Review: Natasha Lushetich, Iain Campbell and Dominic Smith (eds.), ‘Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies’
Review of Natasha Lushetich, Iain Campbell and Dominic Smith (eds.) Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) 336 pages
Abstract
Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies addresses the tension between the seemingly determinate design and practically contingent reality of contemporary technologies. It calls for thinking their plasticity, meaning their ability to be contingent and adaptable while also, in everyday experience, being overdetermined and over-determining our lives. By forging links between philosophy of technology, media theory and the arts, and investigating the nature of information and the entropic processes in which technology is involved, this book makes a timely effort to open up new perspectives on the technologies humans increasingly find their existence (in)determined by.
Reviewed by Ole Thijs
From architecture to artificial intelligence, technology is supposed to be determinate: we want it to reliably perform its intended operations every time. On the other hand, unexpected outcomes, accidents and other types of contingent events seem to be inherent in the use of technologies. Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies, an edited volume of 15 chapters, seeks to explore the philosophical implications of confronting these two seemingly opposite characteristics. The editors rekindle the ages-old debate between necessity and contingency in the context of today’s ‘everyday technologies’, chiefly meaning the digital systems we find ourselves surrounded with. Are these determinate, and do they (over)determine our lives, or do they offer new creative and political opportunities? How could technological indeterminacy be conceptualised and what does indeterminate technology look like? These, roughly, are the questions posed in the introduction. They lead to an imaginative and speculative book. It occasionally borders on the bewildering and offers few concrete answers but provides all the more intriguing questions and starting points for further thought.
Before continuing, a word on who this collection is for. It seeks to break down disciplinary boundaries, and injects philosophy of technology with information theory, art history, media theory and mathematics, all the while carefully sidestepping the ‘usual suspects’ of current academic work in philosophy of technology. It contains little mediation theory, no postphenomenology, and seeks to reinterpret ‘classical’ or ‘Continental’ philosophy of technology in exciting new terms. Thus, the book’s main interest to philosophers of technology will be in offering new methodologies and opening an interdisciplinary field of research that reaches into art history and practice. For readers from other disciplines, mainly information and media theory, arts, and AI, it will contain fruitful ideas and conceptualities that can help further their own work, be it research or practice.
The first of the volume’s three parts, ‘Social-Digital Technologies’, deals with technologies as well as underlying questions about the nature of information itself. Ashley Woodward’s excellent opening chapter explores the latter, noting that ‘information’ can be considered either the improbable exception – the contingent, the ‘event’ of French philosophy – or the usually unsurprising signals circulating in the totality of ‘information technology’ (13). Using Simondon’s notion of the ‘margin of indetermination’, which allows ‘open’ machines to distinguish information from noise and respond to it, Woodward proposes a definition of information between the extremes of uniqueness and noise in terms of plasticity – the ability to adapt to new inputs.
In the second chapter, Luciana Parisi explores the adjacent question whether AI technologies comprise the ‘end’ of original thinking through their rational design. She concludes, to the contrary, that indeterminacy and randomness are an integral part of AI systems, and thus, that AI potentially affords space for hyper-original, ‘alien’ thinking (32). Parisi includes a wealth of technical knowledge and philosophical viewpoints, but this is laden with jargon, making the intricacies of the argument difficult to follow. Parisi’s contribution is juxtaposed with Aden Evens’ chapter, claiming that although the digital occasionally offers new pathways to contingency, this is the exception to the rule. He provides an ontology of digital and actual objects and argues that the digital is essentially ‘positivist’: digital objects only exist insofar as they are preprogrammed, i.e. posited in code. The actual, on the other hand, is ruled by the true contingency of spontaneous emergence (37). Evens combines this well-argued insight with a subtle critique of Parisi, Yuk Hui, and Beatrice Fazi, before presenting an ‘ideology’ of the digital rooted in rationalism and instrumentalism.
If Evens’ chapter provides lucid case studies already, Alesha Sherada goes even deeper into the workings of blockchain technologies and gives an excellent explanation of their features. Her chapter, ‘Blockchain Owns You’, is mostly focused on critiquing the utopian promises of blockchain governmentality. The ‘radical trustlessness’ she identifies behind the familiar rhetoric of decentralisation and democratisation will apply, mutatis mutandis, to many other digital technologies as well. Franco ‘Bifi’ Berardi ends the section on a much more speculative note, asking after the implications of ‘datafying life’ into the all-encompassing ‘cognitive Automaton’ of digital technology-driven ‘semio-capitalism’ (71), which he associates with life becoming increasingly determined. However, increasingly complex automation also leads to a proliferation of ‘Chaos’, i.e., increasing vulnerability to indeterminate events. This ‘double spiral of Chaos and Automation’ seems to preclude the possibility of system change through means of the past, such as revolutions. It leads Berardi to a highly associative chain of references and conclusions – a starting point for the techno-political attunement to the rhythms of chaos he proposes (84), but hard to draw concrete conclusions from.
Bookended by two architecture-focused chapters, Part II’s titular ‘Spatial, Temporal, Aural and Visual Technologies’ refer to the arts in a broad sense. Andrej Radman opens with the aim of developing an ‘Allagmatics of Architecture’. He peppers his chapter with references to wildly diverse authors, from Karen Barad to Rem Koolhaas, before embarking on a comparison between Simondon’s philosophy of technology and Guattari’s ‘Fourfould’, landing at an ecological understanding of architecture. It will require extensive knowledge of both latter authors to understand the intricacies of what is going on here, and even then, it is doubtful whether the chapter succeeds. It is followed by Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra’s contribution which asks an insightful question: can computation be thought beyond Heidegger’s diagnosis of it belonging to the ‘age of the world picture’, i.e., can there be a mode of computation that does not represent nature as a calculative totality (109)? What follows is a (pre)history of computation, and some case studies of nonrepresentational computation in art, with particular attention to how matter itself comes into play in them alongside numbers. No clear answer to the initial question is provided, but the possibilities suggested are tantalising. Then, in a dazzling contribution focused on experimental musicians such as John Cage, Iain Campbell meditates on the ‘equation’ of ‘music is information’ (134). Campbell shows that this risks hiding the mediating function of the involved technologies, and the social and power relations that they entail; it represents a totalising approach wherein all sound, even noise, becomes musical (135). However, in the work of Cage’s successors, he finds new possibilities for musical technologies that remain open to contingency by again distinguishing music from noise. It does not take much imagination to transpose Campbell’s ideas into the domain of new technologies in general, which makes this chapter particularly interesting.
Co-editor Natasha Lushetich considers works by Cage’s student Brecht, as well as precursor Marcel Duchamp and contemporary art collective Troika, in her beautifully entitled chapter, ‘The Made and the Given’. The goal is to provide an understanding of ‘transversal plasticity’: plasticity as both predicate and process, with the artworks articulating it traversing our usual dimensions of space and time from a higher dimensionality. Imaginative though this ‘n+ dimensionality’ (149) and the wealth of imagery Lushetich connects to it may be, its precise meaning for the notion of ‘plasticity’ remains somewhat underarticulated; however, she presents an original and engaging analysis of major works by the mentioned artists. Closing out the section, Stavros Kousoulas invokes the Greek arche-goddess of necessity, Ananke. Kousoulas claims that architecture is ‘synaptic’: it is the prime example of technicity individuating or ‘informing’ the universe through weaving Ananke’s constraints (169). While the comparison with synapses is never fully cleared up, Kousoulas does open up a new and refreshing perspective, in terms of Simondonian individuation, on the well-trodden discourse of the interaction between norms and values and technology.
In rigorous analytic fashion, Joel White opens Part III with an interpretation of all life in terms of entropy, inspired by but arguably clearer than Stiegler’s thinking of ‘neganthropy’. White gives an exceptionally clear and concise overview of the history of the concept of entropy, as well as a definition of the whole of life – i.e., earthly ecology – in terms of its entropic indeterminacy. He claims that life’s defining characteristic is that it exhausts its own conditions of possibility (191). This makes the chapter relevant reading in a wide range of disciplines from theoretical philosophy to posthumanism and the ‘Anthropo-scene’, although the link to the section’s theme of ‘epistemic technologies’ remains opaque. Peeter Müürsepp continues in a similar vein, asking after the epistemological status of temporal irreversibility as suggested by thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. Is this a result of epistemic uncertainty, i.e. incomplete knowledge or measurements, or ontological irreversibility, i.e. irreversibility as a basic tenet of the universe? Building on the work of Ilya Prigogine, Müürsepp concludes that it is the latter. This has important implications for mathematical predictions, including the type of work currently being done with ‘big data’: complete prediction is impossible, because it would entail a repetition of the exact same state of the universe, which is impossible if irreversibility is true.
Next, Stephen Dougherty draws a parallel between Catherine Malabou’s philosophy of plasticity – in which the essential and the accidental mutually inform each other, as opposed to being externally predicated – and the event of the invention of plastic. Plastic is an ‘essence that can assume any form’, goes the argument, it can take any shape and thus has no essential properties (231). This is why it is so essential to globalisation and the coming-about of the Anthropocene. Plastic emerges as a material reflection of the philosophical concept of plasticity: it stands testament to humanity’s own plasticity and can be moulded into good as well as bad forms.
The most experimental contribution of the section comes courtesy of co-editor Dominic Smith, who highlights the role of everyday technologies as focal points for reflection on our (epistemic) habits while criticising Benjamin Bratton’s 2021 book ‘The Revenge of the Real’. Along the way, Smith encounters (a fridge magnet of) ‘Ugly’ David Hume and uses the latter’s notion of ‘habit’ to reflect on the dynamic between individual and collective thought and behaviour, arguing that Bratton misses the importance of the personal in transpersonal events such as pandemics (247). Philosophy, Smith shows through a bricolage of writings and reflections, remains essential in forming and assessing the individual epistemic habits without which a better politics – be it of the techno-global kind Bratton proposes or not – can never come to be. Then, dense to the point of being hermetic, the collection’s final chapter provides notes on determinacy and indeterminacy, unpredictability and randomness which will require advanced knowledge of mathematics and Deleuzean heterogeneity to understand. Sha Xin Wei’s aim is to describe how thinking through these notions, and applying them in the arts, helps to imagine and realise the ontogenesis of a ‘different world’ – though whether it succeeds in doing so remains obscure to the non-expert.
In a stroke of genius, the editors round off the collection with David Zeitlyn’s anthropological epilogue on spider divination among the Mambila people in Cameroon. There are important lessons on (in)determinacy and technology here: most pertinently, how clients limit their exposure to ‘fate’, or determinism, by carefully selecting the questions they ask so that related future events remain undetermined. However, the epilogue’s most important merit is methodological: it shows how philosophers of technology and others in the target audience of this book could stand to improve their case studies with ‘anthropological’ descriptions – lucid, precise, and supported by rigorous field research.
In the end, whether Contingency and Plasticity succeeds in all of its stated aims is debatable. The reader probably will not come away with a clear and distinct definition of ‘plasticity in everyday technologies’. However, the collection’s real value, as suggested above, lies elsewhere: it opens up new avenues for philosophy of technology by relating the field to adjacent disciplines, rather than looking inward for another theoretical ‘turn’. ‘Plasticity’ itself is a notion from neuroscience and art theory, and it is successfully related here to problems in information theory and examples from artistic practice. Of course, opinions on the merits of the individual articles will vary; but there is no denying that this collection is a timely call for researchers to look beyond the technologies themselves and consider their wider entanglements with society, art, and the perennial problems of philosophy.
Ole Thijs is a PhD candidate at Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands. His research focuses on the emerging importance of the local in the current age of planetary technology, studied through the lens of ‘Continental’ philosophies of technology, Anthropocene theory, and post-humanism. He holds Master’s degrees in both philosophy and art history and is interested in the mutual historical development of the intellectual world of ideas and the material world of technologies and art.
Email: ole.thijs@wur.nl
