Q&A #2 | @ MGLC Švicarija, Ljubljana
With Enea Kavčič, Lea Sande, Tisa Troha, Alessandro Sbordoni, Stefan Kafidov & Maks Valenčič
Transcription
Maks: There are definitely some interesting overlaps between all of the presentations. Uncertainty is one of the core themes that has been explored by basically all of you. I can ask a question to Alessandro, and perhaps ask you about this connection between the death drive and acceleration, because it seems like, with technology, and how artificial intelligence is increasingly used in warfare dynamics, state surveillance and so forth, there's like a cybernetic loop between these two forces, and it almost necessitates a kind of acceleration in terms of what you were proposing in the talk. So I'm interested in how you think of this question, and also if you have some insight into that — let me say, just because Christian yesterday ended with a single remark that stemmed from his introductory statement, that desire is fundamentally computational. And it seems like your approach to the death drive leads to similar outcomes. So maybe if you could reflect a little bit on that, and maybe also on how you see the political implications — however you want to define it, like agency or things like that.
Alessandro: Thank you. So regarding certainty, what I find interesting is that with the shift from analog to digital technology, we've been able to reproduce something identical with itself — in which we are obviously falling into a Baudrillardian paradigm — with mathematical certainty. So while before there was always the threat of the outside, of noise or of entropy entering into reproduction, with digital technology this is abolished and basically mediated by what Baudrillard calls the code. I would like to force the technological metaphor here, which then I extend also to a concept like the death drive. So in history there have been different readings of the death drive, and mine is just the latest addition. But in contrast with other formulations — and when you were talking I was thinking especially about Nick Land's formulation of the death drive, since you mentioned accelerationism — other formulations have taken this endless repetition of the death drive in different ways. Nick Land, for example, emphasized the death drive as a positive feedback loop, something that drifts away from a state of equilibrium. But I think this isn't so arguable in our current state, in the political and cultural state, where I see more and more the repetition of the same. And I want to answer very briefly by saying that if the death drive is posited instead as a repetition always identical, with mathematical certainty mediated by digital technology, the only way to introduce an alternative is by looking at the paradigm itself. And this maybe links to the penultimate talk about black holes and black boxes: only by looking at the paradigm in its perfection as a closed circuit, and trying to almost introduce concepts like transparency and opacity into it, can we think through it. And this links back to the last sentence of my talk, that a revolution today can only take place through a feedback loop with the technological system at its forefront — which doesn't mean that the revolution has to be only technological, but that it's mediated by technology and has to deliver a radically different relationship with technology, a radically different technological system. But as things stand, we are stuck. So that would be my answer.
Maks: Would any one of you like to pose a question to the members?
Audience (Jenna Jauhiainen): Thank you everyone for the super interesting presentations. My name is Jenna Jauhiainen and I'm from Helsinki, Finland, and I am a visual artist and researcher. I've worked a lot with memes, for over 15 years. And I ask this question especially in relation to Enea's comment regarding this "the left can't meme" meme. Good news for everyone: in Finland we have broken across this barrier, and last summer, Mike Watson, who wrote the book about "the left can't meme," interviewed myself and the political candidate Alma Tuuva, who made a landslide win in the municipal elections last spring — so about a year ago. She runs a meme account that has about — and in Finland this is a big number — 50,000 followers, and is part of this network of leftist meme discourse in Finland. The article/interview is in Jacobin magazine in the US, and has been translated into some other languages. But in relation to this, I want to ask: why did you choose the devil? What's the path toward using this analogy — though I don't know quite how to voice this — because we also have this, in the left-meme sphere in Finland: people consider those who are very successful in the craft to be more like meme angels. And there's this weird Christian-type language, even though I guess we are in more secular societies these days, but you see this happening or being discussed, so I would love to hear more about that.
Enea: Thank you for your question and comment. I will read this interview, I'm sure it's very interesting, but I picked the devil basically because this artist, Brina, already picked it for me. But it also makes structural sense, because this question of why the left can't meme can have many, many answers. My main answer would be that, back when this question was first asked, it was answered that to meme, you have to be morally corrupt, and the left couldn't perform that in the way the right could — because the whole meme culture, angels, devils, Wojaks, they all come from 4chan, and they're part of the internet, and then it spread everywhere. So, yeah, the devil came from this first part. The second part was that this devil in Joan of Arc creates this loop that you always use to justify things you do on the internet. If someone asks you, "why did you like this Epstein meme, don't you hate Epstein?" or whatever, you just say, "it was funny because the meme also represents a criticism, usually" — or it used to, or sometimes it does. And so you can defend yourself for enjoying something that is morally corrupt. That was the second part, because you always have an excuse — and even if you don't have one, you have this safety of internet language that allows you to defend yourself with another meme, or another phrase. So you're basically free to do anything, and in your head you're always justifying yourself through this endless loop: "I'm actually not a bad person, I can like this meme." People are basically limitless in the possibilities of participation online, and the devil is having fun because you're not forced into doing anything — you just participate and enjoy it. That would be my answer.
Maks: Any other question, perhaps?
Audience: So there's two philosophical holes and two philosophical surfaces related to them. The first hole in philosophy is the well that Thales of Miletus falls into, and then people laugh at him because he was looking at the sky — the surface, in this story. And the second one, of course, is Plato's cave, where people also look at a specific surface. So from these two examples, I think there's a choice of surface involved for philosophers, and even smart students — and Einstein chose a different surface than, for example, the devil's chessboard surface of discourse. So how do you think about this in your philosophy? How should one choose a surface, or should we just have a theory of all surfaces? I know this is a kind of pre-French idea of surface, but surface was kind of abandoned.
Tisa: Thank you for the good question. I'd like to think that there's a way to make the surfaces, on the one hand, and the holes, on the other, isomorphic, in the topological sense. I guess that would be the smallest possible way to reduce it down into just "the surface" and "the hole."
Stefan: I think that the usage of holes and enclosed spaces in philosophical analogies kind of begs to be used, because the very concept, the very idea of definition, implies an isolation of the thing from the rest of things. And our thinking is also shaped by that. So it's just useful to treat things as holes, or as caves, and stuff like that.
Maks: Any other questions from the audience?
Claire: I could add something to the last question, perhaps about the relationship between surfaces and holes and the theme of this event — that sometimes when we're thinking about the digital, we really tend to believe that it's something we know deeply. But as we learned yesterday, as we explored with Ivan, there is a way of problematizing the difference between cyberspace and the internet, and how the internet is what we use to access cyberspace. So I want to suggest that maybe, in terms of thinking of the digital as a kind of black hole that we don't really directly observe itself, we are just observing the effects that happen around the digital — we're seeing the light distortions around it, but not actually interacting with it directly. So I feel like, for me, I found the analogy of the black hole very useful for thinking through the digital.
Maks: If there's no more questions, I think that we had a very productive day. The talks were great. Thank you.
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