nettime: Hari Kuzru/Rewiring 2

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

qiFrom: hari@dircon.co.uk (Hari Kunzru)

Rewiring Technoculture 2: Do We Allow Maths In Here?

- Hari Kunzru

Hello everyone. Thanks for the responses to my post last weekend - I've
had a heavy week - otherwise I would have written back sooner. Loads of
questions were raised, but I'd like to concentrate on answering some of
Ted Byfield's objections to what I wrote about nonlinear maths. He
contends that:

the ways in which nonlinear math is _used_ appear as little more than an
extension of the ways in which linear math was and still is _used_:
positivist, productivist, reductive, teleological, and instrumental.

I think that's fair to some extent - anyone who introduces a scientific
vocabulary into a political debate has to answer the charge of positivism.
I'm entirely aware that nonlinear maths, like linear maths is only a
'conceptual technology' Mistaking its conventional relationship with the
systems it describes for a natural or necessary one would be to ascribe
it too much importance - perhaps to produce it as a scientific theology of
the type responsible for the widespread hostility towards any convergence
between the vocabularies and procedures of science and those of political
theory. The historical reasons for this hostility - eugenics and rational
social control and all the rest of it, are good ones, and if it was simply
a question of reinstituting the teleological vision of
scientifically-driven progress towards a perfect society, then Byfield
would be right to dismiss my position out of hand.

However, the procedures consequent on admitting this version of the
nonlinear mathematical perspective into the debate are very different to
that of scientific positivism. In a sense, much of the work I want these
ideas to do could be achieved without reference to mathematics at all. A
theory based on open systems, on plurality and difference, a located,
embodied knowledge conceived of in terms of change, mutation and flow
rather than the ascription of fixed a priori definitions.... These
theoretical aims are reasonably commonplace, and much of this agenda
forms the current orthodoxy in the academic study of the humanities. It is
a register which I imagine many people on Nettime feel very comfortable 
with, and were it expressed in another way, would probably not inspire 
great opposition.

The usual way this list of ideas is approached is via language, or more
specifically the version of Saussurean linguistics which was taken up by
Derrida, among others. Theories of difference abound, many of them keyed
to particular political agendas, and treating various systems 'as a 
language' has become a common move. Language is unfortunately a poor
model for a lot of phenomena - especially in social and political fields.
Asserting 'difference' as an ethical or political imperative is useful as
far as it goes, but seems to produce political debates largely concerned
with linguistic definition at the expense of possible courses of action -
some of this stuff feeds into the 'PC' controversy, which given that I've 
got enough on my plate already, I'll leave well alone.

Treating nonlinear maths as a metaphorical resource for doing metaphysics
(I do think it's more than that, but as to how much more I'm undecided -
more so than I appeared in parts of the last post), one finds interesting
convergences with Deleuze and Guattari's theories of desiring machines.
Both are concerned with statistical aggregates - hives, colonies, swarms,
crowds and so on, indeed in the case of D+G's desiring machines, 
explicitly with treating the 'I' (the sacred unitary individual whose
rights are the subject of the libertarian discourses people seem to think
I'm shoring up) as such. A multiplicity, an aggregate, a mass. So whatever
I'm arguing, it's opposed to the tendency towards homogeneity and unity
which is a feature of the nineteenth-century scientific theories Ted
Byfield lumps it in with. (I'd also like to draw this paragraph to the
attention of Mark Stahlman).

It's a radically materialist perspective, which I find attractive as an
alternative to the sterile strand of postmodernist thinking which
concentrates on mourning the loss of the real (a natural casualty
if there's nothing outside the text and the sign bears only a conventional
relationship with the referent). By this I don't mean that nonlinear maths
has the natural and necessary connection with the real that language
lacks - it's still conventional, although with better-established
criteria than natural language for testing the success or failure of its
representations.
I do contend that a concentration on forces and matter, on stuff rather
than signs, is valuable.
Old-school Marxists always hated postmodernism (a writer for Socialist
Worker magazine once insulted me in a college bar by calling me a 'bloody
postmodernist') for its concentration on representations. Baudrillard's
widely-misunderstood remark that the Gulf War didn't happen is usually 
held up as the nadir of this tendency. I've come to think that critiques 
based on exposing certain discourses as totalising ('bloody totaliser' was
what I shouted back at the SW writer - oh happy days) are of limited use. 
Not 'no use', just limited. The point isn't just to identify instances of
oppression. The point is to do something.

I don't propose nonlinear maths as a foundational, privileged discourse. I
don't require Ted Byfield to worship at its altar, merely to admit
it as a conceptual technology which is good at describing many of the
phenomena which concern us when we think about politics (economies and
crowds come to mind as obvious examples). He objects to my
characterisation of States as 'organisms which wish to perpetuate
themselves', and a bunch of other stuff, on the grounds that none of it
flows from nonlinear mathematics. Well spotted.  Like I say, I'm not
proposing nonlinear maths as the sole source of knowledge. We can talk
about power, biology, distributed intelligence or Emergence, all of which
require the introduction of other conceptual technologies (or 'trendy
jargon' as Byfield would have it - though I must say I think he's packing
some pretty trendy jargon himself), and no doubt I can get myself into
trouble, without a number in sight.
Does this count as 'supplementing the sterile tautologies of math'? If you
like, though I imagine asserting that all mathematics is a closed
'tautological' system would get you in trouble with Goedel. Does my lack
of purity invalidate my argument, given that I'm not proposing some
uncomplicated mathematical foundationalism? No.

OK, I said earlier that I thought nonlinear maths was more than a source
of interesting metaphors for metaphysicians. So what is it good for? I'd
like to underline that I'm open to persuasion in this area, and this is 
why I've tried to reply in detail to Ted Byfield's post. I think most of
the objections to what I said depend on the idea that maths tends to be
predicated on a founding or originary set of axioms, with problems
being solved through the unfolding of sets of statements or proofs
consequent on these axioms. Foundationalism, teleology, all the rest of
it. But as I understand it, the interesting thing about complex nonlinear
systems (not everything in the world, just *a lot* of things) is that in
them prediction and control are difficult. In order to do things with/in
such systems, you have to *model* them.

Your model, as Ted Byfield helpfully points out, is only as good as your
data. I think it's uncontroversial that in almost all cases, such data
will be imperfect. However your criteria for success and failure are
precisely not 'how well that data substantiates the (reductive) systems
it seems to constitute', since the truth of the system isn't the issue.
It's not about proving or disproving the axioms you've erected as the
foundation of your project of prediction and control. It's about whether
your model *works* to do whatever it is you're trying to do. This is
exactly how I'm treating the conceptual technologies (I like that phrase a
lot, thanks Ted) I'm employing to make this argument.

There are several things going on here. Are they metaphors? Does it
matter? I'm not sure. First is the claim that actual nonlinear modelling=
 is useful in areas which tend to be grouped under the heading of
politics.

Answer - people are already doing it, mostly economists. I have seen
crowd models, market models, organisational models - treating 'human'
areas with exactly the same tools as an engineer would use to model
turbulent flow. The modellers seem to find their models useful. Are they
doing it with the sort of insights about totalisation, scientific
foundationalism, difference, multiplicity and the like that many people on
this list can provide?
Maybe not. This strikes me as important, and an argument for engaging
with the phenomenon.

Second thing. I made a series of 'limit case' assertions. Typical of these
is - *If* an economy 'is' a complex nonlinear system (for which read:
can usefully be described as...) and a government or other organisation 
exists not outside it with perfect knowledge but inside it with imperfect
knowledge, one should recognise that there are limits to the actions that
organisation can perform. In certain cases, an attempt at control by
centralised allocation, distribution or decision-making may work less well
than decentralised local allocation, distribution, decision making. This
seems to be where I piss most people off, because in some circumstances
it is an argument against government distribution of resources.

Third thing. Metaphysics. I realise this is broad brush stuff  - but a
culture of simulation rather than a culture of axiomatic ideologies
(recipes for achieving the good life which are supposed valid in
 all cases) seems to me a significant departure. It produces a politics
which is contingent, local, situated, rather than transcendental,
ahistorical. It demands that you change your mind when a better tool comes
along - something rather easier to do than in a situation where a change 
of mind brings your whole ideological edifice tumbling down. So I make no 
apologies for my patchwork of misappropriated, mongrel ideas. They are
gloriously/reprehensibly unscientific (note the slide from axiom to
ideology - should be enough to get all this thrown out by both scientists
*and* political theorists). I'm very suspicious of overarching totalising
ideologies - Enlightenment throwback stuff, perfect language, blah blah. I
realise 'Science' in its classic, institutional form, is one of the
main perpetrators of such an ideology, but I'm scared of the consequences 
of the blanket hostility to anything emerging from Science. Engaging with 
Science, rather than the nineteenth-century straw man too often found in
humanities papers is really important. The de facto apartheid which means
(in Britain at least) that artists, literary people and the like boast of
their scientific ignorance, allows Science to fall into the hands of
people who genuinely don't give a shit about anything outside Science. I
think the bastardisation, appropriation, corruption and maybe even
(horror) the straightforward use of Scientific procedures and concepts
outside their usual context are required at this point in our culture.
Isn't this bastardisation what Net culture is producing?

Coda: Just a Little More about the State

McKenzie Wark is right that the State/Market dialectic is too simplistic.
Since my last post in which I threw off references to 'the State' in a
pretty reductive manner, I've realised that it's a word which has
substantially different connotations in different political cultures.
In an email, Geert Lovink told me that in Holland there is a substantial
identification with 'the State' (and 'the public') - that my hostility to
it read very worryingly in that context. In the US, as David Hudson made
abundantly clear in his sneering categorisation of my post as
'libertarianism dressed up with fancy French thinkers' (or something) on
Rewired, anti-Statism makes you a Newt-o-phile, hostile to big government,
on the Republican right. *Not* what I meant.

<BEGIN RANT> In the UK, among my generation at least (I'm 27) there's a
very different perspective. Since I was 9 years old there has been a
right-wing government which has always linked citizenship with a 
particular moral agenda (compulsory heterosexuality, the nuclear family,
Christianity, Anglo-Saxon tradition) and with economic performance. Those
who fall outside the valued categories are considered more or less
explictly as enemies of the State. We have media 'wars' against these
enemies - wars on crime, benefit fraud, single mothers, travellers,
ravers, the homeless, beggars. Currently we're enjoying a Conservative
Party media blitz promising 'zero tolerance' to beggars in central London.
It's wholly endorsed by the Labour party, who are vying to win votes from
Tory supporters disaffected by the recession.

>From when I was 18 or 19 until a couple of years ago when I got a steady
job I was unable to vote - initially because the voting registers were
used to bill people for the Poll Tax, which like many others I refused to
pay. I dropped off the register when I moved, and kept moving and not
re-registering so I couldn't be traced. This is very common - after the
introduction of the Poll Tax the official population of the London Borough
of Hackney dropped by one third. It has not recovered. There is now
a substantial mobile underclass of people with no democratic rights, who
through a mixture of culture and economic necessity have severed their
links with mainstream political culture.

Since the Poll Tax we have had the spectacle of Conservative councils
redrawing official boundaries and allocating social housing to Tory voters
to keep control, we have had the infamous Criminal Justice Act which,
among a host of extraordinary measures, technically makes gatherings of 
more than 4 people illegal. This week we have heard about a new Police
Bill which promises to end the right of lawyer-client confidentiality, to
empower surveillance, searches and confiscation of property without a
court warrant (the decision would be made by senior Police officers) for
people suspected of 'banding together for a common purpose'. Maybe in this
context my hostility to 'the State' makes more sense. My perception that
in the UK the government machine is run by and for a rich white oligarchy
is not uncommon. Anything which decentralises power in this country seems 
to be a good thing. </END RANT>

I'd be glad to carry on this argument - and I *promise* I'll try to make
shorter posts.


-------- Hari Kunzru ----------

| vox: +44.181.743.6947 | @Wired +44.171.775.3441 |
| mail: hari@wired.co.uk |


And do promise to send your next contribution in proper ascci. Stop using
childish software like Word 6.0 or Eurdora, or at least learn how to
convert those files. It's so easy. (geert)


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