Toward a Minor Tech:Milne

Working in the gap between philosophy of mind and the planetary

Alasdair Milne

Building theories for art practice which engages ‘advanced technologies’ (Serpentine R&D Platform, 2020) is burdened by ambiguities of scale. A tendency toward grander macrolevels of ‘planetary computation’ lies in one direction (Hui, 2020; Bratton, 2021) and at times these are accompanied by political projects aligned with terraforming or accelerationist agendas that propose obscure regime change. The zoomed-in investigation that characterises philosophy of mind, and its technological equivalents, operates in the other (Metzinger, 2004; Gamez, 2018) accompanied by dense metaphysical perplexities. Sometimes the macroscopic and the minute are horseshoed into speculations of planetary cognition like ‘global workspace theory’ (VanRullen and Kanai, 2021) to compound their urgencies.

But might there be a different level of granularity from which we can build theories of human-computational interactivity? This paper proposes the ‘interpersonal’ as a mediatory level of analysis that might offer clearer insight. It will suggest a critical ‘field philosophy’ (Bastian, 2018) method for engaging with ‘minor tech’ projects in which theoretical work blends into empirical data gathering. This method is derived from the premise that thinking and making are inherently interdependent activities that can be traced, not only through citation, but through documenting and mapping collaborative production processes.

The Interpersonal and Collaboration

Though ‘collaboration’ as an ontology is the subject of my PhD thesis, the interpersonal is a longterm concern, both as a subject of study and a level of analysis. Hannah Arendt (via Patrick Hayden’s reading) posits that human activity is situated in the interdependent field of ‘the space of appearances’ in which thought and deliberation take place as common activities. Here, our world is understood as ‘a composition of human artifice’ built together through ‘work’ (Hayden, 2015: 754). According to Arendt (1998) ‘labour’—the cyclical toil that provides us with sustenance—and ‘work’—the processes through which we co-constitute the world—are distinct. This ‘work’ is in part the building of a common technological infrastructure which can be understood in some holistic sense (like the ‘planetary’) except that its construction takes place within a more local frame of reference that we not only understand, but iteratively build and occupy.

Thinking our contemporary technological circumstances through this set-up, in which technological ‘work’ takes place in our midst, though often behind closed doors, might lead us to ask why we often focus on understanding technology at the planetary scale. I would suggest that this tendency comes from seeing technology as an artefact or abstract condition to be evaluated in postproduction rather than a distributed and simultaneous field of research & development which can itself be entered—this behind-the-scenes is discussed in our Lab as the ‘back-end’ (Bunz and Jäger, 2021). The barrier to access then becomes a practical and methodological one then rather than an ontological impasse. Despite the need to justify this approach from first principles, it can nonetheless help us minimise abstraction by attempting to build theories from the ontological level that we are most accustomed to. This is not to say that we don’t engage in analysis across scales, but rather that we can share a ground with such technology and it’s developmental contexts.

If we adopt this Arendtian framing, then we can shift to seeking access (the practical) and identifying how to build an analysis (the methodological). If we want to understand technological development at the scale of the conglomerates (which is vital work) we must follow in Jaton’s footsteps, seeking permission to access their personnel and environs (Jaton, 2021). But if we are interested in artists’ systems, we should seek the hospitality instead of artists themselves, and the institutions that sometimes house the most intensive technical research practices.

Field Philosophy

‘Fieldwork’ is a confusing concept if you are engaged in theory from an Arendtian perspective. Because on this line there is no independent thinking, but ever-interdependent co-constitution of the world, including the concepts, frameworks and theories that exist within it. It seems odd to suggest methods like ‘participant observation’ when taking ‘thinking’ or philosophy as an inherently social activity. Here the line between theory and the empirical becomes blurred, which is convenient for the study of technology, since technology is not and cannot be a purely theoretical subject of study as an intensely ‘worldly’ phenomenon. If a researcher has a social intellectual life, in which reciprocity is the default and a ‘research participant’ isn’t designated through a hierarchy which justifies monovalent extraction, ‘field philosophy’ (Bastian, 2018) offers another name for thinking in the world, in a common ‘research environment’ (Jones, 2020) that we share with our subject of study and others who are directly engaged with it.

Mapping artists’ systems

Distributed networks of artists, technologists, curators, data scientists, theorists and more constitute what from the outside might appear as an amorphous social network, much like Filiou’s theory of the eternal network of artists. The method of field philosophy proposed offers a means for circumscribing these interdependent networks, instead understanding collaborative practices as delimitable systems, seeing the artist as a ‘system builder’ who works to piece together research environments which produce indeterminate outcomes of indeterminate kinds. Once we understand who is involved—and how—a functional picture begins to emerge of the work that brings about and maintains technical systems. This work of mapping—or cultural systems analysis—can begin to produce an account of the wildly divergent forms and functions artists’ systems take. It’s from here that a nongeneralising theory can be developed, finding commonalities through a conceptual ‘feature extraction’ that nonetheless allows for divergence.

These ‘minor’ artists’ projects act as subsystems (or countersystems) within a corporate dominated landscape of technical R&D, or what Meadows calls a ‘leverage point’ which can initiate broader change. Here then we zoom out again, from mapping the artist’s system as delimitable, to situating each as an enactive subsystem within a broader systemic landscape; perhaps what might now be the Arendtian artifice. Remembering that the action takes places at the interpersonal level, though, should give us hope that change can be leveraged upscale.

Conclusion

My purpose here was to share some thinking on the methodological struggles of theorybuilding in evasive empirical contexts, where the stakes seem high but technical access is elusive. The purpose of departing from the ‘interpersonal’ is to provide a starting point for establishing where to look in trying to understand planetary scale technologies that have metaphysical implications. Once we start to look at who is involved and what they are doing, a functionalist perspective, in which a system ‘is what it does’ (Beer, 2002) begins to emerge, and if the researcher can become part of the system for a time, the potential for insight is profound.

Sources

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