Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt
On Scalar Becoming
In this essay we make for a few steps towards mapping the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold. We begin with a few notes on the issue of scale to then move some reflections over the sort of antagonism that minor and major modes of technical existence may be thought to instantiate.
The issue with scale
We can take scalability to refer to a system’s ability to continuously expand without having to rethink its basic components and how they fit together[1]. Following Anna Tsing, we should also note this scale-ability to be either magical or incredibly difficult to pull off or just utter nonsense. For scalar expansion can hardly ever do away with the re-articulation of what it takes as its constituent parts–whether these be ‘nations’ or ‘users’ or ‘species’ or ‘capital’ or ‘floating-point operations per second’. Nor can expansion, in traversing articulation, elude the possibility of its own minor becoming[2]. As big tech drills holes so a minor tech may occupy them. Its armoury is ontological. Its garrisons harboured in the margins of indeterminacy that proliferate anomalous in machines over the idolised and the threatening and the servo-mechanic[3]. Or as Harney and Moten put it: in the flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship[4].
So did insurgent socialites and evasions and fungal infestations cripple the scales of plantation colonialism. The transposition of football to New Guinea altered the game’s competitive spirit[5]; the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scrambled its big-datafied sense-making[6]. Incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar interest[7]. The explosive misery secreted by cities disgorge sprawling patchworks[8], blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons[9], the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history[10]. So may the technoscientific prostheses of patriarchy and colonialism provoke–in the words of Luciana Parisi–heretic thinking in machines capable of questioning the transcendental conditions of knowledge and the computability of instrumentality[11]. So did Kafka’s Prague German draw from its own impossibility retellings that made language itself stammer. And so does the assemblage that is ‘Oogie Boogie’ from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas eventually subscend into its bugs.
The burlap of its enchantment over-stretched; majoritarian technology drops the monological act of scale to disperse in the chattering worlds of its elements[12]. We may pose here the question as to whether the so-called problem of ‘alternative’ organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’ rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure and instead in the institutionalised insensitivity to their minor becomings as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’. This insensitivity extends into the deafness of apocalyptic solutionism to the dismantling potential of capital as a formalised abstraction of agencies whose infinitesimal operations far exceed it from within, from beneath. Aggregates of becoming like minerals redeposited building up in the cave where capital bathes in blood and dirt.
What the operations of scale-ability do entail is circumscribing awareness of and disavowing care for the re-articulating effects of its own unravelling replication. This is what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects’ and inevitable incompleteness of scalar expansion. Its inhibitive task deploys schizoid fictions to carve pathways through hylomorphic frictions: plotting the vindicated inclusion of the excluded into frontier fantasies of undifferentiated growth. Such was also the fantasy of diffusionist modernity–spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the rest of the world ‘like an oil slick’. Images of ‘all-a-piece blocks’ scaling to super-blocs split along the fault lines of race and civilisation.
Constitutive antagonism
But the relations between monolithic majority and minoritarian anomalies, expansive exclusion and intensive inclusion, are perhaps not so neat. The independent contractors studied by Tsing and fuelling global supply-chains by stealing and stealthing, salvaging and foraging at no additional costs to the enterprise loop minor becomings back into grand scale exploitation. So do grassroots ‘politics from below’ all too easily turn self-governed NGOs: control floats free after the end of enclosures. Graffiti turn street art and street art enter collections and auctions. The language of entrepreneurs blends minor and major tones in itsactualisation of breakages in the dominant order to profit from its extension. Military officers have been known to enlist minoritarian post-structuralist scholarship in the planning and executing of their murderous plots. But so what is new? Ancient Chinese sages proselytised the hollowness of effect and the art of success grasped in relinquishing intentionality only to witness their patrons’ successful instrumentalisation of Daoist flow into bloody combat. Today, the subject of neoliberalism has become the hollow subject of human capital–a porous object, in Harney and Moten’s analysis; while logistics seeks to emancipate the flow of things from ‘controlling agents’ and their human fallibility. The smooth striates, the striated reimparts the smooth–dancing into dyssimetry.
A dance–neither an eternal struggle of opposites nor a dialectical scaling up into transcendent space. We find no grounds to claim a particular progression in the unfolding of this dance–its mapping remains incomplete. But we are fairly certain it delineates something of a repetitive pattern. Perhaps a study of interpolating minor and major modes of the technical existence of some object or practice may occasion the abduction of how this patterning dance operates across scales. But any fractal quality to these patterns would need in our mind to rehearse not so much an interrelation as a gap or a cut of sorts; something that might bear out at once the holes dug by worms and big tech and the breakages entrepreneured, the ethnocentric glitches of media platforms and the tears in Oogie Boogie’s precarious sutures. MIA mediation redoubled in the instability of both minor and major orders traced in the jump between Daoist and despotic practice with each side failing to synch up with the other. Both come to be out of the impossibility of scalar expansion, of a being without becoming. The threat they afford one another externalising the self-inconsistency of a dance expansive and intensive beyond computability.
[1] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “On Nonscalability. The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales.” Common knowledge 18, no. 3 (2012): 505.
[2] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan (U of Minnesota P, 1986 [1976]).
[3] Simondon, Gilbert, On the mode of existence of technical objects. (London, University of Western Ontario, 1980).
[4] Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study (Minor Compositions, 2013).
[5] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The savage mind (University of Chicago Press, 1966 [1962]), p. 31.
[6] Miller, Daniel. Tales from facebook (Polity, 2011).
[7] Knox, Hannah. “Hacking anthropology,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27, no. S1 (2021): 108-126.
[8] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (U of Minnesota P., 2005 [1987]), pp. 481-2.
[9] See El Baroni, Bassam (ed). Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (MIT Press, 2022). See also: https://www.crypto-commons.org.
[10] Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things (Duke University Press, 2010), p. 96.
[11] Parisi, Luciana. “Recursive Philosophy and Negative Machines,” Critical Inquiry 48, no. 2 (2022): 313-333.
[12] See Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester UP, 1984).