Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics (Media Philosophy) - Hardcover

Fazi, M. Beatrice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786606089 ISBN 13: 9781786606082

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

In Contingent Computation, M. Beatrice Fazi offers a new theoretical perspective through which we can engage philosophically with computing. The book proves that aesthetics is a viable mode of investigating contemporary computational systems. It does so by advancing an original conception of computational aesthetics that does not just concern art made by or with computers, but rather the modes of being and becoming of computational processes. Contingent Computation mobilises the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead in order to address aesthetics as an ontological study of the generative potential of reality. Through a novel philosophical reading of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and of Turing’s notion of incomputability, Fazi finds this potential at the formal heart of computational systems, and argues that computation is a process of determining indeterminacy. This indeterminacy, which is central to computational systems, does not contradict their functionality. Instead, it drives their very operation, albeit in a manner that might not always fit with the instrumental, representational and cognitivist purposes that we have assigned to computing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

M. Beatrice Fazi is Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. Her primary areas of expertise are the philosophy of computation, the philosophy of technology and the emerging field of media philosophy.

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Contingent Computation

Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics

By M. Beatrice Fazi

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2018 M. Beatrice Fazi
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-608-2

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
Introduction: Novelty in Computation, 1, 
Part 1: Aesthetics, 21, 
1 Continuity versus Discreteness, 23, 
2 Computation, 47, 
3 Processes, 61, 
Part 2: Abstraction, 81, 
4 Computational Idealism, 83, 
5 Axiomatics, 97, 
6 Limits and Potential, 113, 
Part 3: Experience, 141, 
7 Computational Empiricism, 143, 
8 Factuality, 157, 
9 Actuality, 173, 
Conclusion: Computational Actual Occasions, 203, 
Bibliography, 213, 
Index, 223, 
About the Author, 239, 

CHAPTER 1

Continuity versus Discreteness

AN IMPASSE

Contemporary aesthetic enquiries into digital media are stuck in an impasse. On the one hand, this impasse attests to the relentless expansion of modes of thinking, acting, and perceiving that have been enabled by digital technologies and which are, in fact, specific to them. On the other hand, however, it also reflects the widespread belief that these digitally native experiences are imperfect or flawed if they are not validated by a biological substrate, a human referent, a body, or simply by 'life', which — in its multiform organisations and configurations — expresses and catalyses the affects and sensations that are central to aesthetic experience. This impasse in digital aesthetics thus concerns the difficulty of attributing those perceptual and relational features that are the object of aesthetic enquiry to the strictly informational and operative character of the computer or the digital device. This is a difficulty that poses a genuine problem for present-day notions of aesthetics, given that contemporary society is in large part structured by such informational operations and machines.

The deadlock that I am bringing to the fore here lies at the heart of aesthetic elaborations in the field of digital media theory and digital media studies. However, this deadlock is not limited to the cultural analysis of computational media but is informed by much older and broader philosophical questions. The impasse can be conceived as a standoff between two seemingly irreconcilable ways of relating to the world. A mode of relation that is said to be aesthetically primary, insofar as it concerns the qualitative features that belong to the perception and receptivity of lived experience, is thus opposed to an alternative view, which is, by contrast, mediated, technological, instrumental, and, most importantly, dictated by digital technologies' quantitative modes of formal organisation. As a result of this impasse, the very possibility of an aesthetics of the digital becomes a contradiction in terms. While media and cultural theorists, computer scientists, and philosophers might disagree on an exact definition of 'digitality', they accept discreteness as its fundamental feature. The digital is, in this sense, intrinsically discrete or, in other words, characterised as a data technology that uses discontinuous values to access, represent, and manage information. Conversely, philosophical, cultural, and social accounts of aesthetic activities describe a universe of percepts and perceivers, the reciprocity of which is established by a rapport of continuity with what is given or encountered in experience. Aesthetics, in this respect, concerns the perceptual understanding of what counts as sensuous experiencing: its proprieties, features, and qualities and, subsequently, the prospect of its expression all rely equally on the continuity of perceptual and sensuous relations.

In the light of these considerations, I wish to propose a model to interpret this impasse. This model frames the deadlock as an opposition between continuity and discreteness. The continuous and the discrete are antagonistic ontological registers, or two antithetical modes of being, which concern conflicting modes of grasping and recording reality. Digital technology, with its binary elaboration of reality through quantifiable mechanical operations and quantitative inputs and outputs, attends to the real by discretising it. Aesthetics, however, being predicated upon perceptual relations and sensations, would seem to require a continuous — and thus analogue — association with the world. One can see that, from the standpoint of the model of the impasse offered here, the conceptual challenge of any aesthetic investigation of the digital pertains to the problem of pinpointing what constitutes the aesthetic dimension of digitality itself. What are the foundational elements that concern such a dimension, and what ontology do we need in order to account for the disparity between that which is supposedly continuous (perception and sensation) and that which is not (digital technology)?

It becomes evident, through taking up the challenge of thinking about these questions, that the possibility of establishing a digital aesthetics extends beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries of a theory of art (in general), or of art made with or by computers (in the specific). The impasse between continuity and discreteness calls the etymological roots of the term 'aesthetics' into question. These roots lie in the ancient Greek aísthesis, meaning 'perception from the senses', 'feeling', and 'sensation'. If we return to this original sense of aesthetics, the term could be said to denote sensory knowledge, and thus knowledge that is prior to any artistic meaning and judgement of taste. From the perspective of aesthetics-as-aisthesis, the difficulty of having an aesthetic account of the digital entails the effort of conceiving of a digital perception or of a digital sensation. Aesthetics, here, is no longer just a theory of art but, more broadly, a theory of sensory relations, aimed at the investigation of how we relate to things, and how these things in turn relate to other things. From this point of view, what is continuous is not only the recording of reality, but also reality itself, in its relational infinity of variations, modulations, and transformations — relations that aesthetics aims to register through the sensible. Moreover, in this sense, it should already be apparent that the impasse that I am sketching between continuity and discreteness has profound Deleuzian connotations.

It is not an overstatement to say that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze was not keen on computers. Although Deleuze engaged, both independently and in partnership with Félix Guattari, with media such as television, radio, and — above all — cinema, he wrote little, and not fondly, about computing machines. Still, the little that he did write on the topic has influenced the critical investigation of digital technologies, the ubiquitous proliferation of which was just beginning at the time of Deleuze's death in 1995. These sparse comments have framed, with a degree of prescience and great philosophical rigour, the limitations and dependencies of the digital medium, exposing how computing is inherently ancillary to the regimes of communication and representation, and how it relies upon the axiomatic infrastructures and informational goals that fuel contemporary society's systems of control. In a sense, it is thus somewhat paradoxical that, despite Deleuze's overt suspicion towards the computational, his metaphysical vocabulary of rhizomes, assemblages, bodies without organs, and abstract machines abound in media theory syllabi as a means of explaining the condition of living in a networked information society. The influence that Deleuze has exerted over the cultural study of digital technology can, however, be explained by considering how a conceptual apparatus of intensities, multiplicities, and affirmations would seem particularly apt to describe a technomediated society that is, and whose media and modes of production are, without a centre and in continuous flow. In this respect, Deleuze's theoretical language has indirectly facilitated attempts to legitimate a philosophy of digital media. These are attempts that aim to mobilise Deleuze's famous conceptual tool kit in order to advance novel fields of engagement with the technological.

We should now return to the impasse between continuity and discreteness with these concerns in mind. In order to do so, it is crucial to stress that, while the status quo of contemporary digital media studies is not unanimously and universally informed by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, issues pertaining to aesthetics-as-aisthesis have entered digital media theory (partially but influentially) through an appropriation and elaboration of Deleuze's argument for a 'logic of sensation'. This is a relational knowledge in which the forces in play are prior to cognitive descriptions of the world and are thus 'freed from the model of recognition'. Such a Deleuzian setting in digital aesthetics might be explicitly acknowledged, implicitly asserted, or also openly bypassed. Nonetheless, it remains the case that, when dealing with aesthetics-as-aisthesis in the digital realm, the Deleuzian problem, according to which what is mechanical and codified is able to generate neither sensation nor thought, is brought to the fore.

Of course, Deleuze is not alone in posing this problem. The disparity between the limitations of the technological (with its representational and cognitive character) on the one hand, and the irreducibility of the thinking that comes from lived experience and sensation (which both surpass cognitive representation) on the other, has been addressed frequently in contemporary philosophy and critical theory, mostly via critiques of instrumental reason or oppositions to the mechanisation of life. One might think here of the Frankfurt School as a clear example of such criticism. Interestingly, one can also count Gilbert Simondon among those who share a critical stance towards the mechanisation of thought and being; obviously, one cannot omit Martin Heidegger from this list either. Moreover, although they afford very different premises, aims, and outcomes, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and post-Marxism similarly emphasise particularities rather than the abstract universals that might subsume them, thus questioning the usefulness and validity of automating and systematising that which is lived. Finally, as another figure in this list, I should mention Alain Badiou, who — like Deleuze — made irreducible multiplicity the central point of his thought. Despite his aversion towards the affective and the perceptual, and despite his passionate defence of the discreteness of events that do not relate to but rather break with the quotidian, for Badiou as well thought and being ultimately remain beyond formalisation.

This account of philosophical suspicions of the mechanical qua the instrumental is not meant to be exhaustive. However, the heterogeneity of the voices mentioned above demonstrates that the aesthetic impasse between the continuous and the discrete should be contextualised vis-à-vis a broader intellectual aversion to the modern technological 'enframing' (to use a wellknown Heideggerian term) of thinking and feeling into preprogrammed structures of reasoning that can be replicated automatically. From this standpoint, aesthetics is less the ultimate citadel of the Luddite than the sharpest tool in the box of those scholars concerned with saving the singularity and specificity of the lived, whether this latter is a practice, language, art, man, or existence itself. Yet, although other entry points to the impasse in digital aesthetics are thus possible, and although aesthetics itself can be mobilised in different manners in order to respond to this situation, I maintain that the setting of the ontological model of the deadlock between continuity and discreteness that I am proposing in this chapter remains characteristically Deleuzian. This is also the form in which it has, in part, entered the cultural theory of digital media. From Deleuze, one can draw the conclusion that a digital aesthetics (that is, an aesthetics of discreteness) is perhaps impossible. This is not to say that Deleuze himself claimed that. My point, rather, is that the association of aesthetics with a field of continuity can develop directly from Deleuze, and that this affinity between aesthetics and continuity leaves the aesthetic investigation of the digital with a difficulty that cannot be dodged or avoided, but which needs to be fully addressed.

Ontological continuity is a key feature of Deleuze's elaboration of aestheticsas-aisthesis. Drawing upon Bergson's notion of duration (which is about qualitative rather than quantitative multiplicity) and upon differential calculus, Deleuze's continuity is an asymmetric synthesis of the sensible. The continuum is the ontological plane of transformation of what is prior to individuation, of what is not logically predetermined, of what instead invents and creates through difference. This differentiation, however, is never fully realised: it always demands the occurrence of tendencies, vectors, lines of flight, and infinite speeds, which remain pure differential affirmations. For Deleuze, aesthetics is exactly what offers us the opportunity to address these unactualised conditions, insofar as it concerns one's unmediated relation with the sensuous dimension upon which these unactualised conditions find expression. Although he also addressed art and artists extensively, Deleuze did not centre his aesthetics upon notions of the art object, or upon traditional aesthetic values or definitions of spectatorship. Deleuze's aesthetics is, primarily, a theory of sensibility. Following a post-Kantian legacy, and transversally linking Bergson with Nietzsche, Deleuze defined sensation as what strikes us before meaning is trapped into figuration and signification. Operating beyond stable or fixed subjectivity, sensation is characterised not as a merely sensory reaction triggered by the qualities of a certain object, but as constituted by differential relations in intensity, which in turn endow reality with its transcendental conditions of existence.

From this Deleuzian perspective, the discreteness of digitality is evidently problematic, for it epitomises yet another development of the representational: in other words, a development of that which breaks the unmediated relation with the sensible and separates thinking from affect and intuition — the former to be understood in the Spinozist sense of a variation in the potentia agendi of a body, and the latter in the Bergsonian sense of a method of unmediated and immediate 'sympathy' with things. Deleuze's reworking of the traditional notion of aisthesis presupposes instead the immanence of thought and sensation. In this respect, Deleuze's aesthetics is truly an aisthesis insofar as it can be described as a sensory knowledge: there is thought in aesthetics, yet this thinking is enmeshed, inextricably, with the sensibility of the real. Consequently, it is useful to frame the contemporary impasse of digital aesthetics in terms of a mismatch between, on the one hand, the finitude of logico-mathematical techniques of systematisation of thought and being and, on the other, that infinite reality of thinking and feeling that moves in what Brian Massumi has called the 'missing half second' of what is too spatiotemporally compressed and, as such, cannot be cognised or represented but only felt. The impasse of digital aesthetics can thereby be phrased as a problem concerning the ITL8ITL and continuity of thought and sensation against the finitude and discreteness of those strategies that want to bind both thinking and feeling into an automated mechanism. From this standpoint, the finitude in question is not only that of the medium or of the tool, in their historical and material instantiations, but also that of the inherent limitations of formal sciences and of those disciplines that attempt to channel the continuity of thinking and feeling into a self-contained structure of reasoning. This claim can be expanded by phrasing the impasse between aesthetics-as-aisthesis and the digital as an impasse concerning the dynamism and generative power of life as opposed to the static nature of the formal, finite, and binary means through which the digital machine harnesses the living and the lived. The richness and density of sensation, at the core of aesthetics-as-aisthesis, is thus in conflict with the digital machine, understood as both product and producer of cognitive and logocentric abstractions.

In conclusion, this aesthetic deadlock is a contest that is to be fought in an ontological ring: the competition is between the indeterminacy of the lived and the determinism that the digital machine needs in order to operate and function. From this perspective, what seems more challenging is the relationship between the separateness attributed to formal abstraction (as a procedural technique or a method considered to be the norm of reasoning, and therefore also of the information processing that digitality stands for) and the viscosity of life and perceptive experience. Finally, identifying the impasse between continuity and discreteness emphasises the sense in which an attempt to describe what an aesthetics of the digital might be and might do implies a commitment to determining the ontological conditions of the real. It thus requires us to assess whether the digital can indeed be a character of these conditions, and if so, how.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1786606089
• ISBN 13: 9781786606082
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar