The Interfact by Gabriel Yoran - new open access book from Open Humanities Press

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Interfact: On Structure and Compatibility in Object-Oriented Ontology by Gabriel Yoran

Like all Open Humanities Press books, The Interfact is available to download for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-interfact/

Objects in object-oriented ontology (OOO) are mysterious and inexhaustible entities. But since OOO grants ontological priority to objects, it should have an easy time referring to objects. But this is not the case.

In The Interfact, Yoran researches the question of how OOO refers to an object’s haecceity, its ‘thisness.’ He starts with an investigation into OOO’s eponymous practice, object-oriented programming (OOP) and identifies not just a plethora of parallels, but finds OOP’s concept of interfaces (as structured ways of object confrontation in time) a promising tool to describe both the rift between all objects and their relative stability.

Yoran then extends Harman’s fourfold diagrams to reflect the linkages between fourfolds, revealing that objects necessarily are parts of other objects. This phenomenon, which he calls out-of-phase objects, reveals links to Simondon’s notion of compatibilisation.

Yoran argues that objects are necessarily integrated into a fabric of interconnected fourfolds as well as component-compound relations. This structure solves the problem of object identification, by recognizing the object-fourfolds as overlaps, a mutually stabilizing structure which allows for reproducible object confrontation in time, or facts.

'The complexity of the ideas in this book are challenging to the intellect, just as the argument itself represents a worthy challenge to some well-regarded philosophical positions. One of the most exciting things about this argument is that it takes seriously the ways in which object-oriented programming can inform object-oriented philosophy, and vice-versa, demonstrating significant, practical connections between the two.'

 - Noah Roderick, author of The Being of Analogy

The Interfact is published in our New Metaphysics series, which is edited by Graham, Harman and Bruno Latour:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/new-metaphysics/

Author Bio

Gabriel Yoran received his PhD on Speculative Realism at the European Graduate School. Previously, he studied Social and Economic Communications at the Berlin University of the Arts. He is co-founder of several digital companies (Steady, Steganos, aka-aki) and works at the intersection of computer science and philosophy. He contributed “Applied Metaphysics – Objects in Object-Oriented Ontology and Object-Oriented Programming” to the Interface Critique Journal and “Interface kaputt – Cyborgism and Object-Oriented Philosophy” to the volume Interface Critique, published at Kadmos. For more information on his work see yoran.com

'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' published in Media Theory

My article 'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea', has been published in the open access journal Media Theory:

http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/126

‘Pluriversal Socialism – The Very Idea’ starts from the position that politics in the West today is typically conducted in liberal humanist terms. This is the case regardless of whether those involved identify as radical democrats, socialists, communists, feminists, Greens, Marxists or anarchists.

Contemporary antihumanist and posthumanist theory is meant to offer something very different to liberal humanism. Media ecology, media archaeology, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy are all positioned as representing a shift away from anthropocentrism and a modernist epistemology based on the separation of human from nonhuman, subject from object, masculine from feminine, culture from nature, living from non-living. Instead, they champion a radically relational approach to the world that is designed to destablise such ontological dualisms. Yet while antihumanist and posthumanist theorists may write about transgressing the boundary that divides the human from the nonhuman, when it comes to their owns ways of being and doing they too often end up operating as bourgeois liberal humanists.

‘Pluriversal Socialism’ continues with my exploration (in texts such as Pirate Philosophy and ‘Anti-Bourgeois Theory’) of how we can not only write non-liberal humanist theory but actually work, act and live as non-liberal humanists too. It does so by drawing on the emphasis that is currently placed by a number of Latin Americanist theorists on pluriversal, ontological, radically relational politics (as distinct from the universal, modernist, counterhegemonic politics of most left thinkers in the Global North). In the process it addresses two important questions that have been raised recently by Arturo Escobar and Boaventura de Sousa Santos respectively: ‘Can we unlearn the liberal individual … in a similar way that we endeavour to unlearn patriarchy, racism and heterosexism?’ And is what we need to do so ‘another theory of revolution’ or a revolution of theory?

‘Pluriversal Socialism’ is the latest addition to the political discussion about how to transition toward a noncapitalist, nonracist, nonheteropatriarchal future between Jeremy Gilbert, Gabriela Méndez Cota and myself. See also:

Gabriela Méndez Cota, 'Pirate Traces': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/114

Jeremy Gilbert, 'Anti-Bourgeois For What?': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/115

Gary Hall, 'Anti-Bourgeois Theory': http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/91

Machine Intelligences, new edition of Culture Machine – available open access

Culture Machine 20 (2021): Machine Intelligences, guest-edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

https://culturemachine.net/vol-20-machine-intelligences/

Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press and the Radical Open Access Collective

Vol 20: Machine Intelligences, guest-edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

From the editors’ introduction

The aim of this special issue is to advance new critical perspectives on machine intelligence. Although the current hype surrounding artificial intelligence has been countered by several critical interventions, there is still a long way to go in order to produce a shift in the mainstream discourse concerning these technologies. The AI-hype has support from resourceful and well-connected actors within industry and politics. Within the art world and popular culture, AI appears to be a more ambiguous phenomena, associated with both blessings and grave dangers. Nevertheless, its development is all too often portrayed as though it is inevitable and that the path it will take is already set. The impulse behind this special issue is to deepen and diversify the interrogation of this seemingly inevitable development and to get a look behind the shiny surfaces of these supposedly new technologies. This special issue thus offers historical perspectives, conceptual re-thinking and situated analyses of the technical realities and the social and cultural implications of machine intelligence, in its many different forms and manifestations, with the hope that this will provide opportunities to intervene in and change the course of our technological futures….

Contents 

Machine Intelligences – An Introduction – The Editors

The Mountain in the Machine: Optimization and the Landscapes of Machine Learning – Sam P. Kellogg

Generative Adversarial Copy Machines –Martin Zeilinger

Optimal Brain Damage: Theorizing the Nervous Present – Johannes Bruder & Orit Halpern

In Other Words: Smart Compose and the Consequences of Writing in the Age of AI – Crystal Chokshi

What Personalisation Can Do for You! or, How to Do Racial Discrimination Without ‘Race’ – Thao Phan & Scott Wark

Intelligent Borders? Securitizing Smartphones in the European Border Regime – Michelle Pfeifer

‘A Game That is Not a Game’: The Sublime Limit of Human Intelligence and AI Through Go – Kwasu Tembo

Whose Singularity? Artificial Intelligence as a Mechanism of Corporate Sovereignty
– Andrew Davis

Theseus in the Epistemic Labyrinth: Critical Histories of Data and the Apparent Weight of Color
– Evan Donahue

Artificially Shared Kinesthetic Intelligence – Lisa Müller-Trede

We Have Always Been Artificially Intelligent: An Interview with Joanna Zylinska
– Claudio Celis and Pablo Ortuzar Kunstmann

 Playful Machine Learning: An Interaction Designer’s Journey into Neural Networks – Andreas Refsgaard

Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial / Pirate Philosophy and Editorial Work

An e-book of essays on pirate philosophy, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota in Mexico, has just come out:

Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial (Pirate Phiosophy and Editorial Work)

It's partly influenced by, and engaging with, my work on Pirate Philosophy, and a lecture I gave for Gabriela at her institution in Mexico city, Universidad Iberoamericana, in September 2019: 'Liberalism Must Be Defeated: On the Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene'. (A Spanish translation of my lecture is available here.)

But - as is indicated by the 'related posts' section at the bottom of the page - Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial/ Pirate Philosophy and Editorial Work is also influenced by the work of my Centre for Postdigital Cultures colleagues Janneke Adema and Rebekka Kiesewetter on radical open access, feminism and piracy. 

The Postdigital City for Post-Pandemic Times - free online conference

Registration is now open for next week’s The Postdigital City for Post-Pandemic Times conference.

Attendance is free and all are welcome, but please register here: 

https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/about-us/research-events/2021/the-postdigital-city/

The conference webpage is here:

https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures/cpc-2021-conference/