Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age by Alexander Galloway

Author:Alexander Galloway [Galloway, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: computers, history, political science, Public Policy, Science & Technology Policy, Social Science, Technology Studies
ISBN: 9781839763984
Google: 1i1GEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2021-11-02T23:26:07.604109+00:00

In Althusser’s analysis, no cause can simply effect a result in a linear sense. Rather, the economy is filtered through the super-structure in complex ways. Only later does this historical base “assert itself” and appear as a logical cause.

Deleuze also proposed an unusual theory of causality. He labeled it the “quasi-cause,” preferring to underdetermine rather than overdetermine its potency. Deleuze’s quasi-cause is an obscure and slippery concept with an extensive backstory. To explain the quasi-cause, Deleuze evoked the spirit of Joë Bousquet, the French surrealist poet who was paralyzed in World War I. “My wound existed before me,” claimed Bousquet. “I was born to embody it.”6 In a reversal of temporal sequence, Bousquet’s wound predated his wounded body. Bousquet’s body (and his identity) must graduate into a fate already assigned to it.

Deleuze addressed the quasi-cause in Series 14, Series 20, and Series 21 of his book The Logic of Sense from 1969. “The quasi-cause does not create, it ‘operates,’ and wills only what comes to pass,”7 Deleuze wrote, highlighting the elusive, retrospective glance of a cause that can appear only after its effects become evident. The quasi-cause is something like a primordial force that makes things communicate, but only after they have formed as such. A quasi-cause is inserted into a state of affairs; it cannot be said to precipitate a state of affairs. Or, in informal language, the quasi-cause “takes credit” after the outcome.

This weird form of causality has also captured the interest of Mark B. N. Hansen, the philosopher and media theorist who has, among other things, explored Whitehead’s theory of the subject. How can subjectivity operate at multiple levels of experience simultaneously? How can a subject exist at the level of conscious thought, but also at the level of physical sensation, or the level of atomic particles? For example, do the interactions of molecules cause certain sensations in the human body, and do these sensations cause higher-order conscious thoughts? What about the reverse?

To answer these questions, Hansen proposed the concept of “indirection.”8 Indirection refers to the way in which one level of a heterogenous system “indirectly” sends out causal effects upward into another layer of the system. These are not causes in the traditional sense of a causing b. They are nonlinear causes that emanate from one magnitude of scale to another magnitude, for example from the macro to the micro.

In Hansen’s view, life operates at different levels. At each level, phenomena remain autonomous and contained to their local milieu. Yet such phenomena can also produce epiphenomena that ripple upward or downward in the nested system of levels. These epiphenomena are not direct, causal results within the local milieu, but “indirect” results seeping orthogonally into other plateaus of the heterogeneous assemblage that constitutes subjective experience in the most general sense.

These various theories begin to describe the strange kind of causality at the heart of Barricelli’s mathematical ecosystem. How could Barricelli simply draw a grid of integers and thereby generate a living creature? How can a simple sequence

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