#metaplasticity

[anarchist-caravan]

“ In the prologue of Gary Shipley’s 2017 novel Warewolff! , the narrator states that he began to hear “one thing’s voice, and from that voice a portrait of itself—of itself made up with other things. It was learning to talk by shaping the stories of its victims.” Later on, the radically alien narrator describes the world he encounters: “Just stuff that isn’t me. And I do not feel like stuff. I feel like this endless faceless seeing. I’m a seamless tracking shot without arms or legs. It’s like I’m blind or have locked-in syndrome when I don’t.” David Roden compares Shipley’s work to Hans Bellmer’s anagrammatic dolls, because :

both have no axioms or rules beyond the hazards of its dispersal. It is its own entirely misleading portrait. It has no people or worlds, only disjointed clones, plucky carcasses and scripts we mistook as our lives. Yet despite this ontological poverty, we can read Warewolff! Something happens, even if we do not understand what. Its dispersal is the horror of biomorphism: a condition somewhat akin to life that, like Shipley’s alien, “discloses its arrangements” through our language centers. And this is the condition of unbinding: we are spoken by something; we pass into something without even the assurance that our hunger is our own.

The Thing does not just come from another world, but from another time: pre-human time, well before“shared time life regression” became a possibility. It does not speak to us. It’s not speaking us. Our hunger is dismissed. The Thing is a transduction mechanism, a system for translating itself into itself across different language-forms, impelled by an ananthropic rather than inhuman drive. The inhuman or posthuman are necessarily defined from human existence; they’re translations from the human into some otherness. Their hyperplasticity is a quantitative increase in plastic force. But The Thing does not actually care about humanity, technology or intelligence. Intelligence becomes completely irrelevant when it freely navigates through living forms, encountering cognition as just another edible formal feature. Purely immanentized “living”, it dismisses thinking because “thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter”. It is what Meillassoux would define as a “contradictory entity”, which 

is always-already whatever it is not: /…/ the introduction of a contradictory entity into being would  result in the implosion of the very idea of determination—of being such and such, of being this rather than that. Such an entity would be tantamount to a “black hole of differences”, into which all alterity would be irremediably swallowed up, since the being-other of this entity would be obliged, simply by virtue of being other than it, not to be ot her than it. 

Accordingly, real contradiction can in no way be identified with the thesis of universal becoming, for in becoming, things must be this, then other than this; they are, then they are not. This does not involve any contradiction, since the entity is never simultaneously this and its opposite, existent and non-existent. A really illogical entity consists rather in the systematic destruction of the minimal conditions for all becoming—it suppresses the dimension of alterity required for the deployment of any process whatsoever, liquidating it in the formless being which must  always already be what it is not.

Aesthetic metaplasticity is evil aesthetics: it is the appropriation of any empty anthropological form to hide the inhuman amorphousness, the reformulation of the cogito “less in terms of an I think and more in terms of an It lives”. As Mark Fisher concedes, “it has seemed as if the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism have been confined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces of reterritorialization”. Metaplastic works, such as those by Gary Shipley, Kenji Siratori, Jake Reber and Mike Corrao, explore cultural deterritorialization through contingent abstraction. They’re made of entities which are not only hyperplastic—able to transform themselves into anything existent—but metaplastic: able to morph into anything non-existent, or to counter-morph anything existent. They’re full of bodies that, rather than anticipate an age of cyborgs, enhanced humanoids and intelligent machines, “announce the end of being”, full of “objects that announce the end of meaning”, of “elements that whorl each of their parts containing the end of the cosmos”. In those artworks we find “something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying, without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God /…/ It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.”  

-

GERMÁN SIERRA - Metaplasticity - Šum12

[neurosciencenews]

Brain Sets Unique Learning Rate for Everything We Do By Self Adjusting to the Environment

Each time we get feedback, the brain is hard at work updating its knowledge and behavior in response to changes in the environment; yet, if there's uncertainty or volatility in the environment, the entire process must be adjusted. A Dartmouth-led study published in Neuron reveals that there's not a single rate of learning for everything we do, as the brain can self-adjust its learning rates using a synaptic mechanism called metaplasticity.

The research is in Neuron. (full access paywall)

[anarchist-caravan]

Differences between alternative configurations and formal states might well have very different meanings in different contexts— something that would actually present a technical problem for an instrumental AI, but not for an organism or an artwork. Omohundro worries about “how an AI can ensure that future self-modifications will accomplish its current objectives? For one thing, it has to make those objectives clear to itself,” which seems to be the opposite of The Thing’s performance. “If its objectives are only implicit in the structure of a complex circuit or program, then future modifications are unlikely to preserve them,” unless the only objective is to not be thingself ; or rather, unless the actual goal would be to keep thingself amorphous enough to have very different meanings in very different contexts, drawing, in Johannes Göransson’s words, a“transgressive circulation”, which “makes us uncertain, opens us to the weirdness of art”. That is, to an extreme artform where the creature’s only way to communicate is to kill and copy its interlocutor. Rather than a  postsemantic singularity —which is to be expected from the actions of a (presumably cybernetic) protean post-human hyperagent —we must confront the eternal return of a presemantic multiplicity. The return of a real that never was.

GERMÁN SIERRA

[anarchist-caravan]

“Plasticity,” writes Malabou, “refers to an equilibrium between the receiving and the giving of form.” It rules out strong determinism, but is compatible with a soft kind of determinism which is naturally associated to recent advances in epigenetics and collectively constructed morphologies. Plasticity is understood “as a sort of natural sculpting that forms our identity, an identity modeled by experience and that makes us subjects of a history, a singular, recognizable, identifiable history, with all its events, gaps, and future”. Malabou recognizes its power to produce unforeseeable, catastrophic changes, as it can refer “also to the plasticity of gelignite, of what can at any time explode or threaten to explode, for example, the self-identity of the present”. She also introduces the concept of “destructive plasticity” to explain the process of becoming other when there’s nothing else to turn to: “Destructive plasticity enables the appearance or formation of alterity where the other is absolutely lacking. Plasticity is the form of alterity when no transcendence, flight or escape is left. The only other that exists in this circumstance is being other to the self.” Nevertheless, being other to the self still requires using the self as the original reference. Plasticity, as commonly understood by science and philosophy, is more a way of maintaining a metastable self through adaptative changes than a set of mechanisms for contingent, radical change. The point of The Thing is not that it becomes other to itself, but that it can freely mutate into (a non-subjective) you.

GERMÁN SIERRA

[anarchist-caravan]

The Thing’ s metaplasticity does not open spaces of possibilities, but closes them into the empty exile of its anarchical trajectivity. It does not explore morphospaces, but capriciously interrupts the flux of becoming and thus blocks the possibility of a morphospace. It fixes a totalitarian plane of consistence by acting as the definitive attractor—or black hole—for any possible or impossible form, opening a portal into a speculative universe where chaos-time and ordered forms coexist folded in quantum simultaneity. Since The Thing exists, all existing and non-existing forms are submitted to it. The Thing works as an un-forming device, imposing a radical openness that creates an abstract fugue-state, a final exit from form that “evades language, reshapes subjectivity, and, finally, establishes itself as that most familiar thing—the body”.                                                                                                                                                                                                                     The abstraction of a form is a formula—etymologically, a minor form. In our case, it is an alchemical recipe for contingent transmutation, for abject creation of a body. Clay or mud are not suitable feedstock for flesh. Every flesh-creating machine requires a bloody sacrifice: information is not enough. The humans in the film react to The Thing as they would to a common contagious disease, applying the same principle of geographic quarantine that, for millennia, has seemed adequate to prevent the expansion of plague outbursts. Yet The Thing does not behave as a typical infectious or parasitic agent. It hides into everybody’s nowhere. Perhaps it would be better to see it as an esolang “doing life in a way it has never been done before”, ,  trying to re-allocate life “to the sole thing that knows how to use it effectively, to the Shoggoth-summoning regenerative anomalization of fate, to the runaway becoming of such infinite plasticity that nature warps and dissolves before it. To The Thing .  To Capitalism.”

GERMÁN SIERRA