#luciana parisi

[stargir1z]

"There is not a given set of instructions that you can become a woman in this or that way. To become a woman is to experiment with a process of de-stratification, which is then entering and maintaining an understanding of zones of vulnerability, but then, from there on, it means to rearticulate this zone towards a constructive alienation, a speculative living of what becoming-woman could be. It is a going back in order to go forward." - Luciana Parisi

[sinterhinde]

Abstract Sex, Luciana Parisi, 2004

Abstract Sex investigates the impact of advances in contemporary science and information technology on conceptions of sex. Evolutionary theory and the technologies of viral information transfer, cloning and genetic engineering are changing the way we think about human sex, reproduction and the communication of genetic information. Abstract Sex presents a philosophical exploration of this new world of sexual, informatic and capitalist multiplicity, of the accelerated mutation of nature and culture.

(duke.edu)

Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Studies and Director of the PhD programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research focuses on philosophy and science to investigate potential conditions for ontological and epistemological change in culture, aesthetic and politics.

Specifically engaging with cybernetics, information theories, and evolutionary theories, her work analyses the radical transformations of the body, nature, matter and thought led by the technocapitalist development of biotechnologies and computation.

In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum). She has also written within the field of media philosophy and analysed the bionic transformation of the perceptive sensorium triggered by digital media, the advancement of new techno-ecologies of control, and the nanoengineering of matter.

She has published articles on the cybernetic re-wiring of memory and perception in the context of a non-phenomenological critique of computational media vis a vis strategies of branding and marketing. Her interest in interactive media has also led her research to engage more closely with computation, cognition, and algorithmic aesthetics.

In 2013, she published Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and the Control of Space (MIT Press).

(monoskop.org)

Here is the link again:

And here is a recent lecture Parisi presented at Stanford Humanities Center on The Negative Aesthetic of AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qdsd-HhwQI&ab_channel=StanfordHumanitiesCenter

[omnipol]

Desire can only assemble, without constituting wholes: machinic breaks, partialities, discontinuities make desire. Deleuze thus suggests that queer desire only remains specific to a peculiar relationship with the Outside whose characteristics are present in staying not primarily with the same sex (that is, we are all queer and want to be recognised by the social order as such) so as to resist heteronormativity, but in embracing the non-reproductive order of sex (that is, the bio-social order of reproduction) by inventing, rather than constituting, sexuality. Such an invitation to invent sexuality appealing to a future of sexual becoming, however, is not quickly to be confused with the projection for a new future for queer politics, since this kind of future is already incorporated by the capitalisation of desire through the imperative ‘you can now be whatever you want to be’. Rather, a future of sexual becoming here entails the more implicit task of the production of novel utterances and modalities that do not and must not revolve around being queer itself.

Luciana Parisi in Deleuze and Queer Theory

[marieglassl]

Magazine Diaphanes _ 11 Surrogacies out now Redaktion: Marie Glassl, Michael Heitz, Hednrik Rohlf

Myths and visions of motherhood and fathering, brings together artistic and theoretical positions on reproduction and communication, gender and genus, addressing and conception.

DIAPHANES 11 orbits around the “ambiguities of the maternal significate” (Kittler) and speculates about the idea of humanity as an “absolute family”(Novalis).

This issue explores practices of human and non-human substitution, plays with the myths and visions of motherhood and procreation, ­gathers artistic and theoretical positions on ­reproduction and communication, gender and genus, addressing and conception.

What claims the place of the nuclear family in the face of hybrid kinships and social freezing? What could new elective kinships be in times of chatbots and pseudonymisation? Is this the time for surrogate mother tongues and extra-human ­rhetorics of surrogation?

Sophie Lewis claims a gestational ­communism and hunts our grannies. Barbara Vinken ­reflects on spiritual motherhood, Luciana Parisi on ­human automata and gendered proxies. For ­Zuzana Cela, language is a foreign body that can be ­invaginated. Werner Hamacher strolls through mother museum, which is also a brothel. ­Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi discovers the evolutionary  disobedience of the girl and Thierry de Duve a completely different pleasure with Joseph. Rudi Nuss tells of the new love for ­pregnant men, Allison Grimaldi Donahue of bad kinship in the house of language, M. NourbeSe Philip of a foreign fear. Leda Bourgogne, Lucile Boiron, Lena Kunz and Emma Waltraud Howes occupy the place of these attributions with their images.

[skipieohhhhh]

Experiment Excerpts series

Black, 2012. C-print, 60 x 50"

This series results from Nelson’s experiments with historical mordançage techniques. The patterns resembling organic matter are the outcomes ofstrong chemical reactions orchestrated in the laboratory. When combined, the molecular structures of these varying substances are dismantled and rearranged to form patterns of undulating wave-like swirls. In digitally blowing up the traces of these analog procedures, Nelson directs our attention towards the life-like features of chemicals pointing to what the writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov refers to as possibility of other worldly “life-not-as-we-know-it.” As such, Experiment Excerpts bring to mind what the feminist philosopher Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter,” the forces and flows of materialities that can become lively, signaling, and affective; a liveliness that is swerving, buzzing, and turbulent

Brittany Nelson (b. 1984, Great Falls, MT) explores 19th-century photographic chemistry techniques and science fiction to address themes of loneliness, isolation, and distance within the queer community and its parallels with space exploration.

Mordançage Series

Distorting processes from photographic history, the vibrant patterns in these reliefs are caused by violent chemical reactions. In applying mordançage solutions to silver gelatin prints, Nelson bleaches selected areas and simultaneously lifts specific dark hues of the emulsion. This late 19th century technique is commonly appreciated for its stark contrasts, precise contours, and depths of light applied to create life-like portraits. In appropriating the historical process, Nelson suspends virtuosity and representation as photographic ideals. The works gouge a different potential application of the chemical bonds and—in continuation of feminist and queer abstraction—unfetter the constraints of resemblance to real-world referents. They call to mind Luciana Parisi’s cyberfeminist theory of microfeminine particle-forces emerging from non-linear reactions between potential and actual desires, resulting in intensifications of mutant desires.

[delectablywaywardbeard-blog]

Note a margine, Nicola Piovani festeggia 40 anni di carriera

Note a margine, Nicola Piovani festeggia 40 anni di carriera Il compositore racconta lo spettacolo che sta portando in giro per l’Italia 26/12/2023 tg3 – Luciana Parisi source

[performingai]

‘we need to think of machine learning as a tool which can be placed into a workflow, rather than something which automates artistic function’

Alasdair Milne is a PhD student, part of the Creative AI Lab between Serpentine and Kings College London. He immersed himself in the Performing AI project, making DMSTFCTN’S God Mode one of his PhD case studies, and in turn became a core member of the project team, at the centre of many of our theoretical discussions. This interview took place in October 2022.

Q: What is your background?

A: I would describe my field of interest as the philosophy of technology, influenced by emerging trends, and curatorial R&D. The basis of my thinking originally stemmed from Hannah Arendt, but I'm working with contemporary sources as well. I think that in order to address the kind of key philosophical questions that we're facing, it's useful to speak to our contemporaries and be in dialogue with contemporary literature as well. So I guess some of those core people would be Joanna Zylinksa, Martin Zeilinger, Luciana Parisi, Peli Greitzer, Reza Negarestani – who also does this synthetic philosophy of combining conceptual engineering from an analytic side with a kind of understanding for the need to work within the history of philosophy too. There's a lot of contemporary people out there who are doing very cool things, and I try and respond to them as much as possible, because the philosophy of technology discourse has shifted away from being about how we define a tool, to something which has to be much more technical. If we go back too much to those early 20th century philosophers of technology – there's a lot to learn from them – but I think that there are a lot of issues with to what extent they can speak to the granular technical side of things as they stand half a century on.

When I was at Goldsmiths, Irit Rogoff supervised my dissertation. She says that you should work from conditions, not from genealogies, or theoretical knowledge. Or at least you should be accountable to contemporary conditions. You can't always just import knowledge from the past and assume that it will hold. So I have been quite influenced by that. And this horseshoes in an interesting way into the methods of conceptual engineering, which suggest something similar coming from the opposite direction — that our concepts and frameworks should be calibrated to best serve our needs as we deploy them in philosophical discussion and natural language too.

What is your PhD research about?

My PhD is about a theory of relational practice. So in a way, it's a philosophy of collaboration around technologies. It takes the emerging tendencies to describe machine learning or AI as a collaborator, and critically questions that, instead regarding it as part of a distributed system of labour – a heavily interrelated and combinant network of different agents. These ideas are based on fieldwork that I've done at Serpentine. There are three core case studies, including DMSTFCTN's God Mode, plus some ongoing conversations I've been having with artists and curators. It comes from the fact that philosophical or theoretical thinking is not divorced from the empirical world, as Arendt argued. Thinking is something we do together, and there is a need to think through problems collectively.

Besides God Mode, another case study is from working with Interspecies Communication Research Initiative (ISCRI) an collaboration between 0rphan Drift and Etic Lab. [ see https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/interspecies-communication-research-initiative-iscri-a-cephalopod-↔-machine-encounter/]. That project has been in several years of really deep conceptual incubation, because it's really complex with a lot of questions around its realisation in our current economic and epistemic context. And that is also why it requires that, from an institutional point of view, but also from a funding perspective, and the public's perspective – it's really pushing the boundaries of what you can do with emerging technologies, how you could reorient the scientific method and retain some kind of credibility.

I’ve also been engaging with the artist Hannah Haaslathi for a while. She produced a work called Captured which actually has some interesting commonalities with God Mode, also working with visual categorisation – in this case it's about identifying faces. They built an interesting tech stack from the ground up, not using deep learning, but quite an early machine learning system, which has gone through a lot of iterations over the years. It's a simulation and there's an onboarding interface in the gallery with two cameras, that scans your face as an audience member, puts your face on an agent, and then drops you into this simulation with a bunch of other similar looking agents. 

I think it speaks to one of the core points I'm trying to make, which is that we need to think of machine learning as a tool which can be placed into a workflow, rather than something which automates artistic function;, that's basically one of my core positions. And it also fits in with my work about collaboration, thinking about how we map out the labour and build a realistic theory of what's going on that doesn't necessarily end up making categorical claims about the total transformation of agents or labour.

How do you view AI – as a kind of alien intelligence, or as just a tool?

About AI as an agent or kind of alien intelligence, I think the use of latent space and high-dimensional pattern recognition is a new form of computation, compared to the human or previous computational capabilities. And so in that respect, I definitely think it does something different from being just a tool. Whether it could be a collaborator, if it holds some kind of agency – I think that there's a lot of good reasons to be critical of that perspective, it can become ‘magical’ quite quickly. 

You can describe an agent as something which makes a decision. I'm just not necessarily committed to the idea that we need to call it a tool or a collaborator – I think sometimes it's okay for things to be described in detail without an overall designation. So I'm thinking about it right now as a tool-collaborator continuum. If we did suddenly develop something which has really versatile conceptual capabilities, then maybe we want to go more down the collaborator pathway, but for now, I think a little bit of agnosticism is quite healthy.

How has your experience been on this project?

Reflecting on God Mode, part of my thinking about how we perform this tool-collaborator assessment is that when we call AI a tool or operator, it plays into a constellation in which we are also an agent, right? But when we break the tool down further, we realise the tool is composite in itself. And this comes back to the philosopher of technology, Brian Arthur – his assessment is essentially that all technologies are just composites of other extant technologies. You can find this in Arendt as well in relation to technology as a whole – the ‘human artifice’ – and to a degree in Heidegger when he talks about a ‘totality of equipment’. But the point is that despite this, you can't understand technology simply by saying it's made of components, because everything is made of components.

So when you take a case, like God Mode, it combines narrative components with AI technical components. To me it's an interesting example of a composite agent, made of multiple technologies; a combination of simulation and rendered objects, which are themselves combinations of other technologies. And that in itself is just an ontology. I think that within these tools are some combination between composition and function. Basically, they make a really interesting reflection on what artists and their collaborators can do in this kind of compositional mode, to actually push the envelope of what tech can be developed. I think the project is interesting from a political perspective too – I like the fact that it's a simulation of a simulation.

Images: Alasdair (right) with Performing AI project team Oliver Smith and Francesco Tacchini of DMSTFCTN, Eva Jäger and Roisin McVeigh of Serpentine, at the gallery for a planning meeting.

[anarchist-caravan]

And as R.S. Bakker has said in the past;

"As it turns out human social cognition is radically heuristic. When you and I are having a conversation the humanistic conceit is that we are in some way, shape or form representing in our minds what’s in the other person’s mind. We have all kinds of supposed mechanisms in our brain that actually allow us to peer into each other’s soul representationally. If you take all the representations out of that picture and simply look at it as a physical give and take, then suddenly the situation between two individuals looks completely different. What I am doing is cueing an assumption on your part which you report, which cues an assumption on my part and back and forth and so on. There is no actual peering into one another’s brains, what we are doing is simply working through a kind of social algorithm where you’re one half and I’m the other half. Given enough ancestral consistency in our contexts that algorithm generally will lead to some sort of happy conclusion. But now we have cognitive technologies flooding our ancestral social cognitive ecologies and it’s no longer the case that it’s me pushing your buttons or you pushing my buttons, there’s also all these gadgets pushing our buttons. They have actually been designed to push our buttons in commercially exploitable ways and as it turns out it’s really easy to do that."

". All this button pushing which evolved when there were only humans around and which was at least functional enough to allow our ancestors to muddle along, all these ecosystems are going to be completely gone. You’ll have people making all kinds of moral judgements, all kinds of moral assertions as to who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s good, who’s bad. Instead of that playing itself out in the ancestral ecology, it will be playing itself out in an ecology that’s been overrun, trammelled, invaded by systems that have absolutely no stake as agents, whatever that means, in our cognitive ecologies. It ends up being a crash space insofar as morality is simply going to become more and more dysfunctional. "

[011011100011000101110100011010]

The best book I've read in a while given the criterion for a great book is to reproduce that scene at the beginning of Scanners where the guy’s head implodes. It's nothing less than a feminist reading of The Dark Enlightenment.

[elizabethanism]

Here are some really great living women philosophers if you all need any reccs for woman’s day

1.Luciana Parisi

2. Catherine Malabou

3. Isabel Millar

4.Sadie Plant

5. Christine Korsgaard

6. Luce Irigaray

7. McKenzie Wark

8. Freya Matthews

9. Teresa De Lauretis

10. Amy Ireland

[enricaleone91]

Heather Parisi toccata e fuga in Rai Tantissimi gli ospiti della trentesima puntata di Che tempo che fa, che salvo soprese dovrebbe essere la terzultima della stagione, in onda domenica 19 maggio alle 20.35 su Rai Uno.

[stargir1z]

"For me, to think of gender in terms of artificialization, is a feminist project. This is a very difficult enterprise because you can say: Why, if queer allows you to think of these multiplicities of sexes and invention of gender of another kind, why is it still feminist? It is still feminist because initially, I think, if one does not become woman, one cannot understand and intervene in the political project of what it means that the historical origination of the body of reproduction aspires towards autonomy and freedom in the articulation of the artificiality of all kinds." - Luciana Parisi

[xennnnnnnn]

Actually I'm curious about your books!!

 oh ok!! so i‘m going to do a list of books i would suggest// i enjoyed but most of them are not fresh reads because i’ve been reading mostly books for my thesis (and i don’t think anyone would be interested) + for my exams (and i did read some very interesting things!) — also, i haven’t realy shared about books on this blog like i did on my old one

that being said, i won’t list some authors i love very much just because it’s kinda obvious that i read and like them (e.g. Deleuze, Guattari, Haraway, Benjamin, Agamben, etc.) — i will also do a separate post for fiction/ novels

Thomas Ligotti — The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Mark Fisher — Ghosts of my Life

Mark Fisher — The Weird and the Eerie

Mark Fisher — Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction

Rosi Braidotti — The Posthuman

Rosi Braidotti — Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory

Jackie Wang — Carceral Capitalism

The Invisible Committee — The Coming Insurrection, To Our Friends, Now

Franco “Bifo” Berardi — And: Phenomenology of the End

Franco “Bifo” Berardi — The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance

Scott Wilson (curated by) — Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology

Nicola Masciandaro, Edia Connole (curated by) — Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory

Silvia Federici — Caliban and the Witch

Luciana Parisi — Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutation of Desire

Tiqqun — Theses on the Terrible Community

Tiqqun — Introduction to Civil War

Jacques Derrida — The Animal that Therefore I Am

Hito Steyerl — The Wretched of the Screen

Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez — The Femicide Machine

Laurent de Sutter — Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anesthesia

+ everything by Eugene Thacker

honorable mention: the work of Jakob von Uexkull

on a side note, i think every book by this authors is worth a read, especially Ligotti; i also find myself more excited about book i want to read!! i have a lot of them

[theculturedmarxist]

Against Biology, Against the Sexed Body

Gender, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and the Molecular

The specter of biology is near omnipresent. This omnipresence is nowhere more evident than in the way in which sex, and thus consequentially Gender, is understood. The left has long forwarded the understanding of systems of power as that which constitutes political, and thus social, life. That said, what is surprising is that this semiotic imperialism of biology over the field of sex has planted itself within ‘radical spaces’ as well, and in most cases, expresses itself in ways that would seem contradictory to the held beliefs of those expressing them. For example, how can one resolve that biologization is a primary force of Western colonialism, but also forward an article that ascribes penises and sperm as “Male reproductive physiology” and vagina’s and eggs as “female reproductive system(s)” as “one of my favorite articles” (Martin 10–11; Spira)? It would seem that the praising of such a blatantly transphobic, and thus biologizing, article as positive merely reproduces the same colonial force of Western biologization, thus formulating these two positions as necessarily mutually exclusive. That said, the very fact that these two positions are mutually exclusive and thus contradictory to hold at the same time reveals the way in which biology has penetrated the molecular realm to such a degree that we have been circuited to desire a folding of all life (specifically understandings of sex and gender) under the taxonomy of biology; even when it seems inherently contradictory to other ideologically held beliefs. Following Oyèrónke Oyewùmi, we ought not understand biology as an independent vector of violence, but rather as one that is necessarily situated within the production of Western modernity; anti-blackness, settler colonialism, and by consequence compulsory heterosexuality (9). In that sense, I hope to indicate that the taxonomization of molecular life under the signifier of biology necessarily sexes the body, and in doing so, deploys the structures for which compulsory heterosexuality is able to gain coherence. This essay will hopefully not only impel the necessity of gender abolitionism in revolutionary struggles against compulsory heterosexuality, but also a re-articulation of life that “instead of denoting a possible reality” understands life as fundamentally virtual (Parisi 14). 

Biology and the Molecular 

Despite what biology would lead you to believe life is not determinate, i.e. life is not transcendentally knowable or “determined genetically, predominantly by parts of the genes called chromosomes” but rather fundamentally indeterminate; always already in flux (Stryker 8). The reason for which this is the case is due to the fact that the very quantum materiality’s that make up like, for example protons and electrons, exist within a constant state of flux (Barad 394). As briefly mentioned earlier, one of the primary ways in which the biologization of life operates is through the creation of a singular meaning for which life can express itself. For example, there is a unitary classification system that is imparted onto particular species to such a degree that all of the difference that exists between those that might be considered a species is reduced down to a singular set of unifying traits. In this sense an ontology is created, attached, and reproduced as the de-facto way in which life should be understood; as having a constitutive being. It could be said that this ontologization of life is the raison d’etre for Western science in that “difference is expressed as degeneration” and thus must be smoothed over through the signification of an ontology, or being (Oyewùmi 3). Biology serves as one of the fundamental vectors of this collapsing of difference because of its ability to justify its logics as determinate of how the world operates, which through its omnipresence at the heart of any scientific development, has spilled out onto an understanding of quantum physics as well (Oyewùmi 9). As an instance of this, traditional quantum physics has generally explained quantum properties (waves, particles, etc) as necessarily determinate, and thus because of that developed the determinate principle as the overarching structure for which life expresses itself (Sheldon 4). This generally takes the form of constructing waves and participles as having universal principles that always already determine their expression, and because of that, have a definite expression (Sheldon 4).

There is a multitude of reasons as to why this understanding of life is problematic, but first and foremost it just misunderstands the basis for which it justifies its claim to determinacy; particles and waves. Rather than having determinate characteristics that a-priori dictate the way in which particles and waves express themselves, they are rather indeterminate in the sense that the way in which they express themselves is always dependent on the realities for which they are expressed within; they are virtual. Virtual in the sense that their trajectory is not teleological but rather open to the infinite possibilities made possible by particular material realities, or in other words, “the virtual is reality in terms of strength or potential that tends towards actualization or emergence” (Parisi 14). To elaborate, the classic way in which particles and waves are recorded is through shooting them through an apparatus that is comprised of a screen or, “slit,” that once passed through records the pattern for which the particles/waves were composed (Sheldon 4). Traditional quantum physics would say that particles passing through a double slit would produce a scattershot pattern due to the fact that once a stream of particles bounces off of the first slit it should radiate out like buckshot. That said, when particles do pass through such an apparatus they do not actually express themselves as theorized, instead they tend to represent the formation of what a wave is typically understood to be; an interference pattern (Sheldon 4). Compounded with this, if a detector is added after the fact to determine which of the two slits the particles actually passed through their formation reverts back to a scattershot (Sheldon 5). This indicates that the foundational principle for the very building blocks of life is not determinacy, but rather indeterminacy, virtual particles that are constantly opening themselves towards the possibilities constituted by the material relations they both create and are situated within (Barad 395–396). In this sense, life should not be understood as a stabilized biologic force, but rather an interplay between molecular relations that constantly produce mutations within all fields at which life is able to express itself (Parisi 53–54). To reiterate the old Deleuzoguattarian adage, life is about becoming and not being; any attempt to compress becoming into being (as biology does) is a reactive force of violence (Deleuze and Guattari 106).

Sexing the Body and the Project of Gender 

Biology engages in this sort of violence in that it seeks to create a determinate principle, or being, for which life is organized. An example of this being the way in which biology categorizes bodies as constitutive wholes, or organisms, instead of machines that necessarily interplay and are contaminated by their ecologies. Summarizing Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler articulates that one of the primary ways in which biology engages in this process is through not only the invention of the body as a naturalized product, but specifically the sexed body (463). I want to stress the importance of this argument, Butler’s claim is not merely that taxonomies of biology create a specific conception of the body that is sexed, but rather the structuring logic for which the body catalyzes into existence through a biologic frame is one that is necessarily sexed. To be clear, this is not to say that the impact for which these conceptions of the body are not ‘real’ in their impact/violence, because they certainly are, but rather serves to indicate that the claim to naturalism that they deploy is part in parcel to that violence, and in many cases is the operational logic for said violence (Butler 464). This specific biological project, the compression of the body to be strictly organized around sex, is a process of collapsing the virtual potentialities of the molecular to an ontology and thus a violent attack on life itself. Describing this process, Luciana Parisi brilliantly says this “model of representation does not entail the exact reflection of reality or truth, but is more crucially used to refer to a system of organization of signs where structures of meaning arrange … through the hierarchies of the signifier. The model of representation reduces all differences … to the universal order of linguistic signification constituted by binary oppositions where on term negates the existence of the other” (9). In this sense, it’s clear that the process for which biology embarks upon, the inducing of the body into the semiotic realm vis a vis a sexing, is one that is fundamentally violent, the question then becomes what this conception of sex looks like.

While Susan Stryker’s seminal “Transgender History” is incredibly important for a variety of reasons, it does reinvest within the biologization of sex and in doing so inadvertently is able to reveal the particular conception of sex biology deploys. This reinvestment on the part of Stryker’s when talking about the division between gender and sex, which as Parisi reminds us, are not two distinct entities but rather co-constitutive forces utilized to forward a signified (and thus violent) conception of the body (50). Stryker says “Sex is not the same as gender … the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ refer to sex. Sex refers to reproductive capacity or potential … Sperm producers are said to be that of the male sex, and egg producers are said to be of the female sex” (8). This reveals pretty plainly the specific conception of sex biology deploys as constitutive of the body, one at which is predicated on the idea of static genital expression (penis and vagina), sexual dimorphism, and reproduction. In short, this construction of sex seeks to justify its reduction of genital life to the signifiers of penis and vagina, and the consequential construction of those two signifiers as dimorphic under the banner that sex has solely do to with ‘species’ reproduction. This a-priori association between sex and reproduction is independently violent in of itself in that not only does it constitute the body as a stabilized organism, thereby creating the subject to be disciplined by biopower, but explicitly works towards the overkill of intersex folks (Parisi 35). To elaborate, given the way in which intersex bodies are ones that exist outside of the signifiers of penis and vagina, and the association between sex and reproduction seeks to elevate said signifiers as the only way in which bodies can materialize, it means that intersex people are literally eradicated from existence. To return to the earlier Parisi quote, this semiotic refrain seeks to negate the existence of the other by creating a regime of meaning (in this case what genitals ‘are’) that always already frames them out (9). This is a violence that can once again be seen in Stryker in that she positions sex as the two dialectical positions of male and female ‘sex organs’ that “cannot be changed” (8).

The sexing of the body, through a process of life’s capture within the referent of biology, is not only violent in this sense, but also due to the fact that it is the priming logics used to gender bodies. Logics that gender bodies in such a way that necessitate colonialist, transphobic, and through its production of compulsory heterosexuality, heteronormative violence. Briefly stepping away from the question of biological sexing, it’s important to understand just what Gender is and thus how said sexing paves the way for it to deploy itself. To be clear, when I say that Gender is inherently a violent structure I do not mean to say that gender identity in the abstract is bad. Rather, I mean to articulate the way in which a dominant conception of Gender has been created, deployed, and enforced in such a way that it forces people into specific gender identities that they did not determine. Thus when we critique and call for the abolishment of capital G Gender, that does not mean the eradication of gender identities that exist outside of said paradigm like the Hijra, Two-Spirit, Fa’afafine, etc but rather for the destruction of the system that makes said identities unintelligible. In this sense then, Gender refers to the structure of gender that has been semiotized as the end all be all of what gender could mean, and because of that, the a-priori script for which bodies can exist (nokizaru 6).

This specific structure of Gender was one that was explicitly deployed, and still is, as a tool of the settler colonial project of the land mass we know as the ‘Americas’ and ‘Canada’ (nokizaru 4). To elaborate, not only was this conception of gender one that was almost exclusively a European, and specifically Christian, understanding of how gender operates but it was purposefully forcefully deployed onto indigenous nations in now settler colonial states as a way to engage in the settler colonial project of indigenous eradication (nokizaru 5). This was done due to the fact that a vast majority of indigenous nations not only structured their socialites in non-patriarchal makeups, but specifically had conceptions of gender that did not at all correlate to the European model (Lugones 25). Thus, Gender functions through the production of two gendered subjectivities (man and women), the hegemonic correlation of those subjectivities to particular genitalia, and in doing so, constituting the ontology of those who possess said genitalia. In this sense, Gender could be thought of as operating through what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call the ‘faciality machine.’ The faciality machine refers to a particular construction of how subjectivity comes about, or subjectification, in which subjectivity becomes exclusively defined by static characteristics (168). In this sense then, “faciality … ends up excavating a binarist figure-ground referent as the support of the universal … statements. All flows and objects must be related to a subjective totalization” and thus works in service as a weapon of reactionary violence (Guattari 76). In the context of Gender, the faciality machine works in service of signifying penises as men, vaginas as woman, thereby injecting said gendered subjectivities into said genitalia and then making that subjectivity constitutive of the body who its signifying. In this sense, Gender will always already be not only transphobic, because of its coercively assigning bodies at birth and obliteration of non-binary trans folks, but also exclusively utilized to eradicate indigenous populations all over the globe.

The sexing of the body becomes the precursor to this process of Gender because it constitutes the stage, i.e. the compression of genital life into a static expression, for which the subjectification of Gender necessitates. To elaborate, the idea that bodies are born with either male or female sex organs is the necessary first step for gendered subjectificaton, on the part of Gender, to even happen in the first place. Due to the fact that this subjectification is premised off of the injection of a gendered subjectivity (man or woman) into specific genitals, and then facializing that as a bodies white wall, that becomes incoherent if there is not first a static construction of what genitals are (i.e. either penises or vaginas) for which the sexing of the body is able to provide. In this sense then, the sexing of the body provides the necessary first step for the internal logics of Gender to deploy themselves. A logic that forms the basis for all transphobic violence to dispense itself; coercively assigning bodies genders at birth. What I mean by this is that due to the fact that Gender reproduces itself through a claim that it operates as the a-priori, or ‘natural,’ screen for which all bodies pass through it means that it needs to deploy some sort of constitutive claim onto every single body that passes through its systems. The way in which Gender does this, through a multitude of different apparatuses but most chiefly the medical industrial complex and the police, is through retroactively gendering fetuses in the womb and then once they are born. This process is necessarily coercive because bodies have no choice in whether they are gendered or not, they simply are forcibly shoved into a subjectivity of man or woman by virtue of existing and/or not existing with a particular genital makeup. This process is not only violent in the abstract because, as nila nokizaru articulates “Gender benefits those who want to control, socialize, and manage us and offers us nothing in return. Every time a person is scrutinized and gendered, society has attacked them, waged war on them,” but also because it forms the basis for which all transphobic violence is able to justify itself (4). This project is what is able to frame trans folks as abominations in the face of Gender, because they refuse said process of coercive assignment, and thus are justified in violence being taken against them to sustain the internal logics of Gender’s expression. As previously mentioned the way in which this gendering operates is through the faciality machine, you are born with a penis and thus you are a man and will always be a man. This process becomes incoherent if there is no sexing of the body that stabilizes the genital signifiers that Gender requires to inject its subjectivity into.

Compulsory Heterosexuality

I ultimately contend that not only is this process of biologizing life violent, and just frankly incorrect, for all of the reasons listened above but also that through its justification for Gender, creates the conditions for what Adrienne Rich calls ‘compulsory heterosexuality.’ It does this because, if Rich is right that compulsory heterosexuality is a regime that is first and foremost structured through the gendered relations of man and women, which I think she is, then the creation of the system of Gender that provides coherence for said gendered relations is necessary (633). To elaborate, if we understand ‘sexuality’ to describe a specific taxonomy of desire that orients bodies towards politically constructed forms of relations, then sexuality requires an object for which it is oriented towards (Puar 30). It requires such a complete object because, like Rich articulates, the primary way in which sexuality comes to be understood is through the psychoanalytic frame of Oedipalization (especially compulsory heterosexuality) (638). It requires this because the Oedipal understanding of desire articulates that the direction of desire is always attached to a complete, or determinate, object, which in the context of desire being trapped within the sexuality referent of compulsory heterosexuality looks like desire being oriented towards gendered bodies (Nigianni 170).

If compulsory heterosexuality functions as not only a force of heteronormativity, but more specifically as both a re-justification of male dominance over those who have been disciplined into womanhood it means that Gender is an integral part of compulsory heterosexuality’s formation (Rich 640). This means that absent the biologization of life that paves the way for which the project of Gender is able to gain coherence compulsory heterosexuality is not able to dispense its violence because it does not have any desiring orientation for its sexual taxonomy, and more importantly, does not have a class for which its violence is directed at (womanhood). Additionally, compulsory heterosexuality is first and foremost concerned about reproduction, i.e. due to the fact that women are semiotized as only ever having vagina’s, the fact that lesbian sex under this paradigm cannot ‘give birth’ is one of the justifications used to forward cis lesbian’s marginalization (Rich 637). In this sense compulsory heterosexuality should not only be thought of as a system that dispenses solely heteronormative, misogynistic, or lesbophobic violence but transphobic violence as well. Compulsory heterosexuality, in its predication on the project of Gender, forwards the sex-reproduction association and thus the constitution of womanhood and manhood based on imagined dimorphic genitalia. This is important not only because it reveals a dimension of compulsory heterosexual’s violence that is oft ignored, but also because it reveals the necessity of the sexed body in the figuration and production of the multitude of structures that dispense compulsory heterosexuality. Not only does compulsory heterosexuality require some figuration of gender, to become the object of its structured desiring orientation, but it specifically requires the Gender that is produced by the sexed body because of its interpolation of bodies as having an intrinsic sex-reproduction connection.

Conclusion

“Gender is a war against all of us, and for those who desire freedom, nothing short of the total eradication of gender will suffice” (nokizaru 7). We must turn against Gender not only because of its foundational violence(s), but also because in a time in which Rich’s theories are once again gaining prominence. To be clear I think this recovery is important, Rich was right to identify compulsory heterosexuality (among a multitude of other things) as a central vector of violence, but we can never dismantle said violence if we do not recognize that Gender is part in parcel to said vector. If we do not orient our revolutionary politics against compulsory heterosexuality to also be Gender abolitionist it means we will always fail to truly deconstruct the violence of compulsory heterosexuality, and specifically, a re-deployment of violence against trans people (specifically trans women) under the guise of feminism. This move is not only reactionarliy violent in the sense that it is rabidly transmisogynistic but is also a reinvestment within the logics of compulsory heterosexuality through a reformation of Gender, and thus the sexed body. Moves like this are dangerous because they are wear the veneer of revolutionary action as aesthetic while still forwarding the violent material conditions of the status quo, merely allowing for despotic assemblages to rearrange themselves. This could look like Rich forwarding the necessity of deconstructing compulsory heterosexuality while still supporting transmisogynists like Mary Daly, or properly identifying the violence of biologization yet still doubling down on there existing male or female reproductive systems (644). To avoid this, yet still necessarily combating the violence of compulsory heterosexuality, our politics must aim to abolish the structure of Gender entirely. A Gender abolitionism that seeks not only to destroy all of the systems, apparatuses, and enforcers that make Gender a reality, but also a release of life from its domination from biology. This requires not only an affirmation of life as becoming, but a material freeing of life from its fascist constraints under biology and thus an endorsement of life as “the matieral wanderings/wanderings of nothingness … the ongoing thought experiment that the world performs with itself … an endless exploration of all possible couplings of virtual particles, a ‘scene of wild activities’” (Barad 396).

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It would be wrong to view this proposition that incomputables define the dynamic form of automation with naïve enthusiasm. Instead, it is important to address algorithmic automation without overlooking the fact that the computation of infinity is nonetheless central to the capitalization of intelligible capacities—even in their automated form. My insistence that incomputables are not exclusively those non-representable infinities, which belong to the being of the sensible, is indeed a concern, with the ontological and epistemological transformation of thought in view of the algorithmic function of reason. Incomputables are expressed by the affective capacities to produce new thought, but more importantly reveal the dynamic nature of the intelligible. Here, my concern is not an appeal to an ultimate computational being determining the truth of thought. On the contrary, I have turned to Chaitin’s discovery of Omega, because it radically undoes the axiomatic ground of truth by revealing that computation is an incomplete affair, open to the revision of its initial conditions, and thus to the transformation of truths and finality. Since Omega is at once a discrete and infinite probability, it testifies to the fact that the initial condition of a simulation—based on discrete steps—is and can be infinite. In short, the incomputable algorithms discovered by Chaitin suggest that the complexity of real numbers defies the grounding of reason in finite axiomatics and teleological finality.

If we risk confusing the clear-cut opposition between digitality and philosophy (Galloway 2013), what and how are algorithms? For now, I want to point out that algorithms, this dynamic form of reason, rule-based and yet open to be revised, are not defined by teleological finality, as impersonal functions transform such finality each time. This is not to be conceived as a mere replacement or extension of human cognitive functions. Instead, my point is that we are witnessing the configuration of an incomputable mode of thought that cannot be synthesized into a totalizing theory or program. Nonetheless, this thought exposes the fallacy of a philosophy and critical thought, which reduces computation to an inferior mechanization of reason, destined to mere iteration and unable to change its final directions.

Here, my argument was mainly concerned with the critique of computation as the incarnation of the technocapitalist instrumentalization of reason. It was an attempt at suggesting the possibility that algorithmic automation coincides with a mode of thought, in which incomputable or randomness have become intelligible, calculable but not necessarily totalizable by technocapitalism. Despite all instrumentalization of reason on behalf of capitalism, and despite the repression of knowledge and desire into quantities, such as tasks, functions, aims, there certainly remains an inconsistency within computation. This is the case insofar as the more it calculates, the more randomness (patternless information) it creates, which exposes the transformative capacities of rule-based functions. In the algorithm-to-algorithm phase transition that most famously characterizes the financial trading mentioned at the beginning of this essay, it is hard to dismiss the possibility that the automation of thought has exceeded representation and has instead revealed that computation itself has become dynamic.

The challenge that automated cognition poses to the post-human vision—that thought and technology have become one, because of technocapitalism— points to the emergence of a new alien mode of thought, able to change its initial conditions and to express ends that do not match the finality of organic thought. This also means that the algorithm-to-algorithm phase transition does not simply remain another example of the technocapitalist instrumentalization of reason, but more subtly reveals a realization of a second nature in the form of a purposeless and automated intelligence. If algorithmic automation no longer corresponds to the execution of instructions, but to the constitution of a machine ecology infected with randomness, then one can suggest that neither technocapitalism nor the critique of technocapitalism can contain the tendency of the automated processing of randomness to overcome axiomatic truths.

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“Weird Formalism” and Surface to Solid

“In “Preface: Weird Formalism” of Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space, Parisi calls for a redesign of the traditionally accepted grid. The author “argues for a new digital space that no longer or not fully coincides with Deleuze and Guattari ’s notions of  ‘striated’ (metric) and ‘smooth’ (vectorial and projective or topological) space. Striated space is ‘gridded, linear, metric, and optic,’ going on to describe it “as the space of logos, based on the deductive reduction of infinities to discrete unities constituting the building blocks of reason” (x). It is this rigidity of system which is at odds with the infinitely productive dynamics which result from  large amounts of quantitative data being processed algorithmically. This is all to say that many notions regarding what Parisi calls digital space are incomputable to humans as these notions are at odds with human systems for rationalization.

 Is there any medium through which these new spatio-temporal conceptualizations can be translated into the built world, or is the application of material a constraint which in and of itself negates the infinite nature of computation? Perhaps transforming data-driven design into built realities with which humans can inhabit and interact becomes not an exercise of designing the whole (a building/project as a complete idea), but attempting to locate the right functional part within the endless network of outputs that meets our needs for a built space, an inversion along the lines of “mereotopology of parts that are bigger than wholes” that Parisi describes (xvii)...” (Stewart, 12.4.19)

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Exercise 5  (surface to solid) was data-driven at its core. Specifically, the act of procuring a surface condition (from topological datasets) as the basis of the design process might be considered an act of engaging with the algorithmic forms described by Parisi. Time (labor), prior knowledge of certain topographies (culture) and mechanical/material limitations (safety considerations and dimensions) of the exercise became the foundations of a system in order to engage with the massive data sets. Without this sort of rationalized, yet semi-open-ended approach, there would have been no clear way to access the massive amounts of data in a meaningful way. So, perhaps cultural constraints can acts as guides for navigating algorithmic architecture. 

Source for Discussion:

Luciana Parisi, “Preface: Weird Formalism” in C​ontagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space,​ London, MIT Press 2013. x - xvii.