Synthesis

Contested & Erased Energy Knowledges (Dundee)

1. Metabolism as a Material-energetic Computation

Sha Xin Wei

The Turing model of computation (or equivalently, Church’s lambda-calculus) is a purely formal concept. And for some 80 years, electronic machines materially realizing Turing-equivalent computation have been architected to maintain the immaterial illusions of Turing computation: (1) replacing ontology by tokens, in particular binary data; (2) the immateriality and omnitemporality of representation; (3) the conceit that computation takes no physical energy and no space.  On the other hand, the metabolic is conditioned — though not determined — by thermodynamic energetics, friction, analog continuity, and complexity, with the extra features of mortality, natality, dense metastability, anti-entropy (negentropy), indeterminacy and non-prestatability. Is there any way to associate these seemingly antipodal families of notions?  Rather than reduce the metabolic to the formal (as done by machine pattern classification and synthesis, computer games, a-life, assembly theory), I speculate what alternative concept of “computation” might enjoy some of the features or effects of the metabolic. And following a pragmatic approach I propose some performative experiments from Synthesis @ ASU.

2. Metabolism and Capitalist Social Form

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia

A crucial moment in the development of Marx’s materialism was his deployment of the concept of metabolism to theorise the human relationship with nature. The metabolic framework situates human social activity within an energetic rather than conceptual economy, marking a decisive break with idealism. Yet for Marx social life remains unintelligible as a merely energetic transfer, for that transfer always takes place in historically specific forms, bound to historically specific social relations, institutions, technologies, identities, ideologies, etc.. The critical force of Marx’s account of Capital lies precisely in the analysis of the social forms that mediate the human-nature metabolism in the modern epoch. This paper examines this link, between metabolism and capitalist social form in Marx’s thought, in order to clarify the stakes of the present ecological crisis.

3. Exergy and Ecological Economics

Violeta Garrido and Ramón del Buey Cañas

It is well known that, at least since the publication of the report to the Club of Rome in 1971, thinking in depth about the ecological problems of our time means the understanding of the origin and nature of our ways of living and, moreover, seeing that these are coupled to a type of metabolism that is resulting in a severe erosion of the web of life and an accelerated waste of our material and energy resources. This is another way to pose that, in addition to a knowledge of the social, institutional, imaginary and motivational construction that sets in motion the current capitalist orders, an integrated project of ecological economy also needs to address the dynamics of energy and material exchanges that are established at its base. And for this, a solid knowledge of the functioning of these energetic and material dynamics at a fundamental level seems unavoidable. 

This is precisely what the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen pointed to, when he claimed the crucial importance of entropy in the study and conceptualization of a truly eco-integrative economic proposal. At this point, however, a crucial question arises: does entropy have the potential to become an integrative concept for ecological economics, and is it possible to construct a mutually intelligible interdisciplinary approach to economic processes that takes entropy as its cornerstone? Our hypothesis, which is supported by the numerous and crucial works of Antonio Valero and Alicia Valero, is that it is not possible. From their point of view, although the economy must undoubtedly be taken into account, and incorporate thermodynamics in its accounting, entropy is a bad indicator for it. Why? Our talk proposes an answer to this question, important also to address some crucial debates around the notions of ‘energy’ and ‘exergy’, which are transversal to the fields of ecological economics, feminist economics, ecofeminism and ecosocialism.

4. Fluidics and materialist logics

Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra

As the ongoing “return to matter” trickles down into reinvented glossaries and research methodologies motivated by new materialist thinking, it remains unclear how it challenges our understanding of computation. Even within a resurging field like fluidic computation there is little, if any, theoretical engagement with the material affordances of fluids as a mode of computation.

Developed at first to model post-war national economies (MONIAC) while anticipating the Cold War hysteria as it could operate in an ionized environment, fluidic computation could carry out computations dynamically by solving multiple differential equations simultaneously. In more recent years, scaled down to microfluidics, its operations have been reintroduced in the health sector in lab-on-a-chip (LOC) research.

In this presentation I would like to approach fluidic computation from a theoretical standpoint by re-interpreting some of its key components, and focus on its materially constituted logic, whereby negation is not the result of a posited non-being (NOT) but the outcome of turbulence disturbance. To do so, I will examine Michel Serres’ The Birth of Physics, in which he notes that when a laminar flow of atoms is disturbed by turbulence is what leads to existence. But such turbulence, in fluidic engineering, is what defines the ‘NOT’ operator. From this study case I will conclude by further complexifying the notion of negation through Paolo Virno’s “linguistic anthropology”.

The present panel proposes to sketch out some aspects of a desirable reform of ontology and epistemology aimed at reappraising the relation between form and energy. Taking a lead from Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, a special emphasis will be placed on his concept of ground: ‘what is determinant and plays an energetic role are not forms but that which carries the forms, which is to say their ground; the ground, while perpetually marginal with respect to attention, is what harbors the dynamisms.’ (Simondon, Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, pp. 60-62) Simondon’s approach indeed enables us to conceive of the participation of forms in a ground that is dynamic and rich in singularities. This notion of ground could not be further removed from the disembodied, neutral backdrop of transcendental notions of space and time, in which geometric points without extension and lines without thickness have ruled the ontology and epistemology of classical physics. (Longo, Le cauchemar de prométhée, Puf, 2023) 

1.  Potentials, forces that carve out their path: Simondon’s concept of ground

Cécile Malaspina

2. Stress-energy-momentum tensors as ontogenetic operators

Sha Xin Wei

For Simondon, “information is never relative to a single and homogeneous reality but to two orders in a state of disparation…never deposited in a [given] form…[but] is the tension between two disparate reals.”  The elastic dynamics of his material example, clay, is modeled by what materials scientists call the stress-energy tensor.  I consider this tensor and its general relativistic analogue: the stress-energy-momentum tensor not to reduce phenomena to physics, but to see what insights we may derive from such non-Newtonian figures of thought, for a materialist, haptic, textural (distributed), approach to how “emergent energetic directionalities and/or networks structure human and nonhuman trajectories, behaviour, and affordances.”   I propose to re-earth discussions of energy from dematerializing, transcendental versions of informatics and cybernetics, and orient towards a metabolic understanding of dynamics.

3. Energetics, Magics, and Metaphysics: On the Engineering Metaphorical Devices

Muindi Fanuel Muindi

Since its inception, the science of energy, or “energetics”, has informed the researches of occultists and philosophers, serving as a guiding model and metaphor for the creation of new concepts of the uncanny, the other-worldly, the ontological, and the ethical. Magical and metaphysical thinking have, in turn, informed the science of energetics, serving as forerunners, presaging unexpected findings and paradigm shifts. This presentation investigates the energetic tropes that permeate the varied discourses that characterize magics and metaphysics and, in turn, the forms of magical and metaphysical thinking that permeate the scientific discourse of energetics.

To this end, it will engage with five forms of energetic agency and energetic agents: conduction and the conductors that channel energy; transduction and the transducers that transform energy; resistance and the resistors that dissipate energy; capacitance and the capacitors that intervene between conductors to store-up energy; and lastly, inductance and the inductors that convene (or coil) conductors around them to store-up energy. One particular family of energetic devices will serve as informative anecdote for this investigation: analog radios and their tuned circuits — consisting of a resistor (R), an inductor (L), and a capacitor (C) configured to form a harmonic oscillator.

Following this line of inquiry, the presentation will consider the manner in which Colonial Science tacitly accepts metaphors drawn from the magical and metaphysical languages of “the West” and rejects metaphors drawn from the magical and metaphysical languages of “the Rest”.

4. A relational ontology grounded on constraint

Alicia Juarrero

Western anthropologists studying the indigenous cultures of Black Africans on the continent have, all too often, been intent upon searching for “old ways” that have persisted in spite of the “modern” history of the continent, hoping to gain insights into “pre-modern” and “primitive” peoples. The reality is, however, that the cultural practices of indigenous Black Africans on the continent observed by these anthropologists have all been formed, to some degree, in response to one of the greatest sequences of geographic, demographic, and historiographic catastrophes, from the Slave Trade, to the Colonial Scramble for Africa, to the Organized Abandonment and Underdevelopment of the Postcolonies.

Similarly, Western anthropologists examining aspects of continental Black African cultures that seemingly persist in diasporic Black African cultures have, all too often, imagined that they are observing “old ways” that have persisted in spite of the genocidal, ethnocidal, and ecocidal machinations of racial capitalism. In reality, however, they are observing the dynamic play of homologous and analogous developments and recombinatory Trans-Atlantic crossings, back and forth, between the cultural ecologies of the continent and the diaspora -- all being responses (and not simply reactions) to the apocalyptic events of the past six centuries on both sides of the Middle Passage.

Taking the above into consideration, this lecture will attempt to re-articulate the schism between the continent and the diaspora as an evolving object of philosophical study by re-appropriating and re-evaluating the psychoanalytic anthropologies and ethnographies that informed Deleuze and Guattari’s Schizoanalysis, re-reading them alongside the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Fanon, George Jackson, Hortense Spillers, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman, R.A. Judy, Fred Moten, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. In so doing, this lecture will make the case for an Anti-Oedipal Blackness and an Afro-Schizoanalytics that runs counter to applications of Western psychoanalytics and schizoanalytics to anthropologies of continental and diasporic Black Africans.

BIO

Muindi Fanuel Muindi is a performance artist, philosopher, and poet, with Lacustrine Bantu roots in the Rift Forests of Eastern Congo and the Mara Wetlands in Tanzania. He is the author of six books of experimental poetry and prose.

Muindi’s philosophical perspective, his “deconstructive empiricism”, is deeply affected by Bantu philosophies and by Western deconstruction and schizoanalysis, and it is subtly informed by figures, functions, and structures from comparative biology and measure theory.

Muindi’s performances, his “philosophical gestures”, deploy dramatic devices to create sensuous experiences that deepen understandings of the metaphysical catastrophe of coloniality and that broaden the prospects of the Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences. Having adopted the motto “more grit, less kit”, Muindi’s performance practice privileges high latency, low fidelity, and seamful designs and the use of TEK (Transformative Ecological Knowledges).

Muindi is co-founder of the Fyrthyr Institute for Unsettling Technologies, coordinator of the “Prototyping Social Forms” and “Alter-Eco” research streams at the Synthesis Center, an organizer at the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines, co-producer and audio engineer for the Forested Niches podcast, and a member of the “After School”, “Technologies of Critical Conscientization”, and “Unwriting Nature” research communities at the Center for Art Design + Social Research.

Alice Oswald, celebrated poet and gardener

Sha Xin Wei, Director of Synthesis and Professor School of Arts, Media + Engineering at Arizona State University

Muriel Mambrini-Doudet, 1st Research Director, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, Doctoral program lead at the Learning Planet Institute

Brian MacCraith, Physicist, Senior Advisor to the President, Arizona State University (ASU); Chair, External Oversight Body of the Irish Defence Forces; Chair, Gaelic Players Association (GPA); Former President, Dublin City University (2010–2020)

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, artists, educators, and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice for the transformation of civic spaces and collective imaginaries

Muindi Fanuel Muindi