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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

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

4. A relational ontology grounded on constraint

Alicia Juarrero

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