News

Computing Energy “In Materio” Panel, Contested & Erased Energy Knowledges Conference

Computing Energy “In Materio”: Fluidic Logics, Exergetic Economies and Metabolic Social Forms

Panel 14:00 – 15:30 UK time, 31 October 2024

Contested & Erased Energy Knowledges Conference (short program)

Dundee and Edinburgh | 31 October – 2 November 2024

In The Neglected Pillar of Material Computation, Susan Stepney proposes tapping into matter’s own substrate and its natural computational capacity before trying to comprehend the computational (physical and logical) affordances of biological systems. This panel departs from this provocation and carries matter’s computational capacity to different ends. Fluidics and Materialist Logics will look at the type of logics fluidic computers generate and the subsequent ontologies of turbulence, to suggest a social understanding of negation. Exergy and Ecological Economic posits exergy as a far more crucial concept for bioeconomics, challenging the more commonly used notion of entropy. In the same vein of thought, Metabolism and Capitalist Social Form will further investigate the use of metabolism and metabolic states in Marx’s critique of capitalist social forms.

Abstracts

1. Metabolism as a Material-energetic Computation

Sha Xin Wei

The Turing model of computation (or equivalently, Church’s lambda-calculus) is a purely formal concept. And for some 80 years, electronic machines materially realizing Turing-equivalent computation have been architected to maintain the immaterial illusions of Turing computation: (1) replacing ontology by tokens, in particular binary data; (2) the immateriality and omnitemporality of representation; (3) the conceit that computation takes no physical energy and no space.  On the other hand, the metabolic is conditioned — though not determined — by thermodynamic energetics, friction, analog continuity, and complexity, with the extra features of mortality, natality, dense metastability, anti-entropy (negentropy), indeterminacy and non-prestatability. Is there any way to associate these seemingly antipodal families of notions?  Rather than reduce the metabolic to the formal (as done by machine pattern classification and synthesis, computer games, a-life, assembly theory), I speculate what alternative concept of “computation” might enjoy some of the features or effects of the metabolic. And following a pragmatic approach I propose some performative experiments from Synthesis @ ASU.

2. Metabolism and Capitalist Social Form

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia

A crucial moment in the development of Marx’s materialism was his deployment of the concept of metabolism to theorise the human relationship with nature. The metabolic framework situates human social activity within an energetic rather than conceptual economy, marking a decisive break with idealism. Yet for Marx social life remains unintelligible as a merely energetic transfer, for that transfer always takes place in historically specific forms, bound to historically specific social relations, institutions, technologies, identities, ideologies, etc.. The critical force of Marx’s account of Capital lies precisely in the analysis of the social forms that mediate the human-nature metabolism in the modern epoch. This paper examines this link, between metabolism and capitalist social form in Marx’s thought, in order to clarify the stakes of the present ecological crisis.

3. Exergy and Ecological Economics

Violeta Garrido and Ramón del Buey Cañas

It is well known that, at least since the publication of the report to the Club of Rome in 1971, thinking in depth about the ecological problems of our time means the understanding of the origin and nature of our ways of living and, moreover, seeing that these are coupled to a type of metabolism that is resulting in a severe erosion of the web of life and an accelerated waste of our material and energy resources. This is another way to pose that, in addition to a knowledge of the social, institutional, imaginary and motivational construction that sets in motion the current capitalist orders, an integrated project of ecological economy also needs to address the dynamics of energy and material exchanges that are established at its base. And for this, a solid knowledge of the functioning of these energetic and material dynamics at a fundamental level seems unavoidable. 

This is precisely what the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen pointed to, when he claimed the crucial importance of entropy in the study and conceptualization of a truly eco-integrative economic proposal. At this point, however, a crucial question arises: does entropy have the potential to become an integrative concept for ecological economics, and is it possible to construct a mutually intelligible interdisciplinary approach to economic processes that takes entropy as its cornerstone? Our hypothesis, which is supported by the numerous and crucial works of Antonio Valero and Alicia Valero, is that it is not possible. From their point of view, although the economy must undoubtedly be taken into account, and incorporate thermodynamics in its accounting, entropy is a bad indicator for it. Why? Our talk proposes an answer to this question, important also to address some crucial debates around the notions of ‘energy’ and ‘exergy’, which are transversal to the fields of ecological economics, feminist economics, ecofeminism and ecosocialism.

4. Fluidics and materialist logics

Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra

As the ongoing “return to matter” trickles down into reinvented glossaries and research methodologies motivated by new materialist thinking, it remains unclear how it challenges our understanding of computation. Even within a resurging field like fluidic computation there is little, if any, theoretical engagement with the material affordances of fluids as a mode of computation.

Developed at first to model post-war national economies (MONIAC) while anticipating the Cold War hysteria as it could operate in an ionized environment, fluidic computation could carry out computations dynamically by solving multiple differential equations simultaneously. In more recent years, scaled down to microfluidics, its operations have been reintroduced in the health sector in lab-on-a-chip (LOC) research.

In this presentation I would like to approach fluidic computation from a theoretical standpoint by re-interpreting some of its key components, and focus on its materially constituted logic, whereby negation is not the result of a posited non-being (NOT) but the outcome of turbulence disturbance. To do so, I will examine Michel Serres’ The Birth of Physics, in which he notes that when a laminar flow of atoms is disturbed by turbulence is what leads to existence. But such turbulence, in fluidic engineering, is what defines the ‘NOT’ operator. From this study case I will conclude by further complexifying the notion of negation through Paolo Virno’s “linguistic anthropology”.

Biographies

Ramón del Buey Cañas is a Spanish researcher, with a formal background in Philosophy (BA, MA, PhD; Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Environmental Humanities (MA; Universidad Politécnica de Valencia & Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). He is a member of the research projects “Energy Humanities: Energy and socio-cultural imaginaries between the industrial revolution and the ecosocial crisis”  c(PID2020-113272RA-I00, HUMENERGE) and “Speak4Nature-Interdisciplinary Approaches on Ecological Justice MARIE SKLODOWSKA-CURIE ACTIONS STAFF EXCHANGES (MSCA-SE) MSCA-SE-2021-101086202. He has been a visiting scholar at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (CDMX, Mexico), Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Santa Fe, Argentina) and Duke University (North Carolina, USA). He is a member of the Research Group in Ecological Humanities (GHECO, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Violeta Garrido is a researcher in the Department of Philosophy I at the University of Granada (Spain) and a member of the Research Group “Social Philosophy: Critical Analysis of Society and Culture” (HUM-1036) and the Extraordinary Chair in Social Philosophy of Bodily Discrimination (Inmujeres-UGR). Her research interests concern the relationship between political philosophy and aesthetics, with a particular focus on Marxism and the critique of ideology. She has been a visiting scholar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, at Duke University and at the National University of La Plata, and has published several translations from French and English. She is also interested in the issue of the ecological crisis, on which she is directing a research project funded by the University of Granada’s Research Plan for the academic year 2023-2024, entitled “Techno-optimism and the preservation of the future: science and deliberation on the horizon of the ecological crisis”. Some of her recent publications are “A cultural ecocritique of technological solutionism” (Nuestra Bandera, no. 262, 2024); “Exploitation and reification: Between György Lukács and Juan Carlos Rodríguez” (Izquierdas, no. 54, 2024); “The time of insurrection: past, present and future in Étienne Balibar” (Isegoría, no. 68, 2023) and “Philosophical unconscious and ideological unconscious: on Althusser’s historicity” (Archivos, no. 22, 2023). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8678-8390

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and Associate Lecturer in Theory and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (SNI) and an editor of The Philosopher, Britain’s longest running public philosophy journal. His publications include Subsumption in Kant, Hegel in Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society (Brill, 2024) and the edited volume Marx & the Critique of Humanism (forthcoming with Bloomsbury). 

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.

Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra is a PhD candidate in the transdisciplinary program Media Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. His research interrogates the philosophical and aesthetic implications of treating digitality and computation within a materialist framework, by looking at alternative histories of computation and enacting them in media technologies. With a formal training in mathematics (BSc) and philosophy (BA, MA), and as an active art practitioner and musician, his work spans and coagulates multiple streams of research. His most recent publication is “Computation and Material Transformations: Dematerialisation, Rematerialisation and Immaterialisation in Time-Based Media”, in Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies ed.  ed. by N. Lushetich et al., Media Philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield. In his most recent exhibition, he is part of a group representation of the Cyprus Pavilion in the 60th Venice Biennale.