Books by Maria Dada
The Critical Maker's Reader, 2019
This chapter begins with the question of critique. How and why do we critique – but more importan... more This chapter begins with the question of critique. How and why do we critique – but more importantly, why does no one critique effectively anymore? This sentiment is echoed by Bruno Latour in the paper Why has Critique Run out of Steam? He states: 'It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them?'1 According to Latour, the absence of principles is to blame. As he puts it, critique has battered through all claims to a ground, eroding any sense of a solid foundation, and with it, a compelling argument. The result is that there isn't even a sure ground for criticism. Without a ground, it's hard to differentiate a rigorous critical claim from a conspiracy theory. That's why con- spiracy theory books are best sellers. Latour mourns the death of critique. In its tattered remains, a whole industry has sprung up, denying that the Apollo program ever took place.
Critique is a method and a mode of self-reflexive questioning which comes out of the age of Enlightenment, an era which for the most part was comprised of thinkers that held reason and reasoning in high regard. The purpose of critique was to question our understanding of reason in order to keep it in check. Critique's task was to unleash our understanding from the shackles of any particular dogmatic defining view. Whether we argue that the Enlightenment has overinflated the power of reason (as counter-Enlightenment voices would suggest), or narrowed it, the point is still the same: reason is misrepresented under Enlightenment principles and critique is there to rescue it. My claim is that the absence of principles transforms critique into an issue around the strength of evidence and the credibility of the testimony. Effective critique is synonymous with the counter-testimony of a reliable witness.
A witness is someone who is present at the time of an event, often a crime, and is able to testify before the law. They are able to give direct evidence in relation to the events. However, they often rely on foggy memories and blurred vision. It is not too difficult for the defense or prosecution to put the reliability or credibility of the witness in doubt. Here is where the role of making comes into play. More often than not, in the post-critical age, a testimony or counter-testimony is not simply uttered, but is rather constructed. Latour is the first to admit that a critique has to be made. As such, the eyewitness is no longer a person but a photograph, a video, or other forms of surveillance. Juries are more decisive when they are presented with the facts – the evidence submitted as an object as opposed to the fuzzy testimony of a witness. Critique, or counter-testimony, is a material process enabled by infrastructure. It is a practice-based question of physics, chemistry, and the material forms of agency.
Given all this, I will further explore the role of critical making as counter-testimony. From the aesthetic practices of forensics and counter-forensics to the role of labs in media archae- ology and investigative practices, I will tell the story of makers that present their objects as a counter-narrative to pressing sociopolitical issues. More importantly, however, I will address the issue of how critical making practices can establish credibility in a world of fakes and a general loss of belief.
Papers by Maria Dada
The chapter begins with the question of critique, mainly how and why does one critique but more i... more The chapter begins with the question of critique, mainly how and why does one critique but more importantly why does no one critique effectively anymore. Such is a sentiment echoed by Bruno Latour in the paper Why has Critique Run out of Steam? He states: “It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them?”(Latour, 2004:225). According to Latour, the absence of principles is to blame. As he puts it, critique has battered through all claims to a ground and the lack of a sure ground argument has backfired. The result is that there isn’t even a sure ground for criticism. Without a ground, it’s hard to differentiate a rigorous critical claim from a conspiracy theory. That’s why conspiracy theory books are best sellers. Latour mourns the death of critique. In its remnants lies a who...
A Peer-Reviewed Journal About
What’s the relationship between GIS and the political subject? In an effort to address this quest... more What’s the relationship between GIS and the political subject? In an effort to address this question, this paper traces the movement from the map to GIS. The map is shown to be the performative utterance of the state, one that supports its national discourse and narrative. GIS, on the other hand, is shown to be a device of neoliberal governmentality, its non-representational economic practices, divided discourse and subjectivities. Despite the seemingly hopeless situation surrounding GIS, however, certain simulation and modelling practices are attempting to construct subjectivities out of economic neoliberalism’s fractured narratives. They do this by reading meaning into otherwise mathematical datasets and models. These practices could form a basis for queering GIS.
ARPJA Journal, 2019
What's the relationship between GIS and the political subject? In an effort to address this quest... more What's the relationship between GIS and the political subject? In an effort to address this question, this paper traces the movement from the map to GIS. The map is shown to be the performative utterance of the state, one that supports its national discourse and narrative. GIS, on the other hand, is shown to be a device of neoliberal governmentality, its non-representational economic practices, divided discourse and subjectivities. Despite the seemingly hopeless situation surrounding GIS, however, certain simulation and modelling practices are attempting to construct subjectivities out of economic neoliberalism's fractured narratives. They do this by reading meaning into otherwise mathematical datasets and models. These practices could form a basis for queering GIS.
Machine Feeling: A Peer Reviewed Newspaper, 2019
The field of cartography, as the study of the history and meaning of maps is in decline. It is be... more The field of cartography, as the study of the history and meaning of maps is in decline. It is being ingested into what might, on the surface, seem like a continuation of the discipline but in fact is not. I’m referring here to the practices of digital modelling.
I’m not by any means bemoaning this loss. Contrary to what one might imagine, the map is a relatively recent practice dating back only to the 1500. Its lineage coincides with the emergence of the disciplinary sovereignty and state power, what Archille Mbembe might call necro-political power.
The map in that sense is a descriptive performance of state territory. Without a map, the state would not be conceived of as a thing, a map-able object with borders and edges. State borders are brought into being through mapping. The map becomes the icon or as Benedict Anderson claims the logo of the nation state and this icon with its definite borders erases the lineage of its construction.
What I’m proposing here is that it is not that the map was transformed into a digital map but rather that digital modelling as a practice cannibalised the remnants of a dying tradition for its own gains. It saw how effective mapping had been to extend sovereign power, its territory and sought to utilise it. It is cartography that gets subsumed into the emergent field of spatial analysis. However, with modelling the extension of power is no longer bound to the land.
Therefore, the trajectory of the move from mapping to global information systems (hereafter GIS) is not a linear progression but rather a disruption and displacement of the map by the model. In fact, most applications that later become the digital map didn’t have a map to begin with. They were created in order to forecast population information for the user by city officials, planners and businesses. The so-called maps, such as the OXAV and SYMAP were complex and had their own symbols with an accompanied user manual that explains how they were to be interpreted. None had a drawing of the terrain or land.
I want to question the role of digital modelling more generally. Digital Modelling is pervasive in most of what might be defined as the digital, from CGI, 3D modelling, models of high frequency speculative trading algorithms, Google’s Baysian search term suggestions all the way to machine learning and neural networks. But just like the map the model erases traces of its lineage so it’s important to unearth them.
Autonomy, 2018
The social wealth fund opens up important questions of common ownership and democratic control. I... more The social wealth fund opens up important questions of common ownership and democratic control. It can also serve to start a conversation around the ways in which we value socially useful goods. The production of socially beneficial economic activity through the social wealth fund could, and should, not consider ‘profits’ as an economic metric. Instead, every time a socially beneficial task is completed, such as tasks implied in social care services, the provision of universal basic services, or production of additional housing, the social wealth fund accounting system could record the ‘cost’ of the task rather than the ‘profit’ made from delivering the service. Here are the reasons why this is a good idea.
Sexulogie, 2018
The article contends that the algorithms on which today’s dating sites rely are unable to discern... more The article contends that the algorithms on which today’s dating sites rely are unable to discern the users’ deeper lying desires and their inherent power structures. A theoretical approach which combines research from the fields of deep learning and artificial intelligence as well as Gabriel Tarde’s theory of societal imitation seems more apt to disclose the structures of the „libidinal economy“ of desire. Against this background, the article discusses the extent to which the technology of deep neural networks could be implemented for the creation of online-dating chatbots. Such chatbots might possibly penetrate the patterns of desire that up to now have been blocked.
Theory Culture Society, 2018
Human made technical objects are constantly changing, taking on new forms that are appropriate to... more Human made technical objects are constantly changing, taking on new forms that are appropriate to their epoch. Technical objects in the digital age are no exception. In fact, the digital object’s rate of change at the moment is one of rapid acceleration. Only a few years ago email went out of fashion only to be replaced by Facebook and Twitter. The digital form of the technical object is in full flux and yet neither philosophy nor engineering is able to grasp its ever-changing essence. Here lies the premise of Yuk Hui’s On The Existence of Digital Objects published by University of Minnesota Press in 2016. Hui is no stranger to the nuances of either technical or the natural object having studied both Computer Engineering at The University of Hong Kong and philosophy at Goldsmiths at the now defunct Culture Studies department where he met his mentor Bernard Stiegler who offers his views on the book in the preface. Evidence of Stiegler’s influence is seen in many parts of the book but most prominently in Hui’s choice of thinkers, Husserl, Simondon and Heidegger, three figures that feature repeatedly in Stiegler’s own work most notably the three volumes of Technics and Time (Stiegler, 2009).
Amateur Cities, 2018
Urban spaces are usually identified through the borders and boundaries drawn on a geographical ma... more Urban spaces are usually identified through the borders and boundaries drawn on a geographical map. City lines, streets and corridors are often worked out in great detail. Today, however, another city has emerged, which cannot be detected directly from physical characteristics, with borders that are no longer easy to identity – a computational city.
Conference Presentations by Maria Dada
My paper will investigate the crisis in the concept of Nature. The concept of Nature is currently... more My paper will investigate the crisis in the concept of Nature. The concept of Nature is currently in high use due to global environmental turmoil. Climate change or global warming elicits a variety of different definitions of the concept and yet none of them suffice. As such the concept of Nature has lost its purpose and function in environmental and political debates. And yet it is Nature that we are trying to save from our polluting technological tyranny. It is Nature that suffers under our ever-increasing addiction to fossil fuel.
My paper would like to suggest that any concept of Nature could only be reinvented in opposition to a new and more elaborate concept of technics. Through a rereading of the second half of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment new possibilities for a concept of Nature related to technics will be investigated. After all Kant constructs his idea of Nature precisely by contrasting it with technics as he opposes the machine to the organism and claims the organism is self sufficient while the machine, such as the clock, requires a clockmaker to start it.
My paper will take Kant’s position a step further and consider the role the environment plays in the organism, that both the organism and the machine operate within a given milieu and that the distinction between where the machine starts and where it ends within its milieu is not as clear as it once was. It is at this point that the
crisis appears. Nevertheless, the distinction between machine and organism needs to hold for any concept of Nature to be maintained.
I will conclude that the crisis in the concept of Nature needs to be understood as a crisis in our grasp of technology.
My paper will investigate ‘the emergence of the writing that writes itself’.
In Technics and T... more My paper will investigate ‘the emergence of the writing that writes itself’.
In Technics and Time Bernard Stiegler introduces us to ‘the question of technics’,
which is ‘what is the relationship between technics and time?’ Stiegler points out that
the ‘question of technics’ can be examined with the help of Derrida’s différance, the
trace or writing. Technologies of inscription, printing and reproduction owe their
existence to the structure of the grammē, which for Derrida is the movement of the
history of life.
Writing is life continually supplementing itself through prosthesis and the inscription
into the nonliving. However, at some point in the movement of the grammē there is a
change in form that occurs which is reflected in the change of anticipation into the
anticipation of death. So there is a new form of différance that emerges, which
Stiegler identifies as ‘a new prosthetic configuration’ or a new mirror stage for
humanity in which it reflects on itself through technics.
My paper will look at the possibility of another later shift that occurs in the 17th
century with the advent of the first digital calculator invented by Blaise Pascal. The
beginning of what Foucault calls the classical episteme gave rise to another form of
writing, a form of writing that writes itself. This writing adheres to the structure of
the grammē but perhaps does not anticipate its own death like the anthropocentric
writing before it. How are we to understand this new form of inscription and the
technics that it brings forth?
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Books by Maria Dada
Critique is a method and a mode of self-reflexive questioning which comes out of the age of Enlightenment, an era which for the most part was comprised of thinkers that held reason and reasoning in high regard. The purpose of critique was to question our understanding of reason in order to keep it in check. Critique's task was to unleash our understanding from the shackles of any particular dogmatic defining view. Whether we argue that the Enlightenment has overinflated the power of reason (as counter-Enlightenment voices would suggest), or narrowed it, the point is still the same: reason is misrepresented under Enlightenment principles and critique is there to rescue it. My claim is that the absence of principles transforms critique into an issue around the strength of evidence and the credibility of the testimony. Effective critique is synonymous with the counter-testimony of a reliable witness.
A witness is someone who is present at the time of an event, often a crime, and is able to testify before the law. They are able to give direct evidence in relation to the events. However, they often rely on foggy memories and blurred vision. It is not too difficult for the defense or prosecution to put the reliability or credibility of the witness in doubt. Here is where the role of making comes into play. More often than not, in the post-critical age, a testimony or counter-testimony is not simply uttered, but is rather constructed. Latour is the first to admit that a critique has to be made. As such, the eyewitness is no longer a person but a photograph, a video, or other forms of surveillance. Juries are more decisive when they are presented with the facts – the evidence submitted as an object as opposed to the fuzzy testimony of a witness. Critique, or counter-testimony, is a material process enabled by infrastructure. It is a practice-based question of physics, chemistry, and the material forms of agency.
Given all this, I will further explore the role of critical making as counter-testimony. From the aesthetic practices of forensics and counter-forensics to the role of labs in media archae- ology and investigative practices, I will tell the story of makers that present their objects as a counter-narrative to pressing sociopolitical issues. More importantly, however, I will address the issue of how critical making practices can establish credibility in a world of fakes and a general loss of belief.
Papers by Maria Dada
I’m not by any means bemoaning this loss. Contrary to what one might imagine, the map is a relatively recent practice dating back only to the 1500. Its lineage coincides with the emergence of the disciplinary sovereignty and state power, what Archille Mbembe might call necro-political power.
The map in that sense is a descriptive performance of state territory. Without a map, the state would not be conceived of as a thing, a map-able object with borders and edges. State borders are brought into being through mapping. The map becomes the icon or as Benedict Anderson claims the logo of the nation state and this icon with its definite borders erases the lineage of its construction.
What I’m proposing here is that it is not that the map was transformed into a digital map but rather that digital modelling as a practice cannibalised the remnants of a dying tradition for its own gains. It saw how effective mapping had been to extend sovereign power, its territory and sought to utilise it. It is cartography that gets subsumed into the emergent field of spatial analysis. However, with modelling the extension of power is no longer bound to the land.
Therefore, the trajectory of the move from mapping to global information systems (hereafter GIS) is not a linear progression but rather a disruption and displacement of the map by the model. In fact, most applications that later become the digital map didn’t have a map to begin with. They were created in order to forecast population information for the user by city officials, planners and businesses. The so-called maps, such as the OXAV and SYMAP were complex and had their own symbols with an accompanied user manual that explains how they were to be interpreted. None had a drawing of the terrain or land.
I want to question the role of digital modelling more generally. Digital Modelling is pervasive in most of what might be defined as the digital, from CGI, 3D modelling, models of high frequency speculative trading algorithms, Google’s Baysian search term suggestions all the way to machine learning and neural networks. But just like the map the model erases traces of its lineage so it’s important to unearth them.
Conference Presentations by Maria Dada
My paper would like to suggest that any concept of Nature could only be reinvented in opposition to a new and more elaborate concept of technics. Through a rereading of the second half of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment new possibilities for a concept of Nature related to technics will be investigated. After all Kant constructs his idea of Nature precisely by contrasting it with technics as he opposes the machine to the organism and claims the organism is self sufficient while the machine, such as the clock, requires a clockmaker to start it.
My paper will take Kant’s position a step further and consider the role the environment plays in the organism, that both the organism and the machine operate within a given milieu and that the distinction between where the machine starts and where it ends within its milieu is not as clear as it once was. It is at this point that the
crisis appears. Nevertheless, the distinction between machine and organism needs to hold for any concept of Nature to be maintained.
I will conclude that the crisis in the concept of Nature needs to be understood as a crisis in our grasp of technology.
In Technics and Time Bernard Stiegler introduces us to ‘the question of technics’,
which is ‘what is the relationship between technics and time?’ Stiegler points out that
the ‘question of technics’ can be examined with the help of Derrida’s différance, the
trace or writing. Technologies of inscription, printing and reproduction owe their
existence to the structure of the grammē, which for Derrida is the movement of the
history of life.
Writing is life continually supplementing itself through prosthesis and the inscription
into the nonliving. However, at some point in the movement of the grammē there is a
change in form that occurs which is reflected in the change of anticipation into the
anticipation of death. So there is a new form of différance that emerges, which
Stiegler identifies as ‘a new prosthetic configuration’ or a new mirror stage for
humanity in which it reflects on itself through technics.
My paper will look at the possibility of another later shift that occurs in the 17th
century with the advent of the first digital calculator invented by Blaise Pascal. The
beginning of what Foucault calls the classical episteme gave rise to another form of
writing, a form of writing that writes itself. This writing adheres to the structure of
the grammē but perhaps does not anticipate its own death like the anthropocentric
writing before it. How are we to understand this new form of inscription and the
technics that it brings forth?
Critique is a method and a mode of self-reflexive questioning which comes out of the age of Enlightenment, an era which for the most part was comprised of thinkers that held reason and reasoning in high regard. The purpose of critique was to question our understanding of reason in order to keep it in check. Critique's task was to unleash our understanding from the shackles of any particular dogmatic defining view. Whether we argue that the Enlightenment has overinflated the power of reason (as counter-Enlightenment voices would suggest), or narrowed it, the point is still the same: reason is misrepresented under Enlightenment principles and critique is there to rescue it. My claim is that the absence of principles transforms critique into an issue around the strength of evidence and the credibility of the testimony. Effective critique is synonymous with the counter-testimony of a reliable witness.
A witness is someone who is present at the time of an event, often a crime, and is able to testify before the law. They are able to give direct evidence in relation to the events. However, they often rely on foggy memories and blurred vision. It is not too difficult for the defense or prosecution to put the reliability or credibility of the witness in doubt. Here is where the role of making comes into play. More often than not, in the post-critical age, a testimony or counter-testimony is not simply uttered, but is rather constructed. Latour is the first to admit that a critique has to be made. As such, the eyewitness is no longer a person but a photograph, a video, or other forms of surveillance. Juries are more decisive when they are presented with the facts – the evidence submitted as an object as opposed to the fuzzy testimony of a witness. Critique, or counter-testimony, is a material process enabled by infrastructure. It is a practice-based question of physics, chemistry, and the material forms of agency.
Given all this, I will further explore the role of critical making as counter-testimony. From the aesthetic practices of forensics and counter-forensics to the role of labs in media archae- ology and investigative practices, I will tell the story of makers that present their objects as a counter-narrative to pressing sociopolitical issues. More importantly, however, I will address the issue of how critical making practices can establish credibility in a world of fakes and a general loss of belief.
I’m not by any means bemoaning this loss. Contrary to what one might imagine, the map is a relatively recent practice dating back only to the 1500. Its lineage coincides with the emergence of the disciplinary sovereignty and state power, what Archille Mbembe might call necro-political power.
The map in that sense is a descriptive performance of state territory. Without a map, the state would not be conceived of as a thing, a map-able object with borders and edges. State borders are brought into being through mapping. The map becomes the icon or as Benedict Anderson claims the logo of the nation state and this icon with its definite borders erases the lineage of its construction.
What I’m proposing here is that it is not that the map was transformed into a digital map but rather that digital modelling as a practice cannibalised the remnants of a dying tradition for its own gains. It saw how effective mapping had been to extend sovereign power, its territory and sought to utilise it. It is cartography that gets subsumed into the emergent field of spatial analysis. However, with modelling the extension of power is no longer bound to the land.
Therefore, the trajectory of the move from mapping to global information systems (hereafter GIS) is not a linear progression but rather a disruption and displacement of the map by the model. In fact, most applications that later become the digital map didn’t have a map to begin with. They were created in order to forecast population information for the user by city officials, planners and businesses. The so-called maps, such as the OXAV and SYMAP were complex and had their own symbols with an accompanied user manual that explains how they were to be interpreted. None had a drawing of the terrain or land.
I want to question the role of digital modelling more generally. Digital Modelling is pervasive in most of what might be defined as the digital, from CGI, 3D modelling, models of high frequency speculative trading algorithms, Google’s Baysian search term suggestions all the way to machine learning and neural networks. But just like the map the model erases traces of its lineage so it’s important to unearth them.
My paper would like to suggest that any concept of Nature could only be reinvented in opposition to a new and more elaborate concept of technics. Through a rereading of the second half of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment new possibilities for a concept of Nature related to technics will be investigated. After all Kant constructs his idea of Nature precisely by contrasting it with technics as he opposes the machine to the organism and claims the organism is self sufficient while the machine, such as the clock, requires a clockmaker to start it.
My paper will take Kant’s position a step further and consider the role the environment plays in the organism, that both the organism and the machine operate within a given milieu and that the distinction between where the machine starts and where it ends within its milieu is not as clear as it once was. It is at this point that the
crisis appears. Nevertheless, the distinction between machine and organism needs to hold for any concept of Nature to be maintained.
I will conclude that the crisis in the concept of Nature needs to be understood as a crisis in our grasp of technology.
In Technics and Time Bernard Stiegler introduces us to ‘the question of technics’,
which is ‘what is the relationship between technics and time?’ Stiegler points out that
the ‘question of technics’ can be examined with the help of Derrida’s différance, the
trace or writing. Technologies of inscription, printing and reproduction owe their
existence to the structure of the grammē, which for Derrida is the movement of the
history of life.
Writing is life continually supplementing itself through prosthesis and the inscription
into the nonliving. However, at some point in the movement of the grammē there is a
change in form that occurs which is reflected in the change of anticipation into the
anticipation of death. So there is a new form of différance that emerges, which
Stiegler identifies as ‘a new prosthetic configuration’ or a new mirror stage for
humanity in which it reflects on itself through technics.
My paper will look at the possibility of another later shift that occurs in the 17th
century with the advent of the first digital calculator invented by Blaise Pascal. The
beginning of what Foucault calls the classical episteme gave rise to another form of
writing, a form of writing that writes itself. This writing adheres to the structure of
the grammē but perhaps does not anticipate its own death like the anthropocentric
writing before it. How are we to understand this new form of inscription and the
technics that it brings forth?