13 Contra aggregation and generalization

If one can assume that the contemporary sense of acceleration is not simply an illusion induced by social media which merely displaced the everyday communication to online channels and made them visible, but accept that it also indeed accelerated sociality, lead to a quantitative increase in the number of exchanges and the audience; the research response should not necessarily take its starting point the aggregate data. Software critique Lev Manovich advocates for this method and charges the scholars who do not take advantage of the availability of data with developing insights based on their intuitions (2020). In this positing, the aggregation (grouping) of digital instances itself stands outside of the empiricity of data and enframes it as such. Yet, this enframing itself is also data belonging to the world, inseparable from data and its coming being. What calculating device and representational diagram denote the frequencies and the rates emerging from the measuring apparatus have to be analyzed in conjunction to the lay bare the circumstances in which they come forward, which then opens up the analysis to the historicity and process. What would be temporally thoughtful alternative ways of extracting data and writing on the transformations of subjectivity with new media?

Temporal attunement as informal labor

Temporal attunement to new rhythms is a work in the sense in which historical materialists recognized the unrecognized, unpaid work of reproduction that makes possible wage-labor as a formal possibility in the capitalist market. Thus, the question of the technicity of temporality is fundamentally a political problem. As its examination and alternative performance writing on time is a political act. Scholars are increasingly recognizing the invisible cost of academic production and the need to decelerate neoliberal pressure towards productivity. From an extra-institutional perspective, the sea-changes brought by new media require everyday improvisations in which half-second decisions are multiplied across fields of activity. More deeply autonomic self-regulation of the body, the body’s intelligence, as it interacts with its environment through non-conscious forms of awareness throughout the day, comes to the fore. Zooming in on minor details from the pandemic would situate writing in an alternative rhythm. Therefore, not as an illustration of a unified totality that eludes grasp but as traces of a centrifugal non-totalizable socio-political movement. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s project of developing a minor literature (1974) where speaking in the dominated or yet-to-be-formed language becomes the politically urgent site of speaking, we will treat ‘minor cases’ as germs of emergent heterogeneous temporalities, singular, i.e., prime instances and awkward moments.

Following the footsteps of Georges Bataille who put together historical materialist analysis of surplus with Nietzschean reflections on sovereign consumption social thought and academic writing—in the larger schema of division of labor running through social relations—can be politically situated as sovereign experiments endowed with what Bataille called, weak messianism, in inventions of new temporalities, and hence become an alternative attempt to avow active aesthetic construction of collective memory and speculate puzzling gaps from where future thought germinate.

As the pandemic unfolded, its reception through the biopolitical mode of knowledge/power has been supplemented with heterogeneous logics of perception and inhabitation, e.g., digital scrolling, neoliberal pracarity, postmodern parody and so on. In this formulation, I am drawing on the genealogy of knowledge/power and deconstructive cultural criticism, both evolved out of Nietzschean critiques of power. Derrida, in his exploration of how nature, as an operative concept, never reaches a stable definition in the work of Rousseau, writes the following deconstructive passage:

These two critical approaches undid ways of thinking, albeit in the context of different technological assemblages and different political atmospheres, recuperated and rethought in relation to the multiplicity of the one landmark event of the 21st century. Nietzschean denaturalization of our attitude towards knowledge functions differently at each epoch. Nietzsche himself was interested in how Judeo-Christian doctrines and practices seep into secular ways of conceiving culture and sociality through science. He had found something unquestioned in the way scientific subjects are known and become knowing subjects. The desire for power operating under both positions was unchecked. Influenced by him, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung explored the unexplored sexual and mythological entanglements of the desire of the subject. Martin Heidegger opened up a broader inquiry into the historicity of Western ontology, further deconstructing the knowing subject by pointing out constitutive oblivion operating in the forgetting of the ancient choices that went into initial categorizations that shaped, in a subterranean way, the thinking hitherto.

Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, writing and speaking in the second half of the 20th century, were responding to these thinkers and expanding their critical historicizing work under new technological environments. Foucault explored how the surface of the body became the target of relations of power in a time when bodies were acquiring new forms of visibility under new perceptual and display devices. Derrida was exploring the diffuse quality of text across the conventional notion of writing at a time when communication systems were exceeding any official or otherwise controlled chains of signification. The signs emanate meaning way beyond the intent of the writer and increasingly everything becomes a sign —a signal. As texts proliferate, context becomes indeterminate. They were also writing and thinking in the context of bipolar international world order where economistic definition of capitalist and socialist political regimes were challenged by these other vantage points whereby their difference are questioned and diagonal lines of analysis were formed across economically opposed systems of organizing sociality.

Historicity of process and anti-generalization

In his elaboration on the genealogical method developed by Nietzsche, Foucault showed that discipline and the corollary formation of modern prison cannot be simply derived from the dominant economic mode of production of the epoch, namely, capitalist industrialization. If Capitalism appropriated and circulated disciplinary diagrams from prison to factory and school, its interest and force do not exhaustively explain the origin nor the internal evolution of this method of subjectivation. Discipline has a genealogy that shows the mark of social and technical environments it had to pass through. Nietzsche developed the method of genealogy to draw attention to the impact of the shifting environment on the ingrained social function. Habits developed in response to one environmental problem become redundant and start weighing on the subjects as irredeemable needs.

To summarize this notion, Nietzsche called humans sick animals, as in animals whose evolution had led to both to transformation of their environments and organs without being able to produce a new notion of health. For Nietzsche, past ideals passed down from generation to generation, culture to culture across history bear the mark of this declining process, where attempts to survive lead to further obscurity of the very will-to-live. For him, the cultural task was to identify this catastrophe of what he terms life-denying habits under new guises as they proliferate across a wide genealogy. Just like he philosophically commented on the lives of Greek philosophers are the initiators of a community irreducible neither to family nor to politics, he continued to utilize genealogy to treat the modern condition as if it represented a catastrophically dysfunctional culture. Foucault’s theoretical attacks on subject-forming knowledge institutions such as the medical complex and the criminal justice complex are attempts at continuing this Nietzschean project, saving life from its capture within mummified forms.

If Marx inherited Hegel’s conception of rational history and rendered it class-struggle, he was still philosophizing historically. Social categories were consequences of historical processes. In the 20th century, Nietzsche’s philosophy offered another conception of history as process and becoming without assuming teleology. More recently, philosophy of science and media theory found in  Alfred North Whitehead, another philosopher of events, is unburdened or uncritical towards the particular history of culture from which it emerged. This unburdening allows media and science theory to start fresh theorizing, perhaps as Nietzsche would commend insofar for him, insofar as forgetting is the condition of possibility of perceiving anew. Yet insofar as the very language with all its neologisms still bears its history, this past operates in Whitehead’s philosophy and shapes its character through and through (Stürmer & Bella, 2023).

These two philosophical sources that are feeding contemporary social thought on new media, meet on the methodological preference to theorize in terms of events (evident in the figures that are used to describe the movement of thought such as ends, turns, occasions, gathering, assemblages) rather than objects in order to reinstate temporality. Yet, as discussed, these philosophies are dissonant in one special question of historicity whereby Nietzsche’s work lends itself to a cultural reflexivity and can launch deconstruction of Platonist and neoplatonist Judeo-Christian knowledge and faith traditions, Whitehead’s elaborate philosophy of process does not reflect on itself in time, does not problematize its very language of articulation. Yet, with all its shortcomings, Whitehead’s Nietzscheanism is apparent in his undoing of idealized subjects and in giving greater weight to a diffuse sense of lively process.. Earlier in the first chapter on politicization, we named this problem as the problem of incompleteness à la Kurt Gödel. Even a process philosophy cannot offer a complete set of terms adequate to the description of experience insofar as it excludes the effect of time on the terms. Time is not a mere container of events but a participant. A veritable heterochronicity (Foucault, 1986) emerges across thinkers and political events whereby a non-linear generative process proves to be latent.

Works Cited

Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)

Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648

Manovich, L. (2020). Cultural analytics. The MIT Press.

Stürmer, J., & Bella, M. (2023). Inheriting cosmopolitics: Pericles, Whitehead, Stengers. Theory, Culture & Society, 40(1), 3–24.