Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt

The issue with scale

We can take scalability as referring 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[2]. 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’. A minor tech builds from within the majority it dispossesses[3]. Margins of indeterminacy proliferate anomalous in machines beyond the idolised and the threatening and the servo-mechanic[4]. Or, as Harney and Moten put it: there are flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship[5].

So did the transposition of football to New Guinea change the spirit of the game[6] and the imbrications of Facebook with native Trinidadian cosmologies scramble big-datafied sense-making[7]. Incipient forms of hacking energy bills in Manchester hinge on scaled-up media platforms to gather participants in ways void of scalar potential or interest.[8] The explosive misery secreted by cities disgorge sprawling patchworks[9] and blockchains tilt toward redistributive commons[10] and the world of earthworms and small agents subtend human history[11]. So may technoscientific prostheses of patriarchy and colonialism provoke–in the words of Luciana Parisi–heretic thinking in machines[12] capable of questioning the transcendental conditions of knowledge and the computability of instrumentality. So did Kafka’s Prague German draw from its own impossibility words that made German itself stammer.

The veil of its enchantment stretched ashamedly; majoritarian technology drops the monological act of scale to disperse in the chattering worlds of its parts[13]. We may pose here the question as to whether the so-called problem ‘alternative’ organisations and collectivist enclaves which fail to ‘scale up’[14] rests not in the unviability of what they prefigure[15] but in the institutionalised insensitivity to their minor becomings as a ‘strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation’[16]. 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[17]. Aggregates of becoming like minerals redeposited building up in the cave where capital bathes in blood and dirt[18].

The operability of scale-ability then entails–or so the story goes–circumscribing awareness of and disavowing care for the re-articulating effects of its own unravelling replication–what Tsing refers to as the ‘project-distorting effects[19]’ and inevitable incompleteness[20] of scalar expansion. This inhibitive task deploys schizoid fictions to carve its way through hylomorphic friction[21]– expansive capacities of including the excluded into frontier fantasies of undifferentiated growth. Such is also the fantasy of diffusionist modernity spreading out from North-Western Europe to cover the rest of the world ‘like an oil slick’[22]: images of all-a-piece blocks scaling to super-blocs, split along the fault lines of race and civilisation[23].

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[1] Tsing (2012: 505)

[2] These three things being not necessarily mutually exclusive. Consider here Alfred Gell’s search for a definition of technology in the ‘pursuit of intrinsically difficult-to-obtain results by roundabout, or clever means’ (1988: 6)–allowing for incantation and manipulation through but also beyond what is afforded in technical objects and procedures themselves. A minor technology in this sense is also a disenchanted one.

[3] Deleuze and Guattari 1986 (1975): 16-17.

[4] Simondon 2012 (1958).

[5] Harney and Moten (2013:94)

[6] Read in Lévi-Strauss (1962 31)

[7] Miller (2011)

[8] Knox (2021)

[9] Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 481-2)

[10] El Baroni (2022)

[11] Bennett (2010 96)

[12] Parisi 2022: 322.

[13] cf. Bakhtin (1984)

[14] Gümüsay and Reinecke (2022 238)

[15] Young-Hyman, Magne, & Kruse (2022)

[16] Morton (2016: 5)

[17] Morton and Boyer (2021: 69-70).

[18] The crystal metaphor comes from Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 106): ‘minorities (as) crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements’ of the majority (emphasis mine). The blood and dirt metaphor is Marx’s.

[19] ibid. 507

[20] ibid. 515

[21] Tsing 2005

[22] Geertz 2000

[23] Ibid., see also Huntington 1996.

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