The Episteme of Meta-Modernity Order, Value, and Citizenship in the Space of Digital Finitudes

The Episteme of Meta-Modernity: Order, Value, and Citizenship in the Space of Digital Finitudes Key words: order, work, value, citizenship, knowledge, genealogical methodology, digital f

The Episteme of Meta-Modernity: Order, Value, and Citizenship in the Space of Digital Finitudes

Key words: order, work, value, citizenship, knowledge, genealogical methodology, digital finitudes, the episteme of meta-modernity

Contents

2 Rationale

4 The Ancient Regime Smiling into its Beard

5 The Legacy of Modernity

7 Value in High Modernity

8 Foucault’s Episteme

10 The Episteme of Meta-Modernity

12 Recasting Cultural Heritage in the Language of Meta-Modernity

15 Order and Value in Meta-Modernity

17 Cultural Contradictions of Meta-Modernity

19 Genealogical ‘Maps of Digital Finitudes’ Grounding Thought in Meta-Modernity

23 An ‘Executive’ Summary

Symbol, Representation, and Reality

Normative Digital Finitudes

Complexity as Perpetual Instability and its Consequences

Philosophy… just Smiling

27 Appendix: The Rise and Fall of Modernist Rendering of

Order Generation and Consumption

From the Given to Critical Reason

Duchamp’s Intervention Revisited: Things ‘according to a formula’ Neo-Baroque Marionetteering in the Space of Digital Finitudes

33 References (short)

The outstanding challenge of the 21 st century is to take on board the normativity of novel, digital finitudes, framed by complexity, and enforced by quantitative, empirical methodologies and networking mastering the playing field of the post-mechanical age (e.g Nowotny,

2016, Jaros, 2015, and refs therein) Behind the flow of fragmented social exchanges lie, hidden from view by rising complexification, processes of contingent order generation and development bounded

in space, time, and topic They inscribe in the collective mind the ways of actualisation of citizenship, the pathways along which thought and power travel and collide This calls for a fresh research agenda aimed at redeeming directional thought grounded in the reality of our cultural heritage and presence – still very much veiled

by centuries of masterly speculative impositions - by recasting it into genealogical lines of ‘digital finitudes’ generated and legitimated by the methodologies characteristic of the 21 st century’s ‘meta- modernity’ This will open the way for a radical re-appraisal of the human content of order, work, and value threatened by the novel techno-science and divisions of labour acquiring a life of their own

In spite of perpetual transformations of work practices, the link between value and work remains in the main confined to institutional appreciation of a specialist material act-exchange The ‘value’ is unlikely to be determined by what Marx called “socially necessary time” to perform this act It has to reflect closely the contingent flow

of ‘supply and demand’ in the expertise needed, and the ‘risk’ brought into the act by dependence on other players and on competence in its management (e.g Harvey, 2010, Westra, 2012, Stiglitz, 2018, and refs therein) This ‘risk’ factor no longer stands merely for ups and downs affecting the “relative surplus value” and

sales; the sum of such interactions constitute Hannah Arendt’s vita activa - elsewhere referred to also as the Common or Citizenship

(Arendt, 1958, also Zizek, 2009, Westra 2012, 2015…) The choices and decisions made in the course of such ‘socialisation’ of the specialist act determine – more than any top-down ruling by a

‘centre of authority’- the norms for what is or is not socially acceptable, what is the expert and what the public domain, good and bad, etc It will be argued that today functionality of such decisions depends much on the actor’s grasp of and competent access to the limits of applicability of defining parameters of new forms of order and ordered structures Such ‘finitude’ makes these structures open

on global level to perpetual assessment, design, and

re-networking by front line sciences and by the social structures instrumental in bringing them about or set up in their wake In the post-mechanical age the scales and causal forces driving processes created by state of the art science and technology – the processes on which our wellbeing depends – cut across traditional subject boundaries and lie well outside of the range of human senses, of bodily powers, and even of an above average command of knowledge and communication; and rapidly acquire a life of their own! Apart from a few notable exceptions, this challenge is not matched by availability of relevant instruction in education and management concerning competent recognition and use of new, ‘hidden from view’ pathways of power and thought (see e.g Eshun, 2003, Bromwitch, 2014, Blömeke, 2013, Jaros, 2014, 2015, and refs’ therein) The playing field is left to runaway complexification of life caught in cunning matter (e.g Nowotny, 2016)

The notion of order as an ‘independent measure of organisation’ and of value grounded in this notion had been developed in Kant’s Critique of Judgement It was soon overshadowed by judiciously selected ‘sequences of social effects’ expressed, for example, in the language of dialectics of history or doctrines of free market However, it has recently re-emerged, much transformed but equally powerful as an organising agent, this time as different manifestations

of empirically grounded ‘digital finitudes’ For it is now generally acknowledged that there are as many histories, markets and

‘freedoms’ as there are more or less successful approximations to a

‘closed system’ that can be projected out of the complexities of social dynamics (e.g Morris, 2010, Westra, 2012, 2015…) This does not make such schemes less interesting, just limited to a certain domain

of applicability The same goes for what were once thought to be universal laws of science such as classical mechanics and thermodynamics or quantum theory The advent of quantitative empirical modelling has now completed for any practical purposes the project initiated by Michel Foucault’s effort in freeing order from servitude to historicism with pre-conceived ends By providing means for independent recognition of order, and for construction of genealogies of different forms of order and their impacts, it has raised its status from what was merely a measure of formal novelty to that of an onto-epistemic variable Such genealogies may serve as a fresh and testable source of directionality of thought and as grounds for re-establishing, be it much re-structured, a shared, social space – the digital age’s form of the old ‘Common’ This offers a new research agenda of redeeming our heritage and present in

contemporary idiom and finding ways of bridging the gap between knowledge and its symbolisation.

This calls for a fundamental change in attitude, for a methodological shift (e.g Jaros, 2015, and refs therein) designed to develop the capacity to recognise, without attempting to become a walking Encyclopaedia, order and ordered structures in terms of empirical variables, concepts and symbols making them communicable, their limits of applicability, and their place in the cumulative advance of different forms of complexity To this end it is important to promote fresh rounds of conceptualisation and checks instrumental in enabling digital technologies to serve humanity instead of mastering it! Only then is it possible to begin to address the gap between life and technology, and to re-cast the normative value interfaces between work and citizenship in order to redeem the human-centred character of our institutions, of fairness, and personal autonomy

The Ancient Regime Smiling into its Beard

The Age of Reason and its rapid advance towards the mechanical’, ‘digital’ present - made possible by quantitative models

‘post-of the processes which constitute the human condition ‘post-of today - had fundamentally altered the relation between work and value, not to speak of the meaning of these terms that are being perpetually recast into new normative frames Yet they must also co-exist and compete with the conceptual and behavioural baggage deposited in human minds over the millennia Some of this legacy still retains powerful influence and must be kept on the ‘active list’ for any serious agenda Pre-Socratics were fascinated by Nature but they did not have the tools to make their models stick With Plato comes the “moral turn”

in philosophy which cast the horizon of human outlook for more than two millennia! A glimpse of the totality of perfection resting for ever above the eighth’s sphere can only be obtained at a moment of holy madness, as a Gift of the Given, by revelation granted to the contemplating soul Time is the image of eternity The unity of nature, virtue, and truth does not have to be serviced by labour, only

by way of life shared with Socrates in the olive groves of Athens What we now call physical science, star gazing and cosmic speculations, are only about “saving appearances”, or in the religious idiom the might of God’s Creation revealed to us in the regularity of planetary motion or by the crystalline symmetry.

The Legacy of Modernity

By the time the Christian centuries rose to the reality of medieval Europe, scholastic speculations became so overloaded with meanings that it was increasingly difficult to take seriously the claim that there

is an omniscient, Given law But since this law is God’s law, man can free himself only if he takes His place Both Hobbes and Galileo end

up with a modern man who takes it upon himself to posit the ends Man becomes a measure of things, a master of nature True, for Newton the laws of nature are God’s laws and the inquiry into the world of natural phenomena is a celebration of the Glory of His Creation But these laws are comprehensible only through the intellect of man, through the autonomous mind of an independent observer Galileo’s measure and quantify separated humans from things of Nature Newton’s calculus and laws of motion provided the means for grounding this process in a radically new objectivity Kant set out to bring together philosophy and Newton’s achievement Knowledge is the knowledge of phenomena, the domain

of Pure Reason which depends on a priori forms of perception of time

and space and on categories of logic which can promote a set of individual dis-interested observations to the level of a law of nature The Critique of Pure Reason deals with what ‘is’ and what can be known, the Critique of Practical Reason deals with what ‘ought to be’ The two Critiques show that the principles which apply to pure reason (which refer to phenomena) and those applying to practical reason (which refer to noumena) are logically compatible But for any actualization of the theoretical necessity to take place there must

be a connection between the domains of necessity and (individual) freedom on which this actualization depends To establish this connection is the task of the Third Critique, the Critique of Judgement In it Kant considers reflective judgments, i.e judgements when the particular is given and the aim is to find the universal The analysis of reflective judgements is therefore primarily about our powers of representation (of the world of objects), about the relation between things and images of things that makes life liveable Kant conjectures that reflective judgement has an a priori principle related to feeling in a way analogous to that in which the a priori principles of the understanding relate to knowledge of empirical facts In employing reflective judgement, he again demands

purposive organisation and proceeds as if nature were so organised.

Kant considers only the metaphysical concept of purpose which is

independent of human desire He distinguishes between the purposiveness of a particular whole and the purpose which it serves

He posits that there is a real separation between the two, i.e that purposiveness may be without purpose! Then beauty is the “form of purposiveness in an object”, an order of structure contained in it in

so far as it is perceived apart from a “presentation of a purpose” We often speak of the harmony and ‘design’ of a whole without referring

to a designer or the purpose to which it might have been designed.

The notion of purposiveness implies an imposition of an order upon what otherwise would be only a manifold of perception What is collected by imagination has unity but here this unity exists only in reference to intermediate concepts It is conferred on what has been collected by the imagination through the understanding but not through determinate or specific concepts as it would be if it were possible to proceed as in Newtonian science Hence the aesthetic judgement concerns solely the relationship of the representative powers in so far as

they are determined by presentation Take Hamlet Under the fleeting

appearances staging accessories, costumes, and ramblings of art critics etc it is a world of its own, its parts weighted in ratios marking its own poetic order or symmetry It is this component of the work that remains

as Hamlet for Hamlet’s sake, art for art's sake; it remains as a trace of its other existences, as a self-contained order (e.g Körner, 1990)

In Kant’s day ‘cataloguing’ forms of abstract order was not on the agenda of the day Rather it was the challenge to account for development, for the process of knowledge acquisition, and for cultural change and the diversity of opinion (value) throughout the ages It was Kant himself who towards the end of his active life formulated the challenge It was taken up by Hegel He accepted Kant’s onto-epistemology as a starting point but argued that it is incomplete, merely ‘formal’ He adopted a position of an “objective idealist” (monist) that allowed him to develop what in Marx’s terms became dialectics of objectification of the material exchanges constituting the human condition via social labour It is then not just

a movement of the soul or Spirit but of human engagement (‘work’) with the material world of things and humans pursued in order to foster development In this scheme work, social labour grounding the labour theory of value becomes a key onto-epistemic concept and source of value It endows the objectification process with the directionality of thought and social development grounded in the dialectics of material exchanges and drives the Universal History humans Yet this History still comes to us as a record of the stages of

such objectification process, each with its characteristic signature marking the selection process needed to project from the totality of human experience what Hegel called the spirit of the time or Zeitgeist

to be recognised in most products of that era Indeed, to the present day we find shops full of books about Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque style in art, about ideologies of feudalism and capitalism, communism and post-modernism – bought even by people who have never heard of Hegel and his Zeitgeist and who at best think that Marx was the man who invented ‘totality’!

In this scheme of things, the Kantian order unravelled by pure reason becomes a product of ‘instrumental action’, separated from philosophy and social theory proper The notion of order and ordered value structures developed in the second and third Critiques

is a mere formal intervention lost in the dialectics of History!

Value in High Modernity

Aristotle’s Cosmos was a unity of Gods, things and humans in which truth, value, order, and perfection were at one Galileo separated value from truth and humans from things but preserved their permanence Riccardo and Marx still struggled to save this permanence by looking for ‘objectivity’ criteria for value, at least the value of human labour The significance of abstract order belonging

to “purposivity without purpose” of Kant’s Third critique disappeared in the dialectics of the self-understanding of the collective mind (Spirit) cast into Marx’s historical materialism of social struggle, of the exchange and use value, “means of production” and social organisation, etc Marx conjectured that the objectivity of value (of human work) is ensured by the dialectics of objectification

of products of human labour in the process of social exchange which enables humans to transcend the commoditisation of their labour and alienation from the products of their labour - and efforts to represent

it The value is then given by the socially necessary time needed to make the product The fragmentation and complexification of life and productive processes in the 20 th and 21 st century, operating increasingly away from equilibrium, as an ‘open system’, resulted in loss of consensual evaluation of the human condition It de-legitimises the grounding assumptions of Das Kapital on which the labour theory of value rests - namely that production is well represented as a quasi-equilibrium quasi-closed system.

It is not only economics and politics but the way the human condition is constituted that depend on the status of human engagement with the world, i.e on the onto-epistemic meaning of what is generally referred to as work or labour but which requires clarification if its ‘value’ is to be fully appreciated In the course of the 20 th century the high tech tools removed any remaining doubts about the legitimacy of the scientific method and its predictions directly impacting the notion of finitude of life and of the human physical and social environment at large The assumption of an equilibrium system of nature, value, virtue, truth etc., the necessary condition for the mind to get a glimpse of the ‘Given’ as well as the modern ‘Common’, came to be unsupportable

Foucault’s Episteme

Already in the first decades of the 20 th century the legacy of the 19 th century thinkers came under attack! The project marking the turning point was perhaps Foucault’s revisiting of Aristotle’s idea of Episteme and rescuing the notion of order from its subordination to sequences of social effects brilliantly selected to desired ends by great system builders like Hegel (Foucault, 1973) He argued that the perception of knowledge and life is grounded in the epoch's notion of order, in the way it sees things connected together This depends on the period's usage of signs, i.e on that aspect of the relation between reality and its representations that are used to formulate and implement norms Relationships between things - the order of things – are then an expression of the way people in a given era select things and events For one of the fundamental conditions of establishing any order is to be able to maintain focus on certain aspects of what we observe to the exclusion of others This selection is conditioned by the material and social structures of the day As Foucault readily admitted, it proved too difficult to shed entirely the ghost of Hegel at

al altogether However, his taking up and developing the Nietzschean and Benjaminian (Benjamin, 1999) method of ‘archaeology’ and

‘genealogy’ of reason freeing the notion of order of Hegel’s Spirit etc amount to a millennial shift in outlook – be it based on a ‘choice of data’ no less cavalier that that of his predecessors

Humans are those for whom representations exist This is how

Gary Gutting, in his Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason, (Gutting, 1989), sums up the challenge to the human

condition, in a way still very relevant today Foucault begins his

project by noting that before the 17th century words were joined with things and events designated by those signs by resemblances These resemblances constituted both the content and the form of the

sign In his Madness and Civilisation Michel Foucault refers to an

example of this way of thinking, to a short story which invokes “a certain old Chinese Encyclopaedia” in which animals are divided into those “belonging to the Emperor, embalmed, tamed, suckling pigs, sirens … drawn with a fine camel hair brush”… etc The pun is carefully selected; note also that both ‘real’ as well as ‘imagined’ animals are included!

With the rise of empirical science the status of resemblances was gradually demoted from being the source of knowledge to the realm

of error or charming fantasy such as that we now associate with childishness Language and thought were ‘freed of things’ and became one form of representation of reality Empirical sciences are built on the principle that the relation between things must be seen in terms of a law-like order Hence problems of evaluation and measurement are also reducible to problems of order

The 17th and 18th century witnessed the growth of knowledge as a network of identities and relations The world was made up of isolated elements related by such identities and differences based on representations fitting an assumingly timeless order In this worldview knowledge is constituted by systematic analysis of empirical reality as if in the form of a table

At the end of the 18th century this trust in timeless order and in the ability of humans to study the world in terms of isolated elements derived on the basis of qualitative assumptions about the world began to wane The relations between elements became pushed into the background and the emphasis shifted to those aspects connecting the elements that in their totality account for the function of the elements as a system Everywhere the 19 th century gradually embraced the philosophy of time in terms of Progress, History, and eventually the evolution of the species Instead of just individual's cognition, ability and self-interest, one hears more and more about collective concepts playing the role of parameters spanning the representational space of interest, for example concepts like social class, capital, division of labour, artistic styles of e.g Renaissance and Baroque, eras of capitalism and socialism; in science it is not just particle mass, trajectory, and acceleration but collective phenomena and concepts like fields, ensembles, entropy, and energy

When instead of knowledge in the form of a table one begins to look for a sequential, ascending development of the total system,

signs still represent the thing they are referring to but the meaning is

no longer fixed by the act of representation Instead it is becoming to

be dominated by the history of the way the sign was formed and how

it acts as one of the constitutive elements of a complicated structure.

In modernity, representation becomes grounded in something other than itself It has therefore become an object of critique, something studied and classified Its territory of applicability and its limits are never fixed It is often said that in the modern age schools of thought differ chiefly by their view of relation between image and reality, between material exchanges constituting human life and their representations or representability!

The Episteme of Meta-Modernity

The digital age shares with modernity its project of liberation of humans by reason, from caprices of nature and arbitrary will of other humans to say the least Its aim is to create an autonomous Self able freely to develop and to function in society according to its personal potential It also retains the legacy and practices of the Scientific Method and the Critical Theory However, there is more on the current agenda than what the canon of modernity can cope with.

In the last decades of the 20 th century the social became visibly fragmented into different ‘levels of being’ - molecular, viroid, genetic,

‘financialised’, galactic, i.e into semi-autonomous domains of activity

or systems often functional outside equilibrium and well beyond the scope of the ‘human dimension’ (senses, bodily powers and general knowledge, etc.) The assumptions grounding the vocabulary of more than two millennia of speculations - culminating in the models of Universal History - lost their legitimacy The advent of quantitative, microscopic methods grounded in laws of nature and mathematics enabled humans critically to acknowledge different levels of complexity in physical and social domains It will be argued that this offers the opportunity to recover a novel source of directionality of development by grounding it in the empirically based genealogy of order generation and recognition It amounts to iterative sequences

of mutual interactions between order generation (measuring and

‘making’) and recognition (‘naming’ and conceptualising); here techno-science and its social (philosophical, cultural, artistic) representations are mutually dependent drivers of the iterative process (see examples of this development in e.g Morris, 2010,

Westra, 2012)

The episteme of the digital age - to proceed in the spirit of Foucault’s project – is then best described as meta-modern or ‘more than modern’ The functionality or ‘use’ of any ordered structure depends on the degree to which it is possible to reduce the complexity (lack of programmability and soluble, predictive methodology) in which it must operate to an approximate, i.e sufficiently closed ‘loop’

or ‘system’ which permits predictive modelling in some local domain within testable margins of error! It is not useful to talk about

‘universal’ order as understood in traditional philosophy Even Newton’s laws of motion have limits of applicability; that does not make them uncertain or less law-like, just ‘finite’, i.e with a finite domain of applicability, like everything humans can make, do, and

‘represent’! This ‘loop’ or local closure seeking in pursuit of approximate solutions amenable to transparent critique and systematic improvement is not restricted to physics; for instance we understand a great deal about blood by taking the veins as a sub- system – a part of what is a complex and ‘unpredictable’ system called human body That makes it possible to model it as a good approximation of a ‘closed system’, with many helpful outcomes Similarly it is possible to see that way Hegel’s scheme of the successive stages of self-development of the collective mind (Spirit) or Karl Marx’s model political economy of 19 th century capitalism - as a process selected with assumptions that fit approximately a certain spatio-temporal social domain

The shift from modernity to what might be called the 21 st century’s

‘meta-modernity’ is as fundamental as was the shift from ancient to

modern The Kantian Critiques constituted the modern theory of

knowledge and existence in which the world is like a huge gallery full

of autonomous objects and subjects Nature must remain a neutral referent For a dis-interested observer to remain legitimate, even products of human work must be treated as if they were out there,

‘products’ of nature He had installed a vocabulary and terms of reference for critical thought that has dominated the ways of making and assessing representations of reality until very recently in spite

the long list of academic objections to his Critiques The grounding

conditions for the definition of human rights, civil law, of the public and private of the modern Common – of the shareable social spaces

of human organisation and consensual value structures – rest on Kant’s epistemology However, since his time perpetual re- structuring has broken the habitual as well as creative lifeforms into parts multiply connected across the globe (e.g Mackenzie, 2002,

Eshun, 2004, Foster, 2011, 2015, Miller, 2014, Westra, 2015, and refs therein) This means that meta-modernity of the 21 st century is best accounted for by a ‘context dependent’, ‘dynamic’ onto-epistemology (Smith, 1996, Bryant, 2011, and refs’ therein) What a computer ‘is’ for the purposes of functional analysis and (input-output) modelling, the effective choice of variables and their limits are best chosen so that they clearly reflect the activity in question, e.g whether the task

is, say, about accountancy or about running a navigation system It makes a more realistic and functional definition of what the object

‘is’ if its objectness and existence is given by the way it is ‘registered’

in a particular class of material exchange This ‘dynamic ontology’ approach also offers a better prospect for arts and social organisations to find effective ways of replacing the surviving fragments of old symbols and ideas with fresh, transparent symbolic which can then play the role of old archetypes and myths in creating effective categories and units of experience, its valuation and communication resonating with the novel condition of humans It might then extend and in many instances replace the declining modern Common where shareable content rests in increasingly less credible positing (of ownership) of seemingly permanent features of

‘totality of experience’ of things and events The mastery of recognition of and access to the dynamically defined ordered structures of objects and events is then a key signature of the episteme of meta-modernity and its measure of value

Recasting Cultural Heritage in the Language of Meta-Modernity

The inertia of traditional discourse has been a powerful influence Between about 1750 and 1980 nearly all models of developments of physical and social reality were just different versions of what is elsewhere known as ‘long term, lock in’ outlook (e.g Hegel, Marx) inherited from the two millennia of tradition in making sense of the world whether in religious or secular frameworks They are based on qualitative assumptions favoured by the author What fits the model

of the human condition and its development is taken into consideration and categorised according to the desired result which led to the choice of the model to begin with Any other ‘data’ is proclaimed irrelevant or simply ignored Although well-grounded and rapidly improving empirical results have been appearing since the beginning of the 20 th century (e.g data on the age of the planet, evolution of the species, etc.), until very recently it has not been technically possible to create a challenge backed up by the full rigour

of the scientific method that would put the final nail into the coffin of speculations about everything from the soul to cosmos

The current models based on quantitative evaluation of a large and testable database are often called ‘short term’ Indeed, they are legitimated by conditions and limits of applicability of variables functional in well defined domains restricted in space, time, and topic (e.g Morris, 2010, Piketty, 2014, Trentmann, 2016) They are grounded in the state of the art understanding of the material and social reality They of necessity ignore problems other than those chosen for the study even though the links may be relevant elsewhere and often well known as such This shift from qualitative schemes claiming universal validity to quantitative empirical studies with transparent limits in space, time, and topic led to two fundamental novelties There are no general ‘consensual’ criteria for legitimising the choice of parameters; these are determined by the internal consistency of the process, by the specificity (bounds) of the chosen topic, and by the limits of the empirical database employed Hence such studies turn out to be built around ‘one issue’ such as

‘movements of capital in the 21 st century England’ or ‘male-female income inequality in contemporary France’ Complex social and physical processes are reduced to quasi-closed systems so that formula measurements and predictions can be made

The procedures, scales, and units determining the range and

accuracy of the tools and instruments used in such studies lie well outside the scales and powers of human body and senses and commonly used tools and knowledge This leaves a conceptual and methodological gap between, on the one hand the current science, technology, and work practices, and on the other the narrative and symbolic (social, cultural) tools on which effective communication making life liveable depends It is the outstanding intellectual and educational (e.g Jaros, 2015) challenge of meta-modernity to bring into balance the perception of events and the underlying order generation.

The first programmatic, concerted efforts to implement the methodology based on empirically grounded quantitative accounts of order generation and of the dynamic onto-genesis of its functioning have only appeared in the last decade or so such as, for example,

Morris’ Why The West Rules – For Now, Piketty’s Capital in the 21 st

Century, and Trentmann’s Empire of Things (history of consumption)

offering startling re-assessment of what has been taken for standard

by previous generations For example, Professor Morris wants to show an evidential picture of the social development He uses it to compare the Western and Eastern societies, and makes predictions

about the future, too He says he “just tells the story of ‘his facts’”.

He chooses four parameters or variables, namely the degree of energy capture, urbanism, information, and capacity to make war, with which to generate bounds for the empirical database which is then made available to anyone wishing to criticise his model There is

a ‘price’ for this claim to objectivity He must sacrifice any claim to universality The error margins as well as outcomes are not fully independent of the choice of parameters Nor is it easy to extract from the data what exactly such interdependence leads to The choice

of variables often leads to a number of paradoxes For instance, Morris’ choice seems unintentionally to favour the consumerist model: the more you consume, the more advanced the country Or a cultures with less power consumption, with more efficient and less wasteful technology and lifestyle, with no war machine, or with cities

of modest (sensible) size end up in his scheme of things with an

‘inferior social development’.

In today’s science and engineering computer modelling is unavoidable whether in design, production, marketing and general management However, apart from a few exceptions such as those cited above humanities at large still insist on retaining – be it often under elaborate linguistic camouflage - the qualitative terminology of concept generation inherited from pre-digital traditions Yet, paradoxically, read in terms of the above paragraphs, such linguistic gymnastics may in fact be seen as mirroring remarkably well the thrust of above mentioned methodologies of quantitative modelling in spite of making no reference, indeed distancing themselves from the very vocabulary of empirical modelling such as ‘databases’,

‘variables’, ‘limits’, and ‘numerical’ analysis Take, for example, research projects associated with the so called ontological realism, i.e.

an outlook shared in the broadest sense of the word by oeuvres of philosophers like Deleuze, DeLanda, etc., but also sociologists Luhmann and Latour, and aestheticians Harman and Bryant A good example of a way of bridging the gap between the language of Deleuzian philosophy and that of computer science was given more than twenty years ago by the designer of intelligent machines and

philosopher Brian Smith in his book On the Origin of Objects (Smith,

1996).

In Deleuze’s project substance (object) is formatted or structured without possessing qualities of the virtual Virtual (not ‘virtual reality’!) is ‘real’ without being actual; it is ‘potency’ and ‘efficacy’ belonging to an entity (object) It is ‘part’ of an actual, real object, that substantiality of the object, the structure and the singularities that endure as the object undergoes qualitative transformations at

the level of local functioning and its various manifestations (actualisations) In object-oriented ontology, being is regarded as composed only of discrete entities or substances Substantiality of objects is not a bare substratum but rather an absolutely individual system or organisation of powers In this outlook, there are neither good or bad, ‘stylish’ or ‘kitschy’ works of art; only those – let it now

be expressed in the language of computer modelling - belonging to this or that grouping of parameters and to the corresponding

‘genealogical line’ And so ‘qualities’ are not regarded as something that an object possesses, has, or ‘is’ as an ‘autonomous’ thing out there, but rather as acts, verbs, vectors of something an object does, i.e how it is recognised as such or ‘registered’ at the site of action or experiment Every entity (object) translates the other entities to which it relates, yet these translations must be distinguished from the entities that are translated Entities are ‘constitutively withdrawn’ from one another This withdrawal is a structural feature here, whereas in Kant where the in-itself is unknown or withdrawn it is the price he must pay preserving in his scheme the precious ‘free will’.

To remind ourselves of the gravity of the shift under consideration, let us recall yet again that Kant’s ‘subjective idealist’ onto- epistemology was designed to account for and modelled on Newton’s achievement, his laws of motion thought to be universal laws of

Nature expressed in terms of absolutes of space, mass, and time In

Kant’s ‘subjective idealism’, cause and effect are associations drawn

on the ground that consciousness (experience) is present to itself but that causal relations and powers are withdrawn from the mind Substance is a category imposed by the mind on a manifold of intuition producing phenomena In sum, since the mind is not part of the world out there, it has free will, but the price is that objects are not directly accessible, absolutely knowable, in-itself.

Order and Value in Meta-Modernity

In Kant’s day value judgements belonged either to the domain of the Given - and the ‘traditions’ it gave rise to with ever present re- inventions of the same God given insights - or to what can be summarily labelled as aesthetics Leaving aside the former, the Third Critique explains how in every value judgement such as a commentary on, say, Leonardo’s Annunciation or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there remains a trace of an order peculiar to the work’s own life A tutorial example of a search for such order and value can be

found in the first pages of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and his

brilliant unravelling of the ‘inner life’ of “the time is out of joint” This order emerges, at successive levels of complexity as he raises the bar in his search parameters, out of the body of the text Not in ratios but by weighing different parts of the content systematically purified

of established ‘surface social effects’ Similarly, in Gombrich’s analysis of Ghilberti’s door of Duomo in Florence, the parameters - and the selection process hidden underneath the ‘story’ - with which the aesthetic order of the work is brought out comes close to what a Galileo might say about his experiments! Making a large bronze door

or indeed any other artefact always depends on and bears certain signatures of the application of current technologies and skills However, the power of such structuring to mirror itself in the social was very limited since both the technological and the social as we now understand them were in their infancy and slowly varying relative to the span of the active life at that time As for science and the philosophy of Rational Man, although it has since its birth in the

16 th century inspired many thinkers and influenced isolated developments, it remained largely confined to the cloister and laboratory; until well into the 20 th century when it rapidly emerged

as a powerful source of development and a social agent

Today, even in the most optimistic scenario, products of scientific research, when taken out of the laboratory, become of necessity almost instantly projected upon the parameters determining social conditions in question; like any commodity they acquire a contextualised finitude, and of course an exchange value The decision whether to fund a work on butterflies or stem cells, though it

no doubt benefits from an expert input, can only be a value judgment Innovation is only another way of describing a ‘creative destruction’, an exit from some existing state of affairs rational or not, be it a ‘work of art’ or an ‘act of genius’ in other people’s jargon! In this process of matching what the product can offer with what is demanded, the rigour with which the product’s function may have been established in the laboratory is lost and its inner order and forces it controls is ‘compromised’ (e.g Jaros, 2003, Nowotny, 2016).

At the level of complexity characteristic of the digital age, the separation between made and born, natural and artificial is fatally blurred The inner order of scientific products is projected into and acting as a driver of the dynamics of material life together with other value structures resulting from various activities of human individuals and organisations It now affects most of the decision space previously occupied by religious and other ‘traditions’ originating in or inspired by earlier ages The realm of value judgement of today is therefore vastly expanded compared to that in

the early days of modernity It is in this sense that one may say that

“every-thing is a work of art” (e.g Foster, 2012, 2015, Miller, 2014, Steyer, 2017)

Moreover, it is worth reiterating, that the order constituting the functioning of, say, a car engine or an algorithm driving a light sensor, undergoes - along the path that takes it out of the laboratory and into the street, eventually emerging in a local symbolic, communicational structure - a metamorphosis, a step like transformation of one form of ‘order’ and value to another The outcome of each transition is ‘modulated’ by the mediator in question, its origins hardly recognised in its final, symbolised, communicative form Indeed, the veracity of this claim cannot be better demonstrated than by pointing to the way the processes of fragmentation, of de and re-composition, of rising instability etc as measures of performance and value - which lie at the core of the production at all levels in the digital age - are reflected in the order- disorder clashes dominating contemporary art from painting to film and popular music!

Cultural Contradictions of Meta-Modernity

The rapid increase in the number and power of mediators, divisions, and technicality in work practices increases the gap between the apparent and real order and therefore between the use and exchange value On average, value scales with manageable increase in complexity (‘novelty’) irrespective of its human content The new ordered structures on which the wellbeing of practically everyone depends are created and recognised as such only by small groups of gated technical and organisational ‘elites’ Their range of action, thanks to the way digital networking and work practices are laid down across the globe, has no rational limits These ‘elites’ function in islands of clans, rarely communicate across the boundaries of their gated spaces, and in fact share only a bare envelope of concepts and values - chiefly those constituting the mental gymnastics of their ‘business’ (e.g Harvey, 2010, Kissinger,

2014, Mayer, 2017, Stiglitz, 2018, Zizek, 2009…) What they do then translates into (political, artistic, cultural) symbolisation of something that is not visible or touchable, that fits neither the range

of human senses nor the social norms in what is left of the public space Because the new order originates and can only be truly registered as what it is in perpetually re-organising yet ‘cloistered’ (laboratory) domains, it does not really contribute to the creation