Book presentation by Christian Nirvana Damato
Transcription
Sophie Publig: Thank you for joining us today. I'm Sophie; the Weibel Institute is very, very excited to welcome, both Christian Nirvana Damato, as our author of today, and Claire Elise Herzberg and Polymnia Tsinti from Becoming Press. So, please enjoy and I will hand over to Claire.
Claire Elise Herzberg: Yeah, sure. I can happily make a brief introduction on behalf of Becoming Press and on behalf of Christian. We have been traveling the last few days, we started with the first presentation in Venice, and yesterday we were part of a conference in Ljubljana, where Christian also made this presentation. He is a philosopher and curator [of] a project called Inactual based in Italy, or more specifically, in and around Bologna. And he's also the author of Multiplication of Organs Manifesto, which was a publication that we did together as well last year.
That project Multiplication of Organs Manifesto, is kind of like, let's say, a spin off of a larger or more overarching research project, which is, effectively, culminating in this book Retrograde Prometheus, with Prometheus being a sort of metaphor for either humans or perhaps even a neurotic subjectivity, which is something we might be able to get into later, during the talk and during the Q&A. So, we have the metaphor of Prometheus, and then we have the retrograde, which, of course, relates to the sort of idea of apparent retrograde motion. The idea of this sense of progress being something like an illusion. The book is very approachable and it has a lot of stuff about natural history, and there's so many things you can get from it.
But I feel like I want to explain the subtext of the book a little bit because it is making something like an intervention specifically, rather than just presenting a lot of interesting information. It's an intervention to what we perceive, or what Christian certainly perceives to be a sort of latent problem or a sort of reoccurring problem within the critical theory that we usually read regarding the topic of desire. Probably most of us are familiar with Deleuze and Guattari’s elaborations on desire as this kind of creative, chaotic and most importantly emancipatory phenomenon. And I remember particularly the first book that we published, and I feel like this book really takes us back there, because when we published our first book, we were back in Cyprus still and the community was very, very small — and I remember the first person to basically approach us and give some feedback about the book. And I remember them saying, “I really like this,” and basically their way of contextualizing what they liked about it was that they said: “Look, I spent years as a Deleuze and Guattari, sort of, specialized teacher, and they were teaching in Kingston in London for a long time, and so they introduced themself as “a recovering Deleuzian.” And so they gave us this impression that actually, even though there are a lot of wonderful things about that whole set of work, especially, the ideas of desire and emancipation… But the way that they described it, I feel like it's very apt that there's a certain “drunkenness” that can come with an exclusive or hyperactive focus on, say, Deleuze and Guattari. One of the proclamations of the book or one of the things that the book is exploring is whether or not this sort of emancipatory, chaotic version of desire… sort of backfires. So, we are now with Retrograde Prometheus exploring a different take on desire, in hopes of, let's say, untangling something of a knot. So, in this case, as the subtitle should indicate, we're talking about subjectivity and desire from the perspective of computation.
So, I think that should introduce the book. The presentation will be about 35-40 minutes, and we should have some time for Q&A at the end. Thank you and welcome Christian Nirvana Damato.
Christian Nirvana Damato: Thank you.
My latest work, which I’m presenting here today, is a book that I particularly care about, for the simple fact that it contains a conceptualization that changes the perspective regarding one of the main philosophical topics that I have been questioning in the last years: theory of the subject, desire, technology and their political implications. Given this premise, let me introduce this work briefly, before we enter into it more deeply. In Retrograde Prometheus, I tried to build a theory of subjectivity and desire differently to any existent theories, which are always in some way post-lacanian or post-deleuzian. In general, the common place about desire is that it is an entropic, chaotic, explosive, creative and unpredictable force and because of this, it is potentially revolutionary or emancipatory. I’ve tried to take an opposite direction to this. I adopted an approach that merges philosophy of technology, psychoanalysis and natural history, physics, anthropology, to develop this central thesis: the subject is substantially computational and human desire structurally tends towards stability, predictive anticipation and calculation — it has a negentropic basis.
From this desire emerges technology, civilization and capitalism. In some way, our computational desire – a defective and excessive version of the self-preservation instinct – brings us to extinction. For this reason, Prometheus, who is the titan of progress and in this book is the subject itself, all of us metaphorically, is always retrograde, because the advancement is illusory, an artifice produced by our common capitalist notion of progress. Each step forward brings us in a neo-primitive state of ethics and morality. Look at, for example, the new Palantir manifesto. And, of course, I’ll be reductive in some scientific and historical aspects, because I don’t have the time here for a scientific literature review, so I hope you will forgive me. In the book you’ll find all the aspects analyzed more deeply. Having finished this introduction, I would now like to begin by starting from the origin of life itself. Life is said to have originated as an abiogenetic reaction of matter exposed to the Sun, which by stressing it with its energy, caused it to undergo evolutionary contortions. Life does not emerge from equilibrium. It emerges from stress. Solar radiation strikes matter; matter is exposed to energetic disequilibrium. From this exposure, organization arises. As thermodynamic reflections, life is a local negentropic configuration within a generally entropic universe. Stress produces adaptation. And this stress response function is common to all forms of life, from the simplest to the most complex. In macroevolutionary terms, the brain is the organ that by nature operates on the basis of anticipation, since every form of adaptation must be understood as the ability to predict stress factors coming from the environment and from mutations within the organism itself and to act or react preventively.
We can therefore say that life itself has a germinal predictive capacity for programming, anticipation and mathematization. In computational neurosciences, the concept of Active Inference mathematically demonstrates how every living organism reasons in order to reduce entropy, thus avoiding uncertainty and acquiring as much information as possible from the environment: we are “biologically computational”, primarily as a matter of survival. Another example, according to evolutionary theory, following the anthropologist André Leroi Gourhan and the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in general, self-awareness emerges in human beings primarily thanks to lifting themselves off the ground. At a certain stage, upright posture enabled the brain to expand and develop a neural network dense enough to support the emergence of self-awareness, symbolic thought, abstraction and technical exteriorization. Another striking example of the convergence between anthropogenesis, technogenesis and phantagenesis — which is the genesis of imagination and phantasy — can be found in the oldest historically documented ritual of humanity, the Agnicayana (800 BC, India), the diagram of which combines a procedural, algorithmic and ritualistic aspect. The process conceives fantasy and technique, myth and calculation as inseparable.
Also, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins reminds us how immanentist societies thought of rituals as a form of science of their time. Another example derived from Latin, the term desire literally means without stars (de-siderio). Some priests, prophets and magicians of antiquity used to divine the stars. When the sky was overcast, however, predicting and anticipating the future became impossible and this burning expectation of the future created the temporal condition of de-siderio, the condition of absence of stars. Even etymologically, desire is therefore essentially negentropic and statistical, Promethean. The priests of yesterday sought predictive data in the stars. In a deeper and more substantial sense, this drive did not tend to fill an original void that preceded the subject as psychoanalysis said, but rather a posterior void, a void of the future to be filled in this case, with the divination of the stars. In short, since the dawn of humanity, there has never been a separation between the two parts: imagination and technique. Technology and related techniques have something magical about them at the level of belief and experience, just as every ritual, magic and superstition is often rooted in a procedural ritual that is, to a certain extent, calculated, algorithmic and computational. The predictive practice itself — whether based on data or stars — is rooted in this union. Self-awareness, technique and imagination revolve around anticipation, which is developed through experience. If this capacity for anticipation is present in different ways in many organisms and living beings and in our case combines the above aspects, the capacity for prediction becomes more complex.
And human beings, as beings endowed with the promethean fire of imagination and technology, go beyond need and begin to desire. Desire is the potential anticipation of something that is not present, has never been present, or is no longer present: the essence of desire is the possibility of anticipation and calculation mixed with passions. Desire is a string stretched between the past, present and future; it is the way we move through time. Desire is also simultaneous with, or runs parallel with an awareness of death. This awareness of finitude entails a fundamental desire for stability, an evolution of that basic instinct of self-preservation. And in the second chapter of the book, I turn to the historical dimension of the concept of stability. In other words, I try to understand civilization as the collective amplification of a desire for stability, with all its excessive consequences.
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow question the two great narratives on the origins of civilization that we still find in various forms today: those of Rousseau and Hobbes. In short, according to Rousseau, early humans lived in a state of nature characterized by innocence and egalitarianism. The greatest mistake for Rousseau was the agricultural revolution, which triggered the process of civilization that led to private property, laws, wars, cities and so on. According to Rousseau, therefore, we are originally “good.” The other great narrative running in direct opposition to Rousseau, is Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, where the original human being rather lived in a state of perpetual war, brutality and misery, a fate tied to a rigidly selfish nature.
For Hobbes, it is precisely thanks to all the repressive apparatus and mechanisms that we have made progress. In their book, Graeber and Wengrow seek to dismantle this dichotomy and demonstrate the existence of different forms of society and political organization millennia before agriculture, raising the question of why we have become bound to a single model of agriculture and all the technological progress. From my perspective, it is here that technology and the desire for stability become progressively linked. Turgot’s theory of social evolution in 1750 led to the normalization of the fact that, regardless of problems, technological progress is inherent in the continuous advancement toward higher stages of civilization. In the 19th century, the idea that technological progress was the engine of history and of human liberation was firmly established. In other words, technology converges with the desire for stability and does not care about the price to be paid.
We can see how this universally accepted ideology is closely linked to a desire for real stability, which has been rendered scarce and exploited by those in power as a means of acceleration and domination, starting from a fundamental selfishness. The desire for stability, hybridizing with violent, warmongering and repressive forms of government, also becomes a pretext for exercising pure domination, power and oppression. Power feeds on the masses’ desire for stability, ensuring that the promise of achieving it will garner the high level of consent necessary to carry out any type of action. Today, in political discourse and communication, we often hear not only the word “stability,” but also a dangerous cluster of related terms — dangerous in their means, applications and consequences: “security,” “defence,” “order.” This constitutes a form of interpellation that mobilizes a primordial fear that remains ultimately unattainable under late capitalist conditions: stability, peace, or quiet. Masses have often accepted the enslavement of others within their societies in exchange for a degree of stability, either personal or collective, and privilege.
This speaks not only to history, but to a recurring attitude. We must therefore ask whether this form of acceptance is itself a form of slavery. This fundamentally self-preservative tendency of desire follows a kind of mathematical-computational logic intertwined with the evolution of social organization and it was already present in most ancient civilizations. The development of progress and technological advancement, in its current form, constitutes a condition in which the registers of capitalist reality reproduce the very functioning of human desire: stability and its excess, which are both its product and its perfect conjunction and helps explain why capitalism has prevailed. Capitalist ideology channels the desire for stability into a form of excessive and infinite projection through accumulation of goods, stimuli, partners, knowledge, education, money and so on.
Stability can only be pursued alongside a gamified path of enjoyment and sacrifice. Now, let’s enter into a more speculative, psychoanalytic and philosophical realm. In his famous essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud — starting from Fechner’s Principle of Stability, which follows the Second Law of Thermodynamics — imagined a perpetual mutation of a system until it reaches complete stability. To this he adds the concepts of pleasure and displeasure, linking every mutation towards stability to a pleasant sensation or condition. Extreme stability, of course, is considered death. From an entropic and negentropic perspective, the concept of the death drive, as conceived by Freud, would be a negentropic desire for extreme stability: a desire to return to an inorganic state of ‘inert matter,’ devoid of stress factors. However, these basic drives are diverted and influenced by external factors, by “life drives.” From my perspective, as argued in the book, both drives respond to a desire for stability. More specifically, we desire stability, but in order to maintain it, it is necessary to introduce elements that question and endanger it. Stability is maintained precisely by these negative elements, it is constituted in relation to and in opposition to them, without which there would be no ‘principle of stability’ in itself. Entropy, disorder and chaos always respond to a desire for stability, less biological and more cultural, innervated by the injunctions of the external world and therefore under the aegis of all registers of reality.
The negentropic desire for stability complements Žižek’s view of the death drive as an excess produced by stability and containment, an excess that can only explode entropically in a reasonably insane and self-destructive way. Every overload of this tension is met with an equally explosive dissipation; that self-destructive death drive, which is not actually dysfunctional but always responds to the negentropic law of the desire for stability. So, the liberating and self-destructive act, apparently chaotic and of pure explosive energy is always a reaction to a lost stability, forgotten, to be rediscovered, or betrayed, idealized or non-existent. If we take popular films as examples, we can find the same structure: sometimes the cycle is completed, sometimes it is not. It is not a linear path, but that’s precisely the point. I don’t have the time now to fully explain this theory through films. For now, I’ll simply mention a few popular films that you probably know, so I can offer you some suggestions. So we have a negentropic desire for stability, accumulation of tension, explosive dissipation, or temporary or radical re-stabilization. This argument of a fundamental desire for stability does not eliminate our entropy, that Dionysian vision of the world of ecstasy that is believed to be our true nature outside of all the superstructures we have created. As one might imagine, nature and culture are not so separate and often a certain ‘nature’ is always included within culture.
The Dionysian festival, with its forms of intoxication, psychotropic narcosis, orgiastic excesses, play and class dissolution, takes place precisely within a certain order, which through its temporary negation, leaves room for the maximum creative expression of human entropy so that it can be expelled from a certain order of things. This would therefore not be a more natural state than the one denied: the computational subjectivity. All disorder is also an order of things and we always desire order and stability even when we talk about dynamic or apparently disordered phenomena or experiences. In other words, for example, a party is not merely a way for power to restabilize order within a society or community through a small entropic explosion; it is also a way for the subject to recalibrate and restore inner stability. Now, let’s try to go a step further: real disorder is beautiful only when imagined, idealized, or realized in short and ephemeral times. If this form of entropic desire for disorder leads to repetition, it enters the realm of the ordinary, becoming an obligation rather than a choice. When desire loses its coordinates of stability or when certainty in general collapses, it becomes entropic and sprawling. Desire is ‘infernal’ when stability is lost. In a nutshell, disorder is desirable and desired only when it is our choice and not a passive tendency given by repetition, or by the impossibility of an alternative, by not knowing what one wants or by forces beyond one's control.
The negentropic processes of human beings can take many forms, sometimes explicit, sometimes masked by apparent entropy: but the desire for stability is the basic motive underlying everything. Capitalism and political propaganda today are reconfiguring their powers by operating precisely. Reconfiguring their powers by operating precisely on this desire for stability. The desire for stability is the fundamental aspect on which the capitalist structure and ideology leverage, mobilizing human beings as support for capitalist reproduction itself, as well as for the expression of its extractivist, colonialist, accumulative, classist, racist and genocidal logic. Technological evolution is pushing us ever closer to a form of desire and therefore a drive to live, which in the wake of stability is reconfiguring itself with the capitalist apparatus, no longer in passive and victimizing terms, but in active ones. We are learning to enjoy this extreme externalized humanization. The desire for stability takes on a new form, which I defined in a previous work, namely Multiplication of Organs Manifesto, as statistical desire, i.e. a form of desire that finds its driving force in becoming a number, gamification, the predictability and prediction of the actions we want to take, the rejection of error and adherence to calculation. Statistical desire, which as such occupies all the space and fields of life, also affects the promise of happiness, which — as I wrote in that book — is culturally constructed as the ability to proceed with the mechanical heaviness of the continuous and anticipated programming of one's life.
So we have this shift from this diagram to the excessive dimension of the desire for stability, that is a statistical desire that is a hybridization with new technologies. I believe that there is an intrinsic element of enjoyment in this statistical desire, an element that shifts us from passive victims to active participants; statistical desire is an ideology that is internalized and externalized in everyday life. It can be seen everywhere, permeating all areas from work to universities to private life. The digitization of society, the mathematization of being as an opportunity and the predictive and total control of the self, from biometric tracking to tarot cards, from online trading to the datafication of performativity, from long-term scheduling to potential dating, from the gamification of relationships to that of education and work and the list goes on, are now dominant narratives that will become increasingly stronger because crises and uncertainties — instability — reinforce them, giving them an aura of inevitable necessity.
Statistical desire is formed as a technological illusion of accessibility to being the editor and designer of one's own desires in a world dictated by contingencies; For this reason, technology responds to and challenges that fundamental desire for stability, transforming it into statistical desire. Transforming it into statistical desire and excessively toward increasingly incisive and neurotic forms of automation and mathematization of being. The dream, understood as the imaginative possibility and occurrence of the improbable, becomes perfectly integrated into a computational form: the statistically desiring subject dreams through statistical predictions that always show margins of unpredictability. The statistical desire actively synchronizes us with the entropic chaos of techno-capitalism, condemning us twice: to seek stability, quiet and peace through maximum acceleration and effort and to learn to enjoy this delirious circus of automatic gestures toward self-realization. So, is simulation our reality? I say yes. Edward Castronova calls Digital Exodus the choice to take refuge in a digital world, preferring it because it opens up surrogate possibilities for personal fulfillment, relationships and stability that the physical world may not allow. This effect is essentially a negentropic drive captured by virtual worlds that provide a ‘simulation of stability’ combined with the removal of the traumatic reality that we may find ourselves living in.
Consider, for example, when one plays a video game for more than six consecutive hours in the evening. When one goes to sleep, one often continues to think or dream about playing that game. In addition to being a biological consequence of the brain, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we can imagine this activity as a continuation of the deeper reason as to why the gaming was carried out in the first place, a sort of defense, so that we can continue to dream peacefully even while asleep, preventing traumatic reality from intruding into our sleep. In other words, the simulation continues even during the dream.
Alenka Zupančič links this dream mechanism to the concept of disavowal, taken by Freud. Pushing this intuition even further: within what I would call a libidinal economy of total gamification, this state of disavowal not only acts as a defense mechanism, but it also becomes a factor of enjoyment, as desire is reflexively reprogrammed in the form of excessive statistical desire. The configuration of a statistical desire and the structuring of a world totalized by a libidinal economy of total gamification is affirmed by a digital exodus that has already taken place; we have already escaped our world, we have already entered into ‘a better version’, buried deep within it, a version in which reality itself becomes more bearable because everything is filtered through the form of the game: education, work, sex, relationships, career, politics, war and death itself.
To paraphrase Bataille, today’s libidinal economy is the affirmation of play even in death. In a time when “progress” moves in this way, what can we do? Today, the theory of explosive and infernal desire as a potentially emancipatory force has flattened the possibility for thinking alternative models and revealed its limit, above all because it is linked to forms that are less organized and strategic and more often tied to short-term satisfaction – often dopaminergic, passive, or performative – while at other times appearing as a genuine but naive and optimistic form that ultimately proves ineffective. Perhaps we need to think through the mind and tools of computational subjectivity.
We need to organize our lives, personally or in a collective way, and actions through a critical, anticipatory realism. This is what I call “Total Retrograde Prometheia” in the book and that is the political part. What if we were to redirect the statistical, anticipatory, predictive and computational dimensions of our subjectivity – in other words, that Promethean component more often mobilized for capitalist reproduction – in order to disrupt and gradually transform different levels of society through an agenda grounded in ethics, dignity, equality and freedom? Probably, perhaps, nothing would come of it, because we are, as humans, doomed to fail – due to our excesses and selfishness. And yet, we are also doomed, as humans, to continue trying, because our desire is always under tension, and always oriented toward the future, toward the anticipation, toward the production of a better future condition. Faced with this, our computational subjectivity can be a selfish, self-defensive, conservative and excessive mode of life in a collapsing world; but it can also become a new form of political subjectivation. This latter possibility will be the focus of my next research.
Claire: We can move into a Q&A session. I'm particularly curious to know if there are any questions that anyone in the audience has, but we might be able to ‘start the debate’ by, if you forgive me for being a little bit opportunistic, but because we are in this particular room and because Sophie Publig is in here, and we are today receiving for the first time, her latest book Digital Occultism (with Mikkel Rørbo), it gives me the opportunity to kind of address some of the, let’s say, controversies that come with this kind of intervention against the typical, entropic, chaotic desire of Deleuze and Guattari, because something that in the beginning for me was maybe harder to swallow was the idea that when you're thinking of subjectivity, desire as computational, it almost seems like you're taking the fun out of things because computation feels very deterministic.
But what we've been learning, and I would be in particular curious what Sophie would like to respond to this, because in Digital Occultism as well, we get the idea that actually between the gaps of these computational systems or these things we might consider lifeless, there's a lot of magic there, and there's certainly may even be a source of magic that we on the progressive or left side of things, are not actually tapping into that much. And so I wonder if you might want to respond at all to, let's say, the magic of computation, because I remember that in your book, and if I remember the quote exactly, you're talking about how algorithms produce desire through recursive immersion into computational systems. So I wonder if you might want to start this by responding to that?
Sophie: Sure. If it's okay, I will just jump in here. Thank you so much for a really super rich presentation.
Christian: Thank you.
Sophie: I can also see lots of parallels there in our ways of working of course. And yeah, so thank you Claire, also, for reading already through Digital Occultism and it's true, I do believe that, in a Deleuzoguattarian way I would say that, you know, we form this kind of assemblage with technological devices and how they function and what is happening then, a lot of the times, as we can see right now, is when we actually don't really know how these processes operate on the technical side, we start to do folklore, right? So it's like a form of, you know, creating explanations for what is actually going on. And one of the most cited examples there is on tarot TikTok when you have the videos popping up on your For You page, which then [makes people] go like: oh, this video is has like no hashtags and it has no other words of categorization, so to say, but if it found you on your For You page, this is meant for you. You know, then of course users are going to start believing in those kind of things and be like: oh, this is talking to me, this is a sign from the universe. And we can really see this in this renaissance of new age technologies and knowledges, however you want to call it.
And I feel that there you can really see how, due to this information gap or knowledge on how the TikTok algorithm, for example, works, we start to fill in the gaps ourselves as users. And then, you know, kind of deal with what the technology can do, right? In that sense, it would be the recommendation algorithm and just start to make up things to make them explainable, especially exactly as you would maybe then say to get over this disorder, right, and bring back stability and not sit with the question, why did this video find me? You know, but it's like, oh yeah, of course it's because it's meant for me. So, maybe that would be a little bit of a connection.
Claire: I could even respond because it really takes me back to last year in April or something like that. We were in Graz at a conference and with someone in the room, we came to this kind of agreement—It was an electronic music oriented, Mille Plateaux related, if anybody knows it, it’s a record label that had a long history, and it was being run by someone who was maybe one of the leading Deleuze and Guattari scholars and Laruelle scholars in Germany, maybe one of the only, sort of dignified Deleuzoguattarian and Laruelle scholars in Germany—and we came to this kind of conclusion that yes, there is this sort of… When it comes to the topic of disorder, punk, leftist background people, anarchistic people tend to glorify the idea of disorder (over order, authoritarianism), but then the context that this conversation happened, was in a moment when, basically, Trump destabilized many of the things, many of the, let’s say, global sort of systems in the world. And we were reflecting on the fact that actually we are supposed to be the insurrectionists. But in the end, the people who really championed disorder was actually the MAGA movement.
And so there is an opportunity here to see, I don't know if anyone has read or seen the lectures of Exocapitalism, but they have this kind of contentious statement, or this kind of controversial statement, that the problem is us. And one of the things that they're really saying when they're saying that is that, yes, there is a kind of information gap that allows us to project speculations into things when, at the end of the day, if Palantir is our enemy, if this computational approach to managing human populations and these kinds of things is our enemy, then “we have to know our enemy” and we have to actually know, first of all, what does computation mean and how does it function and so on?
And in what way can computation become a tool for us to explore, let's say progressive, political ideas and things like that. So I think it sort of really relates to this kind of accidental glorification of disorder that has ended up just kind of championing, the MAGA movement at the end of the day.
Sophie: Just to also shortly comment on that… I think it's so interesting that especially the alt-right movement has been already so good in creating memes in the mid 2010s and then using what has been called meme magick to kind of really get into the system and reach, you know, users across all kinds of echo chambers and then you always have the internal discussions on the left, who's like: oh, why can't the left do the same? Why doesn't it work the same way? Which is this age-old debate also there, of course. And I think it's so true that you really have to look into, basically, what is happening there, and how it's working...
Claire: Would you like to respond to any of these comments?
Christian: I totally agree because it's a case study of the concept about how we can use computational subjectivity — this tendency to also organize, anticipate — but with another way less entropically and more strategically, because it's a sort of strategy linked to new forms of communication.
Dr. Clemens Apprich: I saw a lot of things—you have thermodynamics, which would be, of course, the entropy and negentropy, so there's something in cybernetics, where this comes up. But I think that the meta-stability, if you link it to the history of cybernetics, you have, for example, Ashby's thermostat, which is not so much thermodynamic, but it's really mechanistic. So, I am just thinking with different forms about how to understand order and disorder, because there the thermostat, if you know this kind of little machine, you push it to give it disorder and it tries to create these, what they call, ultrastable states, which your kind bleak vision of the future is facing I think when you turn into computation, What kind of disorder does computation yield, right?
Because within computation, the interesting thing is, even without Deleuze and Guattari, that within it there's always an excess. It cannot be pinpointed, it cannot, kind of, be stopped at some point. I know this isn’t going into political subjectivity, but even within the computation, the computer itself, you always have this errancy within it, otherwise it wouldn't work. I think there's such a weird moment in this when you think about computation that it itself has just negativity and negativity, more in the Lacanian sense, which produces something on its own. Would you say that computation in itself has a desire that is driving it? Not as a machine that it links to, you know, other subjectivities, so it would be like the big war machines, whatever it is… But within the computation, there is a real thing, that it has this negativity that pushes it further all the time. Is there something that you see here as a potential?
Claire: If I can maybe respond… If I understood you correctly, it reminds me of a conversation that we had once with another author, of Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence, which is quite a hysterical book but they came up with a lot of interesting points. Exactly this one. So in there he's talking about Wittgenstein and talking about effectively the theological basis of mathematics and computation itself, which is, again, something that comes up in this example from India 800 years before Christ. Effectively these things that we consider very banal and lifeless, like either computation itself or the silicon chips that computation is done on, rather, there's actually an entirely maybe negative or theological or artistic basis for how these things actually function. And I know Marek Poliks, who is another author that we've worked with, has talked about loving and respecting the spirit of the rock, but there might actually be something between the rock, between the carbon atoms itself that is actually magical or something that requires a theological approach or an artistic approach to interpretation. So, I don't know if that relates to what you were saying...
Dr. Apprich: There's also this saying, you know, we have been developing a computer within us for thousands of years, right? Not only in the Eurocentric way. And then we have it here and obviously reflecting back to us but it’s us being in there. And I think the interesting thing about compute, it's more than mechanics that's like order, disorder, there's something which is purely productive.
Claire: It’s the technical thing that we were once the computers ourselves. We were once computers, and now we've externalized that. And that's really a part of what you could say… You could easily see that in terms of the anthropologists that you cited from an evolutionary background.
Christian: Yes, exosomatisation.
Claire: Yes, it’s totally this technical externalisation, where we were the computer and now we've externalized that. And, whatever magic we consider ourselves to have—which may end up not being actually magic, but something much more mechanical (rational) per se—It's also now, totally imbued into these externalized objects that we have. And so, whatever humanity we have that we defend as progressive people who are interested in the well-being of our peers and of alleviating suffering… I mean, that humanity is somehow within these silicon chips, within these computers. And that's something that I think is really productive to explore. And may sort of break the deadlock.
Sophie: You made this beautiful diagram, could you maybe go back to the slide where you show the different steps and how you it works? Yes this one.
Christian: Actually, in the book there is this diagram with all the words. If you take one copy...
Claire: Feel free to grab a copy and have a look and find the diagram within it...
Christian: It’s at the end of the first paragraph, I think. And it's different from this one… It’s more of a complete diagram with all the parts.
Claire: Yeah, because in a sense the majority of the book is actually sort of telling the story of how you enter into this diagram and in what order these things happen, like there's the abiogenesis, the beginning of life itself — abiogenesis, the beginning of life itself. Energy coming down from the sun and then this energy is kind of propagating into these various different cycles that feedback in various ways.
Christian: There is a little part that is narrativistic and mythological in a sort of way.
Sophie: That’s super interesting and it's also interesting that the only thing that is external is the sun, right? We have the line, which is a sort of rope. In the mind of Retrograde Prometheus, there is a rope and there is the subject at the center. The computational part is up and the entropy is down and is sort of attracting...
Dr. Apprich: There’s one part I think that works well with the argument of these retrograde processes… Hito Steyerl had this is argument that what we're living nowadays is like neo-neolithic, but the interesting twist here is that back in the days, because people had the star constellations, [which was used for] the calendar, agriculture, all these kind of things, and they saw a crab in the sky, But of course they knew it was not a crab in the sky. But it nonetheless, did always kind of process this, that then went into this, you know, subjectivization and so on and then building the culture and so on. Nowadays, with pattern recognition, we look into the data and we actually think it's a crab, you know, that's retrograde.
That's what Palantir is trying to sell us, is that we are losing this distance, which is the magic. The space in between. I think this is what we've lost. You can use it, but you need the distance.
Christian: In one point of Palantir's manifesto, they go against companies that refuse religion. It's voluntary. It's not something… Why? It's not a conservative position. It's a position that is ideological, political.
Dr. Apprich: But how crazy is that we look into data in order to get a solution for what to do. You know what I mean? We kind of lost this sense of reality basically.
Claire: Maybe the biggest or the most prevalent thing in our lives that relates to this is, let's say, something like an Instagram algorithm and because we don't actually maybe have the technical knowledge of how these things work or how LLMs integrate into them, or even how LLMs work, or even some of them underlying mathematics and basic mathematics there. We are prone to sort of extreme forms of superstition when it comes to...
I'm telling you, as someone who has to deal with Instagram all the time, I have a small anecdote that we had a kind of major drop in visibility at some point, which is fine, who cares? I mean, it's not the biggest problem in the world for whatever a publishing house, but we had authors submitting essays to us. And, one morning, we were going to publish this essay that was submitted to us, and I said: “look, don't feel sad if nobody presses like on this thing,”
“We have a massive visibility drop at the moment, so don't take it personally,” “It's more about us than about you.”
And we posted this thing and for some reason it was the highest post we've ever had. We’ve never had more than 500 likes and it went to 2000. So it was this huge spike and it made me think, oh, maybe, when we had, the next week, another essay submitted, I will start doing the same thing. Maybe I need to actually tell this person, “sorry, it is probably going to do really badly,” or “We are super unpopular blah, blah, blah,” and maybe there's some algorithm that's looking down, being like: “that's the humility I need.”
The reason that we actually want to step back from Instagram, and I might conclude that that's not the right decision is because I don't want to enter into that absolutely crazy schizophrenic world of superstitious theories about how algorithms work. Something that we don't have time to get to now but it came up a lot in Ljubljana, because we were with psychoanalysts, who were talking about neurosis and psychosis, is that we might think of this desire for stability as some sort of deeply neurotic thing. However, what Maks Valenčič was exploring, which related to this, was that if schizophrenia is not what we're looking for, if neurosis is not what we're looking for, there is the unexplored position of psychosis.
And there is a possibility, if you are daring enough to try to rehabilitate Nick Land and these kinds of theorists, there might be something like a psychotic stability that we could, on the left side, actually take as our magic. But this magic would require us to learn the technical way that these things work and to not be afraid of maths, not be afraid of science, not be afraid of computers because they are not fundamentally against us. They can also be our tools, and we can also push back through the study and the learning and the sort of surrendering to some sort of psychotic chaos magic.
Christian: Also because the shift to the excessive dimension of the desire for stability is a sort of dimension close to psychosis with new technologies. But maybe we have to find practices to find stability in this excessive dimension, because we are in this excessive dimension, we are fully immersed in this dimension that is of course, linked with, techno capitalism.
Claire: Thank you, Sophie, for giving us the time. It's a real pleasure to be here. We knew that we had to pass from Ljubljana back to Berlin, and Vienna seemed something like a bit of an oasis in the middle of that. So, thank you very much.
Christian: Thank you so much.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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