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observation 1:
synkar’s review:
lukas likavcan - introduction to comparative planetology [midlenght review]
"a promising 7⊶"
★★★☆☆
kicker: lukas helps us understand the cosmogrammatic imperative, that the earth-without-us is a planetary-scale infrastructural zone of topological combat between apolitical compromise in design and inhumane spectrality/extinction of human-oriented consciousness, where abstractions are wagers in a representational battle over the apolitical government of the world, and where their scaling and transformation directly impacts actual systemic violence. unfortunately, his writing style is institutionalized prose with an exubrant amount of positivistic and programmatic declarations that do not make use of sohn-rethel and stiegler, or various negativistic understandings of abstraction and anthropotechnics, and in that sense likavcan fails to excuse his weaponization of scaled and realized abstractions, instead producing a non-careful and even dangerous deployment of cybernetics, as is common for the intellectual tradition within which this text is written and helps to promote.
my first impression of lukas' comparative planetology is that, even though it has a fragmented (∴) feel towards the start, it quickly picks up and develops a comprehensive view of the concept of the plantery. although the introduction is too programmatic in nature which prevents speculative inclinations, it re-emerges as speculatively valid throughout the work, however, the introduction actually hosts more epistemic addressings than the entire rest of the work except for the outro, making it ethically weighty yet substantively understated towards the start, yet ethically barren but substantively oversatured near the second half. his outro does politically piece together his entire project and gives as an early recommendation of a very contemporary sociologically reconstructive worldview, which on its own is quite compelling and shows that his philosophy is extremely developed in its interior, even if externally it doesnt present as striking.
i will immediately note just one thing before i continue, and thats that lukas is an extremely political writer, in the sense that his writings arent just stylized theory but a genuine attempt at influencing government policy, and in that respect they have an entirely pragmatic function. my philosophical orientation is extremely disruptive, aiming all my energies at trying to rip it apart as i do with all works. this is counter-intuitive to this project more than many others, but is the natural product of criticism as it stands, and is not indicative of my affective reception of the text. lukas is also situated in a very comfortable position within epistemic ethics because he juggles authorship of all calibres, allowing him to demonstrate ethical comprehensibility. however, the goal of this review is to partially leave a fair stain on that matter and not to recognize its elaborate nature, and that should be expected of this review.
lukas reliance on strict positivism merges cybernetic regulatory frameworks with his new materialist leanings, producing an interior with no negativity or criticality precisely because of the open-ended nature of new materialist philosophy, which refuses to treat contradictions with any merit, instead choosing to endlessly spiral into metabolizing every philosophical inclination into this braidottian manner towards total ontological oversaturation, which produces extremely exciting philosophy but at the cost of the inability to re metabolize it.
criticizeless philosophy produces an untargetable excess and in a certain sense creates the flat ontology it mimics in its very language. lukas, however, is extremely elaborate and eloquent, much more than a lot of his peers, so it still creates a fun read. whats also further fascinating is that he juxtaposes constant regulatory and subjugating frameworks and their associated abstractions with post-colonial moralisms, which he defends through his introduction, "abstraction at scale" which says that although spivak (among a thousand other) thinkers criticizes abstractions, that some are better than others, but that regardless, all of them are appropriate tools for the contemporary navigation of the world, where lukas on the question of governance endlessly circles back and fourth between applied abstractions and the further abstracting of applications.
this is wonderful because he gives us an early perspective of how the contemporary perspective towards abstractions can move past our latent fourierian denial of representation and enter into a more repressive master language, a language of domination that attempts to challenge itself from the inside rather than the outside, the way that new emerging thinkers will be forced to reorient abstractions whilst trying to extract their edgy and harmful essence from their more polite excited potential charges.
to my dissapointment, he doesnt target the concept of topology itself, only mentioning the term once in the work, preferring to actually draw the models of the planetary directly as chapters, whereas governance is mentioned about fifteen times. he simply takes topology to be a stand-in for latours vision of the world as gaia or the terrestrial, the spectral earth and the globe, the stack and so fourth as different spatial configurations that are seen in respect to political and ecological crises.
lukas mixes epistemic, ontological and ethical concerns in this delirius way where on one hand hes talking about fanon on colonial and racial injustice in regards to the image of the globe as unsatisfactory for a planetary understanding, about mbembe's necropolitics and alternate understandings of natural disasters as political corruptions, whilst simultaneously using the dominatory dialect of regulatory systems against it - defining modernity as incapable of the actual liberatory and often times "organic", or rather civil, justice oriented, conflictual, maybe even humanistic rhetoric that was actually used to understand governance at the time.
he uses terms such as "instrumenting", "datafication", "programming", "smooth operations of logistical regimes", "opaque, "indifferent operazationable approximations", in a favorable manner. these terms are often times direct correlates to a regime of post-industrially produced power, abstractions that are meant to dominate, subjugate and better categorize, interchangably in contrajunction with his unfavorable view of "western colonial and racial violence", "westphalian conditions" "geontopower" "necroviolence" and so on. he achieves this because not only does he destabilize power conditions between sociological entities in favor of infrastructure, he also simultaneously projects this condition onto his own programme, equalizing his critique with his sociology.
what this produces is that hes able to shift his attention onto the way in which particular agents like nation-states attain credibility by displacing and furthering infrastructural inequities until they finally have to create external agents to mitigate zones of mythological distrust, or where governance in the human sense which lukas attacks "always comes with a claim of possession over territories, or of control over its resources". he retains the mytho-poetic language of justice-oriented ethics, but precisely flips it on top of its head, where instead of attacking cybernetic intelligence, it inhumanely attacks human-generated uses of abstractions.
he simultaneously argues that the agambenian apparatus (anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings) is going to be used against infrastructure itself in order to mobilize it, whilst also human-centric usage of the apparatus causes systemic violence, yet human-centric usage still proliferates governance itself, which means that the human-centric condition for technology needs to be dialectically cut short, technology reinserted as a governing mediator, where humans govern using it but restrict their acting parameters to it, whilst simultaneously understanding that the ontology it produces is also post-human, whilst simultaneously allowing to fall into it in a way where the distinction from the human side fails the concept of the human.
lukas tragically assumes that abstractions are utterly inessential in their essence, which is both a philosophical and political risk, especially given the fact he stresses that our predictive models of applied abstractions need to be precise, all the while he's basically spinning them on top of their violent surfaces like some type of foucaultian juggling guru.
or, if you strip it down to the self-evident imperatives, apparatuses will be turned against the apparatus, in order to compromise on the conditions of the brattonian "interface" aspect of the stack. or in other words, for lukas it is a meta-war over conditions for power, it isnt conflict in the traditional sense but an inter-conflict between modes of domination that fight over their own conditioned logic, rather than the self-determination of the subjects upon which power is acting.
because if not, how do you manage to argue in the same paragraph that infrastructure creates the conditions for apparatuses, yet apparatuses create the conditions for the mitigation of apparatuses themselves in order to only empower the infrastructure, when apparatuses themselves are determined to be the sole major distributor of geopolitical consequence? (colonial relations include the capture of territories and their resources vs. the infrastructural power to capture, control etc the resources of given supposed moral breach or form of systemic violence).
this prevents an analysis of power in favor of mediation, where abstractions are simply bypassed as necessary byproducts where real political conflict emerges. by de-instrumentalizing their genesis, he is in fact re-instrumentalizing their necessity as conditions for the war over conditions of power. is power conditioned by war, do abstractions condition power, or does power condition abstractions into conditioning war? this is the dilemma that emerges when the genesis of origin of concepts is foresaken in favor of dynamic reconciliation, there is a schizophrenia of cosmogenetics that de-emphasizes essential determinants in favor of a reterritorialization that constantly struggles to understand whether something is internally or externally political in nature. abstractions have this power to divide that allow them to divide their own functional territory, abstractions can spawn abstractions in place of themselves to serve as mediators between their functional role and their actual relations of effects.
lukas simultaneously argues that abstractions need to be categorically seperated by the degree to which they can enact systemic violence, yet he uses the same abstracted concepts to explain both the ideal realized abstractions of his savior, and the very same abstracted violence that very likely those exact same systems propagate, however, under the guise that the problem is that the technology is weaponized conceptually (humans view towards property is posession and control, whereas inhumane planteology's view towards the earth is instrumentality, surveillance (sensing) and transformation into data). the deleuzian-simondonian notion of capture is the ontological precondition for data, because infrastructures convert processes into signals, which equates representation with governmentability.
the abstractive concept of data emerges geo-onto-techno-genetico-politically from control which emerges from capture. for lukas, simultaneously the human is the reason for control and possession, yet the dataification of the world-as-representation directly corresponds to an ontological dimension that abstracts representation into governable constructs, which is only an abstracted form of control itself. control is directly epigenetical to data, so how can humans be the mediator of a concept that doesnt belong to them, yet that they are the original mediated creation for/f, yet that they are at fault for mistakably using in the way they do, that yet retains its dynamic essence all at once?
he defends his uncharacteristic yielding of conceptual contradictions between his ethics and ontology by prophetizing motives of cybernetic intelligence that both do away with current ethical constraints, yet still both process the latent discharge of existing discourses and draw on etymological assumptions with free weights, scheduling a compromise between beurocratic-systems syntax and justice-oriented terminology, which is quite common in thought groups that don't divide technocratic classes from sociological distinctions, such as moldbug and scott alexander, however, what is pivotal for lukas is not how but where he defends civil discourses, and where he allows cybernetic intelligence to step in. the places where technocratic apparatuses are allowed to peak in are where lukas believes there is ethically uncontested territory, and he does the job of filling the empty ontological container with the most brutal and serializing term every time. not once does he step away from his techno-optimism.
he impressively uses ben woodards planetological chaos, thacker's world-without-us, spivak's superior alterity of the planet, lyotards inhuman and latours terrestrial all in one paragraph in order to essentially polemically give value to unidentifiable over identifiable intelligence. techno-optimism is completely different from worship, because it anticipates the existing mystification of grand and invisible forces over any actual such forces, it weaponizes speculative power not in favor of deleuze's novel virtuality but in favor of previous imaginaries of total creative capacity, the grounds for difference and multiplicity are essentially being wagered in a type of crypto-speculation over the value of the planet itself in the face of crisis.
we put the world on a scale, then start to measure it against us, we say, whatever is us is nothing other than something stronger that the world already contains through us in itself, and it will use this power in order to launch us too far away from ourselves, so that we may no longer need to even conceptualize what a strategy is. in terms of governance, lukas still has us inhabiting the realm of politics, but the post-politicality is actually cosmological in nature. this cosmology has never ever not been an allegory for even more politics, however this doesnt mean that on its own it doesnt stand.
against basically a majority of critical anthropotechnical philosophy, the new tech philosophers such as lukas are optimistic about the instrumental power of technology, constantly projecting a programmatic viewpoint of carrying it over, not just a positivistic but almost evangelical view of its passive and attributive potential, almost as if they are blind to the entire history of technogovernance and the way that these systems go hand-in-hand with political repression, in fact even to a certain extent following feenberg and the design argument and all of the predecessors to this including langdon winner, jacques ellul, bernard stiegler and so on, that they are built for this very reason, that it is impossible to seperate any agential or consequential product they emerge around from the goal of using them to achieve a higher order of division.
abstraction seen as an instrument of division can't be rushed to be argued in favor of just because the "virus-to-come" is a blank slate where, if we are heuristically careful enough, we can build only the models that aren't used to subjugate, as if the very idea of the direction of the design (not even the design itself) isnt hierarchically modeled around the logic of domination, as you may see someone like kittler who lukas mentions in the interview argue, that, since war accelerates technological production, winner's artifacts themselves are a consequence of it.
technoambivalent philosophers seem to not be able to comprehend that the "blank slatedness" of technological abstractions is a built in feature of a wider logic of domination that they are built around, and that the indifferent design philosophy isnt meant as an ethical expansion point but a selling-point or rqather a conventional matrice that the artifact doesnt "promises" but holds as a functional feature which is not just a market comrpomise but a form of the symbolic power of its territorial reach, the overarching logic of which is not attributable to its more micro-potentive ability.
ethical contamination is the first breach of technology, and serially everything that follows from this chain cannot just be ideologically turned around to serve opposite means, our very idea of technology could already be infested with a mindset that contaminates all our future models, even if they're built from scratch. just like how technology appears out of nowhere as a new logic, we cannot be sure that the logic itself doesnt have the same power of incidentality as the appearance of technology itself does.
in a certain sense, lukas weaponizes the concept of the human not only within the bounds of arguing it as the point-limit of the uselessness of politics in face of actual totalizing machines that are self-subserviently ethically precise and therefore purely instrumental in their smooth operationability, but in a certain sense, the human metaphor itself is the juxtaposed aspect of the political being tranquilized by the abstractive apparatus. abstraction comes in to literally kill the human, which hilariously ends abstractions themselves. this is why i argued that the flat ontology becomes a realized abstraction, the world is literally "flattened" in the image of nuclear disaster flattening the terrestrial gaia, the world's values are flattened as a result of equalizing smooth processes on top of chaotic enviornments metaphorically.
the human is attacked as a stand-in for chaotic actors on top of smooth surfaces (nature), where instead smoothness is operationalized and chaos is developed to serve as a propagation "on top of" the human politic. the inner contradictions of the human are beaten by stronger outer contradictions that flatten the human, smooth operations take over to to abstract conflict itself, removing conflict as a battleground, where it no longer matters that the human is even trying to compromise its own identity, because divine constructs are coming in and speculating on the conditions for what the conflict over control even is, rather than in the midst of control as a cybernetic-historical entity on its own and within its inner range.
the reason i am finding a weakness in likavcans system is because i myself believe that abstraction can be reappropriated, but in this work it is simply taken as a metaphorical stand in for the power of abstractions over all other models of exchange, meaning none of the conditions of abstraction are contested in this work, only all of its excitements. if abstraction wants to be scaled and reimagined, we have to wage a war in the middle of abstractions themselves, for example figuring out how to ontologize metaphorical descriptions of control. take as an example the centrifuge
lets take an example of an abstraction, the centrifuge, which abstracts centrifugal force by operationalizing separation as principle: the outward thrust becomes a sorting algorithm. centrifugal motion—originally an energetic tendency—is captured as a mechanism of differentiation, turning dispersion into a productive filter, which formalizes escape as sortation. in this example its clear that the performed abstraction is instrumental and functional in character, and instrumental reason argues that all functionality is a product of political meta-concern, meaning function is either the grounds for debate over its existence, or the grounds of debate over its control, but not if its type. if we wanted a science of function, we'd have to understand how to actually create a politics of functionality that resembles a science rather than a social politics, or in other words that can categorically distinguish conflict as compromise without spawning in any contradictions.
if we wanted to not escape abstraction but wager and compromise it, we'd argue that we should only selectively use the centripetal force of the earths rotation around the sun to enact any type of centrifugal force on a subject, in whichever way we can even use such a macro-voluminous proportional force, ceasing to create our own centrifuges or even our own centripetes that are not dependant on the existing dynamics of such forces. or otherwise if we take an cross-categorical stance, that we should examine existing forms of capture or control in nature in order to organize and select abstractions according to consistent logics.
or otherwise and contrary, from an inessentialist stance that we should only organize originally far-seperated abstractions from any organic occurances, such as attempting to create entirely new physical forces to abuse rather than regarding existing organic occurances of abstracted concepts. or that we should only mix far-abstracted cybernetic concepts with close-abstracted mechanical abstractions, or the other way around, far-abstracted mechanics with closely-abstracted cybernetics.
to put it another way, to wager abstractions means to constantly reconsider the boundaries of technology outside of its functional premises. the meta-consideration of abstractions follows not the science of the instrument but the science of possibility itself, calculating possible interactions and trying to form an inner harmony takes precedent over the invention of all possible combinations between cybernetic constructs (communication) and physical constructs (existing assemblages). the science of mixture-abstractive is the compromise between which forms of synthetic interaction in the world get to proliferate, and not how to form these abstractions.
abstractions are self-formable through the logics of their ontogenetics, meaning the politics is located in the tension between function and consideration, not insight and origination. science itself sees its territorial bounds as a testing ground for instrumentation, for the spawning of interactions, which are politicized as within the domain of the experiment, that innovation is the cause of harm. however, innovation itself can escape the principles of the experiment itself, which would only take a disproportionate amount of stagnation to occur. the accident itself can become the grounds for experimentation. this example, where accidents produce innovations rather than active testing, is yet another reconsideration of realized abstractions, which is the domain of this very science, meaning that every functional abstraction is already a site of division, where every function carries latent political topography.
lukas himself considers topologies as a part of scaled abstraction, however his cruical error is that he takes the politics of abstraction to be a decision between forms of governance that prevent ontological collapse, when really its not an intra but interpolitical issue, abstractive politics should be about deciding which synthetic couplings the world may sustain without ontological collapse, not which ontological consistencies can be dragged as safe mediators that prevent exterior collapse, even if internally they cook everything apart.
lukas, by widening his lens, attempts to compromise between consistency and maintenance through the complexity, multiplicity and difference he finds in dynamic processes, however as i stated earlier, this risks not differentiating his project as a grounds for speculating whether this is actually sustainable - whether it is actually true hyperstitiously that this is the case. it remains unclear whether new materialism is a vechile for the real time-crafting of biocentrically (habitable) difference as a political refugee, or whether it is simply the prophetic stating of its inevitability as a gesture towards the recongition of dynamic systems, which, new materialism wants to naturally position itself as the latter between these two - however remaining unclear.
you may argue that my re-proposed abstractive method is purely materialist-dialectical in nature, but on the contrary, i believe in the linguistic domain similar conquests can be made, which was my problem with lukas reappropriation of abstractive vocabulary without any reconsideration. it is not necessarily that we ought to be careful all the way acrosss with the terms we use, because then we simply can reproduce logics even with attempted softer terminology, instead the text has to somewhat perform the exorcism directly. more on that in other writings.