Abstract

What does it mean to ‘calculate’—today? The pause introduced by the dash in this question marks the inescapable necessity of historicizing the problem of calculation. In his provocative essay, ‘Toward a Critique of the Ineffectual: Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle and the Construction of an Action without Ends’, Dimitris Vardoulakis proposes a philosophical and political programme in order to counter the negative effects of ‘Heidegger’s mistake’ (the conflation of causality and instrumentality through a mistranslation of Aristotle) that has led to the theoretical fetishization of the ‘ineffectual’ (action without ends) in continental philosophy. In his conclusion, Vardoulakis advocates for a return to a politics and ethics of practical judgment that avoids the twin pitfalls of asserting either the impossibility or the absolute possibility of calculation. As he puts it, we need to acknowledge today ‘the exigency to calculate in the face of the provisional ends of instrumentality, or to perform the judgment that the Greeks called phronesis’ [2022: 244]. This is why we should keep in mind that Heidegger’s critique of technology in the 1950s was articulated in the context of the early Cold War, atomic warfare, and the rise of cybernetics. But, as many have recently argued, in the age of so-called ‘Big Data’, neoliberal rationality has increasingly replaced the epistemology of ‘causality’ with epistemologies of ‘correlation’: the algorithmic calculation of probabilistic relations between clusters of variables (based on information harvested by digital technologies designed for the total surveillance of human life). As Chris Anderson notoriously announced in his 2008 editorial, ‘The End of Theory’, ‘correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all’. He calls this epistemology ‘dimensionally agnostic statistics’ (the amount of data available can no longer be visualized in its totality). This worldview, however, functions as a basic attack on one of the fundamental (and still often repeated) ground-truths of modern science: correlation is not causation. As Anderson puts it: ‘There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough”’. In other words, the stakes of Vardoulakis’s argument must be tested against the rise of this neoliberal elimination of causality from corporate epistemologies that has led to an inversion of the terms of the Heideggerian critique of technology: as it turns out, technology has produced an ideology of pure instrumentality without causation. Today, there are only ends without causes.