Re: post-note on (topological) continuous transformations,

Having said, that, absolutely this project is part of building a radical (to Western eyes, especially after 70 years of laboring under digital conceits and algorithmic thought, amplified by conventionally globalized and computational capital) alternative journey to alternative politics, art and techne.  

My goal here is just to seed the discussion with profoundly mutant notions.   I invite you to work with me on drawing in examples, cases, and experimental ventures in the political, economic, technological, institutional, and infrastructural spheres! 

Estimating optimistically, it is 3 books worth of work, hand in hand with many people, just to create a shadow-puppet play between this one and any one of those spheres.   Art, if it is not merely allegorical, critical or self-expression, may sometimes constitute a shortcut.   

Xin Wei
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On Jul 2, 2020, at 9:01 PM, sxw asu <sxwasu@gmail.com> wrote:

(1) The “continuity” that Will pointed to, referring to a shared semantic / epistemic ground enabling a conversation that in Stenger’s terms risks exclusion or erasure imposed by asymmetric power, is, as far as I can tell,  pretty radically disjoint from what mathematicians mean by continuous.   So for the sake of conversation, let me suggest that we use a distinct word to point to that situation.   

(2) If for the purposes of exploring ontogenesis and individuation, we adopt the "as-if" of thinking in terms of verbs and adverbs instead of nouns, in terms of disequalities and fields in place of graph-theoretic entity-predicate-relation tropes, let’s try to get a working understanding of transformation and of topological i.e. what mathematicians call continuous transformation.  To that end, there’s the workshop on Primordial Concepts in Topology and Riemannian Geometry @ Vera Bühlmann and Ludger Hovestadt’s Metalithikum symposium

@14:00 Topological space (primordial to Riemannian manifold and fiber bundle, detourned by D&G, after Lautmann)
@28:00 continuous mapping (transformation)


What Is Topological Media?

Topological media for me is a set of working concepts, the simplest set of material and embodied articulations or expressions that allows us to engage in speculative engineer- ing, or philosophy as art, and to slip the leg irons and manacles of grammar, syntax, finite symbol systems, information and informatics, database schema, rules and pro- cedures. I argue that topological media is an articulation of continuous matter that permits us to relinquish a priori objects, subjects, egos, and yet constitute value and novelty.

Topology provides alternative, tough, durable, supple, and—to use Deleuze’s term— anexact concepts with which to articulate the living world, concepts like continuity, open set, convergence, density, accumulation and limit points, nondimensional, infi- nite, continuous transformation, topological space. To play on a motto from Latour, we have always been topological. It’s only in modern, or I should say modernist, times that we’ve been so enamored of digital representations, discrete logic, digital computa- tion, and quantization. I believe these concepts of continuity, openness, and transfor- mation also can inform how we evaluate art and technology and enrich the way we make them. There is nothing mathematically fancy about the elementary topology with which I begin, and this accords with my aim to make richness without complica- tion. Nonetheless, impelled by the way we approach ethico-aesthetic creation, we will appeal to significantly more developed mathematical patterns, most of which rigor- ously and poetically exceed the digital, discrete, computational domain.

The discrete drops out as a special case, by the way, so we are not losing anything of the graph theories (from syntax parsing trees to actor network theory), but just seeing them in their place would be enormously useful. The space of discrete graphs is so sparse as to be measure-theoretically null, entirely negligible at the human, meso scale.

It could be that one of the lures of the discrete has been the notion of choice, discrete choice, which in turn has been associated with freedom. But choice ≠ freedom. And indeed superfluity of choice may simply obscure freedom.

The lure is the possibility that these concepts could provide material and embodied ways to shape, unshape, rework, knead the world. Contemporary engineering is not based on the noncomputable, infinite, and continuous; therein lies the conceptual and technical challenge and interest. 

(PETM, p 5-6)

post-note on (topological) continuous transformations,

(1) The “continuity” that Will pointed to, referring to a shared semantic / epistemic ground enabling a conversation that in Stenger’s terms risks exclusion or erasure imposed by asymmetric power, is, as far as I can tell,  pretty radically disjoint from what mathematicians mean by continuous.   So for the sake of conversation, let me suggest that we use a distinct word to point to that situation.   

(2) If for the purposes of exploring ontogenesis and individuation, we adopt the "as-if" of thinking in terms of verbs and adverbs instead of nouns, in terms of disequalities and fields in place of graph-theoretic entity-predicate-relation tropes, let’s try to get a working understanding of transformation and of topological i.e. what mathematicians call continuous transformation.  To that end, there’s the workshop on Primordial Concepts in Topology and Riemannian Geometry @ Vera Bühlmann and Ludger Hovestadt’s Metalithikum symposium

@14:00 Topological space (primordial to Riemannian manifold and fiber bundle, detourned by D&G, after Lautmann)
@28:00 continuous mapping (transformation)


What Is Topological Media?

Topological media for me is a set of working concepts, the simplest set of material and embodied articulations or expressions that allows us to engage in speculative engineer- ing, or philosophy as art, and to slip the leg irons and manacles of grammar, syntax, finite symbol systems, information and informatics, database schema, rules and pro- cedures. I argue that topological media is an articulation of continuous matter that permits us to relinquish a priori objects, subjects, egos, and yet constitute value and novelty.

Topology provides alternative, tough, durable, supple, and—to use Deleuze’s term— anexact concepts with which to articulate the living world, concepts like continuity, open set, convergence, density, accumulation and limit points, nondimensional, infi- nite, continuous transformation, topological space. To play on a motto from Latour, we have always been topological. It’s only in modern, or I should say modernist, times that we’ve been so enamored of digital representations, discrete logic, digital computa- tion, and quantization. I believe these concepts of continuity, openness, and transfor- mation also can inform how we evaluate art and technology and enrich the way we make them. There is nothing mathematically fancy about the elementary topology with which I begin, and this accords with my aim to make richness without complica- tion. Nonetheless, impelled by the way we approach ethico-aesthetic creation, we will appeal to significantly more developed mathematical patterns, most of which rigor- ously and poetically exceed the digital, discrete, computational domain.

The discrete drops out as a special case, by the way, so we are not losing anything of the graph theories (from syntax parsing trees to actor network theory), but just seeing them in their place would be enormously useful. The space of discrete graphs is so sparse as to be measure-theoretically null, entirely negligible at the human, meso scale.

It could be that one of the lures of the discrete has been the notion of choice, discrete choice, which in turn has been associated with freedom. But choice ≠ freedom. And indeed superfluity of choice may simply obscure freedom.

The lure is the possibility that these concepts could provide material and embodied ways to shape, unshape, rework, knead the world. Contemporary engineering is not based on the noncomputable, infinite, and continuous; therein lies the conceptual and technical challenge and interest. 

(PETM, p 5-6)

cap and trade “indulgences” as an exquisite example of carbon capitalism

For the Alter-Eco Infrastructures Studio, we could take a look at cap and trade “indulgences” as an exquisite example of carbon capitalism perpetuating world-scale problems.

People debunked this crisply 20 years ago.  So what’s changed?

https://therealnews.com/columns/climate-crisis-keystone-xl-supreme-cap-and-trade-takes-hit-and-california-geoengineering
 

California Cap and Trade Case

In a June 12 ruling, the California Court of Appeal shot down a cap and trade system proposed in San Diego County which had served as a centerpiece of its Climate Action Plan proposed in 2011.

Per the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, every county must have a Climate Action Plan. San Diego County, the second most populous in the state and fifth most nationwide, proposed in 2011 to utilize a cap-and-trade carbon offset plan to enable real estate developers to continue “sprawl” style bailout of housing. That scheme, which allows those developers to purchase external carbon offsets as emissions allowances, came under fire by the climate and environmental movement though.

Responding, those groups—including Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Climate Action Campaign and others—filed a lawsuit saying that the cap-and-trade system will not solve the county’s climate issues, but rather exacerbate them. The groups argued that the plan ran counter to the California Environmental Quality Act because it did not properly analyze foreseeable emissions increases which could occur if put into place.

Cap-and-trade has long faced criticism from the climate justice movement for offering a de facto “indulgence” system for polluters—such as the fossil fuel industry, Big Ag and in this case Big Real Estate—to continue business as usual and then pay back for its emissions sins via offsets. Cap-and-trade also does little, they say, to tackle the pollution impacts faced by communities with people who are disproportionately working class and people of color.

In California, emissions from vehicles create 41% of the state’s greenhouse gas inventory, overwhelmingly the top emissions source in California. The plaintiffs in the case argued that the county’s cap-and-trade plan would only incentivize more buildout of housing in the county’s outskirts in its wildlands, in turn putting more vehicles on the roads.

Because its policy would have major impacts on the state’s ability to meet climate goals, California Attorney General Xavier also intervened in the case in October 2019, filing an amicus brief detailing why the state opposed the county’s plan.

“Ultimately, the CAP in its current form will perpetuate current sprawling development patterns, which will impede the ability of the region and State to reach their long-term climate objectives,” Becerra wrote of the San Diego County plan in his October 2019 amicus brief. “This is particularly concerning because of the crucial role of local governments in obtaining important [vehicle miles traveled] reductions.”

Ultimately, the Court of Appeal agreed, concluding that the county’s plan creates “unenforceable performance standards and improperly defers and delegates mitigation.”

“The CAP is not inconsistent with the County’s General Plan,” wrote the Court. “However, the County abused its discretion in approving the CAP because the CAP’s projected additional greenhouse gas emissions from projects requiring a general plan amendment is not supported by substantial evidence.”

San Diego County climate advocates celebrated the court ruling, calling it a win against “sprawl” style real estate development

From the heart of Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter

Dear Synthesis Travelers and Friends of Prototyping Social Forms:

If you have a snippet of time today before today's PSF seminar, I hope you'll enjoy the opening Preface and the chapter 1 “Why This Book?”, skipping the description of the art projects pp 10-15!   It’s written to read comfortably aloud.

If we set aside transcendentalist appeals to universal immortal frameworks structuring our experience, and in the absence of any Archimedean point external to subjective experience upon which we can lever social and ethico-aesthetic judgment, what remains? How can any sense of sociality, solidarity, pathic subjectivity emerge? Not from an atomic world, because we run into complexity and the problem of intersubjectivity—the problem of how monads or groups of monads sum to one society. However, if we start with a plenum—already one substance—then we have, not a starting place—an Archimedean leverage point—but a magma of costructuration that can be the substrate of subjectivation. This magma is already continuous and laden with value, saturated with time and all other quality-creating processes. This magma is not reductionist because it admits infinity and the imaginary—with boundlessly many modes of potential being. All monads, being formed in/out of this magma, are already touching, therefore making ethical action possible. The dynamical behavior of the world’s distributed media is costructured with our noematic experience of the world. Hence the apparently simultaneous emergence of shared patterns of behavior or recognition. The contemporaneity is an artifact of the contemporaneous time slice (or Poincaré section) of the evolving world. It’s the very acausality of that contemporaneous region coimplicated with the nonforced, nondeterminist realm of [poietic] action that is ethical.


I take the liberty of deleting and disavowing the “one substance” clause, and of adding poietic,  and of replacing nonperforming by nontheatrical.
And… here are some tactics that we’ve tried and found fertile, even life-affirming.   See you today 3:00 - 4:30 in zoom!


Epilogue: Conceptual Tactics 


This book does not presume to explain what the world really is made of or how the world really works, or what it really means to be human. It does not “argue” but gives a sense of how one might regard the world with a certain as-if. Inspired by the tactics of a Zhuangzi against the logicians and Confucian order, a de Certeau or the situationists vis-à-vis their city, and Grotowski’s nonperforming [non-theatrical] performance laboratory, I’ve collected a few conceptual tactics over the years, a set of orienting tropisms, what Stengers and Whitehead have called lures for feeling and thinking. They are particu- larly elaborate lures, informed by political, artistic, and technological practices, but they are not recipes or methodologies. (Parenthetically speaking, methodology comes after the practice becomes a process that no longer generates knowledge.) These tactics seem to recur with enough salience to be worth recording. Just as the final chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s Milles plateaux constituted anything but the answers-at-the- end-of-the-book for their reader, let me offer these tactics as a measure against the development of any methodology or school of practice or theory.

We have seen enough leadening in the wake of inspired work (of Marx, Grotowski, Freud, Heraclitus, Christopher Alexander, Deleuze, Guattari) to make me feel more than a little concerned about how readers may “apply” this book in their own work. You have been advised.

(1) Dynamical thinking, topological dynamics, is not so much a metaphysics (which would again be making truth claims) but a style, a way of thinking and making that is sensitive to ethico-aesthetic poiesis.

(2) Use any formal structure, any form, any theory, any representation, but as a trellis, not a carapace for thinking.

(3) Turn nouns into verbs.

(4) Instead of making a theory that makes propositions of the form “X is Y,” try making a theory that turns presumed identities into disequalities, “X > Y” or “X 􏰄⊊ Y.” This is not merely a distinction but a local gradient. Recognize that the vectoriality of the gradient is itself part of your construction, so there you are not making a totalizing claim.

(5) Avoid monocausality, reductionism, looking for the primitive, the ur-explanation, the originary cause or event. A category or predicate P so universal that everything is P is useless. If you define a category S or a predicate P, see if as many things of interest are not in S as are, or do not have predicate P as do.

(6) Aim for richness and multiplicity, which is not complexity.

(7) In art, use the concepts to transform not just the appearance but the making as well. Be dissatisfied with allegory.

(8) Instead of making identities, use a modified form of implication, meaning not “necessarily-leads-to” but “enables.” My suggestion that we use implication in the sense of enabling removes the necessity and the imperative, and replaces those with permitting, scaffolding, trellising, and sustaining as partial actions (analogous to partial objects) to be defined fully only in the event. 

________________________________________________


On Jul 1, 2020, at 3:32 PM, sxw asu <sxwasu@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all, 

As a reminder, and referring to Muindi’s summary of the first phase of the PSF seminars, our goal with these “lite” sessions of the Alter-Eco seminars is to rehearse possible seminar-studios that could be offered under the general thematic of “Alter-Eco” by having discussion leaders step through a sketch of the seminar or studio.

Once we step through the “sketch” of the event, we’ll offer feedback on the content, references, pedagogical design, format.   Each session will come with a proposed set of readings, and some minimal recommended material to pre-view. 

Really looking forward to tomorrow! Our first session (with follow-ups over the subsequent two weeks) will be dedicated to:

Description

If asked what the world is made of, we can say it’s made of objects, or we can say it’s made of stuff. This seminar takes the point of view of stuff, the stuff of which objects are made.  But instead of asking what stuff the world is made of, we ask how the stuff changes, how things and relations emerge and transform.   Repurposing Galileo’s legendary observation – Eppur si muove – we will read and discuss theories of dynamic, historicity, process, and temporality.  Participants will bring, create and write about examples from their own practices and studies. 

Session

  • Presentation: Transformation, Process, Continuity and Field (Xin Wei)
  • Working vocabulary: We will workshop some of the most salient terms so that they may provide some conceptual scaffolding and guidance for subsequent sessions
  • Open discussion
  • With the time remaining, start gleaning some feedback on content, purpose, and format 

Time: 3:00-4:30pm (ET), 07/02/20

Zoom link here

Resources

** Readings are optional! We list them here so that you may go through them on your own time, and know what will be referenced during the session. 


Gabriele + Xin Wei

On Jun 27, 2020, at 9:00 PM, Muindi F Muindi <muindi@uw.edu> wrote:

Hi team,

As you know, I've already drafted a summary of our last PSF session here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pOI2FqFj6h3w7auPMjMMrX-30Ak0_ZYlU_aGlykiy3Q/edit?usp=drivesdk

Please do review the above and make additions, comments, and revisions. Then feel free to post the text wherever you'd like. As I mentioned in the Slack, I will be drafting summaries, like the one linked above, withinh 48 hours of all future, Phase 2, sessions of PSF

As I also mentioned in the Slack channel, I'd like to produce one longer summary of the previous, Phase 1, sessions. To help me do so, I'd like to meet with any one insterested in such summaries to chat about what they would like me to extract from the previous sessions. If you have time next week to meet please shoot me a Slack.

Best,

Muindi

___________________________________________
________________________________________________

PSF --> Alter-Eco Seminar: Emergence, Ontogenesis, Individuation

Hi all, 

As a reminder, and referring to Muindi’s summary of the first phase of the PSF seminars, our goal with these “lite” sessions of the Alter-Eco seminars is to rehearse possible seminar-studios that could be offered under the general thematic of “Alter-Eco” by having discussion leaders step through a sketch of the seminar or studio.

Once we step through the “sketch” of the event, we’ll offer feedback on the content, references, pedagogical design, format.   Each session will come with a proposed set of readings, and some minimal recommended material to pre-view. 

Really looking forward to tomorrow! Our first session (with follow-ups over the subsequent two weeks) will be dedicated to:

Description

If asked what the world is made of, we can say it’s made of objects, or we can say it’s made of stuff. This seminar takes the point of view of stuff, the stuff of which objects are made.  But instead of asking what stuff the world is made of, we ask how the stuff changes, how things and relations emerge and transform.   Repurposing Galileo’s legendary observation – Eppur si muove – we will read and discuss theories of dynamic, historicity, process, and temporality.  Participants will bring, create and write about examples from their own practices and studies. 

Session

  • Presentation: Transformation, Process, Continuity and Field (Xin Wei)
  • Working vocabulary: We will workshop some of the most salient terms so that they may provide some conceptual scaffolding and guidance for subsequent sessions
  • Open discussion
  • With the time remaining, start gleaning some feedback on content, purpose, and format 

Time: 3:00-4:30pm (ET), 07/02/20

Zoom link here

Resources

** Readings are optional! We list them here so that you may go through them on your own time, and know what will be referenced during the session. 


Gabriele + Xin Wei

On Jun 27, 2020, at 9:00 PM, Muindi F Muindi <muindi@uw.edu> wrote:

Hi team,

As you know, I've already drafted a summary of our last PSF session here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pOI2FqFj6h3w7auPMjMMrX-30Ak0_ZYlU_aGlykiy3Q/edit?usp=drivesdk

Please do review the above and make additions, comments, and revisions. Then feel free to post the text wherever you'd like. As I mentioned in the Slack, I will be drafting summaries, like the one linked above, withinh 48 hours of all future, Phase 2, sessions of PSF

As I also mentioned in the Slack channel, I'd like to produce one longer summary of the previous, Phase 1, sessions. To help me do so, I'd like to meet with any one insterested in such summaries to chat about what they would like me to extract from the previous sessions. If you have time next week to meet please shoot me a Slack.

Best,

Muindi

___________________________________________
________________________________________________