An Enzymatic Knowledge Machine

General Philosophy
1

What is an Enzymatic Knowledge Machine? (EKM)

Great question! An EKM is a textured symbolic tool designed to be plugged in to our psychic systems to catalyze an awareness of our situated precarity (in order to help motivate us to do something about it).

So. . . last year, as part of our philosophical essay activity, kindly commandeered by @Amity and @Moliere, I wrote an essay called "Freedom, Precarily, and Enzymatic Knowledge Machines”. The idea was that we ought to alert ourselves to our precarious position regarding freedom in our increasingly tech-driven market dominated societies. EKMs were put forward as a means specifically to do this.

To elaborate, I share with philosophers like Bernard Stiegler (RIP), Mark Fisher (RIP), and Byung-Chul Han a sense of alarm at the level of power over our collective mindspace we’ve ceded to our tech masters even while believing we are freer than ever. That is, I see a growing gap between our “nominal” freedoms—the vast and proliferating array of choices we are presented with, and our “ontological” freedom—our ability to reflect on and resist being functionalized by the attention economy. (And I expect many of you share that sentiment).

I should emphasize here, I’m not anti-technology per se. I believe with Stiegler that technology is a ‘’Pharmakon’’, both a poison and a cure, depending on whether we use it as a crutch or a tool, passively or creatively. Also, re capitalism, I see—currently at least—no viable alternative. The focus here are the mechanisms of contemporary technocapitalism, the way that capitalism supercharged by technology has become so plug-and-play that we have lost the ability to understand that to be plugged in to, or circuited by this system, is to be played by it, i.e., to become a means for its reproduction without having a say in the form reproduced. Even worse, to imagine that this constitutes progress.

There’s a bit more to it than that and the essay is here in the forum archive for anyone who wants to take a look. For now, I’d like to circle back to the idea of EKMs. Here, I know I’m using language in an unusual way, and this may have been an obstacle for some readers of the original essay. On the other hand, the term is both original and theoretically specific. More pointedly, it facilitates the useful oppositional binary of EKMs vs AIMS (the "Anaesthesizing Information Machines” of the market), which is kind of a neat way to look at the dynamic.

Anyway, to wrap up, I originally put forward the essay itself as an EKM, but, due to the aforementioned issues of accessibility, fair objections were raised to this. So, as a follow-up, and maybe more in keeping with the spirit of the EKM, I’ve created an online version that is a) more systematic b) more diverse c) more accessible d) more collaborative, and so, I hope, e) more effective.

A couple of more things

  1. The online EKM is intended to reflect the spirit and practice of Adorno’s "constellation” approach. How well it achieves that I’ll leave for others to judge.
  2. The structural hierarchy is EKM > Conceptual Constellations > Nodes > Catalysts.
  3. I’ve integrated my own work into the nodes and if you submit a node, I encourage you to do the same. Nodes should ideally have some original content.
  4. Regardless of the theory, I hope it’s an interesting aesthetic experience and a way to explore art and philosophy. It’s new and experimental and feedback is welcome.
  5. Thanks to @jamal for taking a gander at the site before I posted this. I’ve made the submissions process less onerous as a result of that.

You can find the EKM here.

I hope this makes sense and that at least some of you share my concerns, and will get involved by commenting here on the social and philosophical issues, trying out the EKM, and/or submitting a node.

2 Likes
2

Excellent. Accessible and meaningful work. Thank you, Baden!

I’ve been exploring the structure and content of the EKM. I engaged with two ‘nodes’ where the combination of text, story, music and image had an immediate affective impact.

I don’t know if this means that I meet your aim of ‘catalyzing knowledge of that concept’.

What is ‘conceptual knowledge’?
…

The first:
The Soul Machine – The EKM in the EKM

I appreciate the wonderful writing but unsure of meaning:
‘Theory must preach but also mock itself as an “idiot” in the church of the sacred—never a denizen but always a refugee.’
Also, this: ‘the theory of freedom as precarity […] one such refugee of the sacred that requests only the provisional respect of reflection on its claims.’

Otherwise, I enjoyed the short extract from:
Lobe – The Soul Machine - Paul R. Buckle - Archive
…

If the EKM is a way to find strength to protect the mind and soul, then it has my vote.
…
The second is a beautiful, philosophical poem (concepts of subjectivity and morality):
The Invisible Kiss – Analyzing Poetic Inter-Being
The music from Revolution Void. The image of a structure: Linear Construction in Space No. 2, by Naum Gabo.

This is an experience. A time to relax and enjoy. To play with harmony.
…

Both are under the Constellation of Poetic Resistance/Being. From the list:
CONSTELLATIONS – The Enzymatic Lexicon of the EKM
…
Overall, this site is a well-structured, thoughtful place to go, to be and become. More. :folded_hands:

2 Likes
3

It’s a fascinating project and there are several things I’d like to say about it. Before I do so, I want to dedicate some time to exploring the EKM as you’ve got it set up at the moment. One of the things that makes it good is the thing that makes the learning curve steep: although it’s structured, divided up into a chunks, it’s not packaged for easy consumption. It shares this with Adorno’s work, of course, and he’s someone I read for fun—so I’ll look into a few of the nodes and then post something here.

As for submitting a node myself, the standard you’ve set is so high that it’s a bit intimidating. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
4

Yes. I’m glad I read it first as an essay in the TPF event. At first, I thought it was pretty dense and incomprehensible. It has to be said, I was not alone - see archival comments. We’ve moved on.

Yesterday, I inwardly groaned at the thread’s title. However, the excellent OP with links, meant I could try it out in a practical sense. There is still much that can be said, therein lies the beauty.

Well, it may well be like Adorno’s work and Baden does say:

I still haven’t read about the ‘constellation’ approach.
For me, the theory and aims can and will be debated. Still, that is how EKM can grow…and transmit, no?

I enjoy the clever use of ‘enzymatic’. I think of ‘organic’ and of my initial bafflement at Dawkins’ theory. From genes to memes.
Baden is a creative genius in our midst. :nerd_face:

I jumped right in to warm waters, not too deep (following OP link to the Manual). It was easy to follow the guiding star :sparkles:

Re: ‘nodes’, I think of them as articles or an essay with added texture.

Previously, I’ve wondered why some have objections to the inclusion of media (images, audio, video) in TPF essays (or even discussions). Also, some want to adhere to strict and narrow definitions of philosophy and ‘essay’.

I’m not sure what is noded in the EKM about how some are discouraged from practising philosophy.
I think the EKM site goes a long way to include philosophy for all. In interesting ways.

1 Like
5

I shall enjoy trying to explain it, briefly. In pre-modern astronomy, stars had meaning according to the way they formed constellations. We now know that stars could equally well be grouped in other ways; the constellations are a matter of convention.

Analogically, in trying to understand things—powerful ideas, historical events, works of art, and social phenomena like racism and poverty—we can successively group them with a shifting set of concepts, to view them in different ways, noticing the way concepts fail or produce contradictions.

The point is to keep the richness of things alive by getting away from the idea that there’s a single way that something is, which can be captured definitively with any conceptual scheme. None will suffice, but we have no choice but to understand through concepts, so we should use concepts more judiciously—circling around the thing you’re trying to understand, using different concepts and criticizing the concepts that harden into dogma and ideology.

I’m not yet sure how much this fits with @Baden’s understanding, but his implementation in the EKM seems entirely consistent with it. The nodes are not concepts, exactly, but they enact a mode of aesthetic and philosophical experience—which is very much in line with the introduction to Negative Dialectics, which I intend to say more about.

So, it’s as if Baden has repurposed Adorno’s theoretical approach into some kind of praxis.

1 Like
6

Thank you. I enjoyed reading this explanation of the constellation approach. As far as I can gather, it’s about circling, capturing and clarifying concepts to better understand. To use individual power to group and counteract extreme ideologies which dogmatically produce adverse affects. (the EKM seems flexible but perhaps some would accuse it of ‘lefty’ bias?)

Yes. I look forward to reading more.

Re: ‘nodes’ and concepts. I find I still need reinforcement.
From the Manual, I understand that constellations are the philosophical concepts. These are listed as groups or categories. The nodes lie within as ‘post pages’ where there is ‘a combination of visual, sonic and written texts aimed at catalyzing knowledge of that concept.’
More succinctly in the OP:

Either way, I am flirting with pick and mix. Tasting imaginary cones :shaved_ice::soft_ice_cream: :ice_cream:

1 Like
7

@Amity @Jamal
Thank you both for engaging with this so positively. You’ve inspired me to lay a bit more groundwork on the innards of the machine before I specifically address your posts.

So, at the risk of sounding a bit dry, I’m going to stick with the machinic metaphor and go into some detail about how I see it functioning.

I think it’s useful to look at the machine in terms of five major divisions: goals, hierarchy, drives, modalities, and tools.

Goals:

So as mentioned before, the idea is that our psychic systems are plugged into the EKM, just as we might be plugged into a media machine, e.g. TikTok, or instagram etc. All this is to say that we use it and / or it uses us. But ordinary language tends to obscure the second half of that equation in favour of the first . The advantage of our terminology is that it leaves the question open. We are plugged in or circuited, but to what end?

Well, the contention here is that the primary dichotomy is symbiosis vs parasitism. The goal of the EKM is some form of synergy or symbiosis, to positively catalyze our attention (ideally into self-awareness), whereas the goal of AIMs like TikTok etc is parasitism, to negatively process our attention (ideally into profit). It’s the difference between ending up energized and inspired vs. numb and dopamine exhausted. And though that is a rather reductive analysis in terms of psychological endpoint (there are many shades in between), it does, I think, point to a real distinction.

So, the goal of the EKM is to be edifying, but it may achieve this in different (and inclusive) ways.

E.g.

  1. (Ideally) Motivate us to act on an awareness of our precarity and the threats to our subjectivity technocapitalism presents. (Practical)
  2. Provide a set of positive affective and aesthetic experiences. (Psychological).
  3. Teach us about philosophy and art. (Pedagogical)

Just as AIMS, conversely, tend to:

  1. Deactivate and functionalise us into a passive reliance on media.
  2. Favour entertainment over aesthetics.
  3. Provide masses of information with little educational substance.

So enough on goals, next is hierarchy.

The system hierarchy inside the machine is constellation (concept) to node to catalysts, but the machine can equally be entered via constellation or node. That is, we can start at a terminal node, experience the catalysts within, get some idea of the theme and then be led back to a specific constellar definition or we can start with a concept and definition and be led into the nodes that way. Constellations lead to nodes and nodes lead to constellations and there is no “right” direction there, which makes the set-up more rhizomatic than simply root-branch.

Typically, for example, we might pick a node from the terminal on the basis of an art catalyst or title that interests us. That node will be connected to others that share a primary constellation via the “Constellar Nodes” link. Also, at some point, as I’ve integrated my own work, we are likely to click on an “Examine Catalyst” button that leads to a “Node Portal” in the archive from which that catalyst was extracted. This portal will have a constellation link underneath that will lead back to an explanation of the concept.

All this is to say, there is a kind of an official hierarchy, but the way the taxonomy functions is more rhizomatic considering how the levels are interlinked, and we can just follow our noses through them, so to speak.

Moving on to drive and modality: the EKM aims to stimulate the formal and the sensuous drives, or the cognitive and the aesthetic faculties (or however you want to put it) and to do so in a complementary way. The philosophical catalysts are the more formal elements, the art and music the more sensuous, and the literary texts some combination of both. Different nodes have different balances in this respect and different constellations have different balances of nodes that favour either drive. But mixing things up here is supposed to be helpful in creating positive flow and intensity.

This again can be set in opposition to the way AIMs work which is to simply favour video, And here we move on to a discussion of modality, where, of course, video tends to overwhelm everything else, which is why I’ve avoided it here and instead presented its component parts, visuals and audio, along with text so that we need to do the cognitive work of putting things together ourselves.

Finally, tools.

These work mainly within nodes as the interrelationships between catalysts that contribute to each node its particular tensions and overall character. And they can be fairly neatly divided into juxtaposition/irony and reinforcement/resonance. So, catalysts play off each other in different ways but they tend to either say the same thing in their own modality or provide an ironic contrast.

For example, in “Trolley Trouble” the main textual catalyst is a dystopic future supermarket competition where competitors get beaten for making mistakes and the sonic catalyst is a hybrid upbeat pop tune / advertising jingle that reduces happiness to something like opening a can of pop—-so, an ironic contrast. The visual catalyst then is ironic within itself, the woman’s face in the shopfront window is obscured while the face of a headless dummy replaces / displaces it. Then the Baudrillard quote more directly resonates with the primary constellation, providing a philosophical or formal grounding for the other catalysts.

I don’t want to get too far into analysis here. We murder to dissect as they say. But I hope the above provides a decent introduction to what’s going on. (And maybe even more so to those who were not here or did not read the essay last year).

1 Like
8

I’m really happy and encouraged to read this. One of the problems that the EKM aims to address is that we can have direct knowledge of a concept but that that knowledge has no effect on us. We “know”, but we just keep doing the same thing anyway.

You’ll hear, e.g. Slavoj Zizek talk about that problem a lot. He reckons it’s typical, even characteristic, of contemporary ideology. E.g. we know very well that tech companies manipulate us, but we don’t really “feel” much about it; therefore, the purely formal knowledge not only doesn’t do us much good, but ironically conceals our helplessness from us. We’re able to pat ourselves on the back for knowing while having no real visceral substance to the knowing that might motivate us to actually do something that changes us so that we change ourselves.

But when there’s an affective impact that goes beyond just empty stimulation - as you’re describing, the sensuous half of the equation is being properly filled out. When we get to the concept’s definition then, there’s some grounding there; it can mean something more substantial to us and is more likely to motivate action.

1 Like
9

Yes, that’s just what I’m going for and I think it helps answer @Amity 's question as to what conceptual knowledge is. Which is to say it can be understood in different ways, but we usually look at it rather one-dimensionally, and again, this can leave us with a bunch of information, but little real connection to it or a shallow understanding of it that’s obscured by our ability to provide a definition.

10

Technical note: Internet Archive appears to be down right now and some of the audio streams route through there. I have backups on my computer if it stays down too long, but streaming is more efficient and hopefully it’s a temporary issue.

(EDIT: Seems to be back up.)

11

Absolutely. A very useful overview.

1 Like
12

I’m afraid I can’t stop thinking of the ‘oppositional binaries’. I have a distaste for Either/Or scenarios. And this is what I see here.

Is it too ‘neat’ a way? AIMS - what are they exactly and how are they anaesthetizing? Machines, AI or human, can just as equally create problems of misinformation with bias towards dogmatic ideology. Depending on what you plug into and how.

Either/Or descriptions are divisive by nature. The analysis is reductive. What are the many shades in between?
Can’t the EKM be seen as yet another parasite even if its goals differ from so-called AIMS?

Is the owner of this system not mutually dependent on others with intertwining concepts - with both helpful and harmful potential? Our attention on specific nodes maybe positively focused but who is to say that the circling nodes always result in societal benefit? We may well be energised but into what? A swirl of mind-boggling chaos?
Just as likely to become exhausted, chasing after circles or vanishing stars. Self-awareness is not guaranteed by EKM, is it?

Symbiosis includes parasites. There is nothing wrong with profit in itself. It is how it is pursued and used by the powerful that matters.
Symbiosis: Commensialism, Mutualism, Parasitism, Neutralism, Competition & Predation

We can all be described as predators or victims in some way. I’m not sure this is a helpful way to consider the complexity of our position or situation.
Isn’t EKM just another, mostly theoretical, way aimed at mentally surviving attacks from the increasingly inhuman?
Even with the best intentions, it is still exclusive to those of certain capabilities, whose intellectual submissions meet certain criteria.
Just a few thoughts. I’ll leave it here for now. Over to whoever…

13

It’s good to bring this up, and I think I’m implicitly conceding your point when I say there are many shades in between. Not everything that has a profit motive behind it is bad, and an ostensible EKM might fail to do good regardless of motive, depending on the context.

But if we look at intention, we can draw a clear distinction between abstract creations the primary aim of which is to help people and abstract creations the primary aim of which is to process people (into profit). In the former case, the intrinsic worth of the subject is recognized, but in the latter the subject is instrumentalised - their value is reduced to a number.

Of course, this distinction might carry less weight if that processing was harmless, but there’s tons of evidence to suggest it’s not when it comes to the media entertainment industry’s marriage to technology.

So, I suppose I’m saying that any time you’re making these kinds of judgements, you end up saying one thing is good and one is bad, which is in itself a binary, but it shouldn’t be misunderstood as absolutism.

So, I might qualify my comments by agreeing not everything the market produces is an AIM. However, I would still claim that AIMs are real, and we ought be aware of how they operate to our detriment.

Having said that, your point stands that EKMs, including this one, may fail to work. They might just confuse people or worse, end up being no more than a glorified form of entertainment. But, of course, the same criticisms could be levelled at art and philosophy in general. We can only try.

1 Like
14

Yes, indeed. And I wish you all the best with the ongoing EKM project. :folded_hands:

I’m enjoying the practice in reading and reflecting with reason and feeling.

I’m reminded of your conversation with Vera Mont (RIP) from the original essay in TPF archives.

Ending:
Quoting Vera Mont

I’m pretty sure the salient points can be translated to more accessible - if less philosophically precise - language. I would like to see that version widely disseminated…
… so the important message could be ignored by a wider range of readers.
[sigh] I’ve been here before, in several formats.[!sigh]

Quoting Baden

It’s always worth a try. :flexed_biceps:

1 Like
15

I may have been responsible for a misunderstanding here. I’m using ideology in the critical theory sense that goes back to Marx (and I’m pretty confident @Baden is as well). Ideology in this sense refers to the ideas that justify the status quo (though not like an intentional deception or conspiracy but as an organic consequence of social relations). And by “dogma” I meant to indicate that these become difficult to question.

Such (dogmatic) ideologies are not often extreme. They are most often completely conventional and taken for granted. Here are some examples:

  • The American Dream:
    • The idea that anyone can succeed through hard work
    • Makes inequality a matter of individual merit instead of structural advantage
  • A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay:
    • The idea that the wage relation is a fair exchange between equals
    • Hides the structural power imbalance between capital and labour
  • Consumer choice = freedom:
    • The idea that freedom, the most cherished social goal in all of history, is achieved with a wide selection of products
    • Obscures the distinction between choosing a phone and genuine self-determination
  • Connectivity = community:
    • The idea that being permanently connected via phone, internet, and social media amounts to social belonging
    • Obscures the way technology is being used to hamper, rather than advance, human flourishing
  • Innovation = progress:
    • The idea that new technology always counts as human advancement
    • Foreclosing any assessment of whether a technology serves us or subordinates us to its own expansion

The first two are classic examples, the others are more relevant to @Baden’s concerns.

When Adorno recommended “blasting open individual phenomena through the insistent power of thought,” he was referring to ideological artifacts: today, examples are smartphones, like buttons (we even have them on TPF), subscriptions to online services (permanent rentals). These can be analyzed to reveal their ideological functions, i.e., the way they reinforce existing relations of power by presenting themselves as natural, as neutral and beneficial tools.

2 Likes
16

Thank you. I appreciate this clear view of how concepts/ideas and ‘dogma’ are being used.

Yes. The concept of ideology in a broad sense includes how ideas and belief are used to justify and maintain power relations.

The status quo means the existing state of affairs in e.g. socio-economics, political, religion, legal… even philosophy, I suppose.

It is the power relations that are important to understand. How the few, immensely rich and powerful males (usually) negatively impact individuals, groups, the world by removing values and supportive frameworks.

In the swipe of a pen, orders to the military, manipulation of religious extremes, their dogmatism has delivered mass destruction. Progress is now fast-forward regress.

So, yes, I see the focus of the EKM as a valuable counterbalance, a creative resistance, perhaps a soft challenge to some of the status quo.

The ‘machine’ inevitably uses media, culture and technology - but in a flourishing, organic approach.
But who will it reach? Who will ask the question:

At least, we know where it is being asked. The combination of TPF and EKM is one of genius.

It starts with individuals listening, responding, analysing, using technology to enhance belongingness and flourishing.

A blast. A wind of change…in a constellation of nodes.

Next up, ‘How to create a node’.

@Baden - I have yet to fully explore the EKM. Is there a search function or a way to interact?

1 Like
17

Free to do what? That’s a question we ought to ask ourselves. I think Han re the loss of eros might be the biggest indicator of what is truly wrong here. Freedom to consume in the “Inferno of the Same” is, I would argue, not even freedom.

This is perhaps what the Stoics or Desert Fathers would have called “being a slave to the passions.” Or, more pointedly, the “linear motion of the nous,” whereby the mind is ever driven on between finite desires with no “gathering inward from multiplicity” to consider if what is desired is even worthy of desire. It is an endless assimilation of the other to the self (what Han describes)—union as consumption.

Well, to use any therapy effectively requires some notion of health, right? But such a measure is largely absent today. Or rather, the implicit measure of health is the (current) desires of the self (generally as Humean impulse or voluntarist will).

Philip Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic is an interesting pairing with Han and Fisher. It’s older, although I think parts of it remain remarkably prescient. Anyhow, a key point there is that once therapy has taken center stage for its own sake, the satisfaction of the self becomes axis on which everything turns. But as Han points out in Agony (or Schindler in *Love and the Post-modern Predicament), this actually has the effect of making the self insatiable.

Still, I cannot help thinking that a common problem in this area of thought is that no measure of health is offered. Fisher was well aware of the way in which capitalism preempts its own critique by making alternatives appear naive, but I don’t think he ever really escapes this either. To my mind, part of the issue is that liberalism has, through unexamined cultural and institutional norms, tended to make itself a hegemonic, transparent, shadow philosophy that sits above all other philosophies and dictates how they can be performed. This is less because it is positively endorsed, than because it is implicit in the very structures of contemporary thought and pedagogy. But the irony here is that, as Fisher well knew, discursive critique is exactly the sort of thing that capitalism is good at resisting.

(I wonder if Kurt Hahn—who was not particularly philosophical—represented something of a solid alternative here precisely because Outward Bound and his other schools were fully oriented towards praxis more than theory—just a thought.)

To that point:

Sure, and this is the classic definition of “weakness of will,” right?

But in this case, I don’t think that fits what is being described. Rather, I think people cannot think of any good reason to resist. It’s not so much a lack of capacity as a lack of motivation. “So what?”

This is the most common response to factory farm conditions of the infamies of pornography industry: “so what?”

Under the therapeutic ethos and neoliberalism, with no measure of “health,” why ought one be concerned over slipping into the algorithmic tech stream if it feels good?

A loss of autonomous control? Plenty of modern thought, from various angles, says this is wholly illusory in the first place.

A loss of creativity? Why is creativity good per se?

Plus, the market offers endless creative options, far more than any retreat from it. Anyone living “off grid” tends to live in more similar ways. If freedom = multiplicity, then you cannot beat neoliberalism.

But I would make an analogy to Lego blocks here. If you throw the blocks in a heap, they are maximally “free” in that they can be in all sorts of arrangements. Yet an atomized heap is always a heap, just as neoliberalism produces a monoculture. In order for the Legos to become a castle, a pirate ship, a work of abstract art, etc. they have to be fit together. They aren’t “free to be anything but a heap” otherwise.

18

:handshake:

Yes, I should explain that. There’s nothing technical to it from the website side. You can go to the submissions page and fill in the form there. I then put the filled fields into a template that produces a node.

The standard form the nodes take is one visual, one audio, and two text catalysts (one long and one short). The “short” is normally a quote. There is no special theoretical reason for that exact balance except it provides a diversity of modalities and fits well on a page.

For legal reasons, the content has to be available royalty free to use for educational purposes, but the only other limit is that it should reflect or comment upon the constellation concept you choose, which you can specify at the bottom of the submission page. All the concepts, as I guess you’ve discovered, are listed on the constellation page. For a node to be searchable it needs to be nested in one of those concepts.

So, for example, you might choose the constellation “The Spectacle”, which is one of the broader ones. Then you might,for example, send a link to a painting from wikiart, a soundscape from the internet archive, perhaps a short story or poem you’ve written yourself, and a quote from a thinker that comments on The Spectacle.

(The mix of your own creations and those of others is more or less up to you, but you should submit at least something original as the node will be credited as written by you, and part of the point is to encourage people to create and post their own work in an interesting context).

Normally, you ought to send a link to the work itself and a link to an explanation of it. If it’s your own work and it’s not online though, you can just fill in the optional message field (newly added) to explain that. Most of the fields are optional, but it’s better for nodes to be diverse, so it’s a good idea to try to fill as many as possible.

In any case, I’m likely to get back to anyone who submits if I think there’s something else to be done that could help with the node.

It’s a very simple set up at the moment. The only “search” function is through the constellation page, where choosing one of the concepts returns a list of nodes under them. I’m open to suggestions here though.

19

Interesting comments, thanks, @Count. I will mull them over and get back to you.