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 new forms of media indeed accelerated sociality, leading to a quantitative increase in the number of exchanges and audiences, the research response should not necessarily take as its starting point the aggregate data. Software critic, Lev Manovich, advocates for such a data-centric method and criticizes those scholars who do not take advantage of the availability of data, accusing them of developing insights based merely 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 into being.
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.
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 precarity, postmodern parody, and so on. In this formulation, I am drawing on the genealogy of knowledge/power and deconstructive cultural criticism, both of which 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:
“The sickness of the outside (which comes from the outside but also draws outside, as one says equally or inversely, a homesickness) is in the heart of the living word, as its principle of effacement and its relationship to its own death. In other words, it does not suffice to show, it is in fact not a question of showing, the interiority of what Rousseau would have believed exterior; rather to make us think the power of exteriority as constitutive of interiority; of speech, of signified sense, of the present as such… Less than nothing and yet, to judge by its effects, much more than nothing. The supplement is neither presence nor an absence. No ontology can think its operation.” (Derrida, 1967/1976, 341-342)
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 landmark event of the 21st century. The Nietzschean denaturalization of our attitude towards knowledge functions differently in 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 Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung probed 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 the constitutive oblivion operating in the forgetting of the ancient choices that went into the initial forms categorization that shaped, in a subterranean way, the entire history of Western thinking.
Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, writing and speaking in the second half of the 20th century, responded to these thinkers and expanded their critical historicizing work within 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 explored 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 well beyond the intent of the writer; increasingly, everything becomes a sign—a signal. As texts proliferate, context becomes indeterminate. They were also writing and thinking in the context of the bipolar international world order wherein economistic definitions of capitalist and socialist political regimes were challenged by these alternative vantage points whereby the putative difference between these regimes was questioned and diagonal lines of analysis were formed across economically opposed systems of social organization.
Historicity of process and anti-generalization
In his elaboration of the genealogical method developed by Nietzsche, Foucault showed that discipline and the corollary formation of the 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 the prison to the 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 the 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 commented on the lives of Greek philosophers as initiators of a historical discontinuity reducible neither to reproductions of family nor to the continuity of the state, he utilized the method of genealogy to treat the modern condition as if it represented the last consummation of metaphysical illusions —a catastrophic 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, the philosophy of science and media theory developed by 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 as, for him, 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 feed contemporary social thought on new media converge 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 the idealized subject and in the greater weight he gives to a diffuse sense of the lively processes that constitute reality. 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.
UFE: Unexplained foreign events
In his prodigious study of film, Gilles Deleuze develops the concept of the irrational cut. Placed between scenes, these cuts do not establish continuity but unhinge habitual linkages we establish across sensory stimuli. We link the knock on the door in one scene to the guest drinking tea as causally linked. But, Deleuze asks, what if Time is not always available for causal understanding? Could cinema present Time beyond rational movement?
For this exercise, pick an explained event that defies political theory. Most economists were completely baffled by the economic crisis of 2008. What similar minor or major eventualities do you think exceed given explanations? How can one write qualitatively about this incident? What are its singular aspects?
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.
