Review: Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, and Lotte Warnsholdt (eds.), ‘Critique and the Digital’
Review of Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, and Lotte Warnsholdt’s (eds.) Critique and the Digital (Diaphanes, 2021), 296 pages.
Abstract
This compact volume aims to take stock of the myriad critical responses elicited in recent years by transformations in computational media and digital capital. Attending to the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence in the construction of digital media environments, these essays collectively highlight the contingency embedded within algorithmic functionality while addressing the oppressive organizational structures and governmental capabilities such operations make available to big data. Containing entries from Mark Hansen, Luciana Parisi, Claus Pias, and others, Critique and the Digital provides an impressive overview of both the theoretical and practical stakes of coming to terms with the digital in its increasingly ubiquitous forms.
Reviewed by Bryan Norton
This new installment of Diaphanes’ “Critical Stances” series has much to offer readers interested in theoretical discourse concerning the political and philosophical stakes of our increasingly digital lives. As philosophers, scientists, and NGOs like the Brookings Institution forecast a political landscape increasingly shaped by forthcoming advances in artificial intelligence technology, this task of coming to terms with the status of critique has never been more pressing. Beginning with a co-written introduction from editors Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, and Lotte Warnsholdt, Critique and the Digital seeks to highlight the multiplicity of responses elicited by the rise of computational media in some of the digital’s foremost theorists. Containing entries from Mark Hansen, Luciana Parisi, Claus Pias, and others, this volume aims to take stock of the manifold perspectives opened up for critique when we approach the present as an overlay of two historical trajectories. The first vector concerns the postwar history of cybernetics in America. Tracing the composition of digital networks back to the operations of command and control systems studied by Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, and others, Hörl, Pinkrah and Warnsholdt ask readers to think critically about what modes of thought we still might avail ourselves of today, in a world where thinking itself appears so often under the guise of a product, the result of feedback loops capturing machine learners, deep learning algorithms, and humans alike. What role can critical discourse play when the traditional subject of critique no longer appears tenable? How do we consider politics and knowledge when the human being no longer serves as an Archimedean point for such activity?
The tentative answers provided within the volume take concrete form with the help of the second historical trajectory outlined in the introduction. Tracing the current problem of locating sites of critique back to the Enlightenment struggle of relating philosophical theory to political practice, the editors invite us to see our current situation as one providing a series of attitudes towards the digital, a vision of critique referred to by Michel Foucault as a “mode of relation to contemporary reality” (Foucault 2007: 104). While acknowledging that we may one day uncover “a condition of possibility of ‘critical computational reflexivity’” for the digital which could be understood along Enlightenment terms of self-knowledge, the volume seeks to point out ways in which the “diffractive practices and conceptualizations” of digital environments may already be taking us away from the Enlightenment’s conceptual terrain (11). Although the volume fails to account for the cultural specificity of this Enlightenment discourse, a lacuna in European thinking on technology that has been recently exposed by the philosopher Yuk Hui, the introduction nevertheless poses an important question for contemporary politics: if it is the case that developments in AI have forced us to think beyond the Enlightenment, then where can we look for alternative modes of political and aesthetic activity capable of resisting the violence of new mechanisms of capture and exclusion? How do we articulate alternatives to a logic of extraction without regressing to the naiveté of anthropocentric truths concerning the subject of truth and power?
The volume opens with a rich contribution from Mark Hansen, “The Critique of Data, or Towards a Phenomenotechnics of Algorithmic Culture.” Drawing from recent work on the capabilities of machine learning algorithms, Hansen urges us to engage in a mode of critique that refrains from reifying the human subject while also refusing to indulge in what Antoinette Rouvroy refers to as ‘data behaviorism’ (Rouvroy 2013). Proving critical of behaviorist models of the human employed by big data and of corresponding behaviorist views of artificial intelligence which seek to reduce the complex operations of computational media to a unidirectional logic of extraction, Hansen makes the case for an understanding of human sensibility that is always already itself mediated by technical processes. Drawing on the philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s concept of phenomenotechnics, Hansen urges us to consider the rapidly expanded role played by computational tools in the construction of knowledge, also insisting on an irreducible difference between such sensibility and the operations of computational machines. By outlining a view of phenomenal experience rooted in what he calls an “irreducibly technical schematism,” Hansen lays the groundwork for a more participatory politics of machine-human interaction (71-72).
This resonance between the medial status of computational architecture and the technicity of the human understanding is treated in more concrete terms in the second chapter, Luciana Parisi’s “Artificial Critique.” Turning to the famous ‘Halting Problem’ introduced by Alan Turing, “Artificial Critique” seeks to highlight a series of homologies between Kant’s method of transcendental deduction and determinist views of computational logic, both of which must be met with a critical stance. While the ‘Halting Problem’ is used by Turing to show the impossibility of designing a catch-all algorithm that can predict whether any given program will stop or run on an endless loop, Parisi finds in this irreducible undecidability the contours of an undeniable contingency that thoroughly contaminates both phenomenal experience and algorithmic design (104-105). This contingency clears the grounds for a more immanent mode of critique, which Parisi outlines with reference to the non-philosophy of Laruelle’s “Transcendental Computer” (2005) and Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason (2017). In this radical mode of immanent critique, it is ultimately lived experience and not traditional subjectivity that is at stake for Parisi.
The next chapters turn to recent discussions of the politics of extraction in digital media environments. In the “Critique of Environmentality,” Erich Hörl turns to the temporal nature of computational media in order to stress the capacity of such media to intervene on a microtemporal register. These hidden interventions betray wide-ranging political and ontological implications for humans, Hörl argues. Drawing on Wolfgang Ernst’s chronopoetics (2016) and Mark Hansen’s studies of the anticipatory structure of new media (Hansen 2014) , Hörl suggests that the ever-expanding capacity of digital capital to delineate users’ horizon of possibility marks an epochal shift in our understanding and experience of governmental control. Suggesting a pivot from technologies of control to technologies of environmental adaptation, Hörl’s essay seeks to highlight the importance of coming to terms with ways in which digital capital acts to “delineate potentiality,” foreclosing other alternatives for the world and its inhabitants (128).
This sense of a foreclosed future under digital capital is explored further in the next essay, Holger Kuhn’s “Critique, Unrest, Common Sense.” Here Kuhn refers to the work of video artist Melanie Gilligan as an ‘allegory of control,’ capable of demonstrating the cultural logic of “flow, liquidity, and gaseousness” exhibited by algorithmic modes of governance (149). Echoing recent scholarship underscoring the financial logic of digital operations (Vogl 2017), Kuhn sees in Gilligan’s work a fruitful exploration of the manifold ways in which neoliberal technologies of control are intensified through digital media. In the open-access miniseries Crisis and the Credit System, for example, Gilligan depicts a group of financial analysts who are encouraged to view themselves as a networked brain. In the more recent series, The Common Sense, benumbed subjects receive a neural patch to modulate their affective behavior. As Kuhn’s essay carefully illustrates, such artistic exploration serves to remind us of the ongoing centrality of questions of medial representation for understanding and subverting regimes of control.
This investigation of the critical potential of contemporary media art is continued in the volume’s next essay, Ying Sze Pek’s “Posthuman Documentary?” In this chapter, Pek takes a cue from the media theorist and artist Hito Steyerl’s notion of “expanded reality” in order to push for more a capacious understanding of the documentary genre, an understanding which proves especially important in light of the augmented reality effects introduced by digital media (Kwastek 2016: 124). Turning to the uncanny way in which the fictional narrative of a video installation project, Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun, unwittingly anticipates a real-world financial crime by Deutsche Bank, Pek highlights the need to take seriously the speculative potential of artistic and philosophical work in our interactions with the real of digital capital.
The next essay urges readers to dive directly into what Michel Foucault calls the practical ‘attitude’ of critique in our comportment towards the digital. In “The Grime of Critique,” Lotte Warnsholdt turns to the recent exploration of London ‘Grime’ subculture by Swiss-German writer Sybille Berg’s novel GRM: Brainfuck. Insisting on immanent modes of resistance to technologies of control, Warnsholdt urges readers to rethink the subject in terms of a negating force. Seen in this light, critique would perform a sort of resistance that recalls the way teenagers in Berg’s novel listen to grime as a virtual escape from their dystopic setting. While it may be difficult to see just how juvenile escapism might be wielded as an effective political weapon, Warnsholdt insists on this possibility of creating such fissures in the face of what Shoshana Zuboff has referred to as “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019).
The next chapter frames social life in digital environments from a much wider angle. Drawing on the “new kind of sovereign power” Zuboff identifies in contemporary regimes of digital surveillance, Timothy Beyes’ “The Organizational A Priori” turns to recent theorizations of platform capital in order to show how “organizational imaginations and practices have come to shape the apparatuses of algorithmic management, platform capitalism, and surveillance capitalism” (247). If media do ‘determine our situation,’ as Friedrich Kittler famously pronounced, this determinacy does not preclude us from tracing the genealogy of their organization into big data, Beyes argues. Such archaeological exercises might in fact enable us to view ways in which the history of digital media’s organization is shot through with contingency, providing hope for the possibility of excavating alternative modes of organization in the future.
One such historical narrative is uncovered by Claus Pias in his chapter, “Presentism: Digital Cultures and the Legacy of Media Critique.” Tracing current conversations surrounding the digital back to the postwar history of cybernetics in America and its reception abroad, Pias uncovers a sense of naiveté and presentism underlying some of the more critical stances taken by scholars against the digital today. While mourning the loss of an imagined sense of community and tradition projected onto the nondigital past, Pias argues, such attempts at critique unwittingly play into the hands of big data by indulging in a narrative of historical determinacy that leaves little room for alternative trajectories.[i] While serving as a constructive reminder of the cultural and historical specificity of media discourse, Pias urges readers to think seriously about the historicity of our current moment and the critical stances we take.
In the last entry, “As We May Have Thought”, Clemens Apprich takes a similar approach, arguing that any critique of the digital must account for the historical functions of media for storing, processing, and transmitting data. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s understanding of the retentional structure of phenomenological experience, Apprich revisits the attempts of post-war engineer Vannevar Bush to create an analog filing system designed to reproduce the associative logic of human memory (269). The essay, however, provides sparse detail concerning its more ambitious claim—that the implied homology between human cognition and machine memory exhibited by Bush’s Memex points to a computational unconscious that might be approached in psychoanalytic terms. While Apprich may be hinting at what may ultimately prove a fruitful perspective for future art historians and literary scholars interested in algorithm art and AI-produced artworks, it is quite difficult to imagine just what this last essay is ultimately after.
All in all, Critique and the Digital serves as a solid primer on current critical discourse concerning the politics and aesthetics of computational media. Emphasizing both the increasingly ubiquitous logic of extraction enacted by digital capital and the contingency permeating computational architecture, the numerous perspectives opened up by this volume provide a thorough overview of critical responses elicited by these political and technological transformations. A final strength of the collection may also lie in the book’s anticipatory nature, as many of the contributions serve as teasers for longer projects in preparation by contributors Mark Hansen, Ying Sze Pek, and Claus Pias.
[i] For an example of this, see Zuckerberg’s “Building Global Communities” post.
References
Ernst W (2016) Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media. Washington DC: Little and Rowman.
Foucault M (2007). “What is Enlightenment?” in The Politics of Truth. Trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 97-120.
Hansen M (2014) Feed Forward. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Kwastek K (2016) “Die Realität hat sich erweitert und ich folge ihr. Ein Gespräch.“ In Kunstforum 242 (accessed 14 August, 2021).
Laruelle F (2005) “The Transcendental Computer.” Trans. Tayler Adkins and Chris Eby. Available at “Speculative Heresy” (accessed 14 August, 2021).
Mbembe A (2017) Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rouvroy A (2013) “The end(s) of critique : data-behaviourism vs. due-process.” in. M. Hildebrandt and
K. De Vries (eds.) Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn, London: Routledge,
Vogl J (2017) The Ascendancy of Finance. Trans. Simon Garnett. London: Wiley.
Zuboff. Shoshana (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.
Zuckerberg M (2017) “Building Global Community.” Facebook Post. (accessed 14 August, 2021).
Bryan Norton is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania and a guest researcher at Humboldt University, Berlin. His dissertation, Fragments of the Concrete, investigates the birth of Gilbert Simondon’s concept of mechanology in German romantic nature philosophy and poetics. He has written on media theory, the philosophy of technology, and German Idealism for a number of venues, including the Goethe Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is currently co-editing a volume with Mark Hansen on the late philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler.
Contact: bryann@sas.upenn.edu
Twitter: @ecoinfopolity__
Further reading
Gabriel O. Apata, Review of Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason
Schneider, Joseph (2019), 'New Media Pharmacology: Hansen, Whitehead, and Worldly Sensibility’, Theory, Culture & Society 36.1.
