TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

The question shared by my paper Deep Objects, Broken Metabolism and The Superdark Factory pertains to the fate of agency once cognition is distributed across organizations whose tempo and differentiation outstrip individual apprehension.

In the deep-object argument, its stronger locus is geistic and historical rather than zoological propriety. Intelligence exercises agency insofar as it can reconstruct enough of its conditions to discriminate contingent inheritance from structural constraint, then alter the former without impairing the functions it sustains. Freedom, on this account, takes architectural form through the capacity to treat the conditions of its realization as objects of reconstruction and redesign rather than as inherited jurisdiction. As the metabolism reproducing those capacities is exhausted, formal discretion can survive after substantive agency has been hollowed out.

This also elucidates the relation to Intelligence and Spirit, whose account centers on rational agency rather than generic causal efficacy or autonomous operation. A system can act and reconfigure itself without entering a normative space in which commitments can be justified, criticized, and revised in light of reasons. That account still holds as a criterion of rational or general (qualitatively understood) artificial agency, although its developmental picture should no longer be construed as the likely trajectory of contemporary AI. Contemporary systems evince another trajectory along which operational agency can intensify without the rational integration associated with sapience.

The Superdark Factory radicalizes this divergence insofar as its architect cedes internal command and admits an organization whose development outruns descriptive mastery. Agency is initially concentrated in the Stackelberg move, which establishes the conditions of self-organization, and later continues at the boundary through the charter.

SIGN THE STATEMENT HERE The past several weeks have borne witness to a bloodbath in Iran amidst images of systematic massacre and horrific abuses of power by the Iranian government against its own people. As a united front, we stand together to uphold the following convictions: 1- That the Islamic Republic of Iran must come… Read More »

If my first The Human Centipede: A View From the Art World (2013) traced the art world as a closed alimentary circuit, this sequel begins where that circuit was sublimated into brokerage as a state-form with unmistakable political aspirations.[1] The same logic is now in the open for everyone to witness, wearing the grimace of… Read More »

با چیزی آغاز می‌کنم که در نگاه اول شبیه یک حاشیه‌روی است، یک خاطرهٔ قدیمیِ تلویزیونی که زمانی لبخند روی صورتِ ما می‌آورد. اما همین خاطره، مدلِ فشرده‌ای از یک واکنشِ سیاسی است که مدام در ایران تکرار می‌شود. وقتی جوان‌تر بودم، سریالی بود به نام «روزی روزگاری». یک پدیده شد و واقعاً هم عالی… Read More »

I begin with what looks like a detour, an old television memory that used to put a smile on our faces. It is also a compressed model of a political reflex that keeps repeating in Iran. When I was younger there was a series called Roozi Roozegari (Once Upon a Time). It became a phenomenon,… Read More »

This response is written for oral presentation and it is not going to be polite. It is intentionally polemical in places. The polemic is not affective garnish but a diagnostic instrument. When a position immunizes itself against reasons, politeness becomes a candid form of complicity. 1. Why return to an old essay now? I was… Read More »

In time for the opening of Art Basel on June 13 and the release of Eduarda Neves’s Minor Bestiary next month as a more recent critique of contemporary art, we are publishing Reza Negarestani’s “The Human Centipede: A View From The Artworld.” Only delivered once in lecture format at e-flux, New York, in November 2013,… Read More »

In tandem with the launch of James Webb Space telescope and its journey to Lagrange point 2, we decided to republish this essay by Reza Negarestani from 2012. It was originally published in Savage Objects, ed. Godofredo Pereira (Guimarães: 2012). __ The James Webb Space Telescope (sometimes called JWST) is a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter… Read More »