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The Hard Matter of Abstraction a Guidebook to Domination by Abstraction Tomislav Medak

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The Hard Matter of Abstraction a Guidebook to Domination by Abstraction Tomislav Medak The hard matter of abstraction Organon 1 V erlag für Handbücher Tomislav Medak Tomislav The hard matter of abstraction A guidebook to domination by abstraction Tomislav Medak V erlag für Handbücher Three ways Hyperbolic diagnostic to approach Critique of ideology Real abstraction abstraction 6 Domination Abstract labor, commodity, value by abstraction Real abstraction, social epistemology and technoscience 16 Abstracting Scientific management and the the labor deskilling of labor Labor in the circuits of computerization 31 _____Automating the automators _____Algorithmically driven automation Owning the The standardization and the soft abstraction law of global exchanges Copyrights and labor wrongs 58 Commodified science and disutility of copyright Contents 6 H_____yperbolic diagnostic complexity, the social imaginary When faced with the question, develops a diagnostic that what are the developments tends to isolate one social trans- that structure the present, the formation – a hyperbole – that social imaginary resorts to it sees as a privileged point of hyperbole. The epochal chan- entry or one transformation ges over the last decades, that dominates all of the others. catalyzed by the parallel rise of digital communication So much so that the chosen 1938 (March 13, 2011), (March 13, 2011), 1938 technologies, the knowledge social transformation then typi- economy, the “new global cally serves as a name giver order“, the global neo-liberali- for an entire epoch. We are thus zation, the creeping crisis of purported to live under socie- 67, doi:10.1098/rsta.2010.0327. US hegemony, climate change, ties of control, Empire, perma- – “A nos amis” (La Fabrique Eds, 2014); Paul Crutzen et nos amis” (La Fabrique Eds, 2014); “A Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical al., “The of the Transactions Perspectives”, in “Philosophical A: Mathematical, Physical and Royal Society” of London Engineering Sciences 369, no. the war on terror, and the 842 nent state of exception, regime mass surveillance, form a com- of governing by crisis, the an- plex matrix of interdepend- thropocene, and so on.1 Tech- ent social transformations that nology-driven transformations 7; Michael – neither common sense nor are in particular conducive to critical analysis can easily en- such detection of epochal chan- compass and comprehend ge. Technologies can have a dis- in their totality. Faced with this ruptive impact on our social relations and our relations to the Three ways to environment, an impact that approach abstraction 1_____These are respectively central concepts in Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, 3 in “October” 59 (January 1, 1992), Antonio Negri, “Empire” (Harvard University Hardt and Agamben, “State of Exception” 2000); Giorgio Press, (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Comité Invisible, seems to be even less under our 8 Three ways to approach abstraction control than the political or that operates at the level of so- social transformations. We are cial structure and sets the thus purported to live in an condition for their action would epoch dominated by the rise of otherwise require a methodo- robots, the circuits of cyber- logical inquiry – a daunting task. netic control, the dragnet of al- However, by focusing rather on gorithms, the dataveillance, isolated elements of that struc- the trappings of narcissistic self- ture – what in Whitehead’s representation, or the black words constitutes a “fallacy of 2 Are TIME’s Person of theAre box societies. misplaced concreteness” – — these diagnostic readings achie- Yes, You Yes, C_____ritique of ideology ve an understanding of social — Such ascriptions of epochal reality that is not necessarily agency to an isolated social or false. First, they reflect the Surveillance State” (Metropolitan Books, 2014); Lev Surveillance State” (Metropolitan Books, 2014); Lev Grossman, “You technological transformation December 25, 2006, http://content. in “Time”, Year,“ time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570810,00. The html; Frank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: That Control Money and Information”,Algorithms Secret Edition (Harvard University Press, 2015). 1st perspectival positions of par- can indeed have a powerful ex- ticular social actors as con- planatory effect. By isolating ditioned by social structure – i.e. only a single transformation their “cognitive mapping” they provide an intuitive grasp of how processes at the level of of the processes that are too social totality structure and complex and too opaque to be restructure the reality accessible fully understood by social to their experience and their actors at the level of their im- social categories.3 mediate social reality. To access Second, they reflect how social 2_____For more on these concepts see Paul Krugman, accessedTimes”, York in “The New of the Robots”, “Rise http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/ May 21, 2015, Alexander R. Galloway, 12/08/rise-of-the-robots/; After Decentralization” “Protocol: How Control Exists Press, 2004); Glenn Greenwald, “No Place to (MIT Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and U.S. the abstract logic of relations institutions are responding to 3_____The notion of cognitive mapping follows Jameson’s definition: “a situational representation on the part of individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.” Fredric Jameson, the Cultural Logic of Late “Postmodernism, or, Capitalism” (Duke University Press, 1991), 51. 10 Three ways to approach abstraction those processes by creating and can be understood in adaptations in the organization terms of their historic specific- of economic, institutional or ity. Thus, to unfold an ideologi- legal affairs to accommodate or cal critique of those categories countervail them – i.e. forms of and the social institutions that social reflexivity in response to ground them, we would need to the processes unfolding at the start from an analysis of their level of social structure. coevolutionary relation. To transform them, we need to re- If we don’t want to simply wave sort to collective acts of deter- off these readings, but want minate negation from within that to take them at their word, we relation. have to go analytically a level further in abstraction. A critical R_____eal abstraction account of those positions This guidebook, however, does requires showing the generative not intend to pursue any of relation between the social those hyperbolic diagnostic categories available to a parti- readings nor develop further a cular social position of those critical ideological account of doing the reading and the social such readings. Instead, it will go institutions that ground such yet another analytical level readings in their respective so- of abstraction further by ana- cial realities. Both the categorial lyzing the real abstraction and the institutional are the that grounds and regulates the result of a reified social practice relations of such epistemic 12 Three ways to approach abstraction notions to their social reality in ly practical format of a guide- the abstract logic of capitalist book and the highly impractical relations. It will chart a general topic of abstraction that is theoretical outline of how ab- bound to raise some eyebrows. straction – at the various levels Appearing in a publishing series of social reality, starting from dedicated to manuals, this relations of production all the guidebook in fact looks at how way to property relations – acts the division between the con- as a concrete material force crete, practical, and manual on in the world, how abstraction the one hand versus the ab- organizes the rationality of stract, structural, and intellectual social institutions, and how ab- on the other is constitutive of straction structures categories a historically specific and reified used for their understanding. social reality that we inhabit. By grounding the categories and As we move through economic, institutions in the abstract logic technological, and cultural of capitalist relations, the real environments that compose our abstraction drives the historic social reality, their complexity transformations that reproduce is made navigable for us through the capitalist domination. procedures, signals, and in- structions. And yet as we move But before we continue with the through these environments, analysis of real abstraction, often perusing manuals ranging a word is warranted about the from workplace task lists to contradiction between the high- psychological self-help books, 14 Three ways to approach abstraction in which those procedures and give more detailed analyses of desired actions are laid out for how that highest level of abstrac- us, we move through systems tion under capitalism is re- with little impact on the general flected in lower level abstrac- direction of structures gov- tions that are specific to the erning their operation. To act on dynamic of technological devel- those requires different modes opment and the transforma- of operation and different ma- tions of the organization of pro- nuals, instructing us rather how duction, regulation of com- to lose our sense of the practi- modity flows, and property re- cal and how to betray the logic lations that follow in its wake. of the operative. Such is this It is these lower level abstrac- manual: aimed at charting how tions that stand closer to the multiple and nested forms of concrete experience of social real abstraction at various actors and their capacity to levels of our experience operate
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