event mechanics

I don’t know enough about you
To be kind, to be kind to you
Don’t you even think about me
– Cymbals, “The Natural World”

The Cymbals’ electro-pop lament of unrequited attention (‘love’) has the same furtively repetitive energetics of yearning through ‘refresh’. Refresh the inbox, refresh the stream, refresh the wall. Repeat. Has the person responded? “Here is my attention; take it.” The “I” of the song is a single contact in a series of contacts presented as the natural world (or ‘milieu’) belong to the song’s second-person “you”.¹

The expectation of being attended to is held by the “you” but it is also shared by the “I”. Obviously, the expectation is not held in the same way. Two perspectives on the same expectation indicates a certain kind of power relation. Teachers and students are meant to share expectations of what will happen in a classroom, but they will have radically different perspectives. The flip-side to the alleged passivity of narcissism consists of the capacity to excite or agitate the world. ‘Agitate’ not in the sense of arguing — there is that too, however — but more in the sense of an ‘agitator’ sometimes used as part of the viticulture process in great wine baths to ensure that the elements in solution continue mixing (and fermenting and so on). What does this mean?

There is a labour of sharing that requires an intensive strategic infrastructure to distribute collective expectations in asymmetric relations of attending and being attended to. The technology is part of this; ‘living with notifications’ in the same way you’d say living with some potentially painful but treatable condition. Snapchat operates purely in this realm. It is not what is shared so much as the anticipation of sharing. The just-in-time sociality of online relations often encourages a temporality not unlike the rhythm of waves, in the silent way the tide draws out the body of water — gathering in the potentiality of repetitive anticipation. Like the way a comedian waits for the audience to ‘get it’ (hoping beyond hope that their gag is, indeed, gettable).²

You decide what you want from me
We can hear the passing of time
And the sound that is in your mind
– Cymbals, “The Natural World”

The second-person “you” has a spectral composition, distributed across her agitations. (Obviously I am using ‘her’ when it very well might be a ‘him’; I know I present such a persona online sometimes.³) Being attended to can therefore be experienced as endured, where the causal relation begins elsewhere; essentially, a passive relation to the actions of others. This is an abdication of responsibility, however. Participation in the anticipatory economy of sharing attentions is at the same time an impersonal cultivation of personal relations. This is a kind of existential wriggle. Impersonal because “you” engage with the cloud, which is nevertheless populated by (im)personal intentionalities.

Does the cloud have a face? What is the faciality of the cloud? I am tempted to suggest it is the drone: a being of pure intentionality — always a mission, always a target, its cybernetic perspective is pure HUD, baby — but one that is remote-controlled. Control is displaced across space for drone pilots; for the Cymbals’ “you” it is displaced across time in the anticipatory economy of sharing. The moral crisis of drone warfare is repeated online in the ethics of being attended to. The question of agency is therefore very tricky in such a scenario as it implies a degree of responsibility. What happens when the drones come home to roost? Can you be seduced by a drone?

A further, more pressing question presents itself: What if, instead of two people, the Cymbals’ track describes a process belonging to a single person?

That is, the agitations in question do not belong to some other (online) realm or ‘world’, but constitute that through which one’s subjectivity is individuated. I don’t know enough about myself to know if my own remote-controlled agitations are returning, repeating their anticipations. This would be the McLuhanist point (the way media technology “massages” the “human”): am I drone of my own affectations, a being of pure HUD intentionality, perpetually remote-controlled by a future version of myself (assembled by expectation and gathered through anticipation)?⁴

Appending ebooks to something is a practice belonging to subcultures on twitter and derived from the meme surrounding the horse_ebooks twitter account. Here are some notes on the cultural meaning of ‘_ebooks’.

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Various ‘_ebooks’ accounts have been created. What they all have in common is the algorithmic act of sampling source material and turning it into a tweet. On the process behind horse_ebooks:

The algorithm that produces the horse_ebooks stream, like most spammic algorithms, relies on user interaction to grow more effectual. It interprets text as data, and determines which keywords might best promote an outcome like the sale of Cialis or Horse Medical Records. Just as with many of our more popular and less insidious internet applications, the more interaction the algorithm gets, the smarter it becomes. The growing popularity of horse_ebooks has reciprocally allowed it to become better at generating tweets like “The Fear Of lowlife criminals With Environmental Protection” (October 30, 2011; 49 retweets).

[...]

While it is true that the algorithm publishes tweets that were, at some point, somehow, written, it is non-author in the sense that it defies the binary border between ebook and reader. It imagines non-authorship in a way that even social media, with its dissolution of anonymity, can enable.

Sure. There is something else going on when _ebooks is appended to non-_ebooks; that is, something that is ostensibly not the algorithmic poetics actioned in the event-space between discourse and code. Something has been extracted from the _ebooks phenomena and has now been folded back into the social practices on social media.

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What has been extracted? (Or what makes ‘_ebooks’ singular?) It is something that, firstly, plays with the relation between sense and nonsense. horse_ebooks enthusiasts are sometimes criticised for anthropomorphising the algorithm-based expressions. The non-discursive semantic sampling of source material is an algorithmic variation of the creative/aesthetic practice of producing and exploding disjunction. Contra the critics, this does not foreclose the possibility of meaning, only that the discursive dimension of the sample has also been parsed by the algorithm. What is this discursive dimension? The incorporeal materialism of all language. ¹

So a little nugget of sense emerging from non-sense. From the perspective of information theory, this is clearly irrational, because signals do not simply emerge from what is ostensibly noise, noise impinges on signals and so on. The meaning produced by _ebooks twitter accounts is (unintentionally?) meaningful but in a quasi-random manner. ‘Random’ because it is derived from the sampling algorithm, ‘quasi’ because it relies on coded text that otherwise belongs to the logical systems of language. That is, the _ebooks are never quite ‘noise’ because they are, at a minimum, sensible as nonsense.

The _ebooks tweets exist not just as a ‘text’, however. They are better understood as an event. Techniques and technologies of representation (language, media, etc.), like all kinds of communication, are forms of transport. ² Representation brings a time and place into contact with another time and place. The singular quality of this contact is the event of sense. Practices on twitter materially enact this process of representational transport. Retweets are ambiguous, ‘favourites’ are less so.

The practical dimension of ‘retweets’ and ‘favouriting’ modifies the relations of visibility and the relations of valorisation inherent in all acts of communication. The normative content of a tweet does not have to be the content that is valorised; rather, more sophistcated twitter users often retweet in an ironic fashion. Twitter users can choose to participate in these processes of transportation by retweeting, this is obvious; less obvious is the purpose of retweeting ostensibly nonsensical tweets. In the passage of the retweet — the ‘journey’ of the communicational transport — what is gained or lost?

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One of Tim Lampe’s Horse E-Posters: http://horseeposters.com/

For a long time subcultural groups have created entire languages of meaning that appear to be nonsensical to outsiders. This is in part happening here as ’_ebooks’ is a syntactic morpheme belonging to denotational practices of twitter-based subcultures. Retweeting can be understood as a practice of citation; think of that bloke everyone went to school with who knew every single line from the Simpsons. Citing the Simpsons produced a measure of cultural cache as a performance of cultural taste.

Retweeting does something similar, but with an additional dynamic dimension. The political economy of belonging in online networks not only means ‘following’ the right ‘people’ (or emitters of becoming-sensical content), but also of participating in the passage of meaning as meaning itself is enacted. Not only is the content shared, as per Raymond Williams’ definition of communication, but the becoming-sensical of the content is also shared.

Think of a joke that develops over the course of an evening. The release of tension signalled by the smile (weak) or laughter (strong) is triggered by a disjunction that produces the affective tension present in all humour. ³ Such jokes cascade, but they are also repeated other nights, just as the possibility of such a joke developing is repeated. The algorithmic disjunction of sample text of the original ‘_ebooks’ twitter accounts is pregnant with a similar potentiality.

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What does ‘_ebooks’ represent?

What happens when ‘_ebooks’ is appended to something?

It is an ironic signifier. Instead of signifying the becoming-sensical of the original algorithmic ‘_ebooks’ twitter acounts, it is signifying the (allegeded) becoming-nonsensical of an actual person’s expression.

“If Léger managed to get the roar of the factory, the squeal of a drill press, and the screech of the unoiled gear, into his paintings, it was an achievement I, at least, do not much appreciate.” Review of Léger exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (O’Connor 1998)

In the latest issue of Parrhesia is a translation of a 1982 letter from Gilbert Simondon to Jacques Derrida where Simondon discusses what he calls “techno-aesthetics”. There has always been a tension, if not a latent snobbery, running between the high aesthetics of the art world — that practicing artists and other professionals approach with a keen sense of technique – and the high technics of the machinic phylum – that practicing engineers, scientists and others approach with a keen sense of aesthetics. The publication of this translation is timely for my own work (currently in the process of being reviewed for publication) that has tried to think about the character of technê using concepts of ‘experience’ and the ‘event’ from contemporary philosophy work on aesthetics (Massumi, Manning, etc.).

Simondon begins by reflecting on the character of visibility in techno-aesthetics, what he calls phanero-technics. (Phaneros, visible; from phainein, to cause to appear.) He has two examples, that of the Eiffel Tower and the architectural practice of Le Corbusier. He emphasises slightly different points in his two examples. In the case of Le Corbusier it is a case of rendering visible what is normally hidden. This exposure is a kind of consecration or valorisation of the technics of function and the technics of design. The frame, such as embodied in the magazine front cover, is a valorising-machine designed to function as an apparatus of capture on the newsagency stand. The frame of exposed-technics is abductive, rather than premised on a shared reading-technics of emphasis, and it dissolves in the solution of experience. Le Corbusier’s “phanero-technical attitude” may render visible the pipes and cables conventionally hidden but the non-normative frame of the exposed-technical relies on the repetition of aesthetic experience and contraction of memory to appreciate the difference of exposure and therefore of the valorisation.

Simondon suggests that the Eiffel Tower didn’t have a function, beyond that being “merely an elevated vista point”, but it became the “best emission antenna in France”. If we agree with Jonathan Crary’s point that the spectacle (as in Debord’s Marxist critique of the image-commodity) is more an architecture for fixing spectators in a certain relational point in space than a semiosis for the communication and indoctrination of an ideological meaning, then the elevated vista point of the Eiffel Tower gains a different resonance. The Eiffel Tower contributes to the technics of what John Urry has called the “tourist gaze”.

The “tourist gaze” is a concept Urry develops from a certain reading of Foucault’s work on the clinic and the “medical gaze”. Urry maps a quasi-genealogical account of contemporary tourism in terms of the way there is an economy of image-perspectives that tourists are encouraged to inhabit. Although not necessarily the sole reason for travelling tourists come to occupy specific “vista points” and the layering of tourist-subjectivities is captured in the work of Swiss-French artist Corinne Vionnet and her project Photo Opportunities. What is interesting about the Eiffel Tower is that the Tower itself becomes the site/sight captured by tourists rather than being the location from which vista-points are constituted; Simondon argues that phanero-technics “is itself already aesthetic: the Eiffel Tower (the tower of the World’s Fair) and the Garabit viaduct on the Truyère river have an undeniable aesthetic power”. Noting the same connection between Vionnet’s work and Urry’s in a brief note on the art project, Madeline Yale suggests that “its distorted visual referent functions as a device for memory transport by funneling many experiences into one familiar locale”.

Photo Opportunities (2005-2012) — Corinne Vionnet

Vionnet’s work is interesting in the context of what has been described as the “New Aesthetic” in the sense that David Berry describes NA as a “form of abduction aesthetic linked to the emergence of computationality as an ontotheology”. The ‘fuzziness’ of the Eiffel Tower above, not unlike the blurred edges of the pirated video-camera filmed of a 3D film at the cinema, is in part the layering of tourist vista-points captured by a camera, but it is also the outcome of Vionnet’s online activity to use everyday Internet search engines to find appropriate images and the design-work of image processing software. The images map an interplay between two series of events: the collective experience of implication in the discursive-architecture of the tourist spectacle and the ‘historical discontinuity’ of shifting from the photo album (or slideshow sceening) to the Internet and social network-enabled sharing of photos — vernacular mnemotechnics and practices of photography from ‘Kodak moment’ to ‘Facebook moment’.

Simondon then shifts to a discussion of the contemplation and handling tools. Using the example of a double-ended wrench specifically designed for cyclists. The two heads of the wrench have four diameters and having a head on each end makes the tool easy to grip in a fist. This tool “answers very well to what it is required to do” and “gives aesthetic pleasure when one contemplates it”. It reminds me of a trivial event from my teenage years. Discussing cars with a father of one of my friends (the father had just bought a Corvette), I was consuming a mint. The father exclaimed to the simplicity of the design of the mint’s container that would release a single mint when squeezed. On investigation the container did not have any moving parts, rather the flexing of the plastic ejected a mint by modulating a series of three chambers. One to extract a mint from the holding chamber, and then a third to release the mint from the extraction chamber. It was an elegant design and a I remember my friend’s father being very excited by this.

This is still contemplation, however, and Simondon goes on to note that “contemplation is not techno-aesthetics’ primary category. It’s in usage, in action, that it becomes something orgasmic, a tactile means and motor of stimulation”. This is a “very particular pleasure of sensation”. Between the ‘consumer’ of the work of art and the sensations of the artist can also be thought of in terms of the pleasures of sensation. One of the more important insights in the brief letter is that Simondon argues there is a “continuous spectrum that connects aesthetics o technics”. Simondon’s example here has a direct connection to my previous research (on enthusiasm in car culture). He discusses the interplay of technics and aesthetics in the context of the Jaguar EV 12 from the perspective of functionality. The body of the Jaguar is designed to be aerodynamic, however the undercarriage is less so. In a later passage Simondon returns to discussing the Jaguar’s engine in a rough comparison to that of the Citreon 2CV. The engine fo the 2CV is “that of car at degree zero”, which for Simondon means that the technical elements have been arranged for function, ease of access and so on. The engine of the Jaguar, on the other hand, has been designed to be an exaggerated technical object that has been araanged for the purposes of a techno-aesthetics incorporating the long hood of the engine and the positioning of the radiator. The exaggerated ‘spoilers’ of modified-car culture are a more extreme example of the point Simondon is making here. Modified cars fitted with ‘body kits’ use a technical aesthetics in subcultural ways. This is a material semiotics of force and function noted by Gene Balsey in the very first critical work on modified car culture “The Hot Rod Culture” (1950); what he called the “competition aesthetic” of post-war hot rodders drawing on the aesthetics of the slat-lake racers.

Similarly, aesthetic objects lend themselves to technical analysis, with Simondon referencing the reception of the Mona Lisa’s technical analysis. This entire paragraph of Simondon’s is remarkable. He is contemplating the Mona Lisa’s smile-event (in Deleuze’s sense of the event, pun intended;), here is the relevant section:

On the very same canvas, one encounters the beginning and the end of a smile–but not the exhaustion of a smile, the entelechy of the smile. [...] The smile that begins, and the smile that ends so as to return to the face’s mask of seriousness, are the extreme terms of this temporal thickness: the smile will unfold itself, and at the same time it will also already be disappearing. The only thing that exists and is materialized are the outer limits of the moment of exhaustion, of full realization. But the entelechy is not figured as part of the painting. Are there not in this unique image two superimposed techniques, as is the case with palimpsests? Aren’t there two messages to decode, in order to infer the source-message (the master-message), which is lacking? It’s the original reality that remains mute, non-present, but past and to come in a quasi-immediate but nevertheless mysterious way. What is of central importance is the mystery itself of what is not-figured.

‘Entelechy’ comes from Aristotlean philosophy and refers to when an object is completely actual and fully present. The smile-event exists between two movements — a ‘becoming’ — one where it is exhausted and the face returns to seriousness and the other when the smile is fully realised. These ends in the double-movement of the smile are fully real but virtual. In the same way Vionnet’s work captures this double-movement, but is complicated by a transversal movement across the two (double) series of the vista-point of the tourist gaze and the algorithmic return of a keyword search of photos proffered for ‘sharing’ and their doubles in the mnemotechnical iterations of these two series across generational differences (both of human collective memory and technics).

In the realm of consumption techno-aesthetics intervenes in what Simondon describes as the  “conditioning (in the commercial sense of the word)” of commodities.  Simondon describes an example of food and the way it is received across cultural differences vary in reception in a given region. Perhaps most interesting of all for those into Object-Oriented Ontology is Simondon’s example of electricity: “Industrial aesthetics can be, first of all, the aesthetic of produced objects. But not everything is an object. Electricity is not an object. It can only be detected and manipulated through objects and possibly also through natural environments: lightning passes through and structures itself through corridors of air that have already been ionized.” Simondon’s example is from nature but his point is that techno-aesthetics deals with action, or ‘function’, not objects.

I’m currently about half way finished writing an article about the garage as an assemblage that has certain gendered and affective affordances for the passage of action. One of the critical remarks I want to make about Simondon’s brief note is ‘functionality’ is always already present in the forms of action either in practice or designed ‘into’ a technical system. I’ve been thinking about how enthusiasm is often a constituent element in vernacular epistemologies of a techno-aesthetic disposition. What is at stake for these amateur tinkerers and what not is that they do not appreciate ‘function’ in the same way as an expert or professional. ‘Functionality’ is backformed from the experience of engaging with “what works” not “the way it works”.

Although Simondon acknowledges that assumes that we engage with technologies according to “the way it works” but technologies do not work the same for everyone even though they may be designed as such. The enthusiast’s knowledge is born of experience and involves an intimate appreciation of ‘function’  immanent and congruent to practice. Without this immanent sense of function and correlative co-determination of the subject and object arrayed by the function, a techno-aesthetics can easily lapse into a neo-Modernist technologism (or critical appreciation of the dialectical opposite, ala Ellul’s technique). Function is a consequence of design for Simondon, while I am suggesting it is immanent to ‘work’. In other words, I am arguing for a techno-aesthetics belonging primarily to technê and not episteme (and ‘truth’); or a techno-aesthetics on the technê end of the spectrum on knowledge and experience.

Like the smile discussed above, functionality is an event, a double-movement between what works and what doesn’t. Something that is malfunctioning is still functioning albeit poorly from the perspective of Simondon’s assumed entelechial functionality. Enhusiasts are often suspended, in action, between two relative compositions of a technical assemblage characterised by different states of functionality. There is a terrific moment in Hugh Howey’s novel Wool (spoiler-free introduction on Geek Dad blog) that captures this movement. The novel is set in a ‘silo’ and its inhabitants are survivors of some kind of apocalyptic event. I want to talk about an event where a character, Juliette, repairs a generator, but I won’t give too much away because it is a very good book.

The generator is a huge industrial machine that generates electricity for the whole silo, which is enough for hundreds of people to live. For as long as Juliette has been alive, the generator has been an incredibly loud machine the vibrations of which can be felt throughout the lower levels of the silo. Juliette convinces the administrative superiors in the silo that preventative maintenance is necessary to ward off catastrophic failure. Juliette carries out the repairs and when the generator is started she needs to be signalled by another person close to the generator that it is operating and that the first character needs to stop pressing the ‘starter’ button.  The generator’s rotating assembly is now so finely balanced there is no vibration and very little noise. The repairs carried out might as well have been improvements because the repair/design of the generator was born of experience and involves an intimate appreciation of its working functionality.  Juliette is operating in a context where there is a constant struggle between all the parts of a machine working together in functional harmony and the constant pressure of entropic decline (used as a metonym in the novel for the functioning of the silo).

In this week’s first year lecture on research methods I am discussing the importance of ‘writing up’ one’s research as part of the process of doing research. Part of what I am discussing is the shift in thinking from scholarship as a linear process (for example, question and then an answer) to a process involving differentiating feedback (for example, multiple questions and answers and answers that help you ask better questions).

The classic error of first year students is to write up essays as they are doing the research and then hand in what is essentially a very early draft of their work. When this is represented in graphical form it looks like this:

You begin on the left and end up on the right. Each increment represents a moment where the student reads or thinks something new and writes it in their (draft) essay. This can be identified when assessing work as what is normally regarded as the ‘thesis statement’ is buried about three-quarters of the way into the essay. I’ve found it to be a common error for students who have not thought about the essay writing process as involving structure and I’ve found it in every university (7) at which I’ve taught or marked.

As I have discussed before on this blog, a better way to think about this process is a spiral with spokes instead of a ‘flat line’ time series. The spiral & spoke is a far better way to represent the way one’s ideas develop:

You begin in the middle of the spiral and gradually work your way to the outer point. Each of the ‘spokes’ represents an action of reading or thinking something. Each time the spoke cuts across the spiral it is at a different time (T1, T2, T3, …Tn). The point is that each spoke is not the ‘same’ thing each time it cuts across the spiral. Ideas develop as you read and think different things in between. So the series becomes something like Idea 1.0, Idea 1.1, Idea 1.2, …Idea 1.n and you get an appreciation of the way what you read or thought in the beginning develops over time. When writing up the research you write up the spokes.

This is great for a process involving small sets of starting information with only ‘interference’ or ‘reinforcing’ effects between the original set of information creating change. This is not how scholarship actually happens, however. Scholarship is essentially a process of innovation involving ‘interference’, ‘reinforcement’ and also ‘cascade’ and ‘originary’ effects. A ‘cascade’ effect being that joyous moment where the ‘red thread’ of one’s work is apparent. An ‘originary’ effect being that moment where the differential repetition of ideas (what Gabriel Tarde called ‘imitation’) leads to development of a new idea (or what Tarde called ‘innovation’).

Another way of representing this differentiating feedback that retains a similar mode of the spiral time series is by using a three dimensional conical spiral as the time series and then locating the various moments of thinking or reading (or experimenting, etc) so that the non-linear relationships between these various moments can also be represented with innovation trees.

The key to the above diagrammatic representation of the processes of research and differentiating feedback.

1. The original way of thinking about the process as a linear timeline. Start at the left and end on the right.

2. A three-dimensional version of the spiral. The researcher still begins in the middle and each reading, thought (or whatever) happens along the spiral, but now the relations of innovation can be appropriately mapped. When ‘new’ elements emerge from previous elements, a new colour is used. More complex versions of these relations would create new spirals emerging from specific element as new directions are taken. I imagine multiple galaxies of spirals.

3. The ‘micro’ time series of each specific point or ‘outcome’ (for a topic sentence in an essay for example), these were the ‘spokes’ in the original two dimensional representation.

Why is this important?

Humanities and social science scholars have traditionally been poorly equipped to think about the relations between the various elements or ‘actors’ in the composition of power relations that makes up a research project, cluster or ‘network’. When I think of ‘actor-networks’ (as in ‘actor-network theory’) I think of a version of this diagram and all the ‘trees’ that actually constitute the relations between the various elements. My childish MS Paint drawings above indicate one way I think it would be possible to graphically represent the non-linear network of relations between various actors as part of a temporal series.

On its own it is kind of cool, but imagine if you could map not only strictly research-based or intellectual endeavours and could include on the same conical spiral time line other factors, such as funding grants, social events, or even maybe (if anyone thinks it is, you know, at all relevant) teaching load and other administrative responsibilities. Rather than mapping the conditions of possible action, this would be a trace of the actual conditions of action in the relations between elements. It would be a very useful way to map the impact of non-output activities in terms of various clusters of ‘elements’ and the number of relations between them. For example, a relative barrier would occur while waiting for ethics protocol approval and so on.

Matteo Pasquinelli has posted a draft article titled Machinic Capitalism and Network Surplus Value: Towards a Political Economy of the Turing Machine. It is well worth a read and raises some very interesting points regarding the production of surplus value in the contemporary socio-technological juncture. Drawing on the work of Alquati, one of Pasquinelli’s more elegant points is thus:

Valorising information is then what enters the cybernetic machine and it is transformed into a sort of machinic knowledge. Specifically it is the numerical dimension of cybernetics that is able to encode workers’ knowledge into bits and consequently transform bits into numbers for economic planning. In other words, cybernetic code transforms information into value. [...]
At the beginning of the industrial age capitalism was exploiting human bodies for their mechanical energy, but soon it was realised that the series of creative acts, measurements and decisions that workers constantly have to take is the most important value they produce. Alquati defines as information precisely all the innovative micro-decisions, which workers have to take along the production process, that give form to the product but also to the machinic apparatus.

I’ve also been interested in the question of value and the machinic for a while; admittedly, however, my clumsy forays are not as sophisticated as Pasquinelli’s work, which is genuinely very exciting. He invited feedback to his draft and I hope to offer some here in whatever meagre way I can contribute. I want to offer an alternative reading of the ‘assemblage’ from A Thousand Plateaus to that of the Delanda-esque inspired reading that Pasquinelli’s emphasises in his paper. Pasquinelli rightly indicates that the machinic as ‘productive’ as been reduced or even ‘neutralised’ of this dimension through the ‘relational paradigm’ of assemblage theory as forwarded by Manuel Delanda’s work (10). Without discounting Pasquinelli’s reading of Delanda’s somewhat de-weaponised version of the assemblage, I want to emphasise Guattari’s post-Lacanian reading of Deleuze’s work in Guattari’s essay Machine and Structure as indicating an alternative reading of the ‘assemblage’ that is at least congruent with Pasquinelli’s thesis.

I am working from the version of Guattari’s 1969 essay published in English in 1984 as a rough synthesis of Guattari’s works titled Molecular Revolution. In the second footnote of the early English translation of the essay Guattari draws on Deleuze’s work (below) and in the body copy notes that “in reality, a machine is inseparable from its structural articulations and, conversely, that each contingent structure is dominated (and this is what I want to demonstrate) by a system of machines, or at the very least by one logic machine” (111):

To adopt the categories suggested by Gilles Deleuze, structure, in the sense in which I am using it here, would relate to the generality characterised by a position of exchange or substitution of particularities, whereas the machine would relate to the order of repetition ‘as behaviour and viewpoint relative to a singularity that cannot be changed or replaced’ (D&R [Fr], 7). [In the 1994 Patton translation of the section I think is being quoted here -- no other passage in the Patton translation comes close to capturing the meaning of Guattari's point -- it is translated thus: "[Repetition] is by nature transgression or exception, always revealing a singularity opposed to the particulars subsumed under laws, a universal opposed to the generalities which give rise to laws” (5).] Of Deleuze’s three minimum conditions determining structure in general, I shall retain only the first two:
1) There must be at least two heterogeneous series, one of which is defined as the signifier and the other as the signified.
2) Each of these series is made up of trms that exist only through their relationship with one another.
His third condition, ‘two heterogenous series converging upon a paradoxical element that acts so as to differentiate them’, relates, on the contrary, exclusively to the order of the machine (LoS [Fr], 63).

Guattari is clearer (or at least the translation is clearer) in the recent English translation and publication of The Machinic Unconscious, probably in part because he no longer had to participate in system of enunciation or ‘territory’ of structuralism and instead is operating within a properly Guattarian assemblage, where he writes:

The difference between Thom’s logoi and abstract machines, such as I conceive them, stems from the fact that the former are simply carrying abstraction, whereas the latter in addition convey singularity points [sic] “extracted” from the cosmos and history. Rather than abstract machines, perhaps it is preferably to speak of “machinic extracts” or deterritorialized and deterritorializing machines. [...]
I will start with the idea that assemblages of flows and codes are first compared in relation to differentiations of form and structure, object and subject, and that the phenomena of formal interaction consitute only a particular case, that of a borderline case, within the machinic processes that work upon the assemblages before the substance-form coupling. (14, 15)

I want to suggest that the machinic, in as much as it is productive, is the concept that Deleuze and Guattari use to describe the milieu of repetition, in the specific singular or forceful mode of ‘repetition’ that, for example, makes and unmakes the relations of substitution of particularities and generalities contracted as habit or projected as the ‘social’ or as the conjunctive and disjunctive syntheses as described in Anti-Oedipus are the gathering and breakage of flows as ‘repetition’ moves across them.

Therefore, there is a problem when discussing the relation between the machinic and machines. Compare the above to the ‘actual’ machine that Guattari describes in Machine and Structure:

Initiation into a trade and becoming accepted as a skilled worker no longer takes place by way of institutions, or at least not those envisaged in such statements as ‘the skill has precedence over the machine’. With industrial capitalism, the spasmodic evolution of machinery keeps cutting across the existing hierarchy of skills.
[...]
As compared with the work done by machines, the work of human beings is nothing. This working at ‘nothing’, in the special sense in which people do it today, which tends more and more to be merely a response to a machine — pressing a red or black button to produce an effect programmed somewhere else — human work, in other words, is only the residue that has not yet been integrated into the work of the machine. (112, 113)

In other words, humans no longer repeat, even when their labour is repetitive; rather, repetition belongs to the machine as a milieu of the ‘machinic’. Both the worker and the machine belong to the machinic. The evolutionary character of the machine is machinic in the sense that ‘new’ evolutions assemble on yet another plane of consistency and produce new territories. These territories are sub-jacent to those that exist and have the effect of being inherently dissonant. The worker in the above is not a force of repetition. Guattari is restricting his analysis to the worker on the floor, and not the synthesised ‘workers’ of Pasquinelli that combines all non-machine human agents that are in some social relation to each other (in conflict or solidarity) as mediated by an actual machine. (So designers, engineers, technicians as well as the button pushers, etc.) In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari call this force of repetition — distributed across the knowledge worker as much as the labour worker and the machinic — the “surplus value of flux”.

Whitehead’s discussion of appetition provides a way to talk about both the tendential relations of futurity and the open, cutting edge of repetition as it is distributed across the machine and the worker (in Pasquellini’s broader sense). The appetiton of ‘repetition’ is immanent or self-posited (quasi-cause); or, following Derrida, it is ‘to-come’. It is only ‘discovered’ (or to use current parlance ‘innovated’) in retrospect, even if it is a retrospective projection of the imagined future into the present (i.e. ‘futurists’, ‘forward thinkers’, mythologised ‘Steve Jobs’, etc.). This is the work of capital: to extract the surplus value of the machinic from the force of repetition (in the specific sense of extraction of singularity, the con/disjunctive syntheses of flows and the redistribution of relations of particularity and generality through de/reterritorialization). Surplus value is extracted according to the “axiomatic of the world capitalist market,” following Deleuze and Guatari in Anti-Oedipus (233-235), that ever expands the immanent limits of capital itself.

The way I have interpreted Pasquellini’s essay — in the context of ‘surplus value of flux’ describing Deleuze and Guattari’s adaptation of something akin to ‘machinic repetition’ in the context of Anti-Oedipus — the appetition of the algorithmic machine is not this self-positing appetition of repetition and the milieu of the machinic. Rather, the algorithmic belongs to specific assemblages (or strata populated by apparatuses of capture, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology) that have ‘captured’ the flux of repetition as surplus value (i.e. as ‘innovation’) and which (re)distributes the particular and the general in specific (‘actual’) ways. The appetition of the algorithmic machine is fundamentally inhuman while at the same time entirely the residue of human labour. What appetites does ‘Google’ have? What character of prehension belongs to an algorithm when it is ‘run’? I don’t know. Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of the assemblage (machinic assemblages, but also the intertwined collective assemblages of enunciation) in A Thousand Plateaus as a way of grappling with the a-human territorializations immanent to machinic repetition: “In every respect, machinic assemblages effectuate the abstract machine insofar as it is developed on a plane of consistency or enveloped in a stratum (71). So I argue that accounting for the assemblages within which the surplus value of flux can be extracted through specific apparatuses of capture is essential, rather than being discounted. Pasquinelli already indicates the work of assemblages in his brief mentions of the socio-technological assemblages of Facebook, Google, etc. in his essay. The emphasis (and dismissal) of Delanda’s interpretation of the concept and development of ‘assemblage theory’ doesn’t necessarily foreclose, if repeated in different ways, productive use of the concept. If the algorithm could self-posit it’s appetites then it would belong to the “surplus value of flux” as a pure force of repetition and the properly ontological realm of the machinic, but otherwise, I want to suggest, it belongs to an assemblage.