Abstract

Juncture : The “Internet of Actual Occasions” Proposition 1: Following on from the emerging Internet of things, someone recently proposed an “Internet of nano-things”. Is this going too far? Maybe this isn’t going far enough. Or maybe this is the wrong question. Now that we can, in very different ways—via technics, via micropolitics, via metaphysics—seem to get near to the very basis of events, what can/should we do? This proposition concerns that which has until now been known, and thought, as “media”, “communication”, “networks”, “algorithms” and related concepts/technics. Start with this speculative-pragmatic proposition: let us assume that we can go as far as possible, that an “internet of actual occasions” is possible. How would it work? Would it be desirable? If we could, should we use it? What difference would it make to think with it, work with it, organize in partnership with it? Do we, in reality, already have it? Is it called the world “as medium for the transmission of influences”, as discussed by the under-recognized media and communications thinker, Alfred North Whitehead? If it is already “there”, what would it’s relationship be to human-designed technics? Juncture: Something like “media”, “communication”, “networks”, “algorithms” and related concepts/technics have been at the heart of power during the last hundred years. A great deal has followed from this. These concepts/technics have always been contested. Yet they have also, in practice, long produced interventions in worlds that are many and major. Thus they perform a particular and important speculative pragmatics. In mainstream culture certain versions of these concepts/technics could even now be said to be “protected” concepts/technics. This protection is almost of a religious order, in that many of these concepts.concepts have become fundamental articles and rituals of a secular faith. The culture energised by this “faith” has been a large factor in what Brian Massumi has discussed as a “becoming-environmental of power”, via the extension of media and communications into more of “world”, and in finer gradations of intervention in “world”, in “bare life”, in geontology and more. This is largely an ecologically destructive extension of power with no limit to it’s appetite. Yet what, really, are communication, media, computing, networks, algorithms? In concept? As ongoing propositions in varieties of speculative pragmatics? As designed technics? As themselves imperfect refractions of world? There is another way to think this. There has recently been what we might simply call a return of the world. This is a world beyond, if still at times working within, the human. This world exceeds the reach of even the extended technics of the human. The “return” to this world is found for example in climate change and other environmental challenges, and has always been accepted in process philosophy and other philosophies tending towards the ecological. It is also found in the increasing acceptance that plants have sophisticated modes of “communication”, and of social networking and action. Such a “return” of the world was also anticipated by Whitehead, in his idea of the “world as a medium for the transmission of influences”, for the vector transmission of feeling. What is now happening at the juncture between these two; the “mediated” becoming-environmental of power and the world as medium? Or, to move away from the bifurcation of the mediating and the mediated, what precisely is this juncture itself, where both have to be considered at once, as on the same plane? How might we approach this juncture with the rigor of attention to immanence it needs? Proposition 2: What would it mean to think/design “media”, “communication”, “networks”, “algorithms” and related concepts/technics without a bifurcation of nature?