Toward a Minor Tech:Toward a Minor Tech:Lomi&Holt-500
Dancing on flights of scale
By Edoardo Lomi & Macon Holt
What is the relation between a minor tech and the major order it displaces and helps unfold?
The question already hints at an answer.
No minor tech is safe from the major order that may desire to scale up into an outside it can neither differentiate nor account for.
No major order is rid of sub-scalar tendencies for becoming otherwise.
Indeed, it is often through scaling up–careless of how this process will affect its basic components–that a system reveals its constituent cracks. Flights borne in the struggle to hold down integrity.
Again: such a heightened visibility also spotlights what systemic failures need redressing - as in the facilitation of racial profiling via resolving the inaccuracies of facial recognition. Failing forward into universalised extractive violence.
The master's house does manufacture the tool for its own dismantling (pace Audre Lorde). Which is not to say they are neutral. Only that they are ambivalent--and that they are not enough. So the explosive misery secreted by cities - to reprise Deleuze and Guattari - does disgorge into patchworks and non-productive (lethargic) dérives. The very aimless dérives –in urban or scroll space - wherefrom digital prostheses mine the feed through which they expand.
The constitutive entanglement of major and minor is not new to our contemporary conception of “tech”. Just think of ancient Chinese sages who proselytised to their patrons the hollowness of effect and direct action - then stood and witnessed how well this principle was deployed in despotic rule. Today, Daoist thought, with its structuration around an understanding of co-constitutive contingency, may yet promise to unsettle anthropic models of arranging the sensible. But emancipating the 'flow' of things from control - and human fallibility - is also the formula of digital logistics and becoming-server (cf. Moten and Harney 2013).
What unfurls in this double move between minor and major techniques of existence? Neither a hopeful dialectics of transcendence, nor a pessimist eternal struggle can fully account for their murmurations. We may perhaps better render it as a dance. Contact improvisation. Forces that transverse across and by way of bodies that experience them in some way or in some register. A dance-form that responds, not always coherently but with consistency to the stumbles and impasses and slips that dis/articulate dancing bodies.
Bumps and impasses and slips; a dance like all dances, plagued by the risk of excessive pressure on heel leads and injuries from overuse. A dance making the minor and major turns that rehearse its patterns. Slips like the jumps from Daoist and despotic orders, grids and their dérives and their instruments, machines and their indeterminacy (cf. Simondon 1980). Minor and major techniques here do not so much chase and fold into each other, failing to completely synch up. The threat they afford the other, an externalisation of their self-inconsistency into a dance intensive beyond expansion and extensive below intention.