Mohammad-Ali Rahebi

Floridi’s remarks about PI being a sort of “demiurgology” might in fact be far more real and true than he suspects. The reason PI is starting to and needs to step out of the impasses of continental philosophy is the re-emergence of the god of Occasionalism. The Cartesian god, the single cause, the mediator of all relations, the guarantor and creator of all truth is becoming real. The Cybernetic Organon is the prosthetic reincarnation of the god of networks, the connector, the truth-maker; but this time there is no guarantee of an infinite benevolence or even omnipotence (which would in turn guarantee the former good will), because the brain that crowns the forehead of this prosthetic god is not a human mind, not a mind at all, but a non-representational, non-informational, data-engine that powers all information and connects all humans into the network in the most efficient manner: flattened subjects, flat ontologies. It is in view of this gradual assembling and becoming of the Cart...

ABSTRACT This text serves as a very short description of the main points of my theory of cybernetics as a new organon, a new "schema of intelligibility" and not a discipline that started in the 1940s and practically died out in the 1970s. Here I outline the birth of cybernetics in the 19th century with the synchronization of clocks in train-stations; the details of its logic and the characteristics of the cybernetic devices. Next I lay down, in brief, the philosophical tenets of the network model I have developed to analyze the appropriation of the cybernetic logic by capitalism and its use in planetary control.

There is a deep affinity between the dead and the machinic when it comes to creativity, the creation of novelty; an affinity that is not reducible to their shared character of non-life. If creativity is the creation of an alterity, an act of spontaneity and a whim through which an other " without genealogy " (Malabou 2012, p. 3) comes to be, and if an organ(ism) creates itself into something new through an instant of self-determination, then by necessity that acts is a near-death experience; there is something of death in every spontaneous (self)creation. Spinoza mentions the zombie-poet Góngora, in his illustration of a death that is not actually dying but the emergence of new structures, new " ratios of motion and rest " (Spinoza and Parkinson 2000) between the parts, of novelty in a body that can no longer be the same. The amnesiac is a popular and necessary figure in the anthropology of creativity, yet one which pales against the cybernetic machine. Malabou is precise in her designation of plasticity by the term " destructive " (Malabou 2012) for in that long tradition that conceives of novelty and creativity as a second birth (by non-predetermined acts), the less background and " genealogy " there is, the less limited the scope of creativity and the potentiality of the emerging novelty: in order to become a new human being, one usually needs to become an amnesiac. It is only through " destructiveness " that plasticity becomes possible; it is only in the second birth, birth of " spirit from spirit " that the agent, the organism, gets to become wind: " The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going (John 3:8). " By speaking of cybernetics, by no means am I limiting myself to the short-lived, disappointing little discipline that Wiener and the Macey group invented; what first manifests itself in cybernetics is the very logic underlying Big-Data Ideology today. The essence of Cybernetics lies in the discovery of machines that (based on feedback mechanisms) are able to change their behavior by sensing their environment and the effects of the actions upon it. The cybernetic machine moves from an " untrained " generic state, where everything all is potentiality, into a fully singular, fully adapted state where its behavior is completely " fitted " to the milieu (the AI gamer of DeepMind would be a good example of a recent model). Only, in case of the cybernetic device, in contrast to the Leibnizian machine, " overspecialization " does not " lead to death " since it does not result from premeditated design and is also fully reversible, instantenously. In principle the cybernetic organ can kick its old " habits " with the most fluid ease. It is this fluidity that has been assumed or attempted in case of the human being in certain philosophies (like Deleuze and Guattari's), which will of course lead into all sorts of machinic mysticisms. The Cartesian radical doubt (and attempted the erasure of all prior education-qua-habit-formation) as well as the more fashionable Deleuzian deterritorialization and Becoming (and BwO) are just ways of wiling the same " destructive plasticity " in human beings. This singularized plasticity afforded by the Cybernetic Organon changes the essence of creativity. The never-functioning procedures of individuation through education (adaptation) and un-individuation (universalization) meant to ensure maximum efficiency for each individual throughout time is made

At the heart of “big data ideology” lies its claim to an immanence (to the very lives of persons) of which human thought is incapable. It is with reference to the computational ability of real-time data processing that the proponents of big data advertise a sense of humanity and singularized individuality (personalized ads, precision medicine) without the inevitable bias of subjective human thought. It is in the name of this immanence, as Rouvroy noted, that reflective, critical thinking is short-circuited as transcendent and obsolete, if not “dangerous” or “reactionary”. The elimination of reflection is far from limited to the sphere of government/governance: It is the same claim to immanence (a principle of the cybernetic organon of which big data and algorithmic governmentality are the most recent manifestation)that underlies the so-called “fourth paradigm” in the sciences, replacing causal and explanatory theorization with real-time predictive modeling where hypotheses are replaced with transfer functions and parameter setting. As more scientific objects are being replaced with black boxes of high “reliability,” the question of truth as well as the questions of why and what are laid aside, and with them the human capacity of critical reflection. Assisted (read assailed) by data-based decision algorithms of all kinds and bombarded with visual stimuli, the thinking subject is short-circuited as data is connected directly to her unconscious body, desublimating desires into drives. The dividual celebrated as the digital savior of neoliberalism gives new meaning to Guattari’s concept of “machinic enslavement.”

Protevi's most recent work has been mostly a cause for joy, for despite its being loosely stapled from a collection of previous articles, it achieves a degree of seriousness and insight that sets it apart from the rabble of " Deleuzian " secondary literature. The dominant theme running through the entire book is a concern for the development of subjectivities in the context of the cognitive, neurological, and biological sciences. While the first part can be seen as a continuation of the project of Political Affect (his previous book), the second part brings the insights of the first to an admirable conclusion that gives the book its unique status. The third part is born of an entirely different line of thought, engaged as it is with panpsychism and the philosophy of biology. The two introductions attempt to acquaint the reader with some of the issues that the book will address, while also explaining the relation between Deleuze and certain branches of science, such as Developmental Systems Theory and cognitive science. Despite the effort, the book suffers a lack of any in-depth insight about why these specific sciences fit in with Deleuze's philosophy or the lat-ter's attitude toward science. The first part, entitled " Geophilosophy: Earth and War, " is thematically linked by the analysis of warfare, and methodologically linked by Protevi's characteristic analysis of the sub-, supra, and adjunct-subjective in their various configurations and connections. The first chapter sets out to study ancient warfare in terms of sub-and adjunct-subjective politics of energy (hydraulic, solar, etc.), preservation, and consumption. It also contains discussions of the works of Margulis, the concept of Hypersea, the portable water carrier of nomads that allowed their deterritorialization, among other issues. The main issue, however, is how the supra-subjective geopolitical factors combine with adjunct-subjective factors; i.e. technical substrate in the emergence of States, their politics, and warfare. Examples include the irrigation practices in ancient Egypt (according to Butzer) and the link between Athenian warfare (the hoplite reform