The Episteme of Meta-Modernity Order, Value, and Citizenship in the Space of Digital Finitudes

The Episteme of Meta-Modernity: Order, Value, and Citizenship in the Space of Digital Finitudes Key words: order, work, value, citizenship, knowledge, genealogical methodology, digital finitudes, the episteme of meta-modernity Contents 10 12 15 17 19 Rationale The Ancient Regime Smiling into its Beard The Legacy of Modernity Value in High Modernity Foucault’s Episteme The Episteme of Meta-Modernity Recasting Cultural Heritage in the Language of Meta-Modernity Order and Value in Meta-Modernity Cultural Contradictions of Meta-Modernity Genealogical ‘Maps of Digital Finitudes’ Grounding Thought in Meta-Modernity 23 An ‘Executive’ Summary Symbol, Representation, and Reality Normative Digital Finitudes Complexity as Perpetual Instability and its Consequences Philosophy… just Smiling 27 Appendix: The Rise and Fall of Modernist Rendering of Order Generation and Consumption From the Given to Critical Reason Duchamp’s Intervention Revisited: Things ‘according to a formula’ Neo-Baroque Marionetteering in the Space of Digital Finitudes 33 References (short) Rationale The outstanding challenge of the 21st century is to take on board the normativity of novel, digital finitudes, framed by complexity, and enforced by quantitative, empirical methodologies and networking mastering the playing field of the post-mechanical age (e.g Nowotny, 2016, Jaros, 2015, and refs therein) Behind the flow of fragmented social exchanges lie, hidden from view by rising complexification, processes of contingent order generation and development bounded in space, time, and topic They inscribe in the collective mind the ways of actualisation of citizenship, the pathways along which thought and power travel and collide This calls for a fresh research agenda aimed at redeeming directional thought grounded in the reality of our cultural heritage and presence – still very much veiled by centuries of masterly speculative impositions - by recasting it into genealogical lines of ‘digital finitudes’ generated and legitimated by the methodologies characteristic of the 21st century’s ‘metamodernity’ This will open the way for a radical re-appraisal of the human content of order, work, and value threatened by the novel techno-science and divisions of labour acquiring a life of their own In spite of perpetual transformations of work practices, the link between value and work remains in the main confined to institutional appreciation of a specialist material act-exchange The ‘value’ is unlikely to be determined by what Marx called “socially necessary time” to perform this act It has to reflect closely the contingent flow of ‘supply and demand’ in the expertise needed, and the ‘risk’ brought into the act by dependence on other players and on competence in its management (e.g Harvey, 2010, Westra, 2012, Stiglitz, 2018, and refs therein) This ‘risk’ factor no longer stands merely for ups and downs affecting the “relative surplus value” and sales; the sum of such interactions constitute Hannah Arendt’s vita activa - elsewhere referred to also as the Common or Citizenship (Arendt, 1958, also Zizek, 2009, Westra 2012, 2015…) The choices and decisions made in the course of such ‘socialisation’ of the specialist act determine – more than any top-down ruling by a ‘centre of authority’- the norms for what is or is not socially acceptable, what is the expert and what the public domain, good and bad, etc It will be argued that today functionality of such decisions depends much on the actor’s grasp of and competent access to the limits of applicability of defining parameters of new forms of order and ordered structures Such ‘finitude’ makes these structures open on global level to perpetual re-assessment, re-design, and re-networking by front line sciences and by the social structures instrumental in bringing them about or set up in their wake In the post-mechanical age the scales and causal forces driving processes created by state of the art science and technology – the processes on which our wellbeing depends – cut across traditional subject boundaries and lie well outside of the range of human senses, of bodily powers, and even of an above average command of knowledge and communication; and rapidly acquire a life of their own! Apart from a few notable exceptions, this challenge is not matched by availability of relevant instruction in education and management concerning competent recognition and use of new, ‘hidden from view’ pathways of power and thought (see e.g Eshun, 2003, Bromwitch, 2014, Blömeke, 2013, Jaros, 2014, 2015, and refs’ therein) The playing field is left to runaway complexification of life caught in cunning matter (e.g Nowotny, 2016) The notion of order as an ‘independent measure of organisation’ and of value grounded in this notion had been developed in Kant’s Critique of Judgement It was soon overshadowed by judiciously selected ‘sequences of social effects’ expressed, for example, in the language of dialectics of history or doctrines of free market However, it has recently re-emerged, much transformed but equally powerful as an organising agent, this time as different manifestations of empirically grounded ‘digital finitudes’ For it is now generally acknowledged that there are as many histories, markets and ‘freedoms’ as there are more or less successful approximations to a ‘closed system’ that can be projected out of the complexities of social dynamics (e.g Morris, 2010, Westra, 2012, 2015…) This does not make such schemes less interesting, just limited to a certain domain of applicability The same goes for what were once thought to be universal laws of science such as classical mechanics and thermodynamics or quantum theory The advent of quantitative empirical modelling has now completed for any practical purposes the project initiated by Michel Foucault’s effort in freeing order from servitude to historicism with pre-conceived ends By providing means for independent recognition of order, and for construction of genealogies of different forms of order and their impacts, it has raised its status from what was merely a measure of formal novelty to that of an onto-epistemic variable Such genealogies may serve as a fresh and testable source of directionality of thought and as grounds for re-establishing, be it much re-structured, a shared, social space – the digital age’s form of the old ‘Common’ This offers a new research agenda of redeeming our heritage and present in contemporary idiom and finding ways of bridging the gap between knowledge and its symbolisation This calls for a fundamental change in attitude, for a methodological shift (e.g Jaros, 2015, and refs therein) designed to develop the capacity to recognise, without attempting to become a walking Encyclopaedia, order and ordered structures in terms of empirical variables, concepts and symbols making them communicable, their limits of applicability, and their place in the cumulative advance of different forms of complexity To this end it is important to promote fresh rounds of conceptualisation and checks instrumental in enabling digital technologies to serve humanity instead of mastering it! Only then is it possible to begin to address the gap between life and technology, and to re-cast the normative value interfaces between work and citizenship in order to redeem the human-centred character of our institutions, of fairness, and personal autonomy The Ancient Regime Smiling into its Beard The Age of Reason and its rapid advance towards the ‘postmechanical’, ‘digital’ present - made possible by quantitative models of the processes which constitute the human condition of today - had fundamentally altered the relation between work and value, not to speak of the meaning of these terms that are being perpetually recast into new normative frames Yet they must also co-exist and compete with the conceptual and behavioural baggage deposited in human minds over the millennia Some of this legacy still retains powerful influence and must be kept on the ‘active list’ for any serious agenda Pre-Socratics were fascinated by Nature but they did not have the tools to make their models stick With Plato comes the “moral turn” in philosophy which cast the horizon of human outlook for more than two millennia! A glimpse of the totality of perfection resting for ever above the eighth’s sphere can only be obtained at a moment of holy madness, as a Gift of the Given, by revelation granted to the contemplating soul Time is the image of eternity The unity of nature, virtue, and truth does not have to be serviced by labour, only by way of life shared with Socrates in the olive groves of Athens What we now call physical science, star gazing and cosmic speculations, are only about “saving appearances”, or in the religious idiom the might of God’s Creation revealed to us in the regularity of planetary motion or by the crystalline symmetry The Legacy of Modernity By the time the Christian centuries rose to the reality of medieval Europe, scholastic speculations became so overloaded with meanings that it was increasingly difficult to take seriously the claim that there is an omniscient, Given law But since this law is God’s law, man can free himself only if he takes His place Both Hobbes and Galileo end up with a modern man who takes it upon himself to posit the ends Man becomes a measure of things, a master of nature True, for Newton the laws of nature are God’s laws and the inquiry into the world of natural phenomena is a celebration of the Glory of His Creation But these laws are comprehensible only through the intellect of man, through the autonomous mind of an independent observer Galileo’s measure and quantify separated humans from things of Nature Newton’s calculus and laws of motion provided the means for grounding this process in a radically new objectivity Kant set out to bring together philosophy and Newton’s achievement Knowledge is the knowledge of phenomena, the domain of Pure Reason which depends on a priori forms of perception of time and space and on categories of logic which can promote a set of individual dis-interested observations to the level of a law of nature The Critique of Pure Reason deals with what ‘is’ and what can be known, the Critique of Practical Reason deals with what ‘ought to be’ The two Critiques show that the principles which apply to pure reason (which refer to phenomena) and those applying to practical reason (which refer to noumena) are logically compatible But for any actualization of the theoretical necessity to take place there must be a connection between the domains of necessity and (individual) freedom on which this actualization depends To establish this connection is the task of the Third Critique, the Critique of Judgement In it Kant considers reflective judgments, i.e judgements when the particular is given and the aim is to find the universal The analysis of reflective judgements is therefore primarily about our powers of representation (of the world of objects), about the relation between things and images of things that makes life liveable Kant conjectures that reflective judgement has an a priori principle related to feeling in a way analogous to that in which the a priori principles of the understanding relate to knowledge of empirical facts In employing reflective judgement, he again demands purposive organisation and proceeds as if nature were so organised Kant considers only the metaphysical concept of purpose which is independent of human desire He distinguishes between the purposiveness of a particular whole and the purpose which it serves He posits that there is a real separation between the two, i.e that purposiveness may be without purpose! Then beauty is the “form of purposiveness in an object”, an order of structure contained in it in so far as it is perceived apart from a “presentation of a purpose” We often speak of the harmony and ‘design’ of a whole without referring to a designer or the purpose to which it might have been designed The notion of purposiveness implies an imposition of an order upon what otherwise would be only a manifold of perception What is collected by imagination has unity but here this unity exists only in reference to intermediate concepts It is conferred on what has been collected by the imagination through the understanding but not through determinate or specific concepts as it would be if it were possible to proceed as in Newtonian science Hence the aesthetic judgement concerns solely the relationship of the representative powers in so far as they are determined by presentation Take Hamlet Under the fleeting appearances staging accessories, costumes, and ramblings of art critics etc it is a world of its own, its parts weighted in ratios marking its own poetic order or symmetry It is this component of the work that remains as Hamlet for Hamlet’s sake, art for art's sake; it remains as a trace of its other existences, as a self-contained order (e.g Körner, 1990) In Kant’s day ‘cataloguing’ forms of abstract order was not on the agenda of the day Rather it was the challenge to account for development, for the process of knowledge acquisition, and for cultural change and the diversity of opinion (value) throughout the ages It was Kant himself who towards the end of his active life formulated the challenge It was taken up by Hegel He accepted Kant’s onto-epistemology as a starting point but argued that it is incomplete, merely ‘formal’ He adopted a position of an “objective idealist” (monist) that allowed him to develop what in Marx’s terms became dialectics of objectification of the material exchanges constituting the human condition via social labour It is then not just a movement of the soul or Spirit but of human engagement (‘work’) with the material world of things and humans pursued in order to foster development In this scheme work, social labour grounding the labour theory of value becomes a key onto-epistemic concept and source of value It endows the objectification process with the directionality of thought and social development grounded in the dialectics of material exchanges and drives the Universal History humans Yet this History still comes to us as a record of the stages of such objectification process, each with its characteristic signature marking the selection process needed to project from the totality of human experience what Hegel called the spirit of the time or Zeitgeist to be recognised in most products of that era Indeed, to the present day we find shops full of books about Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque style in art, about ideologies of feudalism and capitalism, communism and post-modernism – bought even by people who have never heard of Hegel and his Zeitgeist and who at best think that Marx was the man who invented ‘totality’! In this scheme of things, the Kantian order unravelled by pure reason becomes a product of ‘instrumental action’, separated from philosophy and social theory proper The notion of order and ordered value structures developed in the second and third Critiques is a mere formal intervention lost in the dialectics of History! Value in High Modernity Aristotle’s Cosmos was a unity of Gods, things and humans in which truth, value, order, and perfection were at one Galileo separated value from truth and humans from things but preserved their permanence Riccardo and Marx still struggled to save this permanence by looking for ‘objectivity’ criteria for value, at least the value of human labour The significance of abstract order belonging to “purposivity without purpose” of Kant’s Third critique disappeared in the dialectics of the self-understanding of the collective mind (Spirit) cast into Marx’s historical materialism of social struggle, of the exchange and use value, “means of production” and social organisation, etc Marx conjectured that the objectivity of value (of human work) is ensured by the dialectics of objectification of products of human labour in the process of social exchange which enables humans to transcend the commoditisation of their labour and alienation from the products of their labour - and efforts to represent it The value is then given by the socially necessary time needed to make the product The fragmentation and complexification of life and productive processes in the 20th and 21st century, operating increasingly away from equilibrium, as an ‘open system’, resulted in loss of consensual evaluation of the human condition It de-legitimises the grounding assumptions of Das Kapital on which the labour theory of value rests - namely that production is well represented as a quasi-equilibrium quasi-closed system It is not only economics and politics but the way the human condition is constituted that depend on the status of human engagement with the world, i.e on the onto-epistemic meaning of what is generally referred to as work or labour but which requires clarification if its ‘value’ is to be fully appreciated In the course of the 20th century the high tech tools removed any remaining doubts about the legitimacy of the scientific method and its predictions directly impacting the notion of finitude of life and of the human physical and social environment at large The assumption of an equilibrium system of nature, value, virtue, truth etc., the necessary condition for the mind to get a glimpse of the ‘Given’ as well as the modern ‘Common’, came to be unsupportable Foucault’s Episteme Already in the first decades of the 20 th century the legacy of the 19th century thinkers came under attack! The project marking the turning point was perhaps Foucault’s revisiting of Aristotle’s idea of Episteme and rescuing the notion of order from its subordination to sequences of social effects brilliantly selected to desired ends by great system builders like Hegel (Foucault, 1973) He argued that the perception of knowledge and life is grounded in the epoch's notion of order, in the way it sees things connected together This depends on the period's usage of signs, i.e on that aspect of the relation between reality and its representations that are used to formulate and implement norms Relationships between things - the order of things – are then an expression of the way people in a given era select things and events For one of the fundamental conditions of establishing any order is to be able to maintain focus on certain aspects of what we observe to the exclusion of others This selection is conditioned by the material and social structures of the day As Foucault readily admitted, it proved too difficult to shed entirely the ghost of Hegel at al altogether However, his taking up and developing the Nietzschean and Benjaminian (Benjamin, 1999) method of ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’ of reason freeing the notion of order of Hegel’s Spirit etc amount to a millennial shift in outlook – be it based on a ‘choice of data’ no less cavalier that that of his predecessors Humans are those for whom representations exist This is how Gary Gutting, in his Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason, (Gutting, 1989), sums up the challenge to the human condition, in a way still very relevant today Foucault begins his project by noting that before the 17th century words were joined with things and events designated by those signs by resemblances These resemblances constituted both the content and the form of the sign In his Madness and Civilisation Michel Foucault refers to an example of this way of thinking, to a short story which invokes “a certain old Chinese Encyclopaedia” in which animals are divided into those “belonging to the Emperor, embalmed, tamed, suckling pigs, sirens … drawn with a fine camel hair brush”… etc The pun is carefully selected; note also that both ‘real’ as well as ‘imagined’ animals are included! With the rise of empirical science the status of resemblances was gradually demoted from being the source of knowledge to the realm of error or charming fantasy such as that we now associate with childishness Language and thought were ‘freed of things’ and became one form of representation of reality Empirical sciences are built on the principle that the relation between things must be seen in terms of a law-like order Hence problems of evaluation and measurement are also reducible to problems of order The 17th and 18th century witnessed the growth of knowledge as a network of identities and relations The world was made up of isolated elements related by such identities and differences based on representations fitting an assumingly timeless order In this worldview knowledge is constituted by systematic analysis of empirical reality as if in the form of a table At the end of the 18th century this trust in timeless order and in the ability of humans to study the world in terms of isolated elements derived on the basis of qualitative assumptions about the world began to wane The relations between elements became pushed into the background and the emphasis shifted to those aspects connecting the elements that in their totality account for the function of the elements as a system Everywhere the 19th century gradually embraced the philosophy of time in terms of Progress, History, and eventually the evolution of the species Instead of just individual's cognition, ability and self-interest, one hears more and more about collective concepts playing the role of parameters spanning the representational space of interest, for example concepts like social class, capital, division of labour, artistic styles of e.g Renaissance and Baroque, eras of capitalism and socialism; in science it is not just particle mass, trajectory, and acceleration but collective phenomena and concepts like fields, ensembles, entropy, and energy When instead of knowledge in the form of a table one begins to look for a sequential, ascending development of the total system, signs still represent the thing they are referring to but the meaning is no longer fixed by the act of representation Instead it is becoming to be dominated by the history of the way the sign was formed and how it acts as one of the constitutive elements of a complicated structure In modernity, representation becomes grounded in something other than itself It has therefore become an object of critique, something studied and classified Its territory of applicability and its limits are never fixed It is often said that in the modern age schools of thought differ chiefly by their view of relation between image and reality, between material exchanges constituting human life and their representations or representability! The Episteme of Meta-Modernity The digital age shares with modernity its project of liberation of humans by reason, from caprices of nature and arbitrary will of other humans to say the least Its aim is to create an autonomous Self able freely to develop and to function in society according to its personal potential It also retains the legacy and practices of the Scientific Method and the Critical Theory However, there is more on the current agenda than what the canon of modernity can cope with In the last decades of the 20th century the social became visibly fragmented into different ‘levels of being’ - molecular, viroid, genetic, ‘financialised’, galactic, i.e into semi-autonomous domains of activity or systems often functional outside equilibrium and well beyond the scope of the ‘human dimension’ (senses, bodily powers and general knowledge, etc.) The assumptions grounding the vocabulary of more than two millennia of speculations - culminating in the models of Universal History - lost their legitimacy The advent of quantitative, microscopic methods grounded in laws of nature and mathematics enabled humans critically to acknowledge different levels of complexity in physical and social domains It will be argued that this offers the opportunity to recover a novel source of directionality of development by grounding it in the empirically based genealogy of order generation and recognition It amounts to iterative sequences of mutual interactions between order generation (measuring and ‘making’) and recognition (‘naming’ and conceptualising); here techno-science and its social (philosophical, cultural, artistic) representations are mutually dependent drivers of the iterative process (see examples of this development in e.g Morris, 2010, Westra, 2012) The episteme of the digital age - to proceed in the spirit of Foucault’s project – is then best described as meta-modern or ‘more 10 human, by putting before themselves products of their activities, and by recognising and duplicating themselves as individuals and collectives in these objects via iterative, dialectic loops However, this notion of work, value, and citizenship must now be recast into a conceptual frame to embrace novel ‘digital finitudes’ rapidly replacing speculative impositions Until recently, technology has been viewed chiefly as an application of physical sciences, as a ‘neutral’ tool made and managed by humans in order to extend human physical and mental reach; with trains, telephones, clean water, steel, electricity, penicillin, calculators, etc Here humans employ their reason to liberate themselves from the caprices of nature, of human prejudice, and of an arbitrary will of others in general In this outlook the world is like an exhibition hall in which autonomous subjects and objects driven by directional forces of Universal History interact in order to reach self-understanding by mastering Nature and social development These activities were thought of in terms of the Newtonian absolutes of space, time, and matter, with post-Einsteinian corrections of significance only for laboratory or extra-terrestrial events However, since about the middle of the 20 th century, separability of the social and the scientific has been increasingly challenged by philosophical and social studies of science and technology After circa 1940, science was no longer just an inspiration for enterprising engineering brilliance of the likes of James Watt but was rapidly becoming an inseparable part of production and decision making at large The Kantian Subject and Object have been ‘under attack’ by body invasive communication, medicine, and framed by a multitude of mediating devices and networked social structures Rapid changes in productive processes resulted in radically new divisions of labour, power, and wealth carried by complex knowledge systems with connectivity and applicability without borders This undermined the 18th century vocabulary of autonomy of body and mind, and of corporeality, determinism, and directional progress in general – preserved in the public discourse for over two hundred years by creative re-casting of social variables of freedom, right, class, spirit of the age, capital, alienation etc Any consensual notion of such concepts as well as those of creativity and authorship themselves born out of the philosophy of the Rational Man has been further undermined by the sheer number of people - and of interactive connections between them - with at least virtual access to making a mark in ‘History’ This amounts to another example of the transition of quantity to quality in the status of products of human activities in which the static Kantian autonomy gives way to dynamic ontology 20 and local temporality As the uniqueness of any product or intellectual creation becomes difficult to demonstrate, what matters is chiefly the choice of the best time and place for entering a process with the highest recognition potential Today technology resists reduction to discourse rather than conditioning it The relation of humans to technology is then best thought as necessarily bound up with what is often called originary technicity: then technology is a kind of ‘constitutive prosthesis’ of the human species This concept amounts to a working hypothesis that life and meaning are technical without always being ‘technologically determined’ Here technicity refers to an ever present dynamic aspect of human existence which is not necessarily fully actualised, represented or symbolised, yet which remains fundamental to the human condition and its limits More precisely, this technicity is a unity of becoming, of a network of relations, a mode of being as a temporal and spatial network This is often expressed in a cavalier way by saying that objects are ‘loaded with life’, for example in theories of ‘object based’ art and technology It follows that ‘technicity of a machine’ cannot be separated from the milieu which it inhabits Today this milieu is characterised by processes that arise in conditions of high complexity from ever present meta-stabilities in the flow of material exchanges and activate spatio-temporal domains with sites ‘open’ to supplies of structural energy They set themselves in motion or propagation that takes the form of progressive iterations promoting structuration The newly constituted local structures serve as a base for a new round of structuration, and so on The journey constitutes the ‘object’ and vice versa This dynamic ontology of event-ness implies that the vector of motion or directionality and specificity of development arises from the process itself, from the supply of energy at the site of action-event that fuels the rise (and decay) of the assemblage (of things, humans, and machines) Hence, at least in its initial state and impact, neither the sites (place, time) and character of such outbursts of energy (of physical or social innovations, change and development), nor that of their actualisation can be readily controlled (predicted, modulated) even by the very structure hosting its birth! For the place and range of impact (anywhere on this globe) is in principle (and most likely in practice) separated from the place and action which brought it about! In response to this new condition of humans created by the radical transformation of productive forces and division of labour whose impact is amplified by a multitude of mediators standing between the reality and experience of new forms of embodiment, the new levels of organisation and production of reality must be seen as a symptom of 21 a particular kind of technicity In the current condition the machine is literally in-formed by information or by imparted form for it to deal with its task No matter how deterministic or ‘closed’ the input may be, in the course of any event the acting device-object (bodyobject) transduces different forms of organisation and energy Machine is seen as localised suspensions of determinations able at certain instances to receive information as a temporary and approximate determination Then an object (body) in a real context (site of experimentation) is always to be treated as an ‘open system’ (e.g Mackenzie, 2002, and refs therein) This is in opposition to the naïve model of machines (often a good approximation for static objects and mechanical devices) as a neutral tool out there, deterministic and fully controlled In the last and fatal programmatic effort to halt the advent of meta-modernity at any cost, Heidegger proposed that the ‘contamination’ by technology be ‘cleared away’ and at best turned into a poetic term The notions of originary technicity and the ‘transduction dynamics’ introduced in the above paragraphs represent an alternative way of how to strive towards quasi-equilibrium between life and technology without having to revel in a naive dream of being able to console one’s soul by contemplating ‘authentic Being’ without technology If indeed it is right to conjecture that such locally defined interactions and their impact constitute the activa vita or simply the norms and their limits of today’s social being, it follows that this material condition of human manifests itself in potentially very different local structures with norms including those of value, work, and citizenship peculiar to the site of the activity in question - be it a town, region, or other geo-political domain Paradoxically, the account given above then predicts that the very digital culture, known for its built in freedom to move information, knowledge, and power almost instantaneously anywhere around the globe, actualises itself most significantly in dynamics of what are ‘local’ events – instabilities whose spatio-temporal extent - including this activa vita is necessarily limited This then presents an outstanding challenge to political reformists of what is still in the main a Nation State standing on supposedly universal concepts of value and citizenship! The task of quantitative empirical modelling is to capture and make distinct such events so as to organise them into ‘lines of development’ that can be readily recognised (assigned what is normally called the past, present, and future enabling directional thought) and used to replace - with a view to preserving the human interests - the exhausted accounts of development (history, progress…) cast in terms of 22 universal variables chosen to suit this or that particular speculative model of life An ‘Executive’ Summary Symbol, Representation, and Reality Normative Digital Finitudes Complexity as Perpetual Instability and its Consequences Philosophy… just Smiling Symbol, Representation, and Reality Throughout the ages archetypal images of basic human needs, of love, security, spirit, immortality, place etc were cast into an anecdote in accord with the era’s ‘consensual rendering of eternal truths’ Between the symbol and reality stood the most potent mediator, an established Idea or Ideology Michel Foucault, and later the ‘quantitative empirism’ of the digital age, freed the notion of order from being subsumed into top-down, speculative schemes a la Hegel Although in his oeuvre Foucault soon remained tied to the current ‘linguistic turn’, it did upgrade order from a mere ‘form’ to its potential use as an onto-epistemic variable It became the means with which to measure value and directional development along genealogical lines constituted by a finite set of variables and limits Normative Digital Finitudes Recently, the gap between reality and its ‘representations’ widened and its character became transformed by runaway complexification Meta-modernity demoted myth - and all human output in general from ‘universal’ to temporal and relative, to normative digital finitudes in space, time, and scope The resulting ‘products’, ‘approximate representations’ of material exchanges and encounters between humans and things, are characterised by the principle of decomposition and re-arrangement of accumulated and perpetually ‘recycled’ images and symbols The perception of autonomy of objects (and subjects) became weakened by the overriding importance of the chaotic flow of alienated exchanges and signs (mediators) which made it easier to seek meaning and presence (ontology) in the process instead of the thing itself In brief, it is as if in the course of rising modernity the symbol, idea, and reality merged; the human-imposed order via the dynamics of design and human organisation is felt to be ‘contained’ in most spiritual and material products The history of modernity pictured in state of the 23 art modelling (e.g empirical & quantitative studies by Piketty and Morris mentioned above) is conceived as a product of geodemographic and techno-scientific developments framed by and inseparable from the social and cultural structures created in its wake as well as making it happen; clearly in this picture none of these factors can be regarded an ‘independent variable’ – a tacit or explicit assumption in the grand schemes of things created by modernity from Kant to Habermas Complexity as Perpetual Instability and its Consequences The driver of change is no longer just the pursuit of ideas aided by some transcendental theory, man-made tools from spanner to pen, and perceptive exploitation of lucky accident The advent of radical complexity which introduced a novel class of dynamic instability peculiar to complex systems (e.g the stock market) amounts to a qualitative change in the character of what has always been a process of approximating an open structure by a closed one, i.e one permitting - at least in theory - a ‘solutions’ This instability is at the heart of the process of making and implementing novel forms of order today, and dominates product socialisation and symbolisation – that is the processes taking science from the laboratory to the world of ‘work and use’, of ‘culture’ It sets itself in motion, propagating and promoting restructuring of complexity and novel local ordering (transduction) across the full spectrum of social relations (system) Thus the contributing structures are modelled by computer software with iterative, re-enacting facilities and ‘updated’ as ‘local’ and ‘temporal’ resolutions (actualisations) of such ‘travelling instabilities’ This is also the meaning of ‘everything is art’; there is no privileged form of human activity (production, representation) Today, the shapes of cars are no less enhancing representations of life than paintings or novels In more technical terms, the ‘value’ of any registered object-as-process lies in the recognition by human and non-human agents of order parameter(s) in question and their use in establishing genealogical lines of bounded, normative digital finitudes, not in claims about ‘good or bad’, ‘art or kitsch’ based on speculative criteria Philosophy… just Smiling It is born in mind that when ‘representations’ (products of human work) exhibit - be it in a hidden or indirect form - new classes of order that emerged out of investigations across the full range of human endeavour, and found their way into language and material 24 reality, e.g computer codes and new materials in the design of the roof of the British Museum courtyard and elsewhere, the (Hegelian, Marxian…) dream of ‘objectifying dialectics of historical processes’ comes to a paradoxical ‘fruition’ Paradoxical because the sequences of ‘historical’ stages of development are now being newly uncovered not by any ansatz of a Hegel or Marx but simply by the dialectics of actualisation - in its newly established condition of finitude dictated by the digital techno-science - of products of human reason structured into genealogies identified by quantitative, empirical, science based methodologies Already Nietzsche complained that science systematically destroys cultural traditions by reducing them to mere superstition without putting anything in their place And, by and large, it turned out to be about right - for another hundred years or so - even though the premise amounting to a naïve positivistic notion of science from which this deduction originates is today no more credible than any of the prejudices it is said to have refuted This state of affairs changed when, at about the beginning of the second millennium, empirical findings could be credibly gathered and processed by powerful digital machines with the aid of self-consistent iterative models based on clearly defined variables and limits of applicability - and conforming wherever applicable to the demands of the scientific method Then layers of such empirical data can be brought together and structured into genealogical lines which recover the past and present and give a more objective, quantifiable, and refutable meaning to many of the traditional claims about development of the artistic style, social and geo-political history, and so on By transparent processing of social reality, humankind may recover the lost credibility of notions of past and future, and testable distinctions between complexity and complicatedness, risk and uncertainty, closed and open systems, and of the rules for evaluation of their development in space and time Although this is a way for science to begin to return to humankind the lost notion of directional quasi-continuity and near-equilibrium of selected aspects of development, it is as a very different species comprehensible in a very different vocabulary compared to that inherited from the founding fathers of the Enlightenment – the vocabulary which in spite of much criticism and retouching still dominates most of public exchanges It is not that the state of the art empirically-based computer modelling has not been making progress, far from it! Indeed, the number of the above mentioned ‘genealogical lines’ of ‘digital finitudes’ created that way is large and growing, much too large Furthermore, the rise and decline of their relevance is so rapid that 25 any meaningful consensus across a large territory of minds and bodies over a period comparable to a human lifespan is unlikely to be achieved Even those blessed with the necessary insight get only brief glimpses of such processes and most likely only over a limited range of activities It follows that a breed of ‘independent adjudicators’ is much needed, this time well versed in methodologies and the functional makeup of the cunning of complexification of production and human affairs, yet capable of standing above any particular fray so to be able to make a meaningful comparisons of the limits of applicability and relevance of such ‘genealogical lines of digital finitudes’ and their relations both to the reality and to themselves And so here comes another ‘home coming’! For this verbatim does sound like a distant echo of famous texts where just such ‘deeds’ were described, be it after very different metal gymnastics - by no lesser an authority than Professor Wittgenstein – e.g as “constituting philosophical activity”, proclaiming that “… philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity”…”through which statements are explained…”! Statements indeed! Needless to add, this uncanny condition of humans outlined in the above paragraphs is neither necessary nor unavoidable but chiefly a product of the failure of social organisations to cope with the dramatic acceleration of innovation, particularly by the failure to prevent productive forces in all walks of life from being taken over by runaway complexification acquiring a life of its own “Humans are those for whom representations exist” Independent inquiry recognises, creates, and re-creates order Art’s (design’s) role is to make this order visible and liveable That is what “enhancing representations of reality” mean Ultimately, the ability to make sense of reality – and the survival of humanity-owning citizenship in an open society that depends on it - hangs on successful bridging of the gap between social appreciation of what, in an event, is the cause and what effect; on reaching the level of recognition and structuring of the order generation and actualisation peculiar to meta-modernity accomplished enough to lead to human-based quasi-equilibrium grounded in dynamics of effective regulations of the processes governing productive forces and social relations 26 APPENDIX: The Rise and Fall of Modernist Rendering of Order Generation and Consumption From the Given to Critical Reason Duchamp’s Intervention Revisited: Things ‘According to a Formula’ Neo-baroque Marionetteering in the Space of Digital Finitudes From the Given to Critical Reason From the Middle Ages, till at least the second half of the 19 th century, the artist and communicator at large was supplied with symbols and narratives by the ‘Given’, e.g by Biblical traditions When in the 15th century Ficino restored Earthly Venus to the status of Celestial Venus – to where it stood in classical Greece - these verbal and pictorial images could well serve humans on their path out of the ‘dark ages’ However, it took a long time before the age of reason began to challenge this monopoly on meaning Indeed, as late as in the 1960s and 70s, an accomplished collection of myths and archetypes (e.g mother, rebirth, trickster, spirit, etc.) based on the earlier work by e.g Zikmund Freud and Carl Jung, of symbols and images accumulated over many centuries, was re-assembled by Joseph Campbell and turned into a series of popular books The challenge, when it became visible, was based on Kant’s notion of critical theory brought into the twentieth century idiom e.g by Greenberg and his modernist school Already the 19 th century painter and novelist had the courage to turn to scenes from country and city life without directly invoking Hercules or Saint Mary The Art defined by Kant’s Critique of Judgment goes further; it amounts to actualization of individual freedom, a way of connecting the necessary transcendental truths about what is and what ought to be with the experience of living To participate in the project of emancipation and progress underwriting modernity means that art must fulfil its critical role as a guardian of this link In Alan Greenberg's words taking Kant into the 20th century, “to be a modernist work is to be a work that takes its own conditions of possibility for its subject matter, that tests a certain number of the conventions of the practice it belongs to by modifying, jettisoning, or destroying them, and that in so doing renders the conventions or 27 conditions thus tested explicit or opaque, revealing them to be nothing but conventions” The ultimate Kantian condition is that artwork is something exhibited It is also this quality that makes it a sign Works of art are shown so as to make sure they are judged as such Yet it was the very critical function of modern art that led it to challenge the autonomy of the material world in which its legitimacy was grounded Already in the 19th century painters begun to question the aesthetic conditions deemed necessary to identify a given thing as a work of art called painting Duchamp’s exhibiting a urinal challenges this ultimate convention The most popular reading of Duchamp’s intervention is Kantian and Greenbergian Duchamp the modern artist read the binary choice between painting and not painting as a convention Duchamp’s objective was first and foremost to mount a challenge to this convention In doing so he opened a new form of Critique, without sacrificing the Kantian vocabulary; i.e the grounding question of modern aesthetics - what is the work of art - remains on the agenda be it in a very novel sense Far from ‘programmatic dematerialisation’ of art and substitution of language for visuality favoured by those among modernists emphasizing the conceptual content of the word art, Duchamp systematically explored every convention of art representation in order simply to expose it as a convention Duchamp's ‘debunking’ of conventions – of ‘bourgeois ideological constructs’ - was carried out by reducing the ‘artistic debate’ to the irreducible philosophical kernel of (Kantian) distinction between pure and practical judgements Since the latter refers to potentiality only, the institutional (ideological) and individual demands made upon art's ‘value’ remain necessarily unfulfilled The value remains undecided, a mere convention Duchamp’s Intervention Revisited: Things ‘According to a Formula’ However, there is another, more provocative, and as it turns out quite prophetic message in Duchamp's intervention to which he himself drew attention (Jaros, 2001) Having freed himself from "ancient traditions" and "Art Theory" practiced by the Establishment, Duchamp was left with the question about what it is that ‘drives’ event-ness in the absence of the traditional drivers In the course of this search Duchamp noticed that the key clue is a 28 particular property of application of analogy outside science It originates in a well know passage in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: "In philosophy analogies mean something very different from what they mean in mathematics" where "the equality of two quantitative relations" is "always constitutive" "In philosophy when three terms are given I may learn only the relation to a fourth but not the fourth term itself" We cannot know that which the domain of Practical Reason and Judgment is However, since this unknowability is known it provides us with directional insights Yet the concept thus grounded remains a mere potentiality and consequently any algorithm attached to it is destined to fail if an attempt is made to implement it (i.e to actualise its law-like appearance as if it were a scientific relation) Duchamp, whose interest in mathematics went well beyond the curiosity of an artist or chess player, actually invokes this apparent law-like content in his Warning: "…we shall determine the conditions of the allegorical appearance of several collisions seeming strictly to succeed each other according to certain laws, in order to isolate the sign of the accordance between, on the one hand, this allegorical appearance and, on the other, a choice of possibilities legitimated by these laws…" This sounds like a reference to a mathematical theorem A photograph taken in 1917 of the urinal is then an example of the allegorical appearance of it and also the proof that the title Fountain once had a referent Hence we are dealing with a pseudo-organised series of events; he points out that it is as if these "collisions (that lead to the allegoric appearances etc.) seem strictly to succeed each other according to certain laws" What is this "law"? For the Greenbergian modernist the content of this law is primarily the undetermined nature of Art This is therefore the law that everyone can be an artist and anything that an art institution shows is Art Since the Art's meaning thus conceived is necessarily unstable it constantly demands to be replaced (by ‘new’ Art) That way it can still retain its critical social function whatever ‘it’ is However, Duchamp’s formulation contains a cryptic message that comes closer to the surface when he moves on to consider the practices that were common among the men of influence in the Society of Independent Artists and the Independents show he was a member of The Warning is followed by a Note entitled "Algebraic Comparison" Indeed, since Pythagoras aesthetic theories have always contained an element of mathematical ‘argument’ Art objects come into being according to a ‘formula’ - such as the golden section, 29 symmetry operations, Fibonacci's series, etc Duchamp sets out to deconstruct this as yet another pillar on which the "representational" theories of art rest In his rendering, the ratios are not ratios of numbers but names (concepts)! The ratios are then manipulated by invoking analogies of such names until it is ‘demonstrated’ that "the locus of dissent and separation" was "the sign of the accordance" Of course, the legitimacy of the golden section was in the eyes of, say, renaissance artists essentially something given, a divine revelation or gift to be acquired by recollection or through God chosen mediators Duchamp's new turn is that the ‘formula-like approach’ is legitimated by the legitimacy of ‘mathematics’, by the by now well established principle of potential divisibility (de-and recomposability) of things (according to a ‘formula’ or ‘law’) His Note is first of all the remainder that ‘tradition’ is no longer available as a serious legitimating force The phraseology used surely deliberately - reveals a provocative novelty Perhaps, instead of merely trying to play another of his ‘jokes’ or ‘tests’, Duchamp the chess player and amateur mathematician intended the emphasis to lie on "law" Perhaps he had already in the 1930s recognised the intuitive compulsion and skills we possess in this scientific civilisation of ours that makes us turn unconsciously or consciously any encounter into a sequence of approximations It is as if we had a mathematical formula even if we know that the encounter in question is - intuitively and theoretically - not calculable! Hence in the absence of any external ontological source (e.g divine will) an object or event ‘is’ only if ‘it’ is capable of initiating just such recognisable series of steps! Duchamp - whether consciously or unconsciously -implies that these sequences of approximations as if implementing a mathematical prescription by automatically invoking a series of analogies attached to an impulse are traces in our unconscious of the invisible rails along which contemporary thought and power travel and collide They are the ultimate residual source of motion - what remains when traditions become withdrawn These ‘rails’ have been laid down and perpetually re-cast during the many decades of our scientific civilisation; and in the course of this ‘liberating progress’ of the ‘Rational Man’ they have gradually replaced the pathways laid down by the ‘given’, by ‘traditions’ Neo-Baroque Marionetteering in the Space of Digital Finitudes 30 Already in his ‘unsuccessful’ Thesis on baroque mourning drama, and later in his Passagen project, Walter Benjamin (1999) set out to account for the shift in the material condition of humanity in the course of capitalist modernity, and for the systematic destruction of traditional bonds and narratives grounding for millennia the intuitive notion of order He chose Paris as his empirical testing ground, and joined in genealogical sequences various material objects across adjacent ‘archaeological layers’ of ‘Parisian reality’ The backbone of his conceptualisation were ‘Jungian’ archetypes of capitalist modernity, e.g Baudelairean gambler and flaneur, whores, arcades, glass and iron structures, mechanical dolls, etc Hidden under the surface mask of academic Universal History he saw the trickster of theology animating technology By now the memory of traditional bonds has been fatally broken by the march of victorious Capital Amidst the debris of overlapping fragments, laid bare and empty by this slaughter, there remain - as the only potential source of order - the structure (order) formative mechanisms bearing the signature of mathematisation and digitalisation of physical and social reality The trickster – the marionetteer who pulls the strings animating act-object assemblages of today - is not Benjamin’s shaman-theologian playing with fragments of ‘Ur’ history but a machinic pseudo-mathematician, a manipulator-mixer which enters the social in the shape of sequences of structures mediating the events of order generation performed in cloistered places of creative activity The collapse of Summa Theologica and with it the legitimacy of speculative inquiry - which opened the way for science and the philosophy of Rational Man - has led to a decisive shift of values and responsibilities from Godly to human, eternal to earthly and finite Dissipation and decay (birth and death) have been demoted from their Godly status The outcome is a separation between the histories of human organisation and artefacts However, both the new materiality and the allegoric forms staged in the space of multiple mediators and knowledge systems became not only a source of division but also – be it always only short lived - a mixer and unifier, a contingent meeting place and a momentary redeemer of at least fragmentary unity and continuity of human thought and experience Like Mach’s and late Wittgenstein’s, Benjamin’s philosophy and conceptualisation amounted to a process of ‘successive interpretations’ Today more than in Benjamin’s lifetime their durability is best grasped as translatability lifting them from the turmoil of meta-modern vita activa by those few equipped with the 31 skills of recognition of order generation and its directional developments For most, the gap between ‘the thing’ and the human actor is at best bridged by a perpetually updated allegory One of the key outcomes of this change in the human condition is that privacy and personal autonomy – one of the chief demands of Enlightened Modernity - are no longer much of an issue so long as the individual or group in question are not prevented from participating in the processes fitting the way identity politics shaped their ego, i.e anything from shopping to re-enacting battles of the American civil war or blogging about art The act of journeying constitutes both the wayfarer and his ‘way’, and in almost any quasistructured territory replaces the role of traditional symbols – the objects and narratives supplied and ‘accredited’ by centuries-old development reassuring humans of stability and security, meaning and identity (e.g Jungian archetypes of rebirth and immortality, of spirit and body, mother and trickster, etc.) It then matters less what exactly happens, say, on the stage, in the square or on a football pitch - so long as one’s place in the flow of dynamic onto-epistemic is not seriously challenged, and there are at least one or two familiar bits That is why the task of persuading a viewer to choose a particular ‘show’ – or indeed to make any choice at all - is not so much about why and what but about how ‘it’ best satisfies his or hers current ‘existential’ need All this fits well the metaphor of a baroque-like stage - with ‘homo-marionettes’ animated by a multitude of competing quasi-machinic systems with lives of their own! Of course, it is ultimately those processes that best match the demands of the underlying (causal) order generation upon social organisation that emerge victorious and visible as such be it still mysterious to most surviving actors 32 References (Short) Arendt, H (1958) The Human Condition Chicago, Chicago Univ Press Benjamin, W (1999) The Arcades Project Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Transl Eiland, H & McLoughlin, K Blömeke, S., Zlatkin-Troitchanskaia, O., & Fege, J., Eds (2013) Modeling and Measuring Competences in Higher Education Rotterdam, Sensepublishers (Also see Modeling and Measuring Competences in Higher Education, KoKoHs Papers www.kompetenzen-im-hochschulsektor.de (November 2013)) Bromwich, D (2014) The High-Tech Mess of Higher Education The New York Review of Books, LXI, August 14, pp.50-52 Bryant, L.R (2011) The Democracy of Objects Ann Arbor, Open Humanities Press Eshun, K (2004) “Everything Was To Be Done All Adventures Are Still There.” In Lovink, G., Ed Uncanny Networks, pp.348-359 Cambridge, MIT Press Foster, H (2011) The Art-Architecture Complex London, Verso Foster, H (2015) Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency London, Verso Foucault, M (1973) The Order of Things New York, Vintage Books Gutting, G (1989) Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason Cambridge, Cambridge Univ Press Harvey, D (2010) The Enigma of Capital London, Profile Books Jaros, M (2001) Ethological Knowledge Maps of Liminal Territories, Limen http://limen.mi2.hr/limen1-2001/milanjaros.html Jaros, M (2003) Fragmentation and Territorialisation of Knowledge in Conditions of Post-1990 Globalisation: A Case Study (The 6th International Conference of the European Sociological Association, Murcia, Spain, Sept 2003) www.um.es/ESA/papers/Rn21_33.pdf Jaros, M (2014) Leadership and Competence Development in Higher Education: Reconstituting the Human – Machine Interfaces in the Space of Digital Systems, American Journal of Educational Research (10), 898-905 Jaros, M (2015) Leadership and Competence Development in Higher Education Saarbrücken, Lambert Academic Publishing, and refs therein Körner, S (1990) Kant London, Penguin Books Kissinger, H (2014) World Order London, Allen Lane – Penguin Books Mayer, J (2016) Dark Money New York, Doubleday 33 Mackenzie, A (2002) Transductions London, Continuum Miller, A (2014) Colliding Worlds London, W.W Norton & Co Inc Morris, I (2010) Why the West Rules – For Now New York, Farrah, Strauss & Giroux Nowotny, H (2016) The Cunning of Uncertainty Cambridge, Polity, Piketty, T (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century Transl Goldhammer, R Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press Smith, B C (1996) On the Origin of Objects Cambridge, MIT Press Steyer, H (2017) Duty Free Art London, Verso Stiglitz, J.E (2018) Globalisation and its Discontents Revisited London, Verso Trentmann, F (2016) Empire of Things London, Allen Lane Westra, R., (2012) The Evil Axis of Finance Atlanta, Clarity Press Inc Westra, R (2015) Exit from Globalisation London, Routledge Zizek, S (2009) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce London, Verso 34 ... ‘closed loop’ and fit it into the conditions of the territory of functioning of this loop This value, in addition to the best bet to reflect the contingent flow of ‘supply and demand’ in the expertise... ‘Maps of Digital Finitudes? ?? Grounding Thought in Meta-Modernity The foregoing sections indicate that the outstanding problem of meta-modernity is how to engage with the dynamics of embodiment of. .. disappeared in the dialectics of the self-understanding of the collective mind (Spirit) cast into Marx’s historical materialism of social struggle, of the exchange and use value, “means of production” and