Qui Parle

Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955801

Eldridge, Aaron Frederick; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955808

How does tradition, a transmission of body and language, disclose a form of life? This article takes as its point of departure Talal Asad’s methodological pivot away from the modern concept of “belief” to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “form of life.” It elaborates the philosophical and anthropological implications of a rigorous notion of form of life through Asad’s concept of tradition and Martin Heidegger’s rereading of Aristotle’s physis. Interrupting this theoretical argument, a scene from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with Orthodox Christian ascetics in Lebanon exemplifies the challenge (and insistence) of form of life. The article then turns to consider a powerful reading of form of life grounded in Baruch Spinoza’s theory of emanation and vitalist univocity. While echoing the concerns of this article, Spinoza’s philosophical ethic defers the central question posed by “form of life” by making the latter a world-producing apparatus. That approach to form of life foregrounds the possibility of being other than what one is, rather than the crucial question of “still experience” and its dynamic repose. The article concludes by reading this still experience alongside C. Nadia Seremetakis’s work in Greece, which details the work of stillness and memory, the deathly pain of history, as sites where the cultivation of noncontemporaneous forms of life are brought into relief.

Dubilet, Alex; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955822

This essay proposes to rethink the conceptual associations that bind immanence to the secular and oppose it to (divine) transcendence. It asks: What if immanence is divorced from the conceptual opposition between the world and its openings to (divine) other(s), between enclosure and the trace of a transcendent outside? What might arise if immanence is severed from its link with secularity, if it ceases to be merely another conceptual support in secularism’s metaphysical armature? To pursue these questions, the essay engages a variety of materials, including medieval mysticism, anthropological critiques of the secular, work in Black studies, critiques of the subject, and François Laruelle’s non-philosophical thought. The result links immanence more intimately with dispossession than with the subject’s self-possession—and entwines it with the undercommons, as the atopic lowest place, rather than with the nomos and topos imposed by the (modern) world and its regime of the proper. Immanence is thought of as anti- and antenomian force, a groundless ground coming underneath the conceptual logics of the world, its normative order of things, and life lived according to its distributions. As a result, rather than a weapon in modernity’s endless self-justifying polemics with religion, immanence opens forth trajectories for its destitution and delegitimation.

Albrecht, Carina; Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong; Kurgan, Laura; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955829

In a 1954 essay Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton coined the term homophily to describe similarity-based friendship. They based their findings on friendship patterns among neighbors in a biracial housing project in the United States, using a combined quantitative and qualitative, empirical and speculative analysis of social processes. Since then homophily has become a guiding principle for network science: it is simply presumed that similarity breeds connection. But the unpublished study by Merton, Patricia S. West, and Marie Jahoda, which grounds Lazarsfeld and Merton’s analysis, and the Merton and Bureau of Applied Social Research’s archive reveal a more complex picture. This article engages with the data traces in the archive to reimagine what enabled the residents of the studied housing project to live in difference, as neighbors. The reanimation of this archive reveals the often counterintuitive characteristic of our imagined networks: they are about removal, not addition. It also opens up new imagined possibilities for a digital future beyond the hatred of the different and online echo chambers.

Zehner, Brett; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955815

This methodologically important essay aims to trace a genealogical account of Herbert Simon’s media philosophy and to contest the histories of artificial intelligence that overlook the organizational capacities of computational models. As Simon’s work demonstrates, humans’ subjection to large-scale organizations and divisions of labor is at the heart of artificial intelligence. As such, questions of procedures are key to understanding the power assumed by institutions wielding artificial intelligence. Most media-historical accounts of the development of contemporary artificial intelligence stem from the work of Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, especially the 1943 essay “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” Yet Simon’s revenge is perhaps that reinforcement learning systems adopt his prescriptive approach to algorithmic procedures. Computer scientists criticized Simon for the performative nature of his artificially intelligent systems, mainly for his positivism, but he defended his positivism based on his belief that symbolic computation could stand in for any reality and in fact shape that reality. Simon was not looking to actually re-create human intelligence; he was using coercion, bad faith, and fraud as tactical weapons in the reordering of human decision-making. Artificial intelligence was the perfect medium for his explorations.

Pasquinelli, Matteo; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955836

It was not a cybernetician but a neoliberal economist who provided the first systematic treatise on connectionism or, as it would later be known, the paradigm of artificial neural networks. In his 1952 book The Sensory Order, Friedrich Hayek advanced a connectionist theory of the mind already far more advanced than the theory of symbolic artificial intelligence, whose birth is redundantly celebrated in 1956 with the exalted Dartmouth workshop. In this text Hayek provided a synthesis of Gestalt principles and considerations of artificial neural networks, even speculating about the possibility of a machine fulfilling a similar function of “the nervous system as an instrument of classification,” auguring what we call today a “classifier algorithm.” This article shows how Hayek’s connectionist theory of the mind was used to shore up a specific and ideological view of the market and schematically reconstructs Hayek’s line of argumentation from his economic paradigm backward to his theory of cognition. Eventually, in Hayek’s interpretation, connectionism provides a relativist cognitive paradigm that justifies the “methodological individualism” of neoliberalism.

Parisi, Luciana; Morgan, William; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955843

This interview with the digital media theorist Luciana Parisi opens with the hypothesis that cybernetics is not merely the name for that postwar metascience of command and control. For Parisi, cybernetics names a “historical reconfiguration of metaphysics on behalf of technics.” This interview asks about the meaning and consequences of this hypothesis but steers away from the all-too-easy poiesis-as-panacea solution to the computational quagmire. Instead, this interview descends into the computational medium, into the specificity of its logic, asking what it might mean not merely to live in a cyberneticized world but to actively participate and believe in such a world. Parisi’s response puts to philosophy an important task: not to seek the accommodations of an expanding concept of the human within a machinic world but to think with the logic of the ascendant cybernetic metaphysics. For Parisi, a necessary move herein is to negotiate the reality of the algorithm’s syntactic operations, their performativity, a move that for her implies a certain form of belief. In tracking this form of belief across disciplines, this interview broaches questions of scalability, race and colonialism, the nonneutrality of technoscience, and the potential of computational aesthetics. Finally, the interview gestures toward Parisi’s future work, because, as she reminds us, we cannot go back; there are questions emerging from within machines that are eager to emerge and are waiting for us to think them.

Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955850

The all-too-common refrain “I can’t breathe,” in response to obscene incidents of police brutality and the murder of Black people in America, has haunted us through this time where breath is not only dangerous and necessary but also, in this nation, hyperpoliticized at a number of flash points. The widespread refusal to wear a mask is effectively an insistence on breathing together, even if it marks the condition of one’s own last breath—or that of someone else, who may or may not have consented to sharing potentially deadly aerosol particles. Once a concern largely restricted to those with respiratory health conditions, breathing has now become a central preoccupation of the world. This special dossier, “Breath,” considers the politics, history, geography, and conditions of breathing from a moment of respiratory crisis amid a respiratory pandemic, the ecological crisis of California’s increasing wildfires and unbreathable air, and the brutal policing of Black American life. The short meditations in this dossier, from academics in various fields as well as creative writers, are responses to our current moment’s heightened awareness of the complexities of one of the most fundamental requirements for life.

Moro, Jeffrey; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955857

Maude, Daryl; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955864

de Abreu, Maria José; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955871

Gutierrez, Kathleen Cruz; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955878

Myers, Peter; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955885

Bain, Kimberly; Morgan, William; Sutton, Kyra

2021 Qui Parle

doi: 10.1215/10418385-8955892