Managed to get an abstract together for this upcoming conference at Duke. Would be great to hear what Alexander Galloway is up to these days, he’s doing the keynote.
Social computing and the exchange-relation
This paper argues that real-time social computing environments are organizing electronic utterances in such a way as to foster a kind of social-semantic market effectivity. Using the example of the k-nearest-neighbour algorithm, it argues that the underlying epistemological commitments that metabolize social computing reproduce, at the level of their technics, a Kantian schism between Nature and Society—one that Latour has called our modern Constitution. Affordances for indexing user utterances into computable units, and the mathematical procedures subsequently performed upon these utterances through aggregation, combine to activate what Latour calls a process of separation, purification and reblending, which constantly reproduces the schism.
From a more clearly Marxist perspective, the paper goes on to argue that this arrangement tends to reproduce the commodity-relation at the level of discourse. Key to this second claim is Slavoj Žižek’s efforts to connect declarative utterances and symbolic authority with the ideas of the epistemologist Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Žižek, for example, explains the Kantian categories of pure reason through Sohn-Rethel in the following way:
“…the apparatus of the categories presupposed, implied by the scientific procedure (that, of course, of the Newtonian science of nature), the network of notions by means of which it seizes nature, is already present in the social effectivity, already at work in the act of commodity exchange. Before thought could arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction was already at work in the social effectivity of the market.”
Embedded into the designs of social computing, neo-Kantian epistemological abstractions that mark out the role of the rational speech act are blending with algorithms like k-nearest-neighbour, and the unconscious of the social computing user conceived as a transcendental subject, to produce what Žižek calls an Other Scene: external to thought, but giving form to thought. The paper argues that the main effect of this form is to induce and maintain a technological separation between use-value and exchange-value in the networked circulation of living utterances.