“To use the technical language of systems theory: machines emerge from their environment. They are the result of a certain threshold of complexity being crossed in certain arrangements of things such that they begin to be capable of holding themselves together over time. In this sense, machines are both definite things, discrete from other machines, but also ongoing processes. As such, they are characterized by what Maturana and Varela call operational closure and structural openness vis-à-vis their environment. Structural openness means that machines are capable of receiving certain forms of inputs from their environment. Operational closure, however, means that those inputs are shaped to fit specific forms dictated by the machine — other forms of inputs are completely ignored. Machines perform systematic operations on the inputs they receive and produce outputs as a result. In Bryant’s language, that means that we can know a machine by its powers: by what it is capable of doing.”
“To communicate with a bureaucracy we must fill out paperwork or a form and submit it to the institution. A form is itself a machine that operates on certain inputs — most generally, circumstances of our life revolving around taxes, medical matters, permits for building … and so on — transforming these inputs into certain structured media of communication. In other words, the form is the machinic-mediator between us and the bureaucracy.”
“The form acts as the media through which the bureaucracy can know about us, in the same way that photons vibrating at certain frequencies are one of the media through which humans orient themselves in space. This mediation means that systems only ever operate with partial information about their environments: the mediation of our interaction with bureaucracies by forms, for example, means that the bureaucracy never interacts with what we might think of as our “whole” being; it can only interact with those aspects that can be registered by the machine of the form, which is why “our experience of bureaucratic-machines is often so acutely painful and frustrating.””
“[A] corporeal machine is any machine that is made of matter, that occupies a discrete time and place, and that exists for a duration. Subatomic particles, rocks, grass, human bodies, institutions, and refrigerators are all corporeal machines. Incorporeal machines, by contrast, are defined by their iterability, potential eternity, and the capacity to manifest themselves in a variety of different spatial and temporal locations at once while retaining their identity. Recipes, scores of music, numbers, equations, scientific and philosophical theories, cultural identities, novels, and so on are all examples of incorporeal machines. In discussing incorporeal machines, we must take care lest we fall into a sort of Platonic dualism where we treat these entities as subsisting ideally in some other real. All incorporeal machines require a corporeal body in order to exist in the world. Numbers, for example, must occur in brains, computer data banks, graphite, chalk, etc. in order to exist in the world.”
“Incorporeal machines remain distinct from the corporeal machines in their systematic coherence as identical machines across multiple instantiations in other corporeal machines. An algebraic equation, for example, has the same forms of structural openness, operational closure, and internal systematic organization whether materialized in my brain, on scratch paper, or in a graphing calculator.”
“The relations of incorporeal and corporeal machines, then, together weave the fabric of what Bryant calls “worlds.” A world is simply a “loosely coupled assemblage of machines interacting with one another through the mediation of other machines in an ecology.””
“Over time, these machines’ actions and interactions build more or less durable pathways. These pathways are literally geographic in only a trivial sense; much more important are their topological structure. That is to say, it is much more important to know how closely one machine is related to one another — what sorts of access a given machine has to the outputs of another machine, or between which machines pathways do not exist — than to know their physical distribution in space.”
“The difference between his and large-scale social theorizing, however, is that an onto-cartographical approach to understanding that influence would not begin at the level of ideology, or even ready-made conceptual wholes like nations, but would try to map the actual relationships between the incorporeal and corporeal machines that have produced a particular ecological structure or process. To simplify a great deal, rather than looking first at “capitalism” and attendant notions of “alienation” for an explanation of the relationship between the factory worker and her product, we might instead look at the pathways between the energetic machines of petrochemical extraction underlying our global transport system, the incorporeal machines of finance and debt, and the concrete technical machines that form the substrate for the global telecommunications network in order to understand how and why certain persons come to occupy certain topological spaces within our current ecology of production.”
“Bryant explicitly argues that onto-cartography should not be understood as primarily descriptive, but as forming the basis for a new type of politics. If the revolutionary analyses of the contemporary left have been predicated upon a “semiotic politics,” trafficking in meaning and focused on the critique of ideology, then the time has come for a change in strategy. Onto-cartography would form the analytic basis for a “thermodynamic” politics:”
“Thermodynamic politics is a form of political engagement that targets a machine’s sources of energy and capacity for work. … Most machines require work and energy to sustain themselves across time. In the case of a corporate-machine, the energy required consists of the resources that the machine draws upon to produce and distribute its goods — natural resources, electricity, water, fossil fuels, capital to invest in production, and so on — as well as the labor that allows the machine to engage in its operations of production and distribution. These are the flows to which a corporate-machine is structurally open. Thermodynamic politics targets these flows of energy and work, effectively speaking the ‘language’ of the machine’s operational closure, thereby creating leverage conducive to change.”
“I admire his commitment to making the world a less terrible place, and share fellow feeling with many of the movements that he lists here. However, it seems to me that his form of politics and understanding of how worlds work equally recommends itself to those who would maximize their own power at the expense of others as to those who would oppose that power. If all that is at work in the world of politics is the brute clash of force against force, of ontologically equivalent entities maneuvering to achieve their own aims and live by their own standards, what grounds are there to say with Bryant that an onto-cartographical analysis of the oppressed’s own capabilities and aims would in any way necessarily result in compassion for them on the part of the oppressor? One can easily imagine an ethnographically-savvy conquistador.”
“If onto-cartography allows for a sophisticated set of tactics designed to actively reshape the ecological relationships between machines, but no guiding set of principles for when those relationships are healthy and when they are destructive, what is to prevent the emergence of a consultancy that teaches corporations how to use them to liquidate opposition groups? In short, by reducing the world of politics to an interplay of material forces, he may well have unintentionally evacuated it of all notions of right. Ironically, his thermodynamic political position here seems to require a great deal of semiotic commitments to be “ported in” if it is to function as emancipatory.”
“His work represents to my mind the sturdiest bridge yet built between post-structuralism and the vibrant new research being conducted under the auspices of a return to materialist thought.”