this are discussed. First, compulsions were deemed ‘visible’ through their correspondence with animal behaviour. Second, the symptom was seen as open to an experimental modification procedure which privileged visible outcomes. Ultimately, the article concludes that the historical division between ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’, and the extensive investigation of the latter, has had substantial implications for the development of OCD as a category centred on visible behaviours and treated through behavioural means. (shrink)

This article examines the conflicting representations of plasticity and epigenetics in the work of philosopher Catherine Malabou and evolutionary theorists Mary Jane West-Eberhard and Eva Jablonka. In order to speak of a new biological ‘paradigm’ and to attribute values of novelty or inventiveness to life itself, Malabou has to suppress the unsettled debates within the life sciences. The aporias of evolutionary narrative and causality reveal a necessary differentiality and textuality that belongs neither to life nor science itself, but leaves a (...) haunting remanence within every corpus. New materialism resists this necessity of life-science, which calls for a deconstructive reading. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 131-145, June 2022.

In his experimental studies on tactile recognition, the German neurologist Kurt Goldstein observes a peculiar ‘twitching movement’ of the body in neurologically impaired patients suffering from mind-blindness. Drawing on Goldstein’s interpretation of these bodily movements as kinaesthetic reactions, the present article advances a symmetrical conception of tactility that relocates the bipolarity of the sense of touch within the human body. In line with this symmetrical approach, the kinaesthetic reactions will be construed as tactile self-activation or self-touch of the body and (...) conceptualized, following Michael Polanyi’s epistemological notion, as the ‘tacit dimension of touch’. Combining neuropathological aspects with a media theoretical and epistemological trajectory, this article aims at re-evaluating the centrality of the registers of the sense of touch as the fundamental ground for grasping the world in its concrete encounters as well as in its symbolic abstractions. (shrink)