Pedunculated Fandango | Mute

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ARTICLES

PEDUNCULATED FANDANGO
By Jonathan Kemp , 4 June 2014
Philosophy / Art / Media / Computing / Theory / Science / Quantum Physics

Image: All images by Jonathan Kemp

Acknowledging the trends of a new cultural-topological turn Jonathan Kemp reads Sha Xin Weis recent
book on poiesis, enchantment and topology, inside out

I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But you must understand how to be a sponge if you want to
be loved by overflowing hearts
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

If, in a point-driven Cartesian mapping, space is reducted as topographical, measurable, like a carapace, luckily it's
not the only way it can be seen to work. Since the late 19th Century, mathematicians (Bernhard Riemann, Carl
Friedrich Gauss, Johann Benedict Listing, August Ferdinand Moebius, Henri Poincar) have pulled, bent, and
squeezed it outwith of any graphic fix to formalise new found continuities and connectivity, variously foregrounded in
notions of limit, boundedness, orientation, neighbourhood, cut, interior, and exterior.
No wonder then, that topology, with such performative means of description, has come to serve as a non-totalising
articulation of numerous fields outside its mathematical origins. Born in the exhaust fumes of Freuds failed
Topographic Project, Lacan was first to grasp it, not as a theoretical model, but as the original machine (met en
scene) that directs the subject in the immanent structuring of our wonky psyche-substrates. And if other social
scientists have outsourced topology to render explicit any latent pathologies in the socio-technical, then architects
like Greg Lynn use it to spread their gobbets of blob as the quid pro quo of contemporary machinic process.1

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Thus, Sha Xin Weis Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter joins other recent psycho-mathematical treks
across art and culture, including 2011s Tate Modern's Topology Project, an attempt to reify this incubus of much
contemporary theory; and 2012s special edition of Theory, Culture & Society, Topologies of Culture, whose
contributors were tasked with examining social life as topological substrate.2
Sha, concerned with the implications for a humanist ethics in this latter trajectory, details the strands of this research
in his recent book. Firstly, as an essay in process philosophy, he calls for the relinquishment of all forms of
transcendentalism, including metaphysical a priori oppositions such as subject-object, and argues for a continuous
and immanent substrate materiality. Secondly, through a detailed exegesis of set-theory and topology, he articulates
how such a grounding of continuous process, can produce value and novelty. Thirdly, the book variously plots the
implications for subjectivation and sociality in such approaches when elaborated in topologically-created and
computationally-driven performative events and installations.3
Shas is a generous enquiry, deploying mathematical-poietic lures for thinking and feeling, ranged in scale from
setting out the recursive, reciprocal execution of ontological individuation for the ethico-aesthetics of pathic
dynamism; to simply nudging artists and scholars towards more alinguistic means and methods of producing and
negotiating cultural artefacts and dynamics.
What is really most at stake for Sha is the potential for ethico-aesthetic experiment.4 From which, any sense of
sociality and pathic subjectivity [can] emerge but without appeal to any kind of transcendentalism. So, he asks:
To anticipate the arguments of this book around topological media, can there be continuous, distributed
agency, and what ethico-aesthetic invention would that enable? (p.7)
Before he goes about slicing away at any a priori positivism about the material. This is done (via bundled arguments
about musical scores, dance, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Simondon, Karen Barad, and Arabic music) to rehearse
an argument that the means for any such invention must be enabled through phenomenological experimentation
that simultaneously manifests and represents its necessary ground of continuous substance, continuous process.
Articulating a set of axiomatic propositions to express these value-generating processes co-constituted in the
fundament of the connected plenum (magma), Sha makes clear the condition for the possibility of ethics. And, in
following Whiteheads axiom that how an entity becomes constitutes what the entity is, Sha then moves from
implicating such enchanted matter as the field oriented dynamic substrate for an ontogenesis necessarily laden
with value, to asking to what poetic figuration can we appeal in order to articulate such a continuous ethical
ground?
For Sha, topology, in formally describing the qualitative similarities among things, boot-straps itself as this primary
mode of articulation. Lived experience, he attests, can be indexed with rigour, interrogated along its contextual
fields of affective intensity without being totalised or reduced as a priori functions of some measurable system.
As a Stanford PhD in the modelling of scientific data, he exceeds due diligence in making explicit his preferred
topology for the enchantment and poiesis of matter primed as an anexact yet rigorous poetic articulation of
events, point-set topology articulates the generative aspects of a shared, primordial play with which a positive
ethico-aesthetics can co-construct a sociality free of commodification. And the play of the computational, as it
affords boundless and intricate ways to construct media with experimentally different sorts of behavior than
what one expects from noncomputational media like, water, wood, tissue, and sinew (p.90, author's italics)
is reinforced as the means to effect, in a perverse confluence,5 the books thesis of subjectivation:
Not from an atomic world, because we run into complexity and the problem of intersubjectivity the problem
of how monads or groups of monads sum to one society. However, if we start with a plenum already one
substance then we have, not a starting place an Archimedean leverage point but a magma of
co-structuration that can be the substrate subjectivation. (p.8)
Accordingly, this confluence of continuous material dynamics, and topology, via computational media, is uniquely
charged to gain traction on halting our drift towards oblivion to access an affective, caring, joyful life, and thereby
our immanent humanity.
In effect, this litany of subjunctives (for all that may yet be true) demand for a reciprocity of a non-allegorical caritas
(with the transcription of an ardently human care) from the cruel homeopathy implicit in those concrete executions
he butterflies out of the meatier tranches of topology and process philosophy.
Shas elaborations of such execution, those time-slice like installations, experiments, and events, are hinged
together to, as he says, lightly scaffold the emergence of shared patterns of behaviour or recognition.6 And free
from any grid-like restriction, such emancipations can then cascade in their co-articulative gestures and movements

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to realise otherwise unbeknownst socialities.

In another moment, Sha suggests that these new topological understandings, implemented in his poetic
machineries of technological improvisation, can be unfolded and transcribed across rationality to transform reason
(and humanity) itself.
What is not so clear is how these transcriptions are hardcored to effect the stickiness of his confluence. With the
imprimatur of topology as ethico-aesthetic action, invariance, here as social memory, needs establishing through,
say, a maximum gestural isomorphism from each performative localisation. If the topological-computational
underpins and transforms the conceptual, where can any global versioning of caritas be located, especially if it is
otherwise rendered oblique through a mandated protean extensiveness? In other words, from where does the
required globalising epistemological stiffness emerge?
This is a real pragmatic task for this work, that, or its being remaindered like some wormy intuitions or orphaned
carry outs in a heap of spent symbolic charge[s].
In a key chapter, Ontogenesis, Sha argues that
sometimes a local, even point-based phenomenon can manifest a global quality. This need not be so
mysterious at all if we regard the world as a processual magma. (p.144, authors italics)
And, by using a figure of a cut plant stem Sha points to how simultaneities occur across nature, and phenomena
can share a common natality.7 In questioning what cosmologically impels such ontogenic reciprocity he, after
sketching over various metatheoretic candidates, suggests that they might be understood as arising from the
negentropic impulse of a contiguous plenum, where phenomena are impelled to poke through from the substratenoise.8
With topological media propped up as the desired mode of articulation adequate to grip onto this new life, the
capacity is there to patch a way across the
simplest symbolic substances that respect the lifeworlds continuous dynamism, change, temporality, infinite
transformation, ontogenesis, superposability, continuity, density, and value, and yet are free of or at least
agnostic with respect to measure, metric, counting, finitude, formal logic, linguistics (syntax, grammar),
digitality, and computability, in short all formal structures that would put a cage over all of the lifeworld. (p.162)
And once this poietic self construction has been filigreed out from the margins9 of undefinable openness, we
encounter its
radically decentred, deanthropomorphized concept of experience and cultural dynamics [...] a conceptual

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trellis for the condensation of subjectivity in the endless exfoliation of experience in the world. (p.182)
The apparatus for executing such a nonanthropocentric conception of living matter is one, he declares, in which
any state changes are meaningful and where data is modelled, cooked, and has feedback mechanisms, yet is
neither nonrandom, bureaucratic, nor tyrannical (p.207). As the book details, this has taken the form of a
responsive media installation-event system that synthesizes with participants sensing via the adornment of
computationally augmented fabrics within time and sensor-based interactive environments.10
This is the pedunculate of practice, one tasked with eviscerating cultural dynamics yet ever clocked by current-state
proprietary technologies (hard and soft). Necessarily co-constitutive within its environment, it excludes as it
includes, so where the call for art all the way down promises of opening up the technical substrate, its the tyranny
of lingua franca machines in funded labs rather than the less disciplined craft of any DIY artist thats ringfenced for
the mainlining of ethico-aesthetics (p.110).11
Thus, any detailing of the wider materials science of cultural dynamics and human-machine agencies in the
creation of emergence of subjectivities (p.254), is jettisoned, along with, arguably, any strong claim for ethicoaesthetic practice:
I prefer to create installation-events in which participants may have compelling experiences without having to
think how everything works [] puzzle solving is a poor substitute for theater or any thick form of life. (p.256)
It's worth noting here that had Sha invested in examining Karen Barads agential realism, an extension of Nils
Bohrs theory of complementarity, he would have had to hand a more deliberate methodology for any AtelierLab.12
Practice, and play, is dynamically determined from without, via multiple material-discursive agencies, but here Sha
accessions it as a non-random non-instrumentalised polity, compacted and affiliated, via veiled lookups between
verb and gesture, with environmentally sedimented (subject) intuitions. It is as much this out-with that produces the
with-in, and without any transcription across the spatio-temporal, there can be no sense of primordial sets, open or
not, and certainly no thick experiments in the wild (p.235).13
Furthermore, far from establishing loops of feedback (the parody of cybernetics) to synthesise media and the
senses, where software affects behaviour and behaviour modifies the system (memory), the sequential alteration in
its technical mechanisms expose a bigger problem, a Gordion Knot of rationality that prescribes any infinite and
uncertain quality to behaviour.
Sha is overconcerned not to slash through this knot; he wants to avoid being thrown into the uncontrollable
chaosmosis, the ontologically unstable groundless ground (Flix Guatarri) replete with its micro-fascist potential.
Thus rather than embrace any merelogical imbalance or distortion in the dynamic life-world, Sha wraps his affective
field of primordial care (p.94) around the sweet epistemic core of ardent humanism, and (lettered in red) shot
through with The Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you (p.103).
This is his datum against which the prefiguring of any ethics for our time can be transcribed. Its an attempt at a
read/write construction to inscribe stability over the continuous substrate. But where its means, of synthetic a priori
reasoning and a clocked technological procedurality, make it a metaphysics of necessity a metaphysics of
mechanical reasoning (sequence-matching as logic) that has hit on the technics of knowing, its a how of things
sensed and known that is discontinuous with any processual autonomy of mind.
Thus, and to conclude, this is a book on implementation: the less than incidental confluence of topology, of
current-state (proprietary) technologies, of a joyous reading of continuity in Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North
Whitehead, piped around a damaged narrative of subjectivation. If its the nomos to come, its one that deactivates
openness and non-constructedness (invention) by deferring to a rubric of symbolisation that procedurely
(computationally) remonstrates that humans, with all their billions of micro-biological contingencies and relations,
cannot produce novel behaviours or emerge newer socialities without the aid of some kind of normative supraprosthetic. Sha pendunculates his Mbius mirror, and anything prescient about humanity succumbs to the red
masque of illimitable dominion, of disciplinary oblivion.
And now I am no longer able to distinguish what is dream from what is actuality; irrational numbers grow
through my solid, habitual, tridimensional life; and instead of firm, polished surfaces, there is something
shaggy and rough...14

Jonathan Kemp has a long history of organising and collaborating (including as ap and xxxxx) on DIY
material processing laboratories, environmental installations, interdisciplinary symposia, and social

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software events executed in international festivals and venues throughout Europe, the US, and Brazil. His
current work is informed by an interest in aleatory and code-brut reconfigurations of computations
material substrates

Info
Sha Xin Wei, Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2013.

Footnotes

1 Greg Lynn http://glform.com/, especially his 1998 publication, Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays.
2 Professor Sha Xin Wei is Director of Arts, Media & Engineering at Arizonas Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. From 2001-2013 he
instigated and directed the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University, Montreal, http://topologicalmedialab.net/ More information on the
Tates Topology Project can be found at http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/eventseries/topology A table of contents for the Theory,
Culture & Society issue is available at http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/29/4-5.toc
3 The book really would have been better as two volumes a treatise on process philosophy in the light of Shas insights on
topology, and a separate volume as a lavishly illustrated manual to the 12 years of practice at the Topological Media Lab.
4 The experiment engages with Flix Guatarri's Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.
5 Vis a vis the subjectivation and (pre-)construction of the individual; of the synthetic discipline of mathematics where the objects of its analysis
are of our own creation; and of the computational media-theatre of his and others invention.
The expression perverse confluence is borrowed from Evelina Dagnino, a Brazilian political scientist, who coined the phrase in relation to
bundled notions of active citizenship by diverse interest groups in her 2010 paper, Citizenship: a perverse confluence in Andrea Cornwall and
Deborah Eade (Eds.), Deconstructing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords, Oxford: Oxfam, 2010, pp.101-110.

6 Much of the artwork discussed in the book has been executed with the art group Sponge, and in collaboration with FoAM http://fo.am/, a
network of transdisciplinary labs.

7 An illustration borrowed from Saussure's 1906-1911 Course in General Linguistics Sha suggests two spots of the same material,
although separated by the 'universe' of its trunk, were born at the same point simultaneously as a part of the stems history;
Saussure uses it more simply to make the point that cutting across the stem reveals something about the plant stems synchronic
state which cannot be seen if only cut longitudinally (ie. diachronically).
On natality as the central category of the political see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958.
8 cf. Michel Serres.
9 With regards to openness and margins Sha elsewhere describes how the boundary-value of the open set is undefined and yet a margin.
10 Gilles Chatelet's mathematical gesture is referenced.
11 And where methodology becomes the reality within the lab machine, hinged on the theoretical presumptions of its own dynamics, its surely
bureaucratised to bridge the cognitive gap between its hermeneutics and those Feyerabendian agencies outwith in the world of academia and
funding.

12 Sha significantly misreads Barad's concept of agential realism by suggesting that he is extending her notion of performativity into ontology
(p.59), seemingly unaware that she repeatedly describes it as an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework. He later misquotes her
methodology of 'diffraction' as one of refraction (p.239). The above highlights how there is less than exact editing in the book: from paragraphs
here and there that don't make sense (e.g. p.71, where Sha jumps suddenly from commitment in the work of Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, to
the importance of agreement in any continuum limits within quantum mechanical models); or do not answer the question they set themselves up
to do (eg. in answer to the question of how to evaluate his methodology, Sha gives a baffling non-answer about human subjects committees
(p.228-229); or references that are either incorrect or distorted (eg. John Searles Chinese Room argument is misrepresented as being a form of an
homunculi conceit (p.254).
As Bohr explains in Unity of Knowledge, The recognition that the interaction between the measuring tools and the physical systems under
investigation constitutes an integral part of quantum phenomena has only revealed an unsuspected limitation of the mechanical conception of

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nature, as characterized by attribution of separate properties to physical systems, but has forced us, in the ordering of experience, to pay proper
attention to the conditions of observation [] Thus there can be no complete configuration of quantum phenomena, since in order to measure e.g.
the momentum of a photon, another state must be sacrificed (its position). Niels Bohr, Unity of Knowledge, (1954), in Essays 1958-1962: On
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958, p.74. Arkady Plotnitsky, who has discussed Bohr extensively
elsewhere, does not mention him in his Afterward to Sha's book.
13 At worst it provokes its participants with anonymous processes, ventriloquising them by abstraction. Of course, the social forms that we
mentioned earlier all have rules and conventions, some of which are followed pretty strictly even if they are tacit. However we think of these rules
not as chains or shells encasing our activity, but rather as collective agreements arising after the fact, emerging as conventions in the course of
play. We think of rules as constructed by newcomers to the game, for the newcomers' benefit, as a way to summarize history. And we think of
rules as scaffolding to enable the players to improvise against a provisional framework, and reach beyond the scope of their past activity if they
desire. Maja Kuzanovic of FoAM, discussing Sponge and FOAM associations including Shas's main project, TGarden (undated). http://fo.am
/from_representation_to_performance/
14 Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, London: Penguin, 1993, p.96.

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