Hi Barbara, Tom, and all,
Barbara, you ask, "Can we coders translate this to say that there is a fundamental connection among computation, the performativity of code, and historical temporality (not just clock-time!)?"
How would you define "computation" above? (I'm not being snarky. I'm actually curious.) I uderstand what you mean by history (like biological evolution) vs. computation (like an emergent artificial life system). But when the performativity of code is set against (or even beside) something else called "computation," i'm wondering what remains that may properly be called "computation?" I would say the two are so fundamentally connected as to be (at least immanently) inextricable.
Material state change thresholds are alway crossed in a kind of particular, present tense "utterance" event (this lake freezes, that branch burns). Yes, there are all sorts of historical (deleuze would say virtual) constraints that color those events. But such emergent becomings always necessarily emerge in the node of the present. It's just that the present is a lot more entangled with the past and with the horizon of the coming future than we usually allow.
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Regarding Tom's reference to Actor Network Theory and the mutliple references in other posts to digital labor and its relationship to code/instruction, here are two things I wrote that seem relevant:
1.
"Manifesto for a Theory of the ‘New Aesthetic’"
http://bit.ly/18fGarR
Just recognizing that our algorithms are not transcendentally standing outside of our immanent world modeling it, but that they are making the world in which we are embedded.
2.
"Sabotage! glitch politix Man[ual/ifesto"
http://www.tacticalgl.it/ches/txt/sabotage.html
Positing that code is (always already) intrinsically historical, and that the fulcrum of ethical agency rests in the (present tense) utterance event.
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It's no accident that Derrida begins (and ends?) as a philosopher of phenomenology, not as a (mere) literary theorist or semiotician. The relationship of the past, present, and future in terms of lived human experience (whitehead is most relevant here) is not unrelated to the relationship between the utterance event and stored/written langauge (bakhtin is most relevant here). So to set aside speech act theory in order to get at the contingent futures and historical pasts of code-centric art seems unnecessary at best.
(At) Best,
Curt
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