By: Devin Bae
Preface to the Preface:
The story goes like this: A young-girl flies into Istanbul to meet a world-renowned philosopher going by the name "◼️". Traveling through the city she stumbles upon a dusty manuscript under a [ ] bed at a [ ] hostel she frequents when visiting Turkey. As the days pass she looks for more clues about the text, crude insanity, missing pages, corrupted files. The computer she finds shuffles, then fails. Pages pile up through a series of disordered filings, forgotten drafts, knotted notes, compounding disorder by accelerating and decelerating phase shifts. The rest of the story is history.
Chaos arrives from the past.
Clear crystal governance diffracts then dissipates.
Monosynthetic-control.
There is only the negative of the negative.
Preface
The proposed concept of Khaos-politics builds upon Michel Foucault's notion of biopolitics (Foucault, 1976), Achille Mbembe's development of Necropolitics (Mbembe, 2019), and most recently, Isabel Millar's concept of Patipolitics (Millar, 2023). While biopolitics, necropolitics, and patipolitics each respectively examine the governance of bodies, the specific focus on living entities overlooks broader underlying logics of governance, which I argue often preclude or foreshadow movements within biopolitical, necropolitical, and patipolitical governance. By examining the administration of chaos itself as the governance of the dynamics of disorder and order, Khaos-politics seeks to interrogate how the computational turn has fundamentally reshaped governance, looping back to the primordial concept of "chaos," which under complexity science has come to describe deterministic complex behavior; that which is non-periodic and irregular yet still maintains a "latent order" (Plaza i Font & Régis, 2006). As Cecile Malaspina (2018) notes, "In mathematical terms, it makes no sense to equate even chaos with disorder, since mathematical chaos, for instance as treated it in catastrophe theory by René Thom, is deterministic – determined and thus orderly in its necessary unfolding, even if its graphic representation is baffling and unpredictable" (p. 200). Following David Berry (2011), Lazer et al. (2009), and Langlois et al. (2015), I define the computational turn as "the use of computational technologies[...]not only to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth, depth, and scale[...]but also to shift the critical ground of these disciplines' concepts and theories" (Langlois et al. 2015).
Of course, the origins of the computational turn may be considered differently depending on what presuppositions one makes about "computation," "techne," and the movement of intelligence throughout history. Traditionally speaking, we might map the rise of computation to the work of Ludwig Boltzmann (Negarestani, 2018), Ada Lovelace (Plant, 1998), and Alan Turing (Cavia, 2022). Yet, to some extent, the computational turn has always been ongoing (following Baudrillard) "as a constitutive part of the process of abstraction that begins with language itself" (Millar, 2023). Indeed, examining the works of Reza Negarestani and AA Cavia, it becomes clear that the underlying forces behind computerization lie distinctly outside of what's typically defined as the "computational turn." Nevertheless, at the very least, we might say that the trajectory and pace of computerization have exponentially increased following the computational turn as both a driver, by-product, and factor in the "glocal" proliferation of computers and computational devices.
I use the term "glocal" (see the work of Roland Robertson, and most recently, Victor Roudometof) here to draw attention to the disparate ways in which the computational turn has diffracted throughout the planet, in both local and global contexts, as well as particular "glocalities" (Roudometof, 2023) where the lines between global and local are blurred by technological and material conditions (Roudometof, 2021). Within the spectra of "global" and "local" composed of particular "glocalities," the effects of the computational turn play out in differing ways, which then influence and shape the deployment of administrative technologies/governance. This is a complex space with the interplay between cultural contexts, intercultural fusion (and diffusion), and the profound historicity (including colonialism) embedded in the computational turn and governance.
Within these notes, I will try my best to sketch some of the underlying dynamics, though given the preliminary nature of the work, the writing may be disordered and (at times) difficult to follow. Additionally, I am not interested in reducing the inherent complexity within the space, so I will try my best to avoid making spurious claims or over-generalizations. Finally, I don't believe there is an inherent "goodness" or "evilness" within the governance of chaos; rather, the problem lies with particular methods and ideologies behind such techniques that enable the perpetuation, reproduction, and creation of worlds in which oppression, violence, slavery, etc. may continue.
Based on my understanding, patipolitics, necropolitics, and biopolitics are engaged in a sort of Borromean trio, where governance of chaos (as the determination of indeterminacy) threads itself throughout. It is only once the inevitable trajectories of history have been called, shaped, and defined, that politics comme toujours can continue. Drawing from the Deep Objekt framework developed by Sepideh Majidi and Reza Negarestani (2024), chaos presents itself as one of the C’s, relevant to both computational cost and complexity, in addition to intersecting with the V's (such as value and verticality). Emerging from this lattice of C's and V's, chaos and its political project of capture trace an equally intensifying and disruptive vector through the structure, heading towards a horizon whose limits are not yet clear. Contextualized within contemporary technological, social, and political developments, the sedimenting continent of politics reveals a fundamental element of its formation, which we would be best to note.
Note #1: Some Thoughts on Deep Objekts
The framework of a "Deep Objekt" (Majidi & Negarestani, 2024) originates in Charles Bennett's conception of a "deep object" rooted in logical depth (Bennett, 1988; Bennett, 1994). The recently passed Daniel Dennett's computational approach to the mind can be mapped (bottom-up) to all geopolitical entities possessing the capacity to act within the world. In this regard, various political, bureaucratic, and logistical structures can be understood and analyzed from a computational perspective. The benefits of such an approach are myriad, from a more rigorous mapping of underlying political dynamics to an ultimately "higher" degree of objectivity. Indeed, Patrick H. Winston and Mark A. Finlayson (2004) make similar observations in their development of "Computational Politics," noting how "a computational approach to assisting analysts will allow them to make more responsible and enlightened decisions in the pursuit of policy and national security goals." Of course, the underlying philosophical motivations behind this approach can be debated; however, computation's ability for "detecting, measuring, predicting, explaining, and simulating human behavior" (Margetts & Dorobantu, 2023) is undeniable. This purely functional explanation of computational models (within the realm of politics) is enough to justify its use as an explanatory model if we are simply interested in examining the underlying logic behind collective decision-making embodied in the state. The state as a Deep Objekt then is recursively immersed in a lattice of C's and V's, including computational cost, complexity, chaos, and concurrency, in addition to velocity, volume, variation, value, and verticality, each of which deserves an explanation in their own right. For this series of preliminary notes, I will only briefly explore these relationships; nevertheless, a more in-depth exploration will be forthcoming once the outline of the theory is finalized.
Perhaps touching on one of the most obvious examples, states are often presented with computational problems when it comes to logistical management. In this regard, the amalgamation of personnel assigned and through which the bureaucracy/stratified decision-making functions, can be conceived through the lens of computational cost wherein certain arrangements, functional organizations, and stratifications create cost-benefit trade-offs behind which there certainly lies an algorithm which may be deduced from the dynamics of the system.
Here I present my interpretation of the Deep Objekt framework, as a structure that perhaps resembles a lattice at first glance, but which in reality is quasicrystalline. Quasicrystals are a unique set of ordered yet non-periodic crystalline structures. This structure results from the projection of a periodic lattice in a higher-dimensional space to that of a lower-dimensional space, for example a quasicrystal structure in 3D can be considered as a projection of a higher-dimensional periodic lattice into 3D space. As a result of this unique structure, quasicrystals exhibit unique forms of symmetry (such as 5-fold, 8-fold, 10-fold, and 12-fold) that are forbidden within traditional periodic crystallography. Hence, what we might observe in the 3D lattice occupied by a Deep Objekt can really be considered the projection of a higher dimensional lattice into a 3D space, resulting in unique symmetries which must be careful identified and mapped in order to fully understand the higher dimensional space.
When dealing with politics, governance, and complex multidimensional entities such as the state, they may (at first) only be understood from a higher theoretical level. This representation is something Kojin Karatani accomplishes quite deftly in his work The Structure of World History (2014). Karatani argues that nation, state, and capital are intertwined in a Borromean trio, an analogy he undoubtedly pulls from Lacan, who establishes the same relationship between the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic. In doing so however, some scholars argue that Karatani neglects the fundamentals of Marx's critique. Elena Lange argues that his focus on "modes of exchange[...]attempts to de-emphasise the process of production" and avoids a "detailed discussion based on [direct] textual evidence from Marx's own texts" (Lange, 2016).
"Karatani depicts Marx as a theorist of commodity exchange – and not as a theorist of a particular form of value production to which exploitation of labour power forms its essential dynamic" (Lange, 2016).
Lange also emphasizes Marx's theory of surplus value (and Karatani's supposed abandonment of it), writing, "Instead of addressing the source of relative surplus value and, along with it, the main contradiction of capital – that labour time consumed in the production process is the source of profit, and yet has to be reduced to minimize production costs – Karatani refers to a vague concept of 'temporal differentiations between systems of value'" (Lange, 2016).
In an attempt to add more rigor to this relationship, I start from the two matrices Karatani gives at the beginning of the book, integrated them into my conception of the Deep Objekt, which I believe is functionally useful for understanding the complexity of both modes of exchange and modes of production. Despite Lange's critique, modes of production are still functionally implicit within Karatani's modes of exchange.
"To sum up, relative surplus value is generated within the value system of a single country or region by creating a new value system through technological innovation that increases productivity. A difference arises in the value of labor power between the moment when workers sell it by being hired and the moment when the products they make are sold. Industrial capital obtains its margin by carrying out exchanges (equal exchanges) across the value systems it has differentiated in this way." (Karatani, 2014, p. 192)
Karatani also approaches the history of "capital", "nation", and "state" from a profoundly spatial perspective, and lays the groundwork for conceptualizing this CNS structure (sharing parallels with the "Central Nervous System") as a quasicrystalline Deep Objekt. Let the corresponding elements of Matrix A be mapped from Table 1, given by Karatani (2014, p. 9).
And let Matrix B be a representation of the corresponding elements of Table 2 (Karatani 2014, p. 9).
First, we must establish some properties of these matrices to ground our analysis. Perhaps at the top of the list, we should be concerned about whether Karatani imbued any special meaning into the placement of terms within the matrices. Indeed it appears that Karatani arranges a correspondence between the positions of elements within Matrix A and B respectively, and that the elements correspond with each other in their historical positionally (ie. the general transition from mode of exchange a -> b -> c). This is important to determine whether the matrices are Hermitian, which is a mathematical definition of a matrix that has certain properties which are useful and necessary for conducting quantum physics etc. A Hermitian matrix can be defined as a complex square matrix that is equal to its own conjugate transpose. Hermitian matrices have the following mathematical properties which are important for their functional usage: 1. The diagonal elements of a Hermitian matrix are always real numbers because they must be equal to their own conjugates, 2. The eigenvalues of a Hermitian matrix are always real. This property is crucial in quantum mechanics where Hermitian operators correspond to observable quantities, 3. A Hermitian matrix can be diagonalized by a unitary matrix, and its eigenvectors can be chosen to be orthonormal.
I argue these properties are also functionally important and implicit within Karatani's matrices, and any corresponding mathematical representations of these social formations or modes of exchange should be Hermitian for a more accurate representation of the elements in their historicity. For example, the first property of conjugation can be justified because both reciprocity and commodity exchange are "real" as opposed to mode of exchange which does not have a "fixed" definition within which it can be bounded. In this regard, mode of exchange x more closely resembles an irrational number, as a ratio between different modes of exchange.
Additionally, considering the two matrices Hermitian allows us to go about constructing a spectral graph of the quasicrystalline structure, which is perhaps one of the only ways (barring an abductive approach) to directly map/analyze the higher-dimensional space of the quasicrystal (since we do not have access to its immediate structure, only the current compressed 2D version). Considering we have two matrices, they must either be given some sort of mathematical values or the problem space of the quasicrystal represented in terms of non-mathematical variables. For the purposes of these notes, I will attempt to outline how one might go about performing the reverse projection (from lower dimension to higher), though a rigorous mathematical mapping of variables to numbers/equations etc. is in the works as a future project of mine.
Consider a d dimensional lattice ℤ raised to the dth power where d is greater than the available physical dimensions. This d dimensional space is split into two orthogonal subspaces: the physical space, E, in which the quasicrystal lives (eg. two or three dimensions), and an internal space, I, representing the remaining dimensions (also known as the complementary subspace). The lattice points ℤ^(d) are then projected into E according to a projection matrix P, where the physical space projection of a point 𝑥 ∈ ℤ^(d) is given by P_E (𝑥). Importantly, not all projected points form part of the quasicrystal since they must fall within the accepted domain (or window) of the internal space I. A point 𝑥 is included in the quasicrystal if P_I (𝑥) (the projection of 𝑥 onto I ) is within this window.
Given the two Hermitian matrices given by Karatani, which are also diagonalizable (see proof for further details), then the eigenvalues (λ) of Matrix A and Matrix B can be given as follows where λ_1 and λ_2 represent the eigenvalues of Matrix A and λ_3, λ_4 represent the eigenvalues of Matrix B:
To map the mathematical logic to the relevant space (in this case history), these eigenvalues can be seen as mathematical representations of the underlying logic within the given matrices, since we are trying to formally map Karatani's matrices to a quasicrystalline space. Essentially, for a given element within the mode of exchange matrix (say a_1) we can represent its relationship to other elements of the matrix within a quasicrystalline space by solving for the eigenvalues of Matrix A and B. As stated earlier, in order to map transhistorical political concepts to a formalized quasicrystalline space, either the concepts need to be converted to some meaningful formal mathematical representation (ie. assigning meaningful mathematical values to each of the items, possibly through some sort of relational map), or the corresponding mathematical values (as qualifiers of relationality) need to be utilized in order to map the concepts to a more formalized spatial dimension. I see the latter as contingent for the former, since the mathematical representations one chooses for elements within Karatani's matrices must be grounded in an understanding of history.
We can then represent the eigenvectors as columns in a matrix V, and corresponding eigenvalues in a diagonal matrix D. The eigendecomposition of matrices A and B can then be given as = VDV† where V† is the conjugate transpose of V.
Following this, we can attempt to construct the higher-dimensional lattice from the eigenvectors of V where each eigenvector defines a direction in the higher-dimensional space. The dimensions spanned by the significant eigenvectors (i.e., correspondingly large eigenvalues) can be assumed to constitute the actual dimensions of the higher-dimensional lattice. Smaller eigenvalues (correlated to the eigenvectors) might represent noise or dimensions that do not significantly contribute to the observed structure.
From this information, one can qualitatively infer that larger eigenvalues in the context of matrix A and B are those which (within A and B) represent temporally significant (ie. existing for a longer duration of time) elements in these respective matrices. Following this, we can begin to examine the "actual" dimensions of this higher-dimensional lattice assuming that it is composed of the following eigenvectors (note, for the purposes of simplicity, the value of x is set to 1):
If we represent the lower-dimensional projection as y = 𝑃x where 𝑃 is the projection matrix we are trying to solve for, x is a higher-dimensional vector, and y is the observed lower-dimensional projection, then we can estimate 𝑃 by finding an x which corresponds with a given y. If 𝑃 is full rank and x belongs to the column space of 𝑃, then x can be estimated as x = 𝑃†y where 𝑃† is the pseudo-inverse of 𝑃.
Given the trajectory of a relevant event (outlined by Karatani in the following Table 3), we can define a higher-dimensional vector x based on the following information in the table, and qualitatively identify a corresponding lower-dimensional projection y from the matrices given by Karatani. It should be noted that when we are speaking about the dimensions of historical events and historical structures as outlined by Karatani, higher-dimensional "events" correspond to specific periods of history rather than lower-dimensional "elements" immanent within history such as a nation, capital, or specific modes of exchange.
Table 3:
Political Superstructure | Stateless | Asiatic state | Ancient classic state | Feudal state | Modern state |
Economic Base (Mode of Production) | Clan society | King/vassals (agricultural community) | Citizen/slave | Feudal lord/serfs | Capital/ proleteriat |
Following a rigorous mapping, one could then go about determining the projection matrix, however since we don't know the "true" values of the higher dimensional quasicrystal, we need to make some educated guesses. These should be fully rooted in the historicity of modes of exchange, as well as a thorough understanding of each event.
Note #2: A Short Genealogy of Chaos
While I haven't had the time to fully explore the space of mythology and the interplay of chaos immanent within history, it is clear that the governance of chaos emerges out of a long mythological, cosmological, and existentialist history rooted in the positioning of the human in the context of the world. Though one should be careful of projecting pre-defined/prejudiced notions of mythology and ideology across cultures, it is clear that chaos itself emerges throughout various mythologies around the world, from the serpent Jörmungandr in Norse mythology to the Ometecuhtli of Nahua mythology, and Set within Egyptian mythology. In the context of Greek mythology, Andrew S. Mason (2006) notes how Plato develops his notion of God (in the Timaeus) as a "craftsman" who "creates order out of chaos." Importantly, Mason identifies a sort of dialectical movement where "teleological" and "material" phenomena are synthesized by intelligence to produce a "new phenomena by exploiting the nature of material things" resulting in "both a teleological and a physical explanation" (Mason, 2006). Given the influence of Greek thought within Western governance and philosophy, it is important to understand the ways in which Plato's conception of chaos shapes current projects of governance, and indeed, may have even influenced the mathematical understanding of chaos. Plato's conception of chaos hinges on "natural necessity," which is the "deterministic" behavior of a thing which "must behave in a certain way" given a set of "certain circumstances," though it "does not have to be regular in the sense of being periodic[...]returning to its starting-point and repeating the same process" (Mason, 2006). If this sounds familiar, it should be, because (as Mason notes) this is the definition of chaotic behavior, which deterministic yet non-periodic. Importantly, Plato separates necessity from intelligence, which produces the effects of "chance" as the "unpredictable" elements/events of reality which a "finite being" with finite intelligence cannot predict (Mason, 2006). Here, Plato's foundational logic of the "universe[...]produced by necessity subordinated to intelligent persuasion" (Mason, 2006) reveals perhaps one of the fundamental cosmological assumptions underlying logics of governance and extraction: that "the good" is rooted in "stability" and a "paradigm of order," which (at least for Plato) means "bring[ing] the universe as close as possible to the complete stability of eternity" (Mason, 2006). While this particular notion of "governance" respects the immanence of chaos, it is (naturally) teleological and does not preserve the inherent complexity and dynamics within reality. Though I could certainly contrast Plato's understanding of chaos with other cultural mythologies and even other Greek thinkers, for the purposes of these preliminary notes (and in the interest of time) I'll leave it at that. Suffice to say, if Plato's notion of chaos has truly shaped Westernized notions of governance and control, it is easy to see how and why the logics of colonialism, exploitation, and extraction play out, even though the masks of ideology may have subtly shifted.
By examining the mythological origins of chaos, we can also map the ways in which "religious normativity has spread into our modern scientific ways of knowing," through its "most characteristic aspiration,[...]the aspiration to objectivity" (Gamez, 2023). As the milieu continues to consider questions of the human (post-, trans-, non-, and inhumanism) in the context of the cosmological; the questions of cosmological nihilism (Brassier, 2007; Negarestani, 2008; Roden, 2014; Sorgner, 2023), the dialectic of nihilism (Rose, 1994), and the emerging concept of "negative pragmatism" (Javier Rivera, 2024), -which I see as connected to the work of Stephen Mumford (2021)- grow increasingly important. If humans are truly unable to escape the circle of ideology, then the ideologies that emerge from these works will increasingly shape the trajectory of the human as the governance of chaos lays the foundation for cosmological expansion.
Note #3: Governance, Computation, and Chaos
The administration of chaos is an asignifying process that nevertheless enables signification to occur, the re-inscription, reinterpretation, re-projection, and reproduction of action into a specific space characterized by randomness, complexity, and indeterminacy. Within this space, incomputability meets its limits, but this limit is ultimately a false one, as the signifying power of governance projects on top of this limit, creating a productive and generative use for it. In this regard, the vector of computation cannot be thought to simply stop at a certain point, rather it must be seen as a project approaching the limit of chaos itself, under which all else becomes subsumed to the inherently unpredictable and indeterminable, made coherent or incoherent via the apparatus of computation. One of the fundamental theses of big data is the law of big numbers, which suggests that the more data one has the average of that data will tend towards its "true value" (if it has one) and thus, more “accurate” conclusions can be drawn from the data. In this regard, the project of Khaos-politics and the Khaos-political subject can henceforth only emerge from the convergence of big data and computation, the first of which involves a massive capture of data (which was previously deemed incoherent, un-valuable, undesirable, secret, or simply impossible to capture), and computation which represents a method/process/technique of drawing conclusions from the data.
In the topological space of governance, now occupied by a multiplicity of entities including corporations, national governments, international organizations and institutions, etc. we can broadly approach from four angles, first examining how the development and evolution of technologies (via the computational turn and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution) have reshaped the field of governance, second, how agency and subjectivity have evolved post-computational turn, third, examining how computational technologies have been leveraged by states to fundamentally reshape the nature of governance, and finally fourth, analyzing the ways in which chaos serves as a connecting element (a sort of equally intensifying and disruptive "attractor") within the "structure of world history" as Karatani describes (2014).
Before we can fully understand the ICT revolution, it is vital to understand what constitutes information and its sister concepts: data, idea, and noise. Building upon the work of Jones and Tonetti (2019), and Romer (1990), Lizhi Liu outlines the constitutive parts of information which (according to her) "consists of two mutually exclusive parts: data and idea” (Liu, 2021). Following this, “Idea is the method of making an economic good, whereas data is a factor of production (i.e., an input),” and data is "nonrival" meaning it "can be used an infinite number of times and by many parties simultaneously," and "partially excludable" since (barring encryption, anonymization, and/or offline isolation) "it is easy and inexpensive to duplicate and to transfer over a long distance, even across a country’s border" (Liu, 2021). Importantly, Liu notes how "the economic characteristics of data—nonrivalry and partial excludability—lead to three types of problems that lay the foundation for cross-national politics of personal data: externality, commitment, and valuation problems" (Liu, 2021), and these problems are further compounded by existing/historical structural colonial hierarchies (Gray, 2023). Within the space of data, as the ultimate resource for computation, we can outline a sort of "data dilemma" consisting of tensions between the V's and C's of the deep objekt that is data. As Liu outlines, data firstly has a valuation problem due to its nonrivalry and intangibility, compounded by its shaky temporal value: "its value does not necessarily depreciate over time. Quite often, data fusion—the recombination of different independent datasets—generates new value" (Liu, 2021). Additionally, data has a commitment and security problem, since "states have high incentives to control and compete for data" and "multinational firms cannot credibly commit to not sharing personal data with their home government" while the "home government cannot commit to not abusing personal data for surveillance or for other political purposes that encroach on individual liberty" (Liu, 2021). Finally, data has a colonial problem as "practices of data processing are played out across a global terrain of differentiated exploitation" deploying logics of "appropriation and exploitation" that rely "on a large amount of ideological work, just as historic colonialism did" (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). Building on the work of Couldry and Meijias (2019), Catriona Gray develops a more grounded critique of data politics, drawing on the concept of "dispossession" as "a social relation of coercive redistribution, which is organized into socially and historically specific regimes" (Gray, 2023). In the context of data colonialism, this practice of disposition also has an important epistemological dimension as Gray notes, "data dispossession is enacted through a more heterogeneous and decentralized apparatus. However conceived, any theory of dispossession must remain alert to the violent epistemological underpinnings of dispossessive practices, including how they create and are reinforced by settler knowledge systems that generate epistemic oppression as a matter of course" (Gray, 2023).
Given this epistemological context, I situate data in relation to the concept of “noise,” emerging from the field of information theory which largely developed out of the work of Claude Shannon. Shannon "was the first to formalise the statistical reliability of communication channels and[...]invented a measure of information that can be applied to any probability distribution" (Ladyman et al., 2013). There are other measures of information, such as the metrics from algorithmic complexity theory (Ladyman et al., 2013), however the most important move within the field was the differentiation between "information" and "noise," which suggests that there is a meaningful and epistemological distinction between different aspects of a given message or string. Often within data analysis, noise is characterized in a profoundly negative light, with some arguing that its introduction leads to "certain distortions, certain errors, certain extraneous material, that would certainly lead one to say that the received message exhibits, because of the effects of the noise, an increased uncertainty." (Shannon & Weaver, 1963, p. 19, cited in Kent, 2020). Intuitively, this makes sense since "noise" by any definition is a measure of "spurious uncertainty" (Malaspina, 2018, p. 19). However, it is important to note that the epistemological character of noise is not inherently negative, as anyone familiar with generative AI models can tell you. In particular, diffusion models make explicit use of this noise (Chen, 2023) to generate outputs, and (at risk of vastly oversimplifying) there is an increasing trend towards randomization within machine learning to increase computational efficiency and produce more desirable results. The ambiguous nature of noise is something Malaspina heavily emphasizes, relating "noise" to the biological "freedom of choice" upon which evolution is contingent. Furthermore she writes, "What this tacitly accepted dichotomy between ‘information entropy’ and the ‘negation of entropy’ reveals is, first of all, that there is freedom of choice in the discursive interpretation of mathematical formalization. This freedom of choice is nothing other than the ambiguity of non-mathematical concepts" (Malaspina, 2018, p. 17). Laurence Kent (2020) also notes, "Malaspina’s task is not that of deciding which of the definitions of information works best[...]but in delving into the philosophical ramifications of noise and disorder lying at the heart of knowledge production. The lack of any pre-made or a priori distinctions between information and noise makes the drawing of the line a normative question; it is the reason which both is necessarily driven by norms and is the contingent source of these norms."
What is implicit within talk of the ICT revolution, data, information, and noise, is the underlying importance of how data is analyzed/interpreted, what determines the intelligibility of data, and who stands to benefit from this interpretation. These underlying dynamics influence data's value, and hence shape the resources required to perform extraction, storage, and analysis. In this regard, the epistemologically contextual nature of "noise" makes it far more important to have access to computational power and large datasets in order to properly leverage, contextualize, and extract relevant information, and these resources have historically been restricted to the hands of technologically advanced nation-states and corporations (Gray, 2023). There is also something to be said about the epistemological nature of “noise” in relation to data, as in who/what decides how “noise” is categorized, identified, and cleaned. As Kent (2020) observes:
"Malaspina’s emphasis on a form of willed openness suggests its relevance in opposition to the passive form of constant and forced exposure to information required by the modern workplace of 24/7 email engagement and social media bombardment. The ethical and political stakes of drawing the line between information and noise becomes thus even more urgent when an insidious form of openness is the sine qua non of maintaining one’s self in a networked society."
Not only has noise become somewhat of a weapon within society, but it also raises important questions in regards to the underlying logics behind the defining of noise, which are also inherently inter-contextual. As Malaspina writes:
"Noise becomes the excess generated by the acceptance of a new norm. What is at stake here is not only the changing soundscape of modern society, but the divisive and decisive power of norms." (p. 149)
She outlines an important break between "acoustic noise" and "statistical noise" with the former serving as perhaps the "origin of the noise metaphor in information theory, cybernetics, but also in finance and the empirical sciences more generally" (Malaspina, 2018, p. 143). This particular distinction serves to separate computational approaches to noise from the aesthetics of music, however the distinction is increasingly being blurred. As musicians approach "acoustic noise" with tools such as Generative AI, and statisticians approach statistical noise from the perspective of aesthetics, the boundary between the two becomes increasingly blurred, in no part due to the contingent origins of "noise."
The implications of this blurring are profound when we realize that both the artist and statistician are equally contributing to and wrapped-up in appropriative technologies. Nevertheless the possibility for a revolution exists, yet it cannot simply be attained via an uncritical re-deployment of colonial logics. In this regard, we return back to the rise of "data politics" (Liu, 2021) and what is now recognized as "data colonialism" (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Gray, 2023; Mumford, 2021), contingent upon "the development of digital technologies that have enabled the mass collection, storage, and analysis of data" (Liu, 2021) which have only emerged (at such scale and efficiency) as result of the ICT revolution (Roudometof, 2023). As Roudometof (2023) observes, the emergence of the ICT revolution has its roots in 20th century communication technologies such as the radio, TV, and satellite processing, and it is only the merging of audiovisual media with the internet that has enabled the ICT to have such widespread and disruptive effects. Though the implications of the ICT revolution are broad and widely explored (see Baudrillard, McLuhan, Stiegler, Haraway, Galloway, Plant, Barad, Berardi, Terranova, Parisi, Bratton, Cronin, Carley, Hui, Fisher, Srnicek, etc.) in particular, we might examine how the photographic medium (at first only isolated to photographs but now "democratized" via the emergence of personal electronic devices) has impacted politics, and in-turned reshaped some of the mechanisms of governance.
Note #4: Threading The Needle
As chaos immanently threads itself throughout history, one can detect a sort of disruption and dispersion caused by the "presence" of chaos itself. In this section of the notes I aim to explore one small thread of this "presence" which is simultaneously wrapped up in mythological, historical, colonial, and ideological patterns. Nevertheless, I believe the rise of photographic medium was an important historical event to trace the "presence" of chaos.
The work Vilém Flusser is vital to understanding this photographic turn, and it can be said that both the ontological turn and identification of "photographic thinking" simply revealed (made explicit) what was already implicit within Western modalities of human thought and language. Nevertheless, such a revelation has allowed for an direct manipulation of narratives, themes, photographs, etc. which can perhaps partially explain the current milieu. Importantly, this theme of making explicit what was implicit is crucial to understanding how mechanisms of governance have evolved, and something I will continue to touch upon throughout the rest of the notes.
Flusser's work on the technological developments of the 1970s-80s coincides with his notion of a "technical image," or that which generated via a technical apparatus (say a camera), which itself is governed by "scientific texts" (Flusser, 2013; Irrgang, 2023). Daniel Irrgang notes the conceptual difficulty in distilling Flusser's work because of the "dynamic character of Flusser’s concept formation" which was partially a result of his "non-academic background" and "practice of associative essayistic writing" (Irrgang, 2023). Based on this notion of technical images however, we can begin to map the underlying technological space/dynamics which have shaped the ICT revolution and in-turn mechanisms of governance. Flusser argues that technical images "enable the projection of entirely new models and concepts into the world" as "expressions of a new imagination which works through the calculation of an apparatus" (Irrgang, 2023) rather than representing phenomena in the world (ie. as signs representing an object). Since technical images originate from early 19th-20th century communicative technologies (photographic camera for instance), the emergence and spread of technical images is intimately linked to the ICT revolution, which has created new mediums (the internet) and new modalities (digitization of images, generated videos, etc.) of the technical image, some of which perhaps are not so much "new," but are simply extensions of previous mediums.
Nevertheless, the impact of technical images cannot be understated, and the proximity-based dynamics observed by Flusser (which shares similar parallels with Gerard Genette's notion of "speech distance," see Katušić, 2017, p. 138). As Flusser writes:
"The fateful sentence love thy neighbor acquires a new meaning because the nearer, the more interesting. Love and hatred become integrated within knowledge as they never were during history; one knows what one loves and hates because it is near, and the less something interests, the less one knows it. This is, of course, far more human than the cold, objective attitude of calculating scientific reason. But it is not humane or humanistic: I am far more interested in the fly that bothers me here and now than I am in the future of eight hundred million Chinese, and I love my dog more than I love the suffering masses."(Flusser, 2022, p. 199, emphasis in original)
The relational, proximity-based dynamics which influence and shape human desires, values, and actions, are disrupted by emerging forms of the technical image (perhaps compounded by other technological elements such as predictive analytics, social media algorithms, online networked communities, etc.). Indeed, in a blog post titled: "War Lore" on the Do Not Research substack, Aimee Walleston argues that, "Today, many belief structures seem like almost an inverse manifestation of Justice Frankfurter’s, the man who could believe an individual human was telling the truth, and also believe that the truth described was impossible. We seem to believe images that are outright fictions or lies, and we attempt to reverse engineer a reality – however horrific – that would make these fabrications tenable." (Walleston, 2024). She traces this particular line of thinking from an analysis of reactions to Alex Garland's "Civil War" film trailer, noting how "Almost every reaction I encountered seemed to reveal the belief that this film was in some way meant to depict the manner in which an actual civil war might or will go down in this country, and criticized the trailer for being inaccurate in its depictions" (Walleston, 2024). Drawing on Flusser and the Marxist art historian Arnold Hauser, Walleston argues:
"More and more, we regard images as the representatives of not just our identities and our experiences but also our beliefs, and we must believe their lore (meaning that an image’s real or imagined linear narrative must work coherently with its optical coding) for us to continue to have a healthy relationship with them. Untethered from a lore we find fathomable, they start to resemble what? Enemies? The anti-magical? The un-lorified? If the internet and all other apparatuses and programs that make and then scatter technical images are the great sensemakers of the 21st century, they are certainly untethered to a system of logic that would attempt to unite or synthesize differing humanistic belief structures under an umbrella of similitude."
In the modern epoch, the inherent and profound disorder traced throughout unmediated, uncompressed, non-narrativized human life has not only become something apparatuses of control chafe against, but also something the individual (in a reference to Althusser's concept of "mise en scène") willing subjects themselves too.
"The climate of mass culture is pseudo-magical because the inability to decipher technical image programs is not a technical difficulty (technical images are not mysterious) but a refusal to decipher them on the part of the receivers (they are believed with bad faith). The explanation is that people fear to see through the programs they are fed: they prefer semiconscious reception to the responsibility of full awareness. And this fear is justified: The conscious use of technical imagination would undoubtedly imply the abandonment of experiences, values, and knowledge cherished for countless generations." (Flusser, 2022, p. 5, emphasis in original)
This form of "bad faith" (traced from Johan Huizinga and Marcel Mauss through Sartre to Flusser, see Restuccia, 2022; Welten, 2015) can principally be recognized as a functional explication of a particularly passive form of governance "realized by the sociality of agents, which itself is primarily and ontologically constituted by the semantic space of a public language" (Negarestani, 2018, p. 1). What Althusser calls "ideology" is less so the realizable ideological commitments of agents than their passive submission to the historical contingencies of the past, and this line of reasoning can be traced through Flusser's work:
"Historical consciousness became accessible to Western society as a whole and was superimposed onto magical consciousness. Images were expelled from everyday life into the 'baux-art' ghetto. Historical images, and above all the scientific ones, became unimaginable[...]Texts, as all other mediation, including images, obey an internal dialectic. They represent the world and conceal the world, they are instruments to orient but form opaque walls in libraries. They de-alienate and alienate man. Man may forget the orienting function of texts, which is their intended aim, and may start to act in function of them. This inversion of the relation 'text-man,' such 'textolatry,' characterizes our history in its last stages. Political ideologies are examples of this type of madness. Thus historical consciousness gradually lost the ground that supports it, the contact that the texts establish with the world of concrete experiences. And this contact happens only when texts explain images, when they have imaginable messages. The 19th century is therefore the stage for the crisis of historicity." (Flusser, 2013, emphasis in original).
Through the medium of technical images, modalities of governance have been able to better regulate the inherent disorder within the system. By limiting potentialities and possibilities, the overall indeterminacy of the chaotic space becomes reduced, and henceforth, much easier to govern. Technical images and their associative ideologies (the ideologies they both influence and enable to propagate) henceforth (in this very abstract way) serve to delimit the possibilities of imagination, desire, and action via a simultaneous enforcement and expansion of this mise en scène or bad faith. Left to their own devices in the social milieu, the individual is presented with no other option but to think through (as in mediated by, interfacing with) technical images and their subsequent apparatuses. Henceforth, the political space of possibility becomes reduced, and the governance of chaos (as the governance of relational dynamics between order and disorder) strengthens its grasp.
On a less abstract level, these same dynamics can be identified in a range of contexts. For these notes, I'll pick a particular case study done by Marland (2012) who briefly traces the rise of "Image management techniques" and "online political photography." Marland argues that "In the digital age, the evolution of political journalism from textual to visual is speeding up, and shortened sound bites are competing with voiceless image bites" and this process of technologically induced acceleration should be familiar to anyone who has read the works of Deleuze and Guattari, or perhaps Nick Land. Yet we should be careful not to flatten the unique topologies inherent within such processes of acceleration, which may show unique differences across geographic and cultural contexts. While I don't have the time to outline specific examples of shifting contexts within these preliminary materials, one perhaps might identify (on a surface level) how surveillance is conducted, normalized, etc. differently in Canada as compared to China.
Returning to Marland's work, he catalogues a shift where"in 2000 the Web sites of American presidential candidates were text-based with some photographs[...]in 2002 only about 14 percent of U.S. Congress members’ online newsrooms contained photos, [however] a casual look on December 30, 2010, at government Web sites around the world found that digital photos were becoming the norm" (Marland, 2012). Indeed, Marland notes how, "In politics, managing the public image and reputation of a party and its leader is often intertwined with selling policy, and it has an important endgame given that electors’ evaluation of leaders is a key variable in vote choice. Image management is a component of the research-inspired 'design' of a political product and can be used to counteract image weaknesses with such methodical rigor that its techniques are on the margins of state propaganda" (Marland, 2012). Furthermore, Marland notes how "Image handlers’ preferred techniques evolve with new technologies. Communicators take on more specialized roles, their skills and knowledge improve, and they respond to changing circumstances" (Marland, 2012). These dynamics are strikingly similar to the ones observed by Flusser, who (in his work) particularly focuses on the implications of how, why, and when "specialists manipulate technical images" (Flusser, 2022, p. 199).
"If one considers how specialists manipulate technical images, both on the elite and mass-media levels, one can observe the formation of a new form of consciousness and action. They are new in the sense that they are no longer linearly programmed. Categories such as sooner-later, if-then, true-false, or real-unreal do not apply to it. Other, non-dialectical categories, such as proximity, point of view, or the other, form the structure of this way of experiencing, knowing, and evaluating. And this may be observed in action: how video cameras are handled, how photographs of stars are made, but also how gigantic apparatus are being operated." (Flusser, 2022, pp. 199-200, emphasis in original)
Drawing on the work of Gandy (1982), Marland also catalogues the changing dynamics within information consumption, noting how "as information becomes cheaper, it is more likely to be consumed. This positions those with the power to subsidize a stable and timely supply of information at an advantage to frame issues and influence decisions" (Marland, 2012).
Though there is undoubtedly more to unpack within the shifting dynamics of information production/consumption, ideology, and the philosophy of photography, I hope this short case study was at least able to illustrate both the sheer number of implications immanent to the ICT revolution and their corresponding depth/breadth. To say that the ICT revolution has simply changed the way we consume media is to drastically underestimate how these technologies have reshaped society.
In regards to this, given the slightly informal nature of these notes, I would like to also quickly touch upon Flusser's work on imagination. Flusser combines Kant and Heidegger to create his conception of "new imagination" describing the "capacity to project new models as technical images" (Irrgang, 2023). Importantly, while technical images can be manipulated by specialists, Flusser believes that "there are no specialists in imagination" (Flusser, 2022, p. 107).
"But with imagination it is different; there are no specialists in imagination. Everybody is programmed for images since earliest childhood. And thus the curious feeling arises that the meaning of a symbol within an image is somehow contained in what is meant by the image. In short, we are programmed, from early childhood, to believe that images are not conventional, that imagination need not be learned." (Flusser, 2022, p. 107)
Implicit within what might be called the ongoing "AI revolution," is the very real and functional appropriation of imagination, even if this amounts to nothing more than "entrepreneurial delusions" about imagination as a collection of "mere psychological and spontaneous attitudes" (Negarestani, 2023, p. 188). The result (like it or not) is the creation of a new genre of specialists, uniting the disciplines of computational neuroscience, statistics, geometry, etc. to produce generative AI models. Yet, it is not simply the abstract rise and production of AI models which should truly concern us, rather the underlying logics and ways in which imagination has become, and is becoming functionally reduced to the realm of technique. Nation-states and corporations, with their assortments of tools like predictive analytics, identify, adapt, and directly shape this "programming" (identified by Flusser) in ways which may not at first appear obvious yet at once manifest themselves as a
"general tendency toward infantilism and idiotization both on the elite and the mass level of communication, which prevents us from grasping the situation we are in (and which manifests itself as the tendency to blame others for it), is a tendency willed by all of us most of the time, because infantilism and idiotization (consumer culture) are evasions from the responsibility to embrace technical imagination. It is preferable to behave as if one did not know of the countless openings that our situation offers us and continue to let oneself be programmed (and at the same time complain about lack of freedom and meaningful communication) than to dare to face those openings and give up cherished categories (linear programs)." (Flusser, 2022, p. 206, emphasis in original)
In a very unserious sense, to anyone who believes these dynamics are not playing out, I would refer you to the following passage by Flusser: "film operators know that their code has not yet begun to be effectively manipulated, but they are unable to see the possible applications in the field of philosophy or education. This is so because specialization is a sort of idiotization in the strict sense of that term: a limitation to a single idiom (hermetic code)" (2022, p. 206, emphasis original). The functional expropriation of imagination by increasingly skilled "specialists" will undoubtedly result in the perpetuation of the same logics, apparatuses, and structures unless something changes. Additionally, one arguably cannot be surprised by this encroachment into territories once exclusively reserved for the "human mind" as this is simply a continuation of the project of unfolding and externalization of the mind (whose underlying logics are deftly observed by Leroi-Gourhan).
Thus not only has the information technology revolution modified calculus on the international stage (Eriksson & Giacomello, 2006; Liu, 2021; Cronin, 2020; Lanoszka, 2019; Jonsson, 2019), but it has also disrupted dynamics between states, individuals, organizations, corporations, and groups. In particular, Eriksson and Giacomello (2006) note how "The Internet was designed to maximize simplicity of communication, not security of communication. The price for this has been the increasing opportunity for criminals or wrongdoers to exploit the vulnerabilities of the network for their own ends." While within the space of chaos, control-oriented entities may attempt to increase order, the non-linear dynamics of chaotic systems should inform us that such actions may not always have their intended effects, nor immediately take shape/dissipate into ineffectiveness.
In the interest of time (and because I'm currently lacking the time), I will truncate my exploration of global politics in favor of examining other niches within the space, whose dynamics are not only important but also necessary to understand for the development of Khaos-politics.
Note #5: The Importance of The Secret
Data has often been likened as the "new oil," and as data-driven/informed/influenced governance continues to grow so too does the functional importance of the secret. While this growth may not always be visible (this is of course due to the hidden nature of secrets), it can be deduced, and abducted from the space of state-craft, and subsequent trajectories mapped. In the context of data-politics, Liu (2021) notes how "data can still be excludable if it is fully encrypted, anonymized, or stored offline" and while "encryption, anonymization, and offline isolation involve a cost and can make the data less valuable," she ignores the distinction between different types of data that (in particular) can include information on, or related to, topics of national security. In particular, I map a functional rise in what David E. Pozen (2010) calls the "deep secret" with the changing political/economic landscape which not only re-affirms the data dilemma, but also creates new incentives to protect or "secret-away" data. Building on the work of various other scholars such as Kim Lane Scheppele, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Pozen defines a continuum between "deep" and "shallow" secrecy, where a "secret" is simply an item of information (say a message, string of characters, etc.) that one party intentionally conceals from another. Important to note is the relation secrecy has with modes of exchange, especially considering that Karatani draws from Marcel Mauss, whose work on secret societies is highly recognized.
In order to make a meaningful distinction between a shallow and deep secret in the context of state secrets, Pozen suggests evaluating the secret along four indices: how many people know of the secret, what sorts of people know, how much do they know about the given message content, and when they obtained access to this knowledge (Pozen, 2010). A maximally deep state secret according to Pozen then is one in which a numerically small number of "similarly situated" officials conceals its "existence from the public and other officials, such that the outsider's ignorance precludes them from learning about, checking, or influencing the keepers' use of this information," importantly he notes "the depth of a secret decreases to the extent that members of the community, including their representatives in government, understand that information is being concealed from them, the basic contours of that information and how to go about discovering what it is" (Pozen, 2010).
Within this definition, I believe it is also fruitful to apply my interpretation of the Deep Objekt framework as a quasi-crystalline structure, given that these deep secrets must possess some recursive higher dimensionality and non-linear temporal dynamics. As Pozen writes, "Smaller first-order decisions taken by officials may be entirely opaque to regular citizens, even if they are embedded within higher first-order and second-order decisions that are themselves public or anticipatable. Like the atomic bomb program, those smaller decisions can still be deep secrets if the known information has not provided meaningful notice of their existence" (Pozen, 2010). Especially in the case of time, he notes, "Time does not change with depth as do the other factors; rather, time complicates the depth calculus because other factors change with its passage" (Pozen, 2010). This matches with my proposed definition of a Deep Objekt, which displays characteristics of higher-dimensionality embedded within lower dimensions, and through which non-linear temporal dynamics enact themselves. The level of complexity inherent to deep secrets makes it easy for outsiders to misinterpret the fundamental nature of political decision-making, potentially leading to conspiracies about a "deep state". Not only are these conspiracies about a "deep state" potentially revealing about the demise of agency (especially contextualized in a psycho-analytic lens, see my forthcoming book: The Psychoanalysis of Conspiracy Theories), but also reveal how the rise of secrets has shifted the political consciousness.
Returning to the "deep state," very notion of this concept originated in Turkey and was likely used to describe "Kemalist network activity in Turkish state bodies, maybe with roots dating all the way back to Ottoman times, such as top military, judiciary, officials and others to some degree collaborating to defend secularist norms against elected governments of the Turkish state" (Stjernfelt, 2023, p. 1422). Recently however, scholars have noted how influential American right-wing figures popularized and deployed the term as "an effective moniker for the 'swamp' which newly elected President Trump was supposed to 'drain' in Washington" (Stjernfelt, 2023, p. 1423), with some even suggesting that while “continuities persist [with] similar theories of the past […] the Deep State narrative is unique to the Trump era” (Phillips and Milner, 2021, p. 12, cited in Tuters & Willaert, 2022). As Stjernfelt (2023) observes though, "Deep State activities may spring from much more improvised, temporary, fluid networks, even harboring their own inner tensions" (p. 1423) thus the suggestion that there exists some secretive cabal of individuals colluding to maximize their interests is not only widely outlandish but divorced from the reality of global power politics. Additionally, such a narrative mistakenly equates improvised, temporary, and fluid behavior with the workings of a "Deep State" for "Deep Secrecy."
The rise of such narratives is intricately tied to the secret's recent elevation within governance, which itself can and should be contextualized in relation to the two previous shifts I identified: the ICT revolution and demise of agency. Each of these shifts has revolutionized the functional importance of secrecy and created pressures for disempowered groups to grasp at an increasingly blurred collection of influence and manipulation techniques at the disposal of corporations, states, and other powerful entities today. It should also be noted here, that techniques of control largely make themselves more effective by moving from "overt" to "covert," since secrecy offers a functional protective mechanism for control.
Note #6: The End of Agency As We Know It
It is within this context that I also map another important shift, that is, the demise of the political subject and gamification of agency. The convergence of multiple trajectories on social media, in society, and in politics (Roberto Alonso Trillo & Marek Poliks | Non-Player Dynamics, 2024) has essentially created the possibility for agency at first to be curtailed, and now more effectively managed. This was the most fundamental logic Foucualt identified in his work: that it is much more efficient to surveil, covertly manipulate, and manage rather than enforce, persuade, and discipline. In fact, one can identify that enforcement, persuasion, and discipline can (but not always) be induced from surveillance, manipulation, and management (acting as simultaneous enablers in-and-of-themselves for "enforcement, persuasion, and discipline," but also represent indirect methods of "enforcement, persuasion, and discipline" when deployed in specific capacities in specific contexts using specific methods).
In relation to this (broadly speaking), it is widely acknowledged that subjectivity as formulated by likes of Althusser, Foucault, Gramsci, Lacan, and other 20th century thinkers has radically changed in the face of new technologies which subsequently overhauled semiotics, power structures, surveillance, and modes of exchange. Equally important to this shift is the question of agency (as drawn in relation to a "political subject"), and the question of agency in relation to the state (social contract theory). For the purposes of this notes I will tentatively map out a brief summary of these three points. I first move from subjectivity to the specific question of individual agency, before finally returning to the concept of political agency (placing these discussions in the context of governance). Of course, each point itself contains relevant information to how governance has evolved, and I single out political agency since it is fundamental for understanding the functional structure of political organizations (within which there are various interpretations), and is influenced (from a bottom-up perspective) by the shifts in individual agency/subjectivity. Potential questions for my future investigations include: How has the process of political subjectification changed in light of postmodernism (and the "vaporization" of subjectivities, see Trillo & Poliks, 2023, pp. 5-6)? How has social contract theory developed in relation to these changes? What are the implications of these shifts?
Finally, to end this brief note on agency, it is worth it to examine chaos, and the dynamics immanent within the field of chaos that is increasingly governed. Arguably, where chaos exists so too can agency flourish, yet chaos and agency do not create the preconditions for themselves. As the revolution in big data increasingly demonstrates, where chaos once perhaps promised liberation or a legitimate line of flight from capitalist biopolitical mechanisms, the advent of computing has allowed for the analysis of big data on unprecedented levels, thus in some respects reducing the efficacy of chaos itself as a line of flight and as protection against biopolitical regimes of control. Hence, the Khaos-political subject exists as a reflection of the inhuman, existing within a simultaneously stratified yet supremely networked structure within which the individual is at once reduced to a governable multiplicity of data aggregates formed via surveillance (both within and of) networks and vectors built via predictive analytics, while also at the same time remaining immanent within chaos, as the uncomputable indeterminacy within the determinant chaotic system. In this regard, I argue that this novel form of “subjectivity” is simply a recognition and return to the immanence of chaos itself, unbounded and unmediated (directly, without interfaces or abstractions).
Some Endnotes:
I'm still in the process of developing this concept and there is definitely more to come. The nature of these preliminary notes should demonstrate , and I'm interested in adding more rigor to my quasicrystalline framework. Additionally, I'd briefly like to discuss some content I was not able to put into these notes, such as the horizon of possibilities, revolution, the space of history and historical contingency, and a prolegomena to the Return to Kronos (another book I'm working on). Thank you for taking the time to read this very long and disorganized post. More updates (and clarity) coming in the future 🙏.
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