DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

From the science of nanotechnology to the nanodesign of artificial atoms for what has been trademarked “programmable matter," the aim, as Parisi sees it, is “to neutralize the distinction between the physical composition of materials—atoms, photons, protons, electrons—and their properties, such as color, shape, smoothness, brightness, and so on,"such that “material can change their substance instantaneously like the design and debugging of software" (Parisi 2012: 38). Parisi sums up by proposing that,

by entering the realm ofpure potentials—of color, shape, roughness, electricity,vectoriality, etc., programmable matter promises an architecture of instantaneous realization of potentialities. ... At work here no longer is control intended as the calculation of the future by means of prediction, or the calculation of the unknown through pre-set probabilities. The disappearance of bio-physical contingencies instead is directly proportional to the nano-programming of uncertainties as the inclusion of fuzzy states in the design of thought and extension. (Parisi 2012: 39)1

I have quoted at length from one of Parisi's essays to situate my discussion of measure, as she situates her discussions of calculation and computation, in relationship to technoscientific development (Parisi 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). Nanotechnological development also is meant to frame my return to an earlier moment of engagement with labor, affect, and measurein a 2007 publication that I coauthored with Greg Goldberg, Rachel Schiff, Aaron Weeks, and Craig Willse titled “Notes Toward a Theory of Affect-Itself."We drew on George Caffentzis's disagreement with Hardt and Negri's claim that the value of immaterial or affective labor is immeasurable. Arguing instead that capitalism “imposes an extremely quantified form of life on its constituents," Caffentzis warned against claims of immeasurability, proposing that capitalists have sought and still do seek a way to measure what at first seems immeasurable. Caffentzis not only argued that exploitation still was measureable in terms of laborers' production of surplus value, but he also proposed that those who would resist capitalism must have quantitative capacity to match the quantitative capacity at the service of capitalism.2

While taken with Caffentzis's interest in measure and capitalism's quantitative capacity, we felt that the question of the measurability or immeasurability of affective labor had to be posed differently than in terms of laborers’ productive time, since affective labor as Paolo Virno (2004), among others, would have it, goes even beyond the labor of communicative and cognitive capacities in a knowledge societyorinformation society, beyond what Marx called the labor of a general intelligence to the laboring ofaffect in a biopolitical society where affect refers to

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a preindividual, nonconscious, noncognitive, asubjective bodily capacity to affect or be affected. Here, affectis a vector of unqualified intensity opening to future actualization, a pure potential. Defined in this way, affective labor raised questions for my coauthors and me about the embodiment of pure potential or vectors of intensity in contrast to the organic body of the laborer. We asked what kind of body is the affective body or what is an embodiment of vectors of intensity. We doubted that it could be the body modeled on the human organism or the human laborer. If measure is central to affective labor as much as any other labor, we asked how should the measuring of affect be thought.3

Bodies, Affect, and Media Technology

The preceding definition of affect is drawn from the philosophical tradition employed by Brian Massumi, the philosophies of Deleuze and Whitehead, and before them Spinoza and Bergson. Although Massumi (2002) develops his conceptualization of affect for the most part in relationship to the human subject—or, more specifically, the autonomic nervous system of the human organism—his very conceptualization of affect as preindividual potential, resonant with Deleuzean virtuality, would seem to let affect slip from the human organism. Indeed, Massumi at times does point to the various scales of matter at which affect is potential or indeterminism. It would seem, then, that affect points to the reconfiguration of bodies andmatter/energy; affect may be experienced by and be the experience of bodies other than human bodies or bodies conceived as organisms.

In "Notes Toward a Theory of Affect-Itself," my coauthors and I focused on the technical frame of affect, starting with the technologies with which Massumi measured affect as a fraction of time before conscious experience, a technological enhancement or measuring device theoretically overlooked by Massumi but seemingly necessary to his examples of preconscious affect as a measurable fraction of time before consciousness, a measurement that necessarily moves affect toward consciousness, virtuality toward actualization, although without depleting virtuality or affective potential. That is to say, ontologically, affect is potential and, as such, cannot be realized, only actualized; actualization can only be a matter of invention out of virtuality, which itselfontologicallyremains virtual. It seemed to my coauthors and me that it might be possible to imaginethe body of affect as a technological assemblage or a technology of measurement, where measure measures without depleting or fully capturing, a computationally open technology of measure.

In “Heat-Death: Emergence and Control in Genetic Engineering and Artificial Life," Parisi and Tiziana Terranova (2000) provided a way to begin to address our queries. Offering à genealogy of the (re)configurations of bodies, technologies, and labor, “Heat-Death"makes it possible to think of the body-as-organism as only one figure, a historically specific one, of what the body is or what it can do. Focusing on autopoiesis, characteristic of the body-as-organism, Parisi and Terranova argue that it was in the 19th century that the body-as-autopoietic-organism becomes the figure of what the body is and what it can do. They go on to propose that this figure of the body is befitting the disciplinary society of late-19th-century industrial capitalism, “where the fluids which were circulating outside and between bodies are folded onto themselves in order to be channeled within the solid walls of the organism/self/subject"(Parisi and Terranova2000: 4). The body-as-organism is organized for “reproduction within a thermodynamic cycle of accumulation and expenditure; and trained towork" (Parisi and Terranova 2000: 5). Here, Parisi and Terranova are suggesting that a body is a historically specific mode of organization of material forces, invested by capital into being as well as elaborated through various discourses of biology, physics, neuroscience, medicine, and so on that reconfigure work, bodies, production, and reproduction.

If the turn to affect is registering a reconfiguration of the body, labor, and technology, as my coauthors and I went on to argue, then we also wanted to propose that it is due, in no smallpart, to digital technologies and to the technosciences of information that now propose that information is the general theory of matter/energy and that thermodynamics is only a special case.4 Here affect at every scale of matter points to the self-organization inherent to matter or matter's capacity to be informational or informing. It points as well to the digital technology that supports a mathematics that is able to attach to and modulate the informational substrate of bodily matter and matter generally such that technosciences—for example, biomedia and new media—introduce what Keith Ansell-Pearson (1999) has called the “post-biological threshold" into “life-itself." Thatis to say, these technologies are changing what the body can do or its affective capacity, with the postbiological as a threshold or a limit. However, in what follows I suggest that in her treatment of nanotechnology, Parisi raisesa question as to the status of this limit in thinking of bodies, affect, technology, and labor—a question that also points to recent philosophical debate over ontology.

In the years since the 2007 publication of “Notes Towards a Theory of Affect-Itself,"the thought of affect as a technological assemblage hasbeen refined through interdisciplinary discussions about affect, media, technology, governance, and economy. This has occurred as media studies discourse has been shifting its focus from technologies and uses of mass communications to affect or capabilities of perception and sensation, and not only human perception and sensation, In fact, media arebeing defined in terms of a subtractionof human perception as the presumed center of being and feeling.Steve Goodman, writing on sound technologies and leaning toward the process philosophies of Deleuze and Whitehead, argues: “If we subtract human perception, everything moves.... At the molecularor quantum level, everything is in motion, is vibrating" (Goodman 2009: 83). For subjectivity and objectivity, all that is required is that an entity be felt by another entity. “All entities," Goodman continues, “are potential media that can feel or whose vibrationscan be felt by other entities" (Goodman 2009: 83). Here media are understood in terms of nonanthropocentric affect, where “affects are transitions, gateways, and passages between dimensions," as Jussi Parikka has put it (Parikka 2010: xxvi).

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In these terms, media is more broadly described as"contractions of forces of the world into specific resonating milieus" (Parikka 2010: xiv), such that mediation is contingent and immanent. Mediation (if it even should be called that) is less about connecting two or more entities, although by the above definition of entities, they are media and they do connect other entities. Still, for theorists such as Goodman and Parikka, it might be better to describe mediation as modulation, intensifying or deintensifying rhythmicities and forces that are of but also below, above, and other than human perception. Here media are extended to various platforms organic, nonorganic, chemical, and neurochemical. As Parikka concludes: "we do not so much have media as we are media and of media; media.. . cast a plane over the chaos" (Parikka 2010: xxvii).

This definition of media borrows from contemporary thinking about assemblage as a mode of affective (de)intensification—that is, an affordance to sensations, percepts, and concepts and the modulation of their intensities at every scale of matter. As such, an analysis of effects engages them not as the end result of a predefined condition, but immediately as a cause or a condition of possibility of affect and further effects. This is the working of what Massumi has called a quasi-causality"—that is, the (eternal) return of indeterminacy in every actualization or individualization.⁵ These actualizations and individualizations might well be thought of as bodies of affect, the bodies that this discussion of media provokes. If all entities are affective media, then they may share the definition of bodies that Elizabeth Grosz offers: "discontinuous, nontotalizable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations" (Grosz 1994: 164), and, as such, they are open to the affordance of a media assemblage and its modulation of intensities. Given this take on media as affective embodiments and bodies as affective media, questions arise as to how an entity or object should be thought, or how relation mightbe thought when the body-as-organism is no longer the figure of life, and organic matter is no longer privileged over nonorganic matter. And, finally, what does addressing these questions have to do with measure and affective labor?

Prehension, Media Technologies, and Measure

While Parisi has relied on Deleuze, increasingly she also turns to Whitehead. It is Whitehead's philosophy that accompanies Parisi in observing the ongoing investment in technoscience and its elaboration of mathematical technologies that are transforming, as nanotechnology means to do, the biophysical strata of evolution, adaptation, and change and thereby are displacing the postbiological as horizon of thought and extension in matter. This turn to Whitehead, I would argue, is due in part to the difference between his thinking about process and Deleuze's. While Whitehead is concerned with how entities become, nonetheless, entities do become; they become and they perish (Whitehead 1978). In this way, they generate space/time, while Deleuze's conceptualizations of virtuality, pure past, and duration put everything in time, put all entities in relationship, if not to each other, to virtuality. ForWhitehead, while there is becoming, it is a matter of what he describes as “concrescence,"the actual becoming through a novel production of togetherness or the coming together of multiple prehensions, where prehension is the preconscious, preindividual act by which one actual occasion (entity) takes up and responds to another. Everything, not just humans, prehend in that each thing orients toward; it withdraws from or advances toward the worldas it experiences its becoming. Prehension is a “decision,"’to use Whitehead's term, eliminating potential occasionsand delimiting a specific occasion, which, after perishing becomes the past or “datum" for another occasion or for a grouping of occasions that endures as a “society"—again to use Whitehead's term. It is precisely to prehensions that Parisi imagines nanotechnology to be directed.

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After all, nanotechnology, as Parisi sees it, aims “to substitute bio-physical materialities with the nanoprogram of matter and thought" (Parisi 2012: 40). This goes beyond a joining of technology and human; it goes beyond the cyborg and genetic engineering as well. This is because nanotechnology initiates“the process of inorganic reprogramming of the organic nature of matter all together," forcing "biotic life to confront thefar from equilibrium dynamics of its quantum condition”(Parisi 2012: 40). Nanotechnology means to reprogram the experience of prehension at all levels of matter, especially the prehension of what Whitehead refers to as “eternal objects," or potentialities that will belong to each entity, “ingressing" into each entity as it becomes itself. For Parisi, then, nanoprogramming is not aimed at the atom but at its prehension—especially its prehension of the potentiality of the eternal object. As Parisi putsit:

If atoms prehend their transmutation in colour, shape, dimension, electrical power, it is because they prehend eternal objects ingressing their actuality. Yet these atomic prehensions are but appetites for more potentialities, for pure power to become newforms of space and time, new skins andnew cognitive architectures. The nanoprogrammingof matter therefore indirectly allows atomic appetites to become datafor the coming of new actual occasions of experience. (2012: 48)

In other words, nanotechnology isaiming to program potentiality by artificially providing the datum of an experience not actually experienced at any level of matter. Making potentiality experienceable (and not just to humans) is not to control potentiality so much as to make it more productive, weirdly productive. And Parisi concludes: “We have entered the field of pure speculation where reality does not need to be lived in order to be experienced and where thought does not need to be embodied in order for it to be real."Ifand when this truly becomes the case, it will be at least in part through the further development of a mathematical technology or the “mathematization or computation of the living and of thought" (Parisi 2012: 48). Here mathematization works as a technology of measure, where we enter the realm of the incalculable or the computationally open.6

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But, of course, it is not so surprising that focusing on technoscientific modulation of potentiality, or what is referred to as affect above, points to a calculation or measure that is computationally open. After all, affect or potentiality cannot be measured without modulating it, or the far from equilibrium dynamics of its quantum condition, without affecting vectors of potentiality, moving potential toward actualization. It is for this reason that affect or potentiality as stated at the start of this essay have been thought to be immeasurable. But what Parisi refers to as the computationally open or the incalculable points to a kind of mathematics, a kind of measure that might very well enable measuring affect or potential. This is because the mathematics that operates in relationship to the digital architecture she is exploring engages with the curvilinear.

In her treatment of what she calls the digital prehension of a symbiotic architecture, Parisi returns to the ancient debate about the line and the curve, to those architectures that “seem too indebted to the finitude of the line and do not fully follow the labyrinth of the curve" (Parisi 2009c: 349). She explores the development of parallelalgorithms that are moving software architecture beyond the genetic algorithms to a deployment of a “parasiting architecture"for interactive art and media (Parisi 2009c: 348). This architecture allows for the “ingression of anunforeseencurvature"and directs attention to à mathematics that attests to the viral ecologies or dense folds ofinformation between Os and 1s (Parisi 2009c: 363). These work as speculative activators of the future or potentiality. As Parisi puts it: “parallel algorithms are nested into each others’ activities, trading and distributing variations across milieu of interaction."This allows “simultaneous communication between different processors and the sharing of memory and message transmission." These communications involve many very simple algorithms, which, however, do not lead “to the evolution ofone algorithm or the other but to à new algorithmic behavior"(Parisi 2009c:357).

Here, Parisi draws on Lynn Margulis's conceptualization of endosymbiosis, concerning the origin of multicellular organisms or eukaryotes. Endosymbiosis differs from a genetics of cumulative selection of random mutations. Instead, evolution comes by way of parallel entities whose independent activity remains independently active in any new composite. Parallel processing cannot be contained in a single lineage, nor is it inheritable in a filiative fashion; it points instead to “a labyrinth in evolution" (Parisi 2009c: 358). A symbiotic architecture of parallel algorithms then can take account of and effect experiential dimensions of what has not been experienced, or transition between blocs of space-time, from one state to another, virally transgressing boundaries. For Parisi, this is an abstract machine that entails “an engineering patchwork of partialities passing from one state to another, fusing and breaking into each other, and yet belonging together at points of transitions, which are less irreducible dots than inflections, critical thresholds, curvatures of imperceptible continuities"or an “incomputable materiality” of “the insides of and spaces between atoms, the atomic and subatomic particles" held together in virtuality (Parisi 2009a: 82). Thus, the symbiotic algorithm of software programmingaccounts for curvature as part of its computational design; it involves "biomathematical features of extension" (Parisi 2009c: 360).

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Drawing on the work of mathematician Gregory Chaitlin, Parisi argues that this is a sensual mathematics that would add to the calculus of probabilities “vague orincomplete quantities at the limit of Os and 1s" (Parisi 2009c). These indeterminacies “transform the logic of binary states, yes and no, into the fuzzy states of maybes and perhaps." “These indeterminacies," Parisi continues, “are not merely qualitative renderings of a digital binarism" but are to be understood in terms of new processes of quantification that recognize "the full densely packedzones of information that are the intensive surrounds of zero and one,"zones defined by "an intrinsic numerical variability which remains computationally open"(Parisi 2009c: 363). Parisi also draws on Greg Lynn, whose software architecture makes use of infinitely small intervals of information as well. In such cases, the computation remains open, or “extension becomes inflection or infection," where “active and passive parasitic forces mark the obliqueness of the environment that never reaches a point of equilibriumin so far as any stability is mobile directed by vectorsof attraction and repulsion" (Parisi 2009c: 364).

This mathematics allows a software design that exposes curvature, going beyond probabilities as nanoprogramming of thefuturity of thought and extension in matter would necessitate and as measuring affect or potentiality also would require. It is a mathematics that allows for a measure other than the measure of probability; such a measure is singular but productive, as measuring cannot but modulate and change the intensity of potential or affect. As such, the metric of measure necessarily will change with each and every measure. In this sense, the measure isan aesthetic measure or affective measure, understanding aesthetic measure to be singular, nongeneralizable, and particular to each event or each modulation of potentiality. It is a measure that allows for the experience of imperceptibles, of prehensions, and, as such, permits their modulation. This experience, however, is not a human-centered experience but is experience at every scale of matter; indeed, there is a gesturing toward a scaleless matter. Yet, for Parisi, this is not a mathematical measure that claims ultimate transparency but rather one that shedescribes, drawing onWhitehead, to be carrying with it “"the dust of the world," “the dark affectivity of matter," the incomputable (Parisi 2009c: 266–7). Yet, with nanotechnology, it would seem that there is an effort to get even closer to this dark matter to be able to modulate its potentialities, to get closer to “affective power, whose order, structure or pattern are yet to be universalized and rather remain scattered, discontinuous, infinite instances of a multiplicity of modes of thought and extension" (Parisi 2012: 37).

I turn now to the political and cultural implications of the mathematization or computation of the thought and extension in matter, after which I will return to a discussion of the contrasts between process philosophies more prevalent in Parisi’s work and the speculative realist philosophies that I will argue are also implicated in the mathematics and technoscience that has drawn her to philosophical reflection. Of course, Parisi is not only engaged with philosophical reflection; she also attends to the implications of the entanglement of technoscience, politics, and economy Drawing on current discussion of what Gilles Deleuze has called “control society, Parisi joins others in a discussion of preemption, a mode of governing that preempts the future by modulating the experience of memory and time, and at every scale of matter; she also introduces what she calls “preemptive/hensive power,"’ referring to the nanotechnological aim to “invisibly restratify the biological ground of human-bound bodies and thought” (Parisi 2012: 48).

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Control society, after all, is a term meant to point to a normative, if not compulsive, attending to the self, a dispersion of power, even to preindividual impersonal domains such as affect, with the accompanying smoothening of the space of civil society institutions, capitalizing on their increasing reluctance or inability to socialize, to interpellate individuals to the ideal of the nation-state. It points as well to a global extension of media, especially digital media, and their reconfiguring of the private and pubic spheres, economy, the state, and the market. While control society coincides with the shift from disciplining the subject to what Foucault called biopolitics, which focuses more on species life, expressed in terms of the capacity for life across populations, the shift to preemptive/hensive power is an intensifying of control at every scale of matter, a cosmological politics. It is the meeting of control with the curvilinear. As Parisi puts it: “mathematics of smooth space has become operative in a postcybernetic control of aesthetic curavature or continual variation... the curving space of control itself" (Parisi 2009b: 9).7

This intensification of control hearkens back to the way Foucault has discussed measure in his 1970s lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism. As Tiziana Terranova has argued:

Foucault's lectures in particular allow us to think about the process by which the economic-institutional reality of capitalism . . . has not simply subsumed life in its economic processes of production, but actually has drawn on life as a means of redefining a whole new political rationality where economic and vital processes are from the beginning deeply intertwined. (Terranova 2009:235)

The market, as Foucault sees it, drives governance to be concerned with securing circulation through a milieu, moving into life or nature to make it work well. Securing nature, or being able to optimize natural processes artificially, serves to limit the function of sovereignty in governance, as governance becomes the biopolitical action on a milieu: first the town and finally something more abstract like an oblique environment that never reaches a point of equilibrium.

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The milieu refers to what Foucault describes as a series of events, a seriality that is heterogeneous, without origin or end or that is marked by the reversibility of effects and causes (Foucault 2007: 20), a seriality much like the series Deleuze (1990) writes about. The series should be understood in terms of a spatiotemporal topology that accounts for the nonlinear chaotic action at a distance of bodies one on another, of one memory on another, a quantum nonlocality. Here we see the governing of a neoliberal capitalism moving to a measure beyondprobabilities of statistical populations, the latter being what Foucault saw as central to neoliberal biopolitical governance. The move is to the excess created beyond the capture of probability. It is a move to preemptive/hensive power, to the curvilinear that evokes another measure ofa lively mathematics for the lively interval between Os and 1s.

With this measure, a digital depth offers the incomputable measure, a measure of potentiality befitting the power beyond biopower aimed at the condition of emergence or of potentiality—the prehensive. It is this measure that is set to work in a financial capitalism where wealth is produced external to capital's organization of labor or external to the accumulation of capital through production. What has been called the knowledge economy or the information economy or, most recently, the affect economy points to an accumulation of wealth through the working on the prehensive, what was referred to above as affect—itself a generalized affect, an abstraction brought through past investment in the education and welfare of workers and the upgrading of technical management, which increasingly is not considered to be opposed to creativity and invention. However, through the privatization and rarefication of education, health care, control of fertility, social security, and other social welfare provisions, and as the openness of digital networks continues to hold allure for governments and giant corporations that wish to contain it, creativity and invention are being made scarce. And it is this scarcity that lends motivation for a measure other than or more than the measure of probability. It is a measure that generates enthrallment with measure, integrating words, numbers, images, and diagrams to turn measure into alluring evidence ofan already present future, a preempted future not only because it modulates human time memory but also the time memory at every scale of matter, the becoming of the programmable matter of nanotechnology.

Aesthetics, Measure, and the Object

As measure becomes increasingly particular and affective, necessarily changing the metric for each next measure, there is an increase of interest in aesthetics as part of philosophy's return to ontology;it is a return to affect as a first principle for the ontological grasp of all entities. This orientation suggests an ahumanism, or a democracy of objects, that does not presume the human as center of being and feeling. Thus, an object orientation proposes that all objects have the same ontological weight to throw around—that is, each object can affect other objects and can be affected by them. This certainly displaces the human as the only agency about which there should be philosophical concern; surely this concern is shared by Deleuze andWhitehead.

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However, object-oriented ontologies offer a critique ofwhat has been described as “correlationism," or the assumption that “it is impossible to speak of a world that preexisted humans in itself but only of a world pre-existing humans for humans," as Graham Harman puts it (2009: 122); he also adds toa critique of correlationism acritique of what he calls “relationism."Againstthe view that objects are constituted through relations with other objects, Harman emphasizes that objects are not reducible to their relations. No relation exhausts an object; it endures beyond its relations. In his critique of relationism, Harman is taking a more radical object orientation than Deleuze or Whitehead

Deleuze and Whitehead argue, albeit differently, that relations are external to objects—that is, objects are not reduced to their relationships; nonetheless objects cannot exist outside all relations, as Harman argues they must. Harman's position points back to the virtual or virtuality assumed in Parisi's writings when she is following Deleuze and to the potentiality of eternal objects when she is following Whitehead. For Harman, the assumption of virtuality or potentiality “undermines" objects, suggesting that a dynamism lies beneath or outside them, often at the scale of the preindividual. It also “overmines" objects and leads, as Harman seesit, to the accusation that thereis a falseness to objects; that what matters must be sought in process, eventness, and dynamism that are part of the object but as an eternally returningexcess of indetermination. While Harman recognizes Whitehead's difference from Deleuze, appreciatingWhitehead's specification of objects that exist and perish, which Parisi takes up in her “incomputable materialism," Harman's object orientation nonetheless leads him to criticize Whitehead's notion of eternal objects, in that they point to a potentiality outside the object. Harman also suggests that the speculative turn of an object-oriented ontology also rethinks materialism and is critical of it. Materialism, by his account, fills in all the gaps between objects in some combination of undermining and overmining them. All this is to say that the way objects become related and the way relations become themselves objectsis for Harman the work to be done by “a metaphysics worth its name."

Clearly, an ontological orientation toward objects means for Harman that there is nothing outside the object that contributes to its realness; there are no other agents that make an object real or that are not of the real object-itself. Thus, for Harman, what can be said of objects and how they can enter relationshipsis this: Arguing for a fourfold characterization of objects, Harman proposes that objects are of two types: real objects and sensual or intentional ones. The real object is withdrawn from relations, which, nonetheless, exist simultaneously as part of the object's sensual profile (or sensual object). Thus, the real object is distinct from the primary qualities needed for it to be what it is (in this sense, a real object is something like an essence but not one that is eternal). The real object also is distinct from the secondary qualities that appear in the specific sensual translation for another object—or what, in the human realm, we have called a subject. Sensual objects appear with secondary qualities that are immediately available for relationship. The totality of all thequalities of a sensual object, however, is submergedand distinct from the intentional or sensual object: the sensual object is always less than all of its qualities (Harman 2009: 135–48).

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