Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

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 diference 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. For Whitehead, 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 world as it experiences its becoming. Prehension is a “decision,” to use Whitehead’s term, eliminating potential occasions and 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.

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 the far 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 puts it:

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 new forms of space and time, new skins and new cognitive architectures. The nanoprogramming of matter therefore indirectly allows atomic appetites to become data for the coming of new actual occasions of experience. (2012: 48)

In other words, nanotechnology is aiming 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.” If and 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

But, of course, it is not so surprising that focusing on technoscientific modulation of potentiality, or what is referred to as afect above, points to a calculation or measure that is computationally open. After all, afect or potentiality cannot be measured without modulating it, or the far from equilibrium dynamics of its quantum condition, without afecting vectors of potentiality, moving potential toward actualization. It is for this reason that afect 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 afect 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 parallel algorithms 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 an unforeseen curvature” and directs attention to a mathematics that attests to the viral ecologies or dense folds of information between 0s 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 diferent processors and the sharing of memory and message transmission.” These communications involve many very simple algorithms, which, however, do not lead “to the evolution of one algorithm or the other but to a 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 difers 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 efect 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 programming accounts for curvature as part of its computational design; it involves “biomathematical features of extension” (Parisi 2009c: 360).

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 or incomplete quantities at the limit of 0s 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 packed zones 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 equilibrium in so far as any stability is mobile directed by vectors of attraction and repulsion” (Parisi 2009c: 364).

This mathematics allows a software design that exposes curvature, going beyond probabilities as nanoprogramming of the futurity of thought and extension in matter would necessitate and as measuring afect 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 afect. As such, the metric of measure necessarily will change with each and every measure. In this sense, the measure is an aesthetic measure or afective 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 she describes, drawing on Whitehead, to be carrying with it “the dust of the world,” “the dark afectivity of matter,” the incomputable (Parisi 2009c: 266–7). Yet, with nanotechnology, it would seem that there is an efort to get even closer to this dark matter to be able to modulate its potentialities, to get closer to “afective 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).

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 afect, 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 nationstate. 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.

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 efects 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 beyond probabilities 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 of a lively mathematics for the lively interval between 0s and 1s.

With this measure, a digital depth ofers 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 afect economy points to an accumulation of wealth through the working on the prehensive, what was referred to above as afect—itself a generalized afect, 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 of an 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 afective, 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 afect 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 afect other objects and can be afected 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 and Whitehead.

However, object-oriented ontologies ofer a critique of what 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 to a critique of correlationism a critique of what he calls “relationism.” Against the 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 diferently, 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 sees it, to the accusation that there is 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 returning excess of indetermination. While Harman recognizes White-head’s diference from Deleuze, appreciating Whitehead’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 objectoriented 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 objects is 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 relationships is 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 the qualities of a sensual object, however, is submerged and distinct from the intentional or sensual object: the sensual object is always less than all of its qualities (Harman 2009: 135–48).

Thus, real objects, inaccessible, cut of by a “firewall,” can enter relations only through sensual objects. In contrast, sensual objects can only touch through real objects. Harman refers to a “vicarious causality” to explain how the relationship between real objects is caused vicariously or where the sensual object is vicar of the real object. Further, the relationship thus formed forms a new object. The sensual object allows two real objects to relate, which forms the new object in which the sensual object and real object contact. For Harman, causation is alluring or afective at the point where real objects touch through sensual ones, and, as such, all objects may be alluring to all other objects, albeit some objects have a stronger allure than others.

I have emphasized Harman’s posture toward objects because it turns attention toward the primary and secondary qualities of objects, given that the latter—color, taste, or heat—are understood to be qualities of a subject’s perception. In contrast, primary qualities belong to the object itself, such as length, width, and depth. But in questioning correlationism and relationism, the distinctions between primary and secondary qualities are troubled. It is suggested that all qualities might be thought of as secondary, while being transformable in the relations objects have with each other, removed from the privilege of human consciousness. And yet in the withdrawal of the real object, as the sensual object allures other objects, there is a philosophical protection of the real object while its primary and secondary qualities are opened to profound transformation—let us say by a technoscience such as nanotechnology. After all, Parisi proposes that nanotechnology is turning attention to mathematical technologies that seem to be rendering curvilinearity, making extension in matter, or the prehension of eternal objects, operative and experienceable; nanotechnology means 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.⁸

In such a situation, the tension between process philosophies and object-oriented ones might reveal a particular political, economic, and governmental configuration of labor, technology, bodies, and afect. While the process philosophies have enabled critics such as Parisi to keep an eye on technological transformation and the resulting capacity for the capture and manipulation of potential, thereby afecting life, labor, and matter, the object-oriented ontologies might be put to critical use as the investments of technoscience and capital keep seeking to capture every excess of measure; the object-oriented philosophies might give us philosophical ground when potential and virtuality no longer have a positive valence or only a positive one. When labor is considered the work of afect, the stakes of philosophical debates may well be high; the abstractness of these debates is perhaps just what can give us purchase on critiques of politics, economy, and governing in relationship to the digital.

Notes

1 In presenting what he calls “nanofacture,” Peter Galison suggests that nanotechnology is changing measure from representation to an ungoing doing in which measure is a making and manipulation all at once. Through the use of devices that allow touching and manipulation of nanotubes or even viruses, the technoscientist is allowed “virtual interaction,” or he or she obtains “virtual presence on the surface scaled by a factor of about one million to one…. Imagining in the nano-domain has shifted from a form of passive receptivity to an integral part of manipulation, an everyday increasingly haptic tool to be exploited in the fabrication of a world of the very small” (Galison 2007: 173). Gallison concludes: “Our philosophical ideal, formed in an early time may need to catch up to a very diferent form of science” (2007: 173). My eforts here are to present works that are critically responding to this reconfiguring of the ontological basis of knowing.

2 Cafentzis also has suggested that physics was critical for the labor theory of value: “physics … provides definite analyses of work and new plans for its organization. Its models may appear abstract, but they are directly related to the labor process” (Cafentzis 1992: 220). And more, Cafentzis has argued that just as thermodynamics provided a uniform approach to energy in industrial labor, with the invention of the Turing machine, computers provide a uniform approach to the computational procedures of all labor usually identified as skilled labor, but which are “implicit in all parts of the division of social labor” (Cafentzis 1997: 52).

3 In considering the labor theory of value, the importance of including labor other than the labor of humans also is taken up in Sean Cubitt’s essay in this collection. There also is a connection to be made between afective labor and Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle’s critical engagement with the culture of the code and algorithmic technologies. Yet in neither of these essays is there a rethinking of the body figured as organism and the efect of that figuring on thinking labor, afect, and its measure.

4 Information now is thought of in terms of a new law, which is: “information can neither be created nor destroyed,” which speaks to the physicality of information. (See C. Seife 2006.)

5 For Massumi, quasi-causality “is sensitive-afective, or creative (adding a surplus-value to response). It expresses a global ability to sense and be afected, qualitatively, for change. It injects a measure of objective uncontrol, a margin of eventfulness, a liveliness” (Massumi 2002: 225).