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Momentum & Information: Thinking with Simondon about the stress-energy-momentum of information

Momentum & Information: Thinking with Simondon about the stress-energy-momentum of information

Panel 16:00 – 17:30 UK time, 1 November 2024

Contested & Erased Energy Knowledges Conference (short program)

Dundee and Edinburgh | 31 October – 2 November 2024

The present panel proposes to sketch out some aspects of a desirable reform of ontology and epistemology aimed at reappraising the relation between form and energy. Taking a lead from Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, a special emphasis will be placed on his concept of ground: ‘what is determinant and plays an energetic role are not forms but that which carries the forms, which is to say their ground; the ground, while perpetually marginal with respect to attention, is what harbors the dynamisms.’ (Simondon, Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, pp. 60-62) Simondon’s approach indeed enables us to conceive of the participation of forms in a ground that is dynamic and rich in singularities. This notion of ground could not be further removed from the disembodied, neutral backdrop of transcendental notions of space and time, in which geometric points without extension and lines without thickness have ruled the ontology and epistemology of classical physics. (Longo, Le cauchemar de prométhée, Puf, 2023)

Abstracts

1.  Potentials, forces that carve out their path: Simondon’s
concept of ground

Cécile Malaspina

The climate crisis and its interrelation with sociopolitical and economic crises, require that we re-examine our approach to systemic complexity. The notion of ground, as conceived by Simondon, will draw our attention to what remains perpetually marginal with respect to structural analysis, namely the energetic role played by ground. Simondon describes the relation of form and ground as a bestriding of the present that diffuses an influence of the future onto the present, of the virtual onto the actual (Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 61). Clarifying the topo-chronological future anterior of this relation, what emerges is the constitutive role of ground, of its inherent dynamisms, potentials and singularities one that is very different from the neutral, disembodied background of simulations and modellisations of modern science (Longo, Le cauchemar de prométhée, 2023). Simondon enables us to think of the forms we discern, analyse and classify not only as emerging from ground, but as the very unfolding of a ground that is complex in its dynamic, rich in singularities and replete with potentials, forces that carve out their path (Simondon, 61).

2. Stress-energy-momentum tensors as ontogenetic operators

Sha Xin Wei

For Simondon, “information is never relative to a single and homogeneous reality but to two orders in a state of disparation…never deposited in a [given] form…[but] is the tension between two disparate reals.”  The elastic dynamics of his material example, clay, is modeled by what materials scientists call the stress-energy tensor.  I consider this tensor and its general relativistic analogue: the stress-energy-momentum tensor not to reduce phenomena to physics, but to see what insights we may derive from such non-Newtonian figures of thought, for a materialist, haptic, textural (distributed), approach to how “emergent energetic directionalities and/or networks structure human and nonhuman trajectories, behaviour, and affordances.”   I propose to re-earth discussions of energy from dematerializing, transcendental versions of informatics and cybernetics, and orient towards a metabolic understanding of dynamics.

3. Energetics, Magics, and Metaphysics: On the Engineering Metaphorical Devices

Muindi Fanuel Muindi

Since its inception, the science of energy, or “energetics”, has informed the researches of occultists and philosophers, serving as a guiding model and metaphor for the creation of new concepts of the uncanny, the other-worldly, the ontological, and the ethical. Magical and metaphysical thinking have, in turn, informed the science of energetics, serving as forerunners, presaging unexpected findings and paradigm shifts. This presentation investigates the energetic tropes that permeate the varied discourses that characterize magics and metaphysics and, in turn, the forms of magical and metaphysical thinking that permeate the scientific discourse of energetics.

To this end, it will engage with five forms of energetic agency and energetic agents: conduction and the conductors that channel energy; transduction and the transducers that transform energy; resistance and the resistors that dissipate energy; capacitance and the capacitors that intervene between conductors to store-up energy; and lastly, inductance and the inductors that convene (or coil) conductors around them to store-up energy. One particular family of energetic devices will serve as informative anecdote for this investigation: analog radios and their tuned circuits — consisting of a resistor (R), an inductor (L), and a capacitor (C) configured to form a harmonic oscillator.

Following this line of inquiry, the presentation will consider the manner in which Colonial Science tacitly accepts metaphors drawn from the magical and metaphysical languages of “the West” and rejects metaphors drawn from the magical and metaphysical languages of “the Rest”.

4. A relational ontology grounded on constraint

Alicia Juarrero

This panel has challenged itself to consider the possibility of a new logic, one that shifts from a focus on things to a focus on systemic complexity. In particular, it aims to do so by “reappraising the relation between form and energy.” We take our inspiration from the Simondon’s concept of ground: not as forms but as “that which carries forms.”  Not coincidentally, the notion of ground carries with it a different understanding of temporality than that of (Newtonian, efficient) cause and effect.”

This paper takes up that challenge by proposing a relational ontology grounded on the operation of constraints in complex adaptive systems. Constraints exert influence not as efficient cause; they do so by sculpting, shaping and modulating/regulating possibility vectors within a constrained-generated field.  One type of constraint (context-independent constraints) establishes the field’s persistent and ongoing generative potential by laying out its fundamental ontological ground — the field’s primordial topology within which energy flows directionally. CICs thus set up a stress-energy tensor field and energy flows directionally in response to the field’s topology.

Context-dependent constraints, on the other hand, specify and individuate trajectories within that possibility landscape; mass embodies attractors that emerge when multidimensional context-dependent constraints intersect.  Such emergent phenomena in turn reshape and resculpt the fundamental ground – they turn it rugged and individuated, in other words.

From this perspective, the classical notion of Form can be reconceptualized as constraint regimes that govern individual actions such as to preserve the integrity of the systemic complexity.

Biographies

Alicia Juarrero is President and co-founder of VectorAnalytica, Inc., and Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Miami. She is the author of iis the author of Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (MIT 1999) and co-editor of Reframing Complexity: Perspectives from North and South (ISCE Publishing, 2007), and Emergence, Self-Organization and Complexity: Precursors and Prototypes (ISCE Publishing, 2008). She is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Prince George’s Community College (MD). Among the articles she has published in peer-reviewed journals are “Self-Organization: Kant’s Concept of Teleology and Modern Chemistry,” The Review of Metaphysics39 (1985): 107‑135; “Causality as Constraint,” in G. van de Vijver, S. Salthe and M. Delpos, eds., Evolutionary System: Biological and Epistemological Perspectives on Self-Organization.Dordrecht: Kluwer. 1998 pp. 233-242; “Complex Dynamical Systems and the Concept of Identity,” Emergence (Fall 2002); and “Fail‑Safe versus Safe‑Fail: Suggestions towards A Dynamical Systems Model of Justice,” Texas Law Review69 (June 1991): 1745‑1777. Dr. Juarrero was named the 2002 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; in 2003 she received the Edward T. Foote Alumnus of Distinction Award of the University of Miami; in 1995 the Distinguished Humanities Educator Award of the Community College Humanities Association. In 1992 Dr. Juarrero was appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the Advisory Board of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) where, from 1992-2000 she served as NEH’s Chair of Council Committee on State Programs. In that capacity she was responsible for the oversight of approximately $32 million in NEH funds distributed annually to the States Humanities Councils.

Muindi Fanuel Muindi is a performance artist, philosopher, and poet, with Lacustrine Bantu roots in the Rift Forests of Eastern Congo and the Mara Wetlands in Tanzania. He is the author of six books of experimental poetry and prose. Muindi’s philosophical perspective, his “deconstructive empiricism”, is deeply affected by Bantu philosophies and by Western deconstruction and schizoanalysis, and it is subtly informed by figures, functions, and structures from comparative biology and measure theory. Muindi’s performances, his “philosophical gestures”, deploy dramatic devices to create sensuous experiences that deepen understandings of the metaphysical catastrophe of coloniality and that broaden the prospects of the Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences. Having adopted the motto “more grit, less kit”, Muindi’s performance practice privileges high latency, low fidelity, and seamful designs and the use of TEK (Transformative Ecological Knowledges). Muindi is co-founder of the Fyrthyr Institute for Unsettling Technologies, coordinator of the “Prototyping Social Forms” and “Alter-Eco” research streams at the Synthesis Center, an organizer at the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines, co-producer and audio engineer for the Forested Niches podcast, and a member of the “After School”, “Technologies of Critical Conscientization”, and “Unwriting Nature” research communities at the Center for Art Design + Social Research.

Cécile Malaspina is the author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the principal translator of Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. She is directrice de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris (Ciph) and programmer for Art & Curatorial Practice at the New Centre for Research and Practice. She is based in London, at King’s College, where she is a Visiting Research Fellow. Cécile is a member of the editorial boards of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities; Copy Press; and is a guest editor at Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Sha Xin Wei, Professor at the Schools of Arts, Media + Engineering and Complex Adaptive Systems, directs the Synthesis Atelier for transversal art, philosophy and technology at Arizona State University.  He has been a professor at Concordia University as director of the Topological Media Lab, at the European Graduate School and the New Centre for Research & Practice. Sha’s core research concerns processualist approaches to ontogenesis and poiesis.  Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford University, his art and scholarly work range from gestural media, movement arts, and realtime media installation through experiential design to critical studies and philosophy of technology.  Sha has published in philosophy, media arts and sciences, experimental music and performance, science and technology studies, computer science, and human computer interaction, including the book Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter (MIT).  He is an associate editor for AI & Society, and serves on the Governing Board of Leonardo