Sound Research WIKINDX

     p. 82  

Knowledge becomes information, and thus automated

"Through the functional and algorithmic integration of the intuition (formatted by data-capturing interfaces), the understanding (the analytic functions of which are delegated to algorithms) and the imagination (which is reconfigured by the automated protentions extracted from the retentions accumulated by “profiles” and provoked by the interactions during which the schematization is itself delegated to the functions of the production of desire, in the sense denounced, wrongly, by Adorno and Horkheimer, as an exteriorization of the imagination, which Kant claimed to be transcendental), what occurs is that the fixed capital of capitalism becomes fully computational, and knowledge, which turns into information, becomes massively automated. This amounts, in other words, to the full realization of the “fragment on machines” in Marx’s Grundrisse."

My italics!

  Added by: alexb44  12/10/2026, 05:01

Keywords:   Knowledge, writing

     pp. 83–84  

Everyday informational practice takes over

"In Technics and Time, 2, I argued that information, in the modern sense that appeared in the nineteenth century with press agencies and telecommunication networks, is first and foremost a commodity that loses value with time—in the course of that time during which it is disseminated into a space where it is broadcast or diffused. This space is also a market, a computational milieu that turns behaviors into inherently calculable objects. Information then becomes a function, and it has “value” only inasmuch as it does so. During the nineteenth century—which will also be that of the appearance of mechanography in North America— the world entered into a process of constant transformation. It entered the Anthropocene as the age of calculated exosomatization, oriented toward what will become permanent innovation (or what Joseph Schumpeter described as creative destruction). The need for psychic individuals and collective individuals to orient themselves within this perpetual becoming, to find the way to a future, requires them to exercise not the faculty of orienting themselves in thought and the world starting from what Kant called the subjective principle of differentiation, but the everyday informational practice that Hegel referred to in Jena between 1803 and 1806. Of course, in Hegel’s time, and despite the “absolute knowledge” to which he aspired and which he intended to embody, the concept of information as function was yet to emerge, and he did not see it coming."

  Added by: alexb44  12/10/2026, 05:04

Comments:

Making sense of the world becomes a matter of adapting to information rather than reflective thinking on one's own being.   Added by: alexb44  12/10/2026, 05:04

Keywords:   Knowledge, writing

     p. 84  

"Knowledge" in the new world

"In the new world, which will lead to what is precisely not absolute knowledge but the complete opposite, absolute nonknowledge— that is, computationally and functionally integrated de-noetization (noesis having been functionally disintegrated)—something that informs me is something that matters to me, something of material interest that I had not known, that I was unaware of. From the moment I become “aware” of it, I gain an advantage, an advantage I begin to lose as soon as others also become aware of it and so able to gain the same advantage, which means that no one any longer has any advantage.

Knowledge, then, understood as “being up-to-date,” “being aware,” becomes confounded with “the news” of the new world—and of the “New World.”"

  Added by: alexb44  12/10/2026, 05:14

Comments:

We cannot build knowledge on a field by being vaguely aware of its intricacies. . . This is what leads to surface-level knowledge, and it seems to be everywhere. The LLMs themselves are stochastic parrots, and we become stochastic parrots ourselves.   Added by: alexb44  12/10/2026, 05:14

Keywords:   Knowledge, writing

     pp. 84–85  

Diffusion of knowledge and the value of information

"This is how the question of information and of its value presents itself, and from this we can see that information is the very opposite of knowledge, given that the latter is cumulative, lasting through its transformations (Einstein does not erase Newton, Marx does not eliminate Hegel, etc.). For Charles-Louis Havas in 1835, four yearsafter the death of Hegel, information was worth whatever the newspapers were willing to pay for his dispatches. And the more it is diffused, the less it is worth. Hence is fully established the nihilistic conception of value wherein everything tends toward equivalence— where “everything is the same” and “anything goes.”"

  Added by: alexb44  12/10/2026, 05:17

Keywords:   Knowledge, writing

     pp. 91–92  

On how we disindividuate only to individuate and transform ourselves

"Through what I discover by accident, and as the long-awaited unexpected, I individuate myself: I transform myself “from the ground up,” not so as to produce by calculation a new homeostatic state but, on the contrary, so as to overturn every dimension of my being, leading me to reformulate myself—to adopt new behaviors that are not summable, or comparable, or calculable: they are singularities. Having learned something of the unexpected, I am myself singularly reindividuated, which means that I have bifurcated after having been disindividuated, that I have become no longer comparable to what I had hitherto been, in my having been, in my to ti en einai. This can happen to me through a bullet that lodges in my lower back, as happened to Joë Bousquet, or by alcohol taking hold of my habits, ahappened to Malcolm Lowry: such an individuation by incalculable accidents proceeds step by step according to what Gilles Deleuze called quasi-causality."

  Added by: alexb44  12/10/2026, 05:24

Comments:

'Healthy' individuation builds on anamnesis which requires knowledge and not merely information. We adapt without even realising, however, whether it's information or knowledge, and as thus we individuate regardless, but in vastly different directions, which miht be described as possibilities in our metastability. We adapt to our milieu, and this also shows the pharmacological nature of technics - namely that we adapt to fit whatever the technical system demands of us, constituting our associated milieu. As such, the technical system as a part of this associated milieu is not set in stone, but is determined by our relation, and can therefore be considered to consist of pharmakons in the various technologies it houses. The way we use technologies, constituting then technics, will be based on how they are designed and what kind of interaction they 'demand' of us - therefore they can be changed, both directly through reflective use of them or by changing their nature.

p. 87-92 describe this by looking at an example of using Google to acquire knowledge/information through a serendipitous event. 

  Added by: alexb44  12/10/2026, 05:24

Keywords:   Knowledge, writing

     pp. 92–93  

Tertiary retentions today

"Differing and deferring via what we call information and communication technology, but also via writing, consists in producing tertiary retentions—formerly in a hieratic manner, conducted through sacralization and hierarchization via symbolic, magical, or sacred; then through schools, universities, and academic or scientific powers, aiming to develop forms of knowledge, which are powers to act (first of the polis, then of theologico-political power, and, in the Anthropocene, of capital as the Capitalocene); and, today, through the information industries. The latter tend toward a disruptive takeover of power via control technologies, but in so doing they are heading straight for the wall of a “big shift.” All this makes it imperative to rethink entropy and negentropy in terms that are related to but different from thermodynamics, biology, or the attempted formalizations of cybernetics and the information sciences."

  Added by: alexb44  12/10/2026, 05:28

Keywords:   Knowledge, writing

     pp. 94–95  

Knowledge into systems of information through digital tertiary retention

"This tendency contained in exosomatization is nevertheless perpetually being destroyed by an inverse, anthropic, homogenizing tendency, dictating, to the great noetic diversity that noodiversity forms, obligations to which it must adapt, particularly after capitalism takes hold of Western knowledge to turn it into a function of production and a power of economic domination through calculation and computing. This has tended, ever since the advent of digital tertiary retention, to transform knowledge into systems of information, amounting to the concrete realization of what the “fragment on machines” described as the materialization of automation via the total integration and absorption of knowledge into fixed capital. Yet what this leads to is, in reality, the disintegration of knowledge by absolute nonknowledge."

  Added by: alexb44  12/10/2026, 05:29

Keywords:   Knowledge, writing