Patricia Reed | Independent Researcher (original) (raw)

Papers by Patricia Reed

Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks | Towards a Digitally Cooperative Culture: Recommoning Land, Data and Objects, 2021

Reed’s two-part paper examines the social constitution of necessity as a normative and epistemic ... more Reed’s two-part paper examines the social constitution of necessity as a normative and epistemic referent, orienting the uses and abuses of technology within this historical moment designated as the planetary. Reed’s paper is illustrated with a series of diagrams drawn by the artist, adding a further conceptual dimension to the cosmology of concepts and ideas that the writer travels through.

Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, 2019

The punny call to ‘seize the memes of production’ (a meme in its own right) would entail a gargan... more The punny call to ‘seize the memes of production’ (a meme in its own right) would entail a gargantuan, though not undeliberated task, of both designing and implementing a model of collective ownership for the platforms that enable users to circulate memes in the first place. In a production mode composed of infrastructure, hardware, software and crucially, a critical mass of users, how far down the chain of production does such a call gesture at? If this call is to be taken seriously, and is not merely a play of fortuitously matched words, what do we actually mean by it? The backbone enabling our base connectivity? The ownership of our extracted data on an individual and/or aggregate level? The socialization of gains made through collective, unpaid labour? Platforms reorganized along the principle of a globally-scaled public utility? The open-sourcing of platform architecture and algorithms that guide what we see and what others see from us? All of the above? As a point of entry, these questions point to the depth of scales one is compelled to consider within this comparative play on the historical expression.

The second point, concerns the relevance of this historical referent within our present. Do emancipatory labour models from industrial capitalist historical contexts hold the same degree of effectivity under current conditions of production, value creation and surplus value extraction? When ‘seizing the means of production’ became a communist meme in industrial capitalism, it specifically targeted the socialization of surplus value of production as an emancipatory claim tied to the productive labour of workers (where the enclosure of ‘the social’ presumably assumed the bounds of a nation-state organizational form). Deploying this phrase in the context of globally networked platform economies requires that we would first map the relation between worker and user; secondly, that we identify how surplus value is accrued; and thirdly, contend with a global scale of sociality from which this surplus value is derived, and for whom it would be destined. Additionally, and only adjacently addressed in historical Marxian analyses, are the negative externalities these production modes are tethered to at a planetary-scale, which can no longer be a mere aside in conceptualizing durable transformation. Without adapting the telos of the demands to our present conditions, these referents operate less to catalyze progressive change, and serve to entrap our futural imaginaries by ossifying nostalgic ideals with little use-value or malleability. Can we uphold the general ambitions contained within the historical expression, while doing the analytical work in grasping the different affordances, modes of value-creation, technicity and possible points of leverage at play in our moment for a transformative pragmatics to emerge? When the playing field has changed, strategies for reengineering the rules demand adaption.

Glass Bead Journal, Site 02, 2019

It is not enough to rearrange the furniture in this current historical discursive home; freedom f... more It is not enough to rearrange the furniture in this current historical discursive home; freedom from this given domestic situation and the modes of domestication that conform to its logic, is dependent on the freedom to construct comparative fictions that serve as tools for building a new home from the foundation up, for new sites of positivity upon which thought and activity are based. The desire for betterment is itself entangled with fiction; since the better is always unactualized in the here and now, the better is not empirically available to direct experience. Accounting only for the here and now of what is given to localized experience and thinkability is to foreclose on the imaginative possibility of situated betterment. Betterment always belongs to an otherworld, another site, another situation, and it is through fiction where a counterfactual imagination of that possible world is enabled.

e-flux Journal Vol. 101, 2019

There are those who champion, or who actively seek to amplify, the navigational turbulence produc... more There are those who champion, or who actively seek to amplify, the navigational turbulence produced by this decentered human position at the planetary scale, making for an urgent battle over claims on orientation. Such tendencies thrive among several techno-neoreactionaries, who, in denying absolutely any form of planetary navigability from a resituated human position, ultimately advocate for the stripping of humanity’s cognitive-political agencies to transform given frames of reference. Paradoxically, what is often perceived as a form of techno-fetishist futurism is nothing but an unimaginative conservatism that celebrates the preservation of existing frames of reference. These existing frames are defended as if they are an immutable fact of nature, a world “naturally” oriented by nineteenth-century navigational frameworks, now augmented by twenty-first-century AI, smart cities, and iPhones. Implicit endorsements for dehumanization can be found in this destructive negation of these capacities. This is so, not because this endorsement traffics in images of machinic supremacy on the surface, as is often the point of critique, but because it amounts to a renunciation of the capacity to make claims on the artificial nature of humanity itself, a coexistential fictitious necessity for constructing markers of collective orientation. In the end, revelling in the chaotic perpetuation of navigational turbulences at the planetary scale is nothing more than an uninventive fossilization of status-quo fictions as given and permanent facts. At this juncture, it becomes evident that the struggle for orientation at nth-dimensionality coexistence demands intervention on this artificial plane, in order to dislodge naturalized conservatisms that are often disguised as blinking futurity.

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Vol. 24, 2019

This paper looks at the relation between scientific knowledge and normative pragmatics from the p... more This paper looks at the relation between scientific knowledge and normative pragmatics from the point of view of (mutable) cosmological milieus that map out a sense of purposefulness, as argued by Bentley Allan. Cosmological consequences are drawn out in light of the model of the Stack, as postulated by Benjamin Bratton, through the lens of Haraway’s “situated knowledge” through which new modes of governance and self-understanding emerge, demanding an adaptation of strictly human-centered political theory. The reciprocal dynamics of the interface are explored as a distributed site, not only for the invention of narrative, non-homogenizing meaning from the “totality” of the Stack, but equally as a site of intervention to guide and weight otherwise the non-linear causal forces of our complex, interconnected condition.

Making & Breaking Issue 1, 2019

Although Capitalist Realism is the mode of capture, training and moulding our lives, as the polym... more Although Capitalist Realism is the mode of capture, training and moulding our lives, as the polymath Sylvia Wynter has written, none of this is possible without the foundational construction of the “economic conception of being human”.6 Our existing external conditions are a logical extrapolation of a particular framing of the human, just as other epochs were shaped by human self-understanding upon religious or political foundations. This assertion would then suggest, that to create new conditions of the world requires not only resistance to the residual symptoms of its existing logics as they get materialized (and therefore reinforced) through technologies, systems of classification, cultural production, spatial ordering, economic distribution/valuation models, temporal structures and so on; but that ultimately the target must be set on the transformation of human self-conception itself – or what Wynter more eloquently named throughout her work as the creation of ‘genres of being human’. The argument being, is that to enduringly transform the existing configuration of the world, one must intervene at the root construction of human self-understanding, from which new modes of worldmaking spring forth. This root condition of what is assumed a priori, and what subsequently affords/impedes all manner of navigating the world, is what Foucault named as the ‘episteme’. The episteme is the historically situated, discursive backdrop of assumptions that establish conditions of possibility for the adjudication of knowledge (and therefore power), and for what sorts of questions are enabled (or prohibited) within a particular era. It is this latter part of the episteme definition that strikes as the most debilitating, since it discursively excludes certain genres of questions we likely need to be asking, as legitimately serious and necessary ones. Since this episteme predetermines what is (perceived as) given, it is also largely insensible to entities operating within it (both by individuals and systems), meaning that its internal mechanisms of discursive prohibition are largely obscure. Due to the pervasive power of this episteme in constructing givens in the world (ones that serve as a space of traction), Wynter postulates that even more fundamentally than regimes of knowledge, this episteme constitutes the very construction of the human itself, the codes governing its conceptual framing, its practices and self-definition.7 In her words: “…the ‘politics of truth’ of each episteme has to function in a way that enables its social reality to be known in terms that are of adaptive advantage to the survival, well-being and stable reproduction of the mode of being human that each ruling group embodies and actualizes.”

Para-Platforms: On the Spatial Politics of Right-Wing Populism, 2018

Despite the long-standing ambitions to conceive of humanity from an expansive proportion, the sca... more Despite the long-standing ambitions to conceive of humanity from an expansive proportion, the scale of the shared crises we face render these generically existential questions urgently necessary – not only philosophically, but ethically and pragmatically as well. What sorts of concepts can we develop to fathom ‘humanity,’ and how can we learn to exist in those very concepts? This latter point of existing in concepts is essential. It is one thing to say that all humans belong to the ‘we’ of geohistory, for example, but it is quite another to transform this saying into behavioral traction. Countless injustices have been unleashed from this category we call ‘human,’ and those traumas don’t magically disappear out of historical convenience or our present crises that acutely demand maximal solidarity. Many of said traumas have been enacted in the name of cosmopolitanism, but have been enacted as a brutally bloated Eurocentric particularity thrust onto the world to dominate and conform humanity into a homogenous mold of itself– that is, into a familiar image. Until the historical exclusivity of this category ‘human’ is grappled with, hopes that we humans may unite under the common threat of the Anthropocene remain an ahistorical idealism, trapping us in the immobility of wishful thinking. We cannot brush historical reality aside, but we can amend our paths and corresponding epistemologies because of it. Nor can we let that historical reality arrest us absolutely, as we face up to an indispensable project of planetary-scale humanity for our survival and potential flourishing.

Although neurosis is understood as an ‘abnormal’ condition, it is, what we could call a realist d... more Although neurosis is understood as an ‘abnormal’ condition, it is, what we could call a realist disorder, insofar as it, unlike psychosis, does not suffer from delusions, or hallucinations. Neurosis is not reality distortion, but a so-called ‘inappropriate’ response to reality and an inability to ‘properly’ adapt to ones environment.[1] It follows, then, that one cannot make an adequate account of neurotic responses, without also effectively describing the condition of reality, to which said ‘abnormal’ responses correlate. Rising political, economic and climactic calamities, coupled with our (so-called) ‘alienated’ dependence on communications technologies have typically been the causal targets in explaining the general increase in neurotic disorders (whether clinical, or not, like anxiety and depression). While I do not disagree, these formulations often end in lamentation and fatalism (global civil war or suicide)[2] – and, in offering up few (if any) viable social remedies to this plight, risk ramifying the ‘alternativeless’ quality of our existing political (non)-imaginaries. Perhaps what these neurotic symptoms most tellingly reveal, is not our inability to adapt to reality, but that neurosis is an expression of the existential and material strain in not wanting to adapt, yet not knowing how to materialise that conceptual refusal into gesture.

In The Neurotic Turn: Inter-Disciplinary Correspondences on Neurosis, ed. C. Johns (London: Repeater Books, 2017).

Our ‘Cold World’ of planetary-scaled complexity underwritten by logistics, computation, big-data ... more Our ‘Cold World’ of planetary-scaled complexity underwritten by logistics, computation, big-data and hyper capitalism signals not only the ‘apparent impossibility’ of grasping ‘what this world is’, it also ushers in an additional keyframe in the history of humanity’s Copernican humiliations. Although the Cold World is of (some) human making, the agglomerative results of this “accidental megastructure” we now find ourselves in and complicit with, forces us to contend with a mutated self-image, as decentered bit-users in and for its manifold operations – multiscalar operations that are both unfathomably large and infinitesimally small. The tendency to envision this ‘decentering’ as either debilitating (engendering states of resignation), or one that renders the question of human subjectivity irrelevant (as the blind celebration of machinic ‘efficiency’), offers us only reductive framings of this re-positioning. What this ‘humiliation’ demands, rather, is the re-plotting of our ex-centric non-radiance as a cartographic enterprise, forging a recalibration of our perspectives and therefore our capacities (what we can do), in substantively hypothetical ways…

Intensive incompatibility marks our moment. The multiple crises we face, socially, economically, ... more Intensive incompatibility marks our moment. The multiple crises we face, socially, economically, and ecologically (which are impossible to disentangle), are incommensurate with our existing means to justly mitigate them. These crises did not suddenly appear out of nowhere, but are the result of human making; a deeply uneven making, whose acute consequences disproportionately follow well-trodden trajectories of historical domination. Unbridled technological development is partially complicit in amplifying these crises, but this is largely so because it is embedded in particular socio-political diagrams that set far more determinate constraints on what, for example, algorithms do, than what algorithms, as such, could do. The crux here lies in the “could,” which is a question of enablement: in what conditions can, say, the algorithmic serve us, in what conditions will it devour us for spare parts, and in what conditions does it preemptively criminalize the innocent? It’s from this question of enablement, and the conceptual models of planetary-scaled cohabitation diagramming said enablement, that we need to depart.

Enmeshed in a world of complex entanglement, our navigation of it or the ways in which we co-inha... more Enmeshed in a world of complex entanglement, our navigation of it or the ways in which we co-inhabit its biosphere, seems at a political impasse. As the world becomes increasingly driven by techno-scientific systems at the scale of the planetary, and we, complicit with it, any Romantic persistence on experiential primacy, the promise of an ‘aesthetic compass’ to guide life and reasoning, can no longer deliver on its once emancipatory potency. There is little use for the ‘free-play of the senses’ when confronted with ‘average-objects’—objects like the climate whose residues, such as weather, can be felt, but whose existence is one of an abstract mean, being pluri-local, multi-systemic and (at least anthropocentrically) generational in temporality.

In: Grasping a Concept is Mastering the Use of a Form, ed. Beatriz Ortega Botas, (Madrid: La Casa... more In: Grasping a Concept is Mastering the Use of a Form, ed. Beatriz Ortega Botas, (Madrid: La Casa Ensendida, 2017).

Patricia Reed, “For a Nontrivial Art”, in Reinventing Horizons, eds. V. Bohal, D. Breitling, V. J... more Patricia Reed, “For a Nontrivial Art”, in Reinventing Horizons, eds. V. Bohal, D. Breitling, V. Janoscik, Prague: Display Press, 2016.

We have to create the real possibility of our fiction, certainly. Create the real possibility of ... more We have to create the real possibility of our fiction, certainly. Create the real possibility of our fiction which is a generic fiction in a new form, the new localisation is probably a question of a new political courage. 1

Je suppose que maintenant la vérité peut être dite, le secret peut être partagé. J'ai attendu pou... more Je suppose que maintenant la vérité peut être dite, le secret peut être partagé. J'ai attendu pour cela, explosant dans les marges, véritablement. Le voici donc. Je ne suis pas une publication. Je suis l'espace public. Je suis un chant d'oiseau. Je suis un timbre-poste. Je suis la sonnerie d'un clocher, entendu sur de longues distances.  Je préfèrerai être lu en public, à l'extérieur, en compagnie d' étrangers. Je veux que mon être se traduise en action. Pas grand-chose ne peut arriver aux chandelles sous les couvertures. Plus maintenant. Sortez-moi.  La seule manière de créer un espace public est de faire un espace, public. Je vais vous le prouver. Il y a des bureaucrates qui veulent vous faire croire que la sculpture publique est votre espace public. Eh bien, je suis ici pour vous dire qu' il n'en est rien. Bien au contraire. Je préférerais que vous vous éloigniez des sculptures publiques et passiez votre temps avec des mots. Les mots invoquent l'espace public, après tout, par leur mouvement furtif à travers lui. Les mots sont des yeux et des oreilles et une attache mobile à la terre ferme. Même un journal froissé demande à être considéré, touché, resitué. Leurs formes noires sur fond blanc sont plus permanentes que les roches ignées du Bouclier canadien. Pendant des siècles, vous regardiez les pâles visages de marbre des dieux, admirant leur pâleur classique, simplement un motif duquel les pigments ont été emportés au fil du temps afin d'être mal interprétés selon vos besoins. Il n'y a jamais de pigment ici. Seuls les mots.  À la vérité, toutes les sculptures publiques que je connais sont aux prises avec leur sentiment d'estime de soi. Elles sont tenues d' être flexibles, disponibles à tout moment, pour répondre à des besoins multiples. J'ai assisté à une réunion-Je pensais rejoindre la Coalition des postes permanents pour sculptures publiques. (Nous partageons un sentiment de frustration mutuel avec les annonceurs se faisant passer pour des artistes du graffiti de guérilla. Ils n'ont pas encore formé un corps local. Au lieu de cela ces crétins d'entrepreneurs vont payer plus afin de se déplacer librement dans le monde. Quel qu'en soit le coût.) De nombreuses sculptures publiques ont exprimé un désir sincère d' être retirées, achetées et prises en charge au sein de la collection permanente d'un musée, ce qui m'a terrassé. Peut-être que leurs coins de rue se sentaient de plus en plus ténus alors qu'ils voyaient les bébés en poussettes trainées, les bébés qui, assez tôt, ont grandi et ont défilé en portant des masques à gaz.  « Mais, j'ai discuté avec eux de ma position rattachée au papier qu'ils ont certes trouvé bizarre », « quel musée serait en mesure de coordonner le déracinement d'une sculpture publique et les soins respectueux de cette sculpture dans une collection ? Quoi que fasse le conservateur pour vous aider à être diffusé, la plupart de votre temps de visu attrapera un aperçu de son crâne à contre-jour, alors qu'il ferme l'unité de stockage, en chuchotant : « J'aurai besoin de vous dans trente-six mois. Pouvez-vous être prêt ? »  Non. Je leur ai dit une sculpture publique est plus comme de l'architecture que de l'art. « Vous êtes là pour rester. » La sculpture publique ne fera pas de pli, à l'usure ou la déchirure. Les sculptures publiques ne peuvent être mises en boîte pendant des années jusqu' à ce qu'un humain décide qu'elles sont intéressantes à nouveau et coordonne une rétrospective biennale sensible, in situ, historique, à base d'archives, qui fait référence aux conditions d'origine et remercie les hommes qui ont rendu tout cela possible la première fois. Ils n'ont pas écouté, mais cela me va très bien.  Ce n'est pas facile d' être conscient de soi, je vous le dis. Cela nécessite une bonne dose d' humilité.  Je sais que j'ai besoin de vous.  Je sais que je ne peux exister qu'ici, entre vos mains, et où vous décidez que je dois être lu-quoique je préconise les trains, avions, métros, taxis, places publiques, rues.  En outre, ce serait merveilleux si votre posture et expression pouvaient transmettre une intention totale envers ces mots imprimés. Sinon, ne vous donnez pas la peine. Un air d'ennui peut être presque aussi fascinant à notre époque. Cette époque est une nonépoque. Nous le savons tous. Et cette époque, c'est la jeunesse. Les êtres humains doivent être aussi jeunes que possible, vraiment. Sauf si vous êtes comme moi-imprimé sur une page-auquel cas le plus vieux sera le mieux. J'ai de la peine pour les humains. Vous n'avez pas la tâche facile. Personne n'aime un humain.  Je peux l'admettre. Je préfère vos mots à vous humains. Il y a un pouvoir en leur sein.  Mais c'est entre les pages de vos livres que je trouve le plus de réconfort de nos jours. Pages qui n'existent pas encore. Passages dans des textes qui ont été retirés, cachés, jamais écrits. C'est précisément pour cela que je dois être à l'extérieur, et vous aussi. Le béton appelle. Il veut sentir vos pieds à grandes enjambées sur son dos. Donc, posez moi et JE NE SUIS PAS UNE PUBLICATION. JE SUIS L'ESPACE PUBLIC.

Talks by Patricia Reed

Lecture at Strelka Institute (The New Normal, Moscow) Feb 23, 2017 - Informal Talk not properly f... more Lecture at Strelka Institute (The New Normal, Moscow) Feb 23, 2017 - Informal Talk not properly footnoted!

Talk for HomeWorks7, Beirut | Nov. 13 2015 (apologies not properly footnoted!)

Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks | Towards a Digitally Cooperative Culture: Recommoning Land, Data and Objects, 2021

Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, 2019

Glass Bead Journal, Site 02, 2019

e-flux Journal Vol. 101, 2019

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Vol. 24, 2019

Making & Breaking Issue 1, 2019

Para-Platforms: On the Spatial Politics of Right-Wing Populism, 2018

In The Neurotic Turn: Inter-Disciplinary Correspondences on Neurosis, ed. C. Johns (London: Repeater Books, 2017).

Talk for HomeWorks7, Beirut | Nov. 13 2015 (apologies not properly footnoted!)

We are gathered here tonight under the discursive umbrella of "the Common" and what that might me... more We are gathered here tonight under the discursive umbrella of "the Common" and what that might mean in terms of general uses and resources for art production. The gathering is staged as a micro-environment, as a testing site for the experimental creation of a model of artistic practice with arguably larger, macro ambitions in mind, namely the 'commoning' of socioeconomic relations at large. Since this project proclaims a degree of criticality, let us situate it firstly as an affirmative gesture in subtracting critique from its current predicament in art and academia that often amounts to a stagnating, doomsday diagnoses or hierarchical 'knowing better', in securing positions of didactic expertise. If this project of 'commoning' is to take on 'useful' import it starts to resemble the more constructive notion of critique discussed by Foucault where critique is equal to the 'art' of creating conditions for other life practices to emerge. The former mode of critique seems content to stop at the identification of epistemic impasses, or system illogic; whereas the latter charts out spaces where alternative modes of life can be formed as a constructive adaptation or commitment to the recognition of those impasses. With this in mind, the labour of critique becomes a labour of navigation, a plotting out of speculative trajectories for inexistent territories. This is the navigation of what could be in the face of what is, for what is demarcates a zone of epistemic certainty that supports a particular logic of the world, foreclosing on alternative structural possibilities. Navigating the could be requires the creation of a diagramme for the inexistent, it is the articulation of a new territory of logic unbound to the actual imperatives of the current landscape whose coordinates seem to have calcified our very imaginations, to the exception of cataclysmic narratives.

The current state of accelerationist philosophy increasingly appears to serve as a point of coale... more The current state of accelerationist philosophy increasingly appears to serve as a point of coalescence for various attempts at redefining diverse potentialities, estranged objectivities and inhumanisms which circulate the contemporary discourse. The following questions need to be addressed: what can we do within the confines of present conditions, while facing these challenges, agencies and vast spaces beyond? How can we unbind the shackles of the present? What are the possibilities and conditions of accelerationism itself, and what are the investments and aspirations for such a language and for such an endeavor?
That is what we mean by Reinventing Horizons.

This book arises from a peculiar set of motifs and circumstances. It aims at accompanying the conference which is held on the 18th and 19th of March 2016 of the same name and an exhibi- tion Artificial Cinema, held at Tranzitdisplay, Prague. It also serves a purpose of its own. As such, the book takes its point of depar- ture in the accelerationist discourse, which we take to be a broad and heterogeneous strand of thought attempting a redefinition, or even a repurposing, of current means, be it within the context of academia, the arts, technology or media, in order to address unresolved contemporary socio-political problems. It has been our objective to bring together a broad variety of contributors in order to accommodate various themes coalescing around the debates of contemporary thought.