Some NOTES on modularity in relation to scale and composition in production as politics
SImon Yuill
Title as placeholder no computing, no software
A historical pre-quel
Three books:
Karen Barard - Meeting the universe halfway
Donna Haraway - crsytals fabrics and fields
Amy Wendling - Karl Marx on technology and alienation
embryogenics
speaking back to Chantal Mouffe
'Universalism is not rejected but particularized; what is needed is a new kind of articulation between the universal and the particular' –Chantal Mouffe in: The Return of the political (1993) The universal vs the particular
Agonism Necessity of making decisions decision = cutting something away from something - scissors
According to Mouffe decisive is" why this" and "not that"
politcs is a practice of making cuts, ref: criticality - cutting things apart machines cutting things in a flow
production politics feediing into each other, how to intervene
scale , compostion, modularity
Welding looked at marx' notebooks and searched for text about technology
key component=energy ideas of the energetisists - key consolidating ideas leading to thermodynamics (circa 1850s) emerging from (heat and light - morovsky (sp?))
breweries and steam engines ... ideas of energy
double entry accounting as precursor to conservation laws (energy/momentum)
Helmholz: Physical processes energy as projections of concepts of economics (double-entry bookkeeping) on to nature conservation of energy
Kraft : word used in german by Marx energy, force, power cognitive energy where language moves through ("Hirnkraft"?) Zeit - Raum - Kraft (tr. time, space, energy) A volk is a group of people sharing a certain energy
mediate, regulate ... metabolism
stoff und kraft (tr. stuff and energy) - materialism
stuff and energy and the metabolic process Marx sees labour as part of metabolic process Arbeitskraft - Labourpower
capacity to work labour = measurable
fatigue, exhaustion of energy in the worker = challenge to the morality of work work is bettering vs work is fatigueing sloth as a sin, factory as a nobling device (UK: first factories set up by Quakers, and other Christians)
(the enoblement of work from of Christian ideas of virtue)
shift away from morality of work to a more 'material' concept, by relating it to energy
8 hour workday
fulfilling animal laborans. work as the fulfilling activity for human.
two theories of value in marx: substance (*hegelian?) theory of value (eternal value) value as a field (real cost) (temporal dynamic value)
energetics in relation to economy
neoclassical models of ecomonics also using 'energetic' ideas. (e.g. economy finds it's own level through exchange)
contradiction between economic growth / constant growth (energetic) and thermodynamc entropy ('naturalness' as a false basis)
free worker enter the market place, all he has is the potential of his labour (arbeitskraft)
intervening between the potential and the actual
wider implications of arbeitskraft : continuity of the labor (among animal and humans) ?
how does metabolic model of work relate to the evironment? (c.f. M.Wark - metabolic rift.) eg. use of N2 in farming - displacemnt / depeletion of N2 in industrial production molecular rarity * precapitalist production: local ecology * wide scale capitalism: nitrogen is displaced ex fishermen Scotland feeding into slave production process in US by sending fish out
"the Coal Problem" (ref?) - peak coal
posthuman model of labour prodcution happens across a spectrum (wendling rather than Marx) kraft suggests that work is something that happening across a spectrum of agents (not only humans - as hegel pointed -, but also animals...)
goal: reduce necessary working time (craft movement : ruskin, morris)
in "fragments of machine" marx tends toward rejection of work but never fully accepts it (ref. essay on idleness) pipelines present in ideas of production ex transfer belt (cover Marx), labour channeled on pipelines
20th century: modularity developed in biology - cf haraway
vitalistic v. mechanistic models of biology (life force or 'reductionist' understandings) both focus on identifying substance (building blocks or 'vital energy'), without looking at relationshsips, process (c.f Whitehead) and transformation
whitehead
there is not one thing we can point to Haskell (?) associates darwinism to idea of division of labour (Germany) blurring the boundary between organic and inorganic
"recapitulation" embryo repeating stages of history of a species Needham rejects this idea - embryo evolves different capacities which reflect requirements at a particular stage of development (appropriate to capacties at a time?) child's speech in 19th century was simple/primitive, but it is appropriate to capacities of the child in a certain moment in time Needham - malfunction, partial faliures, against the mecanistic view of organisms
dimension of metabolism -> arbeitskraft (capital containing conditions under which metabolism can be controlled (?))
modularity - irreducability at various levels of scale
boundary/substance
scale / modularity are related
shift from energetics/thermodynamics to substance/identities to relations (harroway) relation as smallest unit of analysis -> biology as studying patterns of relations
now to Karen Barard Performativity meets matter
contradiction in Bohr's srgs in whcih he falls back to classical mechanics to regain an objective perspective, could escape via 'performativity' (J Butler)
relation between observer and observed, and how it makes objectivity (im)possible we can analyse better representation of matter than matter itself
accessibility
apparatus is not outside what is measured
position vs momentum (c.f Heisenberg) position: the apparatus needs to be fixed in place. momentum: the apparatus needs to be moving
can't measure both at same time
wave behaviour particle behaviour
all Q measure has a performative element, analogous to recognition of gender
"assigning a measurement to matter"
recurrent alignment = phenonema, rather than measurement
phenomena as basic unit of physical world. where observer (apparatus) and observed come together
repeatability
apparatus as a way to make a cut between observer and observed [aparatus is never 'external'] agential observability
different ideas of decisionality: Mouffe vs Barard (Butler cuts as distinct from Mouffe cuts)
"reticular fallacy" galloway
responses to differential
differentiated political structure integrational vs a diffractive principle
relations are units of political rather than subject
judgement
look at methodologies
how can our questions be our politics failing well at politics because most of our experiments don't work most of the time
scale as a product of relations, scale at which particular capabilities (and other relations) are possible. (there are always other patternings happening)
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