An essay by [[Yuk Hui]] expanding [[Heidegger]]‘s [[Age of the World Picture]] into our present age. It’s a long essay, and a bit obscure, but I found some stuff that got me really excited.

Further research:

• [[E. J. Dijksterhuis]]
• [[Mark Wigley]] and ‘[[Network Fever]]’
• [[On Distributed Communications - Paul Baran]]

This essay introduced me to [[Altermodernism]].

The notes below are still a bit of a mess.

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word ‘picture’ (Bild) now means the structured image (Gebild) that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before.
Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 1977. (1)

People discuss a "turn," but what does a "turn" in history really show?

"Turns" of history of intimately related to technology. To understand them, we should go back to the origin of the distinction between human and tech.

Yuk Hui sets out to understand the "computational turn" (a la the "linguistic turn" or the "industrial turn"), as a phase of history with an ontology, a culture, etc.

He thinks we’ve kind of already missed it— every phase of our lives came to grapple with it before we had time to process it.

In the celebrated cognitive scientist’s Brian Canwell Smith’s 1998 influential book On the Origin of Objects, there is a small footnote: “computers are not cultures, at least not yet …” (2) What then indicates something becoming a culture? Is it the fact that almost everyone in the West has a computer? Or that our everyday activities, ranging from talking to families to accessing a public toilet, rely on computation? Isn’t this too obvious or even too late to be pointed out? Haven’t we already missed the computational turn?

His claim is that computational logic = the way we understand cultural dynamics.

[Computational logic] is not anymore a method, methodology, or tool but, more fundamentally, the way we see and act in the world.

He sets out to interpret computational world-understanding in the framework of Martin [[Heidegger]]‘s [[The Age of the World Picture]].

The world picture presents us the problem of the world and truth; that is to say, the objectification of the world as the concealment of the truth in the darkness. It is the way that we reduce the unseen to graspable entities. Heidegger’s assertion demands a retrospective of the historical development of Western metaphysics.

Truth is revealing, an unveiling, [[aletheia]]. It "whooshes up."

Being is manifested when beings are not understood too thoroughly:

Truth (aletheia) for Heidegger has nothing to do with correctness, as in logic, but rather is an event; the unconcealment of the meaning of Being (Sein) through the encounters with beings (Seienden). This unconcealment can only be achieved when ‘beings’ are not simply objects which can be known and manipulated, but rather things which are not yet determined and remain open for the manifestation of Being. Truth is a revealing.
Connections to [[Buddhism]].

Modern science and technology, as Heidegger diagnosed, have evacuated the possibility for the question of Being (Seinsfrage), since the world is conceived as an image, which is in front of and against human being, and waiting to be exploited.

In “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger leaves us the melancholia of a prophet who has noticed an invisible power transforming humankind into a destiny hidden in the darkness, yet he remains helpless. Pondering upon what he sees as the gigantic force of modern science and technology, Heidegger writes:

THE GIGANTIC PRESSES FORWARD IN A FORM THAT ACTUALLY SEEMS TO MAKE
IT DISAPPEAR–IN THE ANNIHILATION OF GREAT DISTANCES BY THE
AIRPLANE, IN THE SETTING BEFORE US OF FOREIGN AND REMOTE WORLDS IN
THEIR EVERYDAYNESS, WHICH IS PRODUCED AT RANDOM THROUGH RADIO BY A
FLICK OF THE HAND. YET WE THINK TOO SUPERFICIALLY IF WE SUPPOSE
THAT THE GIGANTIC IS ONLY THE ENDLESSLY EXTENDED EMPTINESS OF THE
PURELY QUANTITATIVE. WE THINK TOO LITTLE IF WE FIND THAT THE
GIGANTIC, IN THE FORM OF CONTINUAL NOT-EVERHAVING-BEEN-HERE-YET,
ORIGINATES ONLY IN A BLIND MANIA FOR EXAGGERATING AND EXCELLING. WE
DO NOT THINK AT ALL IF WE BELIEVE WE HAVE EXPLAINED THIS PHENOMENON
OF THE GIGANTIC WITH THE CATCHWORD “AMERICANISM.” - Martin Heidegger

The force of gigantism comes native to European culture—"…[it is] something originated within European culture, in other words, the destiny of Western history, or metaphysics."

Yuk Hui ends his exegesis of Martin Heidegger by saying he ends his essay (The Age of the World Picture) kind of dumbstruck by the massiveness of the new ontology.

Yet time stops in Heidegger’s thought, as the prophet is not able to see through the power of the incalculable, the quasi-determinate nature of modern technology. In this article, Heidegger doesn’t explain to us the details of the picture; the events wither on the surface, as something merely present at hand.

"If modern technology is to be understood, we cannot stop at the grasped itself, but rather address the shifts of the grasped as such." Not sure what Yuk Hui means here, but I guess it means dealing with the currents atoms of our understanding, and not trying to get above them.

THE MECHANICAL WORLD PICTURE

Here I want to contrast Heidegger with the Dutch Mathematician E. J. Dijksterhuis

E. J. Dijksterhuis in The Mechanization of the World Picture: ARE WE CONSIDERING THE UNIVERSE–THE MIND OF MAN INCLUDED OR
NOT–AS A MACHINE? OR DOES THE TERM MEAN THAT NATURAL EVENTS CAN BE DESCRIBED WITH THE AID OF THE CONCEPTS AND DEALT WITH BY THE
METHODS OF A BRANCH OF SCIENCE THAT IS CALLED MECHANICS?

THE MECHANIZATION OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE
HAS BECOME MUCH MORE THAN AN INTERNAL QUESTION OF METHOD IN NATURAL
SCIENCE; IT IS A MATTER THAT AFFECTS THE HISTORY OF CULTURE AS A
WHOLE, AND ON THIS ACCOUNT, IT DESERVES THE ATTENTION OF STUDENTS
OUTSIDE THE SCIENTIFIC WORLD

Thinker above says the world picture always redoubles itself

A world picture is a kind of encoding, a machine language?, that structures our most fundamental perceptions.

The World Picture of Our Time

Today we have to ask, what is the world picture of our time? There has been a shift from a mechanised world picture, based in analogue models of scientific thought, to one formed through the digital network based on patterns and repetitions of digital matter. It is a specific image of networks…

Differences here (as I picture them):

Mechanical - In place, things behave w the law of identity, have a simple relationship to time

Networked/Computational - Things can be anywhere and nowhere, infinite replications and patterns of oneself, no "original"

The computational "networked world image" takes from quantum mechanics ideas of uncertainty and complexity; it takes more old-fashioned metaphors from telecommunication— dialing ups, downloads, etc.

Network visualisation or analysis pervades all spheres of Western culture: computing, sociology, philosophy, neuroscience, biology, art, etc. Mark Wigley has even characterised the network as a symptom: ‘Network Fever.’

Interesting to think of this re graph-porn in [[Roam]]!

The world now understood as an image of a network has two effects:

one is the effect of technological innovation and evolution; and the other is what Heidegger characterised as the completion of metaphysics in modern technology, specifically [[Cybernetics]].

What is the significance of a networked world picture to the understanding of our culture, especially if we are already immersed within the ‘computational turn?

Hui’s thesis: The converging of communication networks and language are responsible for the networked world picture.

The most referred network models by computer scientists and cultural theorists are still those developed in the early 1960s by Paul Baran of RAND Cooperation.

In Baran’s model, networked are centralized, decentralized, or distributed.

I’ve seen these graphs before!

A distributed network is a network without hierarchy.

A distributed system contains many switching nodes linking to each other, with a redundancy in linkage ensuring the service of connection to the users. The files to be sent over the network are divided into small packets (called ‘datagrams’), which travel on the network from the sender and are received and reassembled in the receiver’s machine.

P2P networks (our most contemporary networks) depend on a distributed system. No controller node. A simple local routing policy is performed at each node, yet the overall system adapts.

In 2004, the Hungarian physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi showed that the World Wide Web has a scale-free topology, which demonstrates several characteristics, for example, the preferential growth of hubs and the power-law distribution.

This relates to language here:

Baran’s dot-and-line structure has its origin in semiotics and language. Human communication since Aristotle has been understood as a coding machine which involves both encoding and decoding. Meaning is encoded and has to be decoded at the receiving end.

However, simple coding and decoding can’t generalize the whole method of human communication. Other info— the time and place, the speaker’s intention and identity—get left out. So inferences are made.

I HAVE A DREAM FOR THE WEB IN WHICH COMPUTERS BECOME CAPABLE OF
ANALYZING ALL THE DATA ON THE WEB–THE CONTENT, LINKS, AND
TRANSACTIONS BETWEEN PEOPLE AND COMPUTERS. A ‘SEMANTIC WEB’, WHICH
SHOULD MAKE THIS POSSIBLE, HAS YET TO EMERGE, BUT WHEN IT DOES, THE
DAY-TO-DAY MECHANISMS OF TRADE, BUREAUCRACY AND OUR DAILY LIVES
WILL BE HANDLED BY MACHINES TALKING TO MACHINES. THE ‘INTELLIGENT
AGENTS’ PEOPLE HAVE TOUTED FOR AGES WILL FINALLY MATERIALIZE. (20) - Tim Berners-Lee

"Discursive Networks and the Altermodern"

Networked topologies + the instrumental use of language (grounded in traditional logic) = the cultural dynamic of the computational turn.

The computational turn provides a "renewed intuition of the world".

Because the network is based in language metaphors (inference), it is a "discursive network".

The French cultural theorist and art critic [[Nicolas Bourriaud]] also uses the discursive network to characterise what he calls the Altermodern.

The Altermodern emerges from the end of both the celebration of the modern and the mourning of the postmodern.

Modernism substituted perception of space (in art) with perception of time (a la History). Postmodernism resists the control of both space and time. (the end of history)

Bourriaud argues for the concept of the altermodern as the Zeitgeist of our time, which begins with the death of postmodernity. The groundlessness which we see in Heidegger becomes the ground of the altermodern: the abandoning of the question of origin in favour of “a positive vision of chaos and complexity.”

For Bourriaud, the time of postmodernism is a “petrified kind of time advancing in loops” and the time of modernism is a “linear vision of history,” while the altermodern is “a positive experience of disorientation through an art-form exploring all dimensions of the present, tracing lines in all directions of time and space.” Altermodern history is a disorientation of the present.

"the altermodern is the affirmation of a technological sublime"

Backs the claim up with this:

There is a paradoxical logic here; on the one hand, we believe that we already understand the world in its networked form, and we are able to grasp it, and predict its movements through the harvest of data; on the other hand, a network form also implies contingency and the difficulty to be totalised and subsumed to control. This indeed justifies one’s affinity to this particular world image: it is at the same time inside and outside our control and knowledge; like the sublime in the face of the gigantic, it is a feeling of pleasure without guilt.

An artwork is not an object anymore, but a network.

"The technique of mixing": the technique of mixing implies a total disorientation in which “there is no longer cultural roots to sustain forms, no exact cultural base to serve as a benchmark for variations.”

If the altermodern is the celebration of our age, then the image of the network as world picture is its symbol, indicating its triumph.

As the new time demands a new world image, it also demands a new metaphysical reflection.

Filed in: [[Literature Notes]]

Related Links: [[Yuk Hui]], [[Altermodernism Explained]], [[Cybernetics Wiki]]