On the Role of Ciphers and Vicarious Symbols in an Extended Sense of Code-based ‘Alphabeticity’
Algebra is the art of subsuming givens under a rule.
—Immanuel Kant
Guy de Maupassant invented a character called Horla, which the protagonist in his short story keeps encountering in a peculiar kind of shadow. Horla is a phantom that is transparent (passive, lets shine through) but not without an irreducible lucidity of its own. It sits in front of the mirror and catches the images the mirror is about to reflect, before the mirror can actually do so. Michel Serres, the polymath writer who has been pursuing, for more than five decades, the project of a natural philosophy of communication, writes about this peculiar character:
What a strange shadow: it is and is not, present and absent, here and elsewhere, the middle which ought to be excluded but cannot, hence contradictory. This is why he [Maupassant] calls him Horla.1
Horla is, to Michel Serres, the character of a kind of spectrality that actively sums up all projections that could possibly be reflected in a kind of summation whose total is indefinite and, because of that, determinable. What is at stake with this proposal by Serres?
Let us approach this indirectly. There are phenomena that are to be considered as genuinely simulacral but nevertheless real, as said by Mark Hansen in a recent talk.2 The question he raised thereby is of generic interest to media theory at large: How to address philosophically the particular kind of ‘spectrality’ at work in communication media, and how to address the rendering of appearances that technical spectra afford in quantum physics-based science, chemistry, for example, or electro engineering? The predominant question with regard to quantum physics is that of location and the point of view of the observer. But in order to address the active role of those spectra, their rendering of appearances, we will have to complement that question with one that asks how to think of the temporality involved in such observations. For they are, in a strict sense of the term, mediagenic: They are engendered by mediation, by resorting to a middle ground ‘that ought to be excluded but cannot’.3 Posthumanist scholars like Karen Barad have begun to address the temporal dimension of the phenomena such observations refer to in terms of an agential realism, or in the case of Bruno Latour, it is being approached through an impersonal kind of agency within networks. Mark Hansen, as well, maintains that considering ‘phenomena that are genuinely simulacral but nevertheless real’ need not be a capitulating gesture for philosophy but can be one of intellectual reclamation: If phenomena are considered as mediagenic, that is, if it is mediate intervention, the augmentation of some givens through technical lucidity in terms of which such phenomena are reasoned,4 then they must have to be approachable within the tentative framework of what he would like to think of as ‘speculative phenomenology’.
While there clearly is an emerging common sense with regard to the importance of attending to the temporality dimension at work in quantum-physical ‘positivity’, the ‘eventfulness’ of probability spaces, the ‘massive activity’ in particle physics (radioactivity) and in chemistry (molecular bondages), there are many proposals of how to do so. Serres’s interest in Maupassant’s character Horla lies in that it impersonates cryptographically the source of a peculiar kind of originality. It is an originality that affords tracing back lineages and hence gives birth to continuity, but the afforded tracing is not one that heads for a beginning that would reside in some transcendent beyond. It affords a kind of tracing within a space that opens up from and co-extends with just such tracing. It is a kind of originality, hence, of which we might feel inclined to call vicious, because by all apparent evidence it appears to be circular (just consider the vocabulary of quantum physics: radiating activity, returning frequencies, extension in phases, etc.). We must also consider that the agency at work in this self-referentiality is indeed attributed, by Maupassant and also by Serres, ‘character’. We seem to have good reason, hence, for rejecting to even consider such a space (one that springs from circular tracings and that is to co-extend with the lineages that are thereby being traced) as a space; both notions, that of ‘character’ as well as that of ‘vice’ (in ‘vicious’) are words with primarily moral connotations.5 Surely, the positivity at stake in quantum-physical phenomena cannot be grounded, ultimately, in moral categories; this would indeed force philosophy to sacrifice its own knowledge of how to articulate and maintain space for hesitation, by demanding accounts that are considerate and capable of withstanding scrutiny – accounts which demand intersubjective, methodical evaluation and argument rather than subjection to absolute authority. Is Serres, with his proposal to conceive a space that were capable of accommodating this fabulous character, Horla, with this peculiar, paradoxical ‘transparent lucidity’, indeed suggesting that philosophy make this sacrifice?
HOW TO ADDRESS THE SPECTRAL SPACE OF MASSIVE CONDUCTIVITY?
The notion of the vicious circle in reasoning was given the general sense of ‘a situation in which action and reaction intensify one another’, according to the etymological dictionary, by 1839.6 An agency that was caught up within such a space of vicious circularity would inevitably be a dangerous agency, a corrupting one, a pretentious one, one that mocks any idea of perfection – from which all moral notions of justness, righteousness, balanced valency and so on are inevitably being derived. Let’s pause and remember our starting point: How can phenomena that are genuinely simulacral but nevertheless real possibly be approached by philosophy in a gesture of reclamation rather than capitulation? And how can Serres’s proposal of a space called hors-là (out, there) possibly be of service to this?
The space which is at stake here is mediated by Horla, the fabulous phantom. By attributing this character to technical spectra, Serres indeed affirms that the quantum space of a physics of light is a space where intensification is triggered, where interferences show up and cannot be entirely reduced, where the directed beams of reflection are thwarted and go in all directions, diffractively. It is a noisy, querulous space, but it is also a rational space (quantum physics supports a certain kind of mathematics). Yet it is that of a rationality within which no one particular order can be purified (quantum physics involves probabilistics and complex numbers, numbers whose rationality is constituted by imaginary units). A particular order, in this space of abundant ‘orderality’, can only be exposed before the noisy background of all of this exposed order’s ‘others’, all those other possible orders with which the one exposed has originally been mixed up and from which it has set itself apart. And it is exactly this crystallizing kind of separation process from within an entropic orderality of mingled bodies that Serres’s proposal of a space called hors-là serves to address. How? By rendering these mingled bodies measurable, in maps drawn by ciphered graphisms (cryptography and topology).7 Like this, what appears within moralist terms as the space of vicious circularity thereby turns into the space of objective vicariousness: Horla, as well as the source of self-referential originality Maupassant’s fabulous character impersonates for Serres, is vicarious in the literal sense of ‘taking the place of another’,8 from the Latin vicarious, ‘that supplies a place; substituted, delegated’ and from vicis, ‘a change, exchange, interchange; succession, alternation, substitution’.9 But this taking of a place, in the quantum-physical space of light’s radiating activity, is not the taking away of a place that had been occupied by something else; it is the place-making exposition of a temporal order, as a contract among pre-specific orders (an active ‘frequenting’). This exposed temporal order is set apart from its own originality, namely the noisy background of all of its possible others, which querulously keep manifesting what the contracted order originates in, and from which it is cast off. It can be rendered apparent only by a spectrum that acts as the ‘filter’ (made of code) and that enables such separation of negentropic order relative to an entropic background.
Such exposed orders, and this will be the interest in my text, can be addressed as pre-specific orders through thinking of them as channels. The contract among pre-specific orders can be stabilized by these channels, but the contract itself cannot be reduced to their geometric and arithmetic formality alone because this formality is spectral (it keeps together in that it affords percolation). Serres’s vicarious space of hors-là thereby can be considered as a space of conductivity. It is the space that affords measurement in a physics where matter is not only thought of as active (quantum physics), but where this material activity can be addressed no longer within the ideal framework of a restoration (or exploitative optimization) of an order of originally well-balanced values. It must be approached within a mathematical and yet realist scope of a querulous panchrony, pantopy, panglossy – an entropic noise from which negentropic order can set itself apart through a price-oriented ‘import–export economy of information’.10 The activity of matter is massive, and Serres’s philosophy of communication crucially depends upon integrating a purely quantitative notion of mass into philosophy, one that does not qualify energy and/or information in any one particular sense. The unit of such a notion of mass is, for Serres, provided by the binary digit in mathematical information theory. Note that this doesn’t mean that a philosophical and quantitative notion of ‘mass’ would postulate that mass were in an ontological sense ‘discrete’ (or, indeed, ‘digital’ as, for example, Stephen Wolfram maintains with his Cellular Automata Universe in A New Kind of Science [2002]).11 But it also discredits the complementary view, which wants to see an ontological reality of matter as analogue and continuous, as do those views which refuse to address the format of electricity for energy in any of its own rights and instead keep referring electricity (and quantum physics!) back to a classical physics of forces that dates even anterior to the thermodynamic physics of heat.12 The unit in terms of information theory is the BIT, the binary digit. In its unit-icity, mathematics is inextricably mixed up with physics: it is code and energy. Insofar as information theory is a mathematical theory, the BIT can count as little (or for some metaphysicists, as much!) as an ultimate and immediate ontological reality as natural, rational, irrational or imaginary numbers, or any of the formats in terms of which we measure empirically in physics (meter, kilogram, mole, etc.), can. In the vicarious space of hors-là, we can think of the BIT as a cryptographical unit of translation between formats, as a unit within and relative to, in each case, a particular cipher.
In the empirical measurements in physics, the unit-icity applied is rooted in so-called natural constants that feature as coefficients of transformations in the mathematical equations that render physics a rigorous science. The constancy at stake is thereby formulated, for the first time by Emmy Noether in 1918, in terms of formal laws of conservation (not predicative ‘laws’ of determination, like the Newtonian laws of classical physics or Laplacean stochastic determinism). The most intuitive example of grasping the difference between laws of conservation and predicative laws is that of how energy is treated in thermodynamics: The sole assumption made is that there is an invariant amount of energy in the universe, invariant in that it can neither be increased nor decreased. This assumed amount does not need to be determined with a positive value (number), nor does energy need to be further qualified in any metaphysical sense. All that the thermodynamic theory of heat provides for is to study transformations of energy, bare of assumptions about energy as a qualified ‘substance’.
Here we come to Serres’s starting point: Mathematical information theory can provide a philosophical notion of mass because it gives us just such a coefficient of transformation – not between one form of energy into another, as thermodynamics does, but between energy and information.13 This is indeed the background before which Serres dares to begin speaking of a physics of communication. A philosophy that accommodates a purely quantitative notion of mass counts to him as a natural philosophy of such a physics because this vicarious space about which we have been talking, that which Serres names hors-là, is not only a spectral space but also a nascent space: Transformations can be learnt to understand and control on more and more levels of complexity. It is a space that is natural insofar as it is born from how the originality of its unit-icity can be traced, by encoding this originality in terms of ever vaster ‘genericity’ (the genericness of mass). It extends in code, it is vicarious, it is where the diffractive massivity of quantum-physical nature can be indexed and channelled in the transformations this physics affords to check and control. And these controllable transformations are no longer restricted to that domain which nineteenth-century physics called the electromagnetic domain. It includes all the augmentations afforded by the communication, engineering ways of digitally encoding those channels, where a single frequency can host literally myriads of coexisting separate channels that allow for ‘inframaterial’ transformations that can be realized manifestly through ‘printing’ – this diffracts the classical idea of ‘imprint’ into manifold layers of relative ‘exprimation’ and ‘imprintation’.14
TECHNICITY RATHER THAN LOGISTICS: THE VICARIOUS SPACE OF AN ELECTRIC CIRCUITRY
The space indexed by Horla need no longer be regarded as the corrupt space of a vicious circularity; it can be addressed critically as a vicarious space of an electric circuitry. Indexical as it is, code-based rather than number- or distance-based, this space provides conductivity rather than localization. From a point of view within that space, number and distance are inverse to each other, while code is an abstraction of distance (linearity), at the cost of inverting the real numbers by thinking of them as a circularity (rather than as a number line continuum).
Originality in terms of such a space, hors-là, provides for an in that ‘indexes’ an out without making positive statements, epistemological or ontological, about this in or this out. This space itself, the space of a physics of communication, is neither out nor in, neither here nor beyond, neither past nor future, neither physical (in the classical, pre-quantum sense) nor metaphysical (in the classical or the modern sense): It is the vicarious space that is, continually but diffractively and intermittently, being sourced through indexing an out in an in. Hors, là. Out there, here. The positivity of quantum physics can only be addressed in a vicarious domain of a representation where the reference relation is indefinitely intermitted by substitutes – substitutes that supply places by indexing what has not been indexed before. The space of this vicarious domain co-extends with the tracings of its own point zero, its own mathematical, metrical ‘originality’.
Of just such strange ‘nature’ is the quasi-physical domain that communication channels have been establishing for real and for nearly a century now. Channels are literally technical spectra: They render apparent a certain generic order which can be observed only before a ‘plentiful background’ of noise (entropy), rather than one of an empty tabula rasa. Serres illustrates this idea of a plentiful background with the colour spectrum, where white light stands for such a ‘plenty’ because it expresses any colour at all, and this in a material, physical manner: ‘white light’ is, ultimately, radiating nuclear activity of quantum-physical mass. Within such ‘materiality’, channels are established for ‘surfing’ on top of the singled-out frequencies, but nevertheless amidst the massive agitation of what is technically called Brownian motion. The space of such generic and entropic materiality must be considered as having as many formats of coordination as it has channels: a communicational web, a ‘pancentric’ (rather than centralized or decentralized) network. This is what Serres proposes to address as hors-là, a space of conductivity sourced from indexing. It is a vicarious space of substitutional operators, a space hence bare of signification and sense and undetermined with regard to meaning. Not because it would be empty in the sense of ‘lack’ as a substantive, but in that of ‘lacking’ as a kind of frequentative preposition: the zero neutrality of white light lacks in that it leaks, in the same sense as spectra lack in that they leak, and such leaking is accessible only through measuring its frequent happening (a frequency). The formality in this vicarious space is spectral; it lacks in that it leaks. White light is percolating not because it lacks colour but because it is ‘abundantly full’ of colour. This vicarious space is a space where points are indexes that point actively, points that are literally pointers. And yet, because their expressiveness is code-based, they are as indifferent to what it might be that they, essentially, link up as algebraic symbols used within formulae are indifferent to what, in essence, were to occupy the place they hold, as substitutes. Algebraic symbols are substitutional operators, entirely indifferent to how they are being rendered ‘substantial’ whenever such a formulation is considered, in empirical experiments, as a description, a simulation or a technical graph of something. They are indifferent, and yet their neutrality has ‘character’: because symbols themselves cannot have exponents, only numbers can. The exponent is a self-reference of a number, and the different kinds of numbers transport us into different numerical spaces (natural, rational, real, complex or those of particular numerical corpora that are being specified in category theory).15 Symbols used in equations have to be seen as indexes, speculative points that must (somehow, this is the inventive part of mathematics in a vicarious, spectral space) be capable of spanning up adequate spaces of reflection. It is clear that the kind of physics science is capable of transforms with the introduction of novel number spaces: Classical modern mechanics would be unthinkable without the extension of numbers to the negative and the involvement of zero as a number in the domain of integers, just as Newtonian and Leibnizian dynamics would be unthinkable without the extension of numbers to a domain that involves infinitesimal incrementality. The same goes for all the creative inventions in number theory since the nineteenth century.
Let us come back now to our initial concern, namely that of raising the question of temporality for phenomena that are genuinely simulacral, rendered through technical spectra, but that which must, nevertheless, count as real. We can now see how channels, within such a vicarious, indexical space of electromagnetic conductivity that is being endowed, augmentatively, with ‘exprimacy’ provided by digital code, must be considered as countering both: the reversible time of classical physics as well as the irreversible passing of time in thermodynamics (and in dialectical history). Communicational channels provide for passage that ‘goes upstream’ and establishes spaces of relative and locally sustainable reversibility as particular temporary ‘niveaus’ or ‘plateaus’.16
The remainder of this chapter will focus on the peculiar role that technical channels play in the kind of instrumentally augmented perception of phenomena that I have suggested to call ‘mediagenic’. While the perspective from which I am writing here draws from Serres’s proposal of considering a vicarious, indexically sourced space of conductivity as the metrical reference for thinking both the locality and the temporality for a physics of communication, I will not discuss much (beyond the preliminary introduction above) the philosophical novelty and relevance of Serres’s proposal. Instead I will restrict myself here to highlighting the importance of the role of codes, symbols and ciphers as an extended sense of code-based ‘alphabeticity’ for grasping theoretically a ‘mediagenic real’.17 I will do this from the practice-based point of view of electro engineering, by translating core techniques from this field to contemporary discussions in media theory, new (and not so new) materialisms (e.g. media archaeology), object-oriented philosophy and the like.
ASSESSING THE POTENTIALITY OF WHAT-HAS-NOT-HAPPENED
As a guard rail to hold on to when trying to orientate within such a set-up as this, abstract and scarcely familiar outside of strictly disciplinary communities of experts, let us consider two exemplary positions: one that seeks to tie back the media-theoretic discussion of the role of digitally coded channels to electromagnetism as a kind of physical ‘medium of the real’ and another one that departs from this first position but seeks to address the speculativity of digital coding with the help of the first position. Let us attend to Wolfgang Ernst’s theory of what proposes as ‘time-criticality’ immanent to a kind of horizontal-basedness that he calls ‘Gleichursprünglichkeit’ (equality in originality) (first position) and Mark Hansen’s phenomenological take on this by bringing in an active role of embodiment with regard to a power of speculation, a notion of embodiment that processes what he calls ‘micro-temporal events’ (second position). Before the background of the above, I will profile the first position (Ernst) as the orthodoxy of a physicalist’s theory on the communicative activity of media, while I will discuss the second position (Hansen) as one that seeks a kind of physics of mediated communication that in many ways is quite close to Serres’s physics of communication. An evaluative discussion of this postulate is out of the scope of this chapter. But in Serres, too, it is an embodiment which plays a crucial role in how philosophy can integrate a quantitative notion of mass along with those of space and time.18
Mark Hansen’s interest is, as shown above, in how to address phenomena that must count as genuinely simulacral but nevertheless real. In my understanding, Hansen’s genuinely simulacral phenomena are phenomena in which something is at work similar to what Deleuze has called dark precursors.19 Hansen’s phenomena depend upon speculation; what appears in them is neither predicative nor directly anticipative, but the phenomena are also not quite premonitions because it is not a message whose content is sinister that these phenomena have to deliver and neither are they, despite their simulacral nature, apparitions that merely pretend to be what they in reality cannot display and effectuate. Mediagenic phenomena are to be accredited a reality that is genuinely natural, and hence they can be approached in the registers of physics because they correspond to real magnitudes that manifest in nothing else but the discretable and registerable (physical) actuality of their apparent appearance – that is, their mode of appearing. I call their reality ‘genuine’ because these phenomena are not in need to be legitimated and authorized as ‘substantial’ by way of testing and determining what may have in fact, that is, in a linearly preceding past, caused them. All the abundant reasons that conflue and cause the effects they display are to be looked for ‘entirely within the present’, as Hansen insists.20 It is not despite but rather because of a peculiar kind of non-signifying autonomy – we could say their impredicativity – that Hansen attributes to these phenomena by treating them within the quantitative registers of physics that simulacral phenomena – like global warming in his example – can help us to prehend that of which we know not (yet) how to assess, how to measure and relate it. Such phenomena are like speculative integrals, meant to embody rational, calculable links between the global and the local, between the predicative and the predicated, in our case between climate and weather. Hence the reality Hansen claims for his simulacral phenomena, and the magnitudes in which they manifest themselves, is not a representational one but a performative or, rather, an operative one. There is a Real whose potentiality is referent beyond the manifestation of it as a particular fact, as Hansen put it.21
In order to gain knowledge from such an operative reality, Hansen suggests, one needs to look for a physical approach. By following Wolfgang Ernst’s approach of theorizing media in their operative dimension,22 which Ernst calls media’s time-basedness and their time-criticality, Hansen sympathizes with locating this ‘physics’ in the electromagnetic domain that comprehends all the radiation of physical particles in wave form. But Hansen’s own approach seems to distinguish itself from that of Wolfgang Ernst in an important manner. Hansen’s interest with a speculative phenomenology seems less interested in demarcating a horizon of ‘simultaneous origination’ (Gleichursprünglichkeit), as is Ernst’s declared interest for his media-archaeology.23 Hansen’s own focus is less on such a horizon or, as I would call it, such a master integral that would comprehensively and objectively register the past, and the potential future, and that which can be ‘recorded only by media themselves’, by their ‘superior wisdom’, as Hansen quotes from Ernst.24 Instead it is the bodily agency that is dispersed and active in media communication – involving both poles, senders and receivers – that Hansen seems to be interested in with his outlook on a speculative phenomenology. With that, his project seems to be the development of a veritable physics of mediated communication, rather than a physicalist’s theory on the communicative activity of media. A physics of mediated communication includes a phenomenological notion of embodiment into its account. At the risk of overdrawing it a little, let me further dramatize the implications of this difference: One way of expressing this distinction, it seems to me, would be to say that the Ernst view wishes to see Hansen’s Real whose potentiality is referent beyond the historical manifestation of it as a particular fact as a white spectrum, in which the embodiment of media, that is from a phenomenological perspective always singular, be purified and normalized into the mathematical ideality of a transcendent order. What Ernst refers to, when he speaks of ‘technomathematics’, seems to be exactly this. For Hansen, on the other hand, such a Real figures as a dark spectrum, whose knowledge resides in the essential darkness of the manifest embodiment of things themselves and shimmers through only in speculative renderings of an integral of which all we can specify, speculatively, is that it is to comprehend actual links between a now and here of the manifest body or fact and the belonging of this ‘now and here’ to an insisting anywhere and anytime.
In other words, Hansen’s phenomenological view seems to suggest that we should think of this Real, which takes the electromagnetic domain as a dark spectrum, as an active state of latently vibrant radiation, more probable than factual, a Real that insists in embodied things. By profiling the two positions before the background of Serres’s vicarious space of indexical sourcing, I would like to make a suggestion of how this laid-out programme of a speculative phenomenology could perhaps be complemented by a further aspect: namely a distinction between what I call functional technology and equational technics, respectively manifesting as dispositional apparatuses and as encrypted applications. The crucial difference is that one is dependent upon a stable framework of coordination, whereas the other encrypts manners of coordination symbolically – a distinction that somehow escapes Ernst’s important identification and exposition of electronic media’s time-criticality altogether. In relation to this distinction, it will be necessary to reconsider ‘alphabeticity’ and to question an assumption that arguably holds a near-foundational status for media studies at large: namely that our age be a post-alphabetical age (e.g. McLuhan, Kittler, Ernst, Rotman, to name just a few of the ‘classics’).
SPECTRA, DEPICTING MAGNITUDES THAT ARE GENUINELY SIMULACRAL
First I would like to try disentangling some of the implications involved in assuming such an initial state of activeness (that captured by spectra of electromagnetic waves and the therein depicted radioactivity of white light) before going on with a more technical part which discusses the importance, and at the same time the philosophical insufficiency, of time-criticality for the inception of a ‘physics’ of mediated communication that considers the Real as a dark spectrum. There are seven strings I would like to distinguish and expose, so that they can resonate through the more technical discussions that will follow:
(1)We begin with the assumption of a Real as an active state that is virtually ‘pregnant’ in an indefinite manner, such that it allows for the speculative interplay between discerning/discreting (Ermessen) and prehending (Vorwegnehmen). This interplay can be seen as a kind of technical criticality that applies to simulacral phenomena whose magnitudes are real despite being simulacral, real in a sense that is purely operational.
(2)This assumed activeness, if it is to be approached speculatively and physically, that is, non-hermeneutically, requires that fluctuating ratios (fluktuierende quantitative Verhältnisse) are considered to make up a peculiar relationality that affords measurement, a kind of rational fabric or texture that constitutes this activeness’s latently vibrant radiation. Now, because the kind of measurement at stake is to be a speculative interplay between discerning/discreting and prehending, this rational fabric must precede and provide abundant rather than sufficient reason for whatever mensural order of being or having one might come to characterize of this activeness’s appearances. In other words, we could say that this kind of measurement must look for a common factor rather than for a common denominator.
(3)These ratios are to be dealt with as analytic points rather than as representations of geometric points. This distinguishes operativity from functionality.
(4)We can call dealings with ratios-as-analytical points computations. Computations are themselves purely rational, but they are so in a reckoning, numbering, calculating manner that does not respond to strict, arithmetically predicative necessities. There are strategic and tactic levels involved which place computations in an agoratic setup – not unlike the one Lyotard has characterized for ‘the state of knowledge in computerized societies’25 – rather than in a historically dialectical one. Such an activeness never yields neutral recording; its recording always elects according to a direction that is, within certain constraints, arbitrarily imposed (Operation als Ausrichtung).
(5)From the point of view of a speculative phenomenology of media’s microtemporal operations, the computations these operations perform do not at all legitimate and autonomize thought in a disembodied, non-corporeal manner; quite inversely, so understood, computations place considerable weight on the role of our bodies in whatever it may be that we call ‘thinking’. Possible abstractions proliferate and abound, and hence ‘rigorously thought-up’ (German: erdachte) abstractions amount to nothing much of value if there are no lived experiences that correspond to them.26 But this same point of view also seems to insist that it is only with the employment of abstractions that the body’s affectivity is capable of opening up a mediate Real that in principle does and forever will continue to be elusive with regard to how we can pinpoint facts by words that name, concepts that comprehend and delimit, forms that manifest regularities or numbers that count predicatively.
(6)Such a stance of abstractions that must be lived ‘phenomenalizes’ the very quantities that are being processed in technical instrumentality.
(7)These phenomenalized quantities are speculated to characterize real magnitudes that are, so to speak, genuinely simulacral magnitudes – like Hansen’s example of global warming. Because there is an operator that induces phenomena at work (something like Deleuzian dark precursors) within the system that provides mensurability, these simulacral phenomena can help us to prehend that which we know not (yet) how to assess, how to measure and relate.
SPECULATIVE (SPECTRAL) PHENOMENOLOGY, PHYSICS OF MEDIATED COMMUNICATION
Hansen’s speculation of where-off and how the simulacral phenomena of such a physics of mediated communication might be decrypted follows Wolfgang Ernst and the latter’s distinction of ‘measuring media’ from ‘mass media’. We must perhaps specify that ‘media’ here is related to ‘technical media’ in the sense of communications engineering more narrowly.27 Within these restrictions, mass media figure in the time domain of waves propagating in space and measuring media figure in the time-critical domain, which is the frequency spectrum of how waves propagate in space. That is why ‘mass media’ are called time-based, whereas ‘measuring media’ are called time-critical. Both are operating within the electromagnetic continuum. The frequency domain regards it analytically and represents it via a spectrum mask, a technical image, whereas the time domain regards the electromagnetic continuum that is analytically captured by a spectrum mask as mechanical and hence pictures it as a field. Now, what Ernst calls a time-critical event features as an analytical point in the electromagnetic field depicted as a spectrum. Let us bear in mind that an analytical point, unlike a geometrical one, is a split point, a ratio, the encapsulation of a quantitative relation (a ‘difference’). This is important because it demarcates where Ernst’s time-criticality remains silent about the aspect of digital computation, which is perhaps the most powerful of all its aspects: that analytical points need to be integrated, and that this can be done in myriads of ways by encryption.
If we consider this aspect of how the electromagnetic continuum needs to be encrypted before it can be taken into account, then we can more clearly characterize three distinct levels that are involved in what Ernst calls ‘measuring media’: (1) a geometric and mechanical level of a wave propagating in the electromagnetic continuum, the physical substrate of telecommunications; (2) a dynamical and analytical level where a propagating wave is singled out of the field and where it is attributed a particular frequency number, as a kind of identity tag within the larger spectrum. Through this singling out, a particular wave is being dynamized, that is, it is identified as a particular temporality that can be differentiated and integrated and (3) a level of encrypting manners of how to integrate and differentiate this temporality, what we can call its sequencing. This third level is the level of coding. It is mechanical again, yet algebraically so: it subsumes the ratios, the analytic points, under an encrypted, symbolic form. I will come back to what we can understand by such a ‘symbolic form’. What is important now is that this third level is mechanical, like the first, but on a different level of abstraction than the wave level – it is only here that we might be in the realm of quantizing dynamical systems through encryptive probabilistic procedures and where we might face what in quantum mechanics is called the measurement problem. Hansen is interested in media’s time-criticality on this third level, as I understand him, because it is here that a notion of media’s embodiment, insofar as it is not normalized and idealized, can be seen to play a role at all.
So, how far can Ernst’s distinction between ‘mass media’ and ‘measuring media’ carry us with regard to this third level of algebraic mechanics, or quantum mechanics? Technically speaking, each frequency itself can be treated as a field for other frequencies. A masked field of fields of waves is called a spectrum, a technical image. It is by way of manipulating this technical image and rendering its manipulations back into the physical continuum that Ernst can speak of media’s measuring time-criticality. In this indirect manner, the amplitudes of waves are encoded in terms of distinguished phases. As a consequence of this, where we have one mass-media channel per frequency that can broadcast the programme from one particular source, we can have n, that is, an indefinite amount of ‘discreted’ channels (distinct articulations of one and the same) per frequency in measuring media. With them, it is not one source that broadcasts but distributed populations of sources that send messages in parallel. The time-based manner of broadcasting is now being coded, in the strict sense of the term – it is being encrypted according to probabilistic alphabets – and like this, it can serve to host not simply one channel but myriads of channels. In such probabilistic set-ups, we have, in its most extreme form of peer-to-peer file sharing, one channel for each ‘message’ sent. Many channels can be encoded onto one and the same physical carrier (a wave). Let us picture the level of artistry and sophistication we are talking about: In this modulatory manner, one telecom cable, for example, the one which supplies our household in Zürich with phone and Internet connections, is capable of maintaining more than ten million distinct channels ‘within’ or rather ‘with the carrier of’ one single frequency. This is of course an extraordinarily large number because we are talking about a cable, and a cable allows waves to propagate with fewest disturbances (as opposed to air, light or water, for example), but in principle this explosion of sustainable channels applies also to services without manifest cables, like mobile cellular services or Bluetooth. Now this encryption, which relies on probabilistic procedures, may well be working ‘mechanically’ (algorithmically) – but that does not mean that it does not involve incredible diligence and sophistication on the side of the engineers! The mechanical work they perform is algebraic before it is functional; it has to make different protocols compatible. We will see in a moment why this is important politically. It is why I think that the emphasis on ‘measuring media’ for what is actually an entire compound of both symbolic encryption and performed time-criticality is somewhat obscure. On this technical level of telecommunication that Ernst addresses, it seems more productive to speak of generic mediality rather than of reified ‘measuring media’.28
CHANNELS, KEYS AND CIPHERS (CODE SYSTEMS AS MANNERS OF DISCERNING NO-THING-AT-ALL)
Let me try to illustrate what is actually happening in such encryptive coding, using an example that is perhaps easier to grasp. Gian Battista Alberti, the Italian architect and polymath in Renaissance-era Florence, famous of his legendary ten books on architecture, wrote a book entitled De Componendis Cifris. It is a ‘code of practice’ for how to encrypt texts in a manner that is augmented by a mechanical device, the so-called cipher disk (which he is said to have invented). Such a disk consists of two concentric circular plates mounted one on top of the other. The larger plate is called the ‘stationary’ and the smaller one, the ‘moveable’ since the smaller one could move on top of the ‘stationary’. The first incarnation of the disk had plates made of copper and featured the alphabet, in order, inscribed on the outer edge of each disk and coordinated in cells that are split evenly along the circumference of the circle. This enabled the two alphabets to move relative to each other and thus to create an easy-to-use key – one could give orders like ‘shift one unit to the right after every fifth turn of the movable disk’ in order to reconstruct the right letters of the text message in the right sequence.
Communication engineers today are not dealing with cipher disks anymore when they organize for the coexistence of ten million distinct channels within one frequency, of course. But they are still providing channels for communication through just such an encryption. The frequency would be the ‘static plate’, and each modulation of its amplitude in phases would be a ‘mobile’ plate. Obviously, such plates can be stacked and set relative to one another in an indefinite amount of manners. With digital channels, every channel is one such key, crafted for every single message that is to be transmitted. Alberti’s cipher disk is still the best illustration of the peculiarly rational, yet not reasonable, ‘laws’ which technical telecommunication media obey when they enframe how messages can be stored, processed and transmitted. It is algebraic laws of equations that enframe in particular notations (code systems) a particular calculus of variations. In encrypted mediation, that which circulates remains invariant in the algebraic sense of the word – algebraic because we are on the level of equations, not their derivatives, which would be that of functions.29
TWO KINDS OF TECHNICS: CONCENTRATING ON NO-THING (EQUATIONAL) AND BEING CONCERNED WITH SOME-THING (FUNCTIONAL)
This is important to realize: every act of coding spells out a code system, which is in fact a measured nothingness – a system of rationality entirely decoupled from any reasonable ground. That’s why it can be a system (unlike Saussure’s semiology, for example): precisely because it introduces a notion of zero, upon which it operates.30 Zero was indeed the name attributed to the cipher’s character, once it was introduced from Indian and Arabic mathematics to Europe. A cipher (and there can be indefinitely many ciphers!), as far as algebra and operability are concerned, is genuinely neutral and vacuous, neither positive nor negative. Empty, as Kant and especially Hegel insisted. Gleichursprünglich, as Ernst says today. Coding, because it is algebraic, operates outside of historical time. That is why a quantum-logical approach to information and data seems so promising. The set-up of a code system is formulaic, equational. It literally represents nothing, or in other words, it constitutes a cipher: A notational body of reciprocal transformability that is transcendent to the distinction between positive and negative. Programming languages are algebraic, and they are heterogeneous with respect to each other.31 It is the epistemological concerns that, within the programme of providing logical foundations for knowledge, try to systematize them in one globally consistent symbolic order. Within the mathematical domain itself, to determine the solvability of an equation, all the terms on both sides of the equation sign must be arranged such that they cancel each other out and sum up to zero. Thus, they literally and actually do describe nothing. In literally describing nothing, they can conserve what is contained in the givens (the data). This is different from a function. A function is derivative to an equation, and it doesn’t concentrate on nothing, like the formula it is derived from. Unlike an equation, it is concerned with something: namely, with determining that one variation of the invariant conforms to another variation of it. A function is always directed, while an equation rests in itself – although it never really ‘rests’. I would like to suggest that the character of a function may be considered as dynamic and that of an equation, as active. Or in other words, functional technology comes in the form of apparatus (with strictly controlled dispositions that are fixed, such that they allow to support variations of a same behaviour) while equational technics come in the form of applications. The latter live from the opposite of centrally controlled dispositions: they open up their own zones of exchange through encrypting the domains in which they operate.32 On the basis of this idea that equations, while resting in themselves, do actively nothing, rather than represent and stand in for something, we can modulate and actualize their proper ‘domains of activity’ by endowing it with particular dispositions. This may sound farfetched and hard to picture, but it describes, for example, how solar cells work. In the case of photovoltaics, a semiconductor is dispositioned such that it is capable of capturing photons from the light to which it is exposed. With solar cells, this disposition is a certain balance between the atomic weights of bohrium and phosphor. Once exposed to sunlight, the electrons begin to jump in order to keep the balance of the initial saturation and eventually spill over the framework of the cell, hence producing electric current garnered from sunlight. Their character cannot be captured in terms of functions (dynamics); it is equational (active). Solar cells don’t need an overall framework; they tap into streaming radiation of light and encapsulate some of its energy by ‘imposing’ their own ‘rationality’ upon it (by capturing photons in a particularly coded – encrypted – receptivity). This is what ‘measuring media’ do, too: they engender the domains in which they operate through partitioning. We can regard not only Internet apps as instances of such equational technics, but also any kind of computer simulations. Their activity is operational and hence strictly technical: they produce what they are set up to produce. If you set up a simulation that computes global warming, you will get values that indicate global warming. If you set up a simulation that computes the limits to population growth, you will get values that indicate limits to population growth. I don’t mean to ridiculize these simulations, and the seriousness and urgency of the themes they address, but if we would set up a simulation that computes the end of the world, we would also get a result that must be considered valid within the constraints embodied by the parametric model – by the equation – on which the simulation runs. Equational technics are strictly rational, and yet they are entirely decoupled from logic and reason – which is indeed why they can support speculative reasoning so well.
ABSTRACTIONS THAT PROLONG RATHER THAN CUT SHORT: ARTICULATING WHAT IS UNTHINKABLE
Hansen’s interest with his programme for a speculative phenomenology is to affirm what he calls the absolute inaccessibility of quantum events to thinking.33 Quantum phenomena are produced by the operation of measurement, he insists, but it is a kind of operationality that comes with its own duration that lasts on, rather than cutting through or intervening, as an act. One cannot find orientation about the phenomenon of climate change from single acts of measurement. It is measuring itself that produces the phenomenon, and hence Hansen suggests calling them ‘originary phenomena’ – phenomena that are themselves actively real, instead of an appearance or manifestation of some underlying and hidden reality. Phenomena so conceived, he maintains, cannot be thought, only sensed (measured). By suggesting to complement his programme with a distinction between functional technology and equational technics, respectively manifesting as dispositional apparatuses and as encrypted applications, my own discussion aims at mobilizing and somewhat displacing what appears for Hansen to be an exclusionary relation between thinking and bodily entanglement (affect and sense). By looking at the probabilistic procedures with which the measurement of quantum phenomena is actually carried out in practice by information scientists and electro engineers, and by exposing how they are working with non-representationalist concepts as well (they are working with cryptological or rather cryptogrammatical and analytical ones), Hansen’s impatience with idealist transcendentalism gains, on the one hand, in support; yet at the same time, thought cannot adequately be conceived as the other to bodiliness, given that such measurement nevertheless involves a kind of conceptualization that affords and demands diligence, sophistication and intellectual mastership. It is the complication of this relation, I suggested, that might be addressed in such a speculative phenomenology, as ‘lived’ or, perhaps better, as ‘quick and prolonging’ rather than ‘short-cutting’ abstractions. Information and communication technology, then, do not place us in a post-alphabetical age where the Real would be immediately ‘recorded’, ‘sensed’ and ‘expressed’; rather, such recording operates relative to the probabilistic alphabets of code it uses. In code, an alphabetical order and a numerical one are mutually implicative – no linear ordering of the finite elements of an alphabet from first to last without applying a symbolization of how to operate by numerals within an element of the infinite (an algebra), and no notational symbolization of how to operate in an element of the infinite by numerals (an algebra) without indexing with an alphabet’s place system a sequential or tabular order of how givens (data points, indexes) can be organized such that they may be subsumed under the rule of this symbolization.34 Code is alphanumerical. The two are orthogonal, and they mutually transverse or ‘co-evoke’ one another. As far as the measurement of quantum phenomena is concerned, the alphabetical as well as the numerical are derived from the ciphers that operate technically and thoughtfully in code – even if the measurements themselves can be said to remain ‘unthinkable’, as long as ‘thinkable’ is restricted to mean ‘critical’ within a representationalist paradigm. The question, then, for such a speculative phenomenology that articulates the unthinkable (and hence is never critical without being inventive, but that may, on the other hand, very well be inventive without being critical), is this: ‘Who’ is thinking in such objective thoughtfulness that operates in technically manipulable code? On this level, the proposed sobriety and libidinous-less-ness that go along with keeping a distinction between equational technics and functional technology prevent us from identifying (with) such an agency in an uncritical manner – be it as Truth, Beauty, History, Nature, God, People or Science.
NOTES
1Michel Serres, Atlas (Berlin: Merve, 2005 [1994]), 59.
2This text is based on the response I was invited to give to Mark Hanson’s keynote lecture ‘Entangled in Media, Towards a Speculative Phenomenology of Microtemporal Operations’ at the ‘Philosophy After Nature’ conference in Utrecht, September 2014.
3Serres, Atlas, 59.
4cf. Mark Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (London: Routledge, 2006).
5According to etymonline.com, ‘vicious’ means ‘unwholesome, impure, of the nature of vice, wicked, corrupting, pernicious, harmful’, when applied to a text ‘erroneous, corrupt’, from Anglo-French vicious, Old French vicios ‘wicked, cunning, underhand; defective, illegal’, Latin vitiosus (Medieval Latin vicious) ‘faulty, full of faults, defective, corrupt; wicked, depraved’ and vitium ‘fault’.
7This is really the overall theme of Serres’s book Atlas – he discusses how we can exercise a kind of map-making for the globalizing world, where maps do not depict territorial order but communicative order. Such map-making combines ‘prophecy with geometry’: it demands that calculations based on stochastic integrals, statistical mappings and probabilistic predictions be graphed out and treated in geometric and constructive terms as well, no longer exclusively in analytical and deductive manners.
8This is the core theme of Serres’s book Le Parasite (1980), where he discredits the idea of a restoration of a balance as the ideal successfulness of communication and instead begins to theorize a natural economic order that is genuinely communicative, where the sun must count as the ultimate capital. Capital, then, can no longer be thought of as the exploitative accumulation and concentration of resources. It must be addressed as the primary source of all kinds of banks of energy information that nature organizes in. It is a very early view of a world naturally globalized through communication, an idea Serres picks up, in its ethical implications, in Le Contrat Naturel (1990).
10This is not merely a metaphorical way of speaking. The unsettling insight that drove the development of information theory since its mathematical formulation is that the acquisition of information, like that of energy in systems that maintain themselves over a certain time in thermodynamics (organisms, ecology), is not gratuitous but comes as a price: energy is treated as a kind of disorder that is a plenty of possibility (entropy), while information is treated as the order that provides stability through warding off of entropy; hence, its order is called negatively entropic (negentropy). This means that novel amounts of information (always ‘novel’ in relative sense to the order at stake) must be acquired at the price of sacrificing some of the settledness of this order, by ‘importing’ and ‘banking’ more of entropy (energy, possibility) than is necessary to maintain itself. The key theoretician of this aspect is the quantum physicist Léon Brillouin, who began to foreground for the first time the particular role of code in information science in Science and Information Theory (New York: Academic Press, 1956). Among Serres’s texts, the following are the key ones where he discussed this: ‘Mathématisation de l’empirisme’ in Interférence, Hermes II (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 195–200; and ‘Vie, Information, Deuxième Principe’ in La Traduction, Hermes III (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 43–72. For an introductory overview cf. my glossary entries ‘Negentropy’, ‘Maxwell’s Demon (Non-Anthropocentric Cognition)’ and ‘Invariance’ in The Posthuman Glossary , Rosi Braidotti et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
11Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Champaign: Wolfram Media, 2002).
12This was at stake already in the forceful disputes around Dialectical Materialism and the Empirico-critical Materialism in the Vienna School around the turn of the twentieth century. Lenin criticized Mach for a corruption of an absolute notion of time just as much as Mach rejected Boltzmann’s theory of the atom for just that same reason. Today’s struggles around New and ‘classical’ Materialism seem to revolve around those same old issues, and they begin to crystallize in the question of how a certain ‘materiality’ can and must be attributed to code and the role it plays in knowledge. For an introduction to the New Materialism approach cf. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Eds. Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012).
13Denis Gabor, MIT lectures, 1951: ‘We cannot get anything for nothing, not even an observation’; here cited in Léon Brillouin, Science and Information Theory (Dover: New York, 1956), position 3800 in the Kindle edition. What Brillouin, following Gabor, calls ‘the price of information’ can be quantified precisely, even with a number (10−16 in Brillouin’s 1957 book, a number which by today’s state-of-the-art particle physics has reached to 10−32, as my theoretical-physicist friend Elias Zafiris tells me [in a private conversation]). The rising value of this coefficient refers to the increasingly small scale on which nuclear science empirically observes particle behaviour. In the case of 10−32, it is the coefficient allowing the famous Higgs boson to be traced in the CERN Accelerator. It is a central topos throughout Serres’s oeuvre. Some key texts in which he discusses its relevance are ‘Mathématisation de l’empirisme’ (cf. fn. 10) and ‘Vie, Information, Deuxième Principe’ (cf. fn. 10).
14cf. Vera Bühlmann, Ludger Hovestadt (Eds.). Printed Physics, Metalithikum I (Vienna: Springer, 2013), here especially Ludger Hovestadt, ‘A Fantastic Genealogy of the Printable’ (17–70).
15cf. Fernando Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics (London: Urbanomic, 2012); and Giuseppe Longo, ‘Synthetic Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Sciences: Conceptual Analyses From a Grothendieckian Perspective, Reflections on ‘Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics’ by Fernando Zalamea’, available on Longo’s institutional website: http://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo/files/PhilosophyAndCognition/Review-Zalamea-Grothendieck.pdf.
16This is, very generally, the theme in Serres’s L’Incandescent (Paris: Le Pommier, 2003), where he introduces the concept of ‘Exodarwinism’ to refer to such temporality.
17The sense in which I refer to the alphabetical might raise the expectation that the following arguments will resonate with Brian Rotman’s increasingly well-received work on ciphers and on the alphabet, but this would be somewhat misleading. In his study Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), the rise of algebra in Renaissance-era Italy is described as the beginning of an ongoing reign of a meta-order that begins to relativize ‘an alphabetical’ order. This tendency is seen as completing itself in what he calls, for example in ‘The Alphabetic Body’ (Parallax 8.I (2002): 92–104), the end of the alphabetical. In this, my own stance differs: My interest is to examine how long before an explicit sign for the symbolization of zero had been invented have ciphers been at work in symbolizing nothingness (albeit not in signifying it). My focus is on the mutually implicative relation between the alphabetical and the numerical in code – as it is constitutive for information science today, and as it can also be studied in the early rise of algebra. Thereby, I want to address the strangely neglected status in today’s philosophical approaches to communication and media of the diverse, and yet peculiarly so ‘void’, character of symbols that operate in algebra as pure placeholders and substitutes. We are dealing with many ‘nothingnesses’, to put it a bit dramatically. Recognizing this affords to gain a technical understanding of communication channels through the encryption and decipherment of cryptograms – an aspect not at all thematized by Rotman’s linguistically semiotic perspective.
18The main references of this aspect are Serres’s The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (Manchester: Continuum, 2008 [1985]), as well as Variations sur le corps (Paris: Le Pommier, 1999).
19In Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1968]), Gilles Deleuze introduces the concept of the dark precursor as something that affords communication within an element of what he calls ‘the disparse’. The dark precursor is called the ‘in-itself of difference’, a ‘differenciator’, the ‘the self-different which relates different to different by itself’ (119) and it is meant to afford communication between heterogeneous series. The characterization on which I rely most with this proposed analogy to Hansen’s mediagenic phenomena, of which he says they originate in a kind of speculation that is driven by microtemporal operations of media, is this: Dark precursors ‘induce phenomena within a system’ in which it itself ‘has no place other than that from which it is “missing”’ and ‘no identity other than that which it lacks’ (120).
20Here we encounter a divergence from the suggested analogy to Deleuzian dark precursors: Deleuze does not subject his concept to a temporalization that would be external to the concept’s own operability as a differentiator; rather, much suggests that dark precursors describe for him the substitute position of algebraic symbols in a mathematical structure, for example, when he holds that the dark precursor ‘is precisely the object = x, the one which “is lacking in its place” as it lacks its own identity’ (Difference and Repetition, 120). I am referring with my citation to Hansen’s lecture, which is accessible online: https://lecturenet.uu.nl/Site1/Play/126f9811aad94d12bede84e7da2efe4a1d?catalog=6aa828db-767a-487c-8ba1-d635a20245e6.
21In his original paper delivered at the ‘Philosophy After Nature’ conference in Utrecht, Hansen formulated, ‘The prehension of this scheme is one more example that actual fact includes in its own constitution real potentiality which is referent beyond itself’.
22Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Experimenting with Media Temporality: Pythagoras, Hertz, Turing’, in Digital Memory and the Archive, Ed. by Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 184–192.
23Wolfgang Ernst, Gleichursprünglichkeit. Zeitwesen und Zeitgegebenheit technischer Medien (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012).
24See Hansen, ‘Media Entangled Phenomenology’, in this volume.
25Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979).
26Michel Serres has elaborated on this extensively in his book on Leibniz’s philosophical system (Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, 1968); cf. also his first three chapters in Hermes II, Interférence.
27My following and very brief discussions of the physics of communication engineering build upon basic knowledge in this field. For an elaborated and detailed account cf. for example Leon W. Couch, Digital and Analog Communication Systems , 8th edition (New York: Pearson, 2013).
28cf. Vera Bühlmann, Die Nachricht, ein Medium. Generische Medialität, städtische Architektonik (Vienna: Ambra, 2014), especially the ‘Coda: Ein generischer Begriff von Medialität’, 266–271.
29It is important to realize that the invariant quantity whose fractions are circulating in the transformability space which an equation constitutes features neither as variable nor as constant (coefficient) within the equation. A Calculus of Variation is today referred to as obeying The Laws of Conservation. They find their perhaps most important application in physics, where energy is treated as the invariant quantity (its total amount in the universe can neither be expanded nor diminished) on the basis of which we can modulate its ‘partitioning’ or even, to put it a bit drastically, its ‘communication’ (German: Mitteilung) by the electrons which ‘commute’ or jump between particles. This is for example how a photovoltaic cell is working: It is a material disposition rendered such that it captures photons from the light to which it is exposed, thereby moving electrons to jump and ‘spill over’ the bounds of the chemical saturation of the cell, thus producing electric power. Such technics, like photovoltaic cells, I suggest to call equational technics. cf. regarding applications of such physics John W. Orton, The Story of Semiconductors (London: Oxford University Press, 2008); for an introduction to invariance theory, see Dwight E. Neuenschwander’s Emmy Noether’s Wonderful Theorem (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2010).
This aspect, that ‘content’ is treated as that which can be conserved throughout transformations within a reciprocal space constituted by signal horizons – in short, probabilistic encryption – seems to me the main characteristic distinguishing digital media categorically from analogue media. A further context which can help us to better comprehend this aspect is this: In a simplificatory manner, we can think of analogicity as the idea where the words that can be articulated by the alphabet are taken to make up, all together, an inventory which names all things existing, in other words, a kind of Adamitic or Original Language which represents a (or rather, the) conceptual order. We can easily find this idea at work in our intuitive but naive idea of the measurement system with all its normalizations based on prototypical material artifacts – the Original Meter in Paris, for example, or the Original Kilo in France, and so on. Now, just as language is being studied from a structural and systematical point of view since the end of the nineteenth century, the International System of Units also began to rid itself of these material prototypical artifacts. The units are defined today within a structural system of conversion – an idea already propagated by Maxwell in the nineteenth century – where all the units must cohere, that is, exact values must be formalizable for some base units, and all the other units must be derivative from these base units. In the form that is authoritative today, all the definitions of the base units are precise algebraic formulations of possible conversions that can be applied to the base unit as an invariant (metre for length, ampere for electric current, kelvin for thermodynamic temperature, second for time, mole for the amount of substance, candela for luminous intensity [light]) – except for the kilogram. It too is a base unit, but its definition is still a prototypical artifact. Thus, it is the declared goal of recent meetings in 2007 and 2010 to eventually set up a New International System of Units, where the structure of the system is to shift from giving explicit, precise definitions for the base units themselves to giving explicit, precise definitions for the natural constants involved, like the speed of light. Like this, so is the ambition, it will be possible to do away with the kilogram as well and find a formulaic definition for it. In order to come up with such a coherent system, it is necessary to assume ‘natural constants’ – as of today, this is the speed of light, the elementary charge of atoms et cetera. I owe my thanks to Nathan Brown for drawing my attention to this in his talk ‘Hegel’s Kilogram’, given at the conference ‘Quantity and Quality, the Problem of Measurement in Philosophy and Science’ which he organized in April 2014 at UC Davis, California, USA. For further information, the Wikipedia entry on The International System of Units provides a valid starting point.
30Every equation, in order to yield a solution, must literally be set equal to zero. Algebra is the art of moving around the terms of the equation from one side of the balance to the other, such that they cancel each other out.
31cf. the manuscript to my talk at the ‘Universal-Specific, from Analysis to Intervention’ conference at ETH Zurich in November 2013, ‘The Question of “Signature” and the Computational Notion of Genericness’, available at www .academia.edu/5117590/The_question_of_signature_and_the_computational_notion_of_genericness.
32A distinction between what I suggest here to call apparatus and application is at work in the partitioning of communication systems into different abstraction layers, and it is the main conceptual set up of the Open Systems Interconnection Model (OSI Model) behind the international and national standards for how to organize communication networks, developed since the 1980s by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE. cf. the Wikipedia entry for an introductory overview.
33I am referring with my citation to Hansen’s lecture, accessible online at https://lecturenet.uu.nl/Site1/Play/126f9811aad94d12bede84e7da2efe4a1d?catalog=6aa828db-767a-487c-8ba1-d635a20245e6.
34The best study on the philosophical implications of algebra I know of is Jules Vuillemin, La Philosophie d’Algèbre (Paris: PUF, 1962).
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———. Le Parasite. Paris: Grasset, 1980
———. L’Incandescent. Paris: Le Pommier, 2003.
———. ‘Mathématisation de l’empirisme’. In Interference, Hermes II, 195–200. Paris: Minuit, 1972.
———. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. Manchester: Continuum, 2008 [1985].
———. Variations sur le corps. Paris: Le Pommier, 1999.
———. ‘Vie, Information, Deuxième Principe’. In La Traduction, Hermes III, 43–72. Paris: Minuit, 1974.
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