Becoming minor,virtuality and counter-modelling

Abstract

Expanding from Borbach and Kanderske's study of counter-practices in sensor-media societies this commentary explores two additional aspects that both support their insights. The first, related to the concept of becoming-minor, seeks to further develop their ethical-political framework, while the second, focusing on virtuality and counter-modelling, broadens the scope of analysis to include the entanglement between the virtual and the computational.

Sensor datafication is a field of vast activity with billions of sensors constantly providing new data, as Borbach and Kanderske (2024) rightly note. Sensors not merely generate data, but thereby determine economic, societal and political situations and the entangled relations between humans, more-than-humans (technology included) and environments. Sensors are ubiquitous, their quantity world-wide is growing, while Earth becomes a planetary computer (Gabrys, 2016). To extend this saturated condition, and the literature on this topic, Borbach and Kanderske propose what they call a counter-practice. A counter-practice is part of a range of praxeological approaches, which decenter technological objects and instead look at the surrounding operativity of human practices entangled with technology. A counter-practice operates in opposite ways to those practices analysed. For sensor datafication and their associated algorithmic processes, their counter-practices are those “that aim to circumvent or subvert their sensing and sensemaking operations” (2024: 4). Borbach and Kanderske propose three archetypical strategies – hiding in plain sight (A), dis/simulating presence (B), and exploiting sensor logics (C) – which help to navigate through the field of counter-practices opposing sensor-based identification. Given that counter-practices are often visual, they constitute practices of countervisuality (Mirzoeff, 2011: 23–25). Furthermore, operations of identification align with enclosure (Andrejevic, 2007), thus counter-practices are acts of resistance, disruption, deception, simulation and dissimulation, exploitation. Since these operations sometimes inevitably involve violence, it is, in my opinion, necessary to frame them as defence, with the aim to cause the least possible damage. It helps that most of the cases introduced by Borbach and Kanderske are from the interference fields of art, experimental design and rather playful activism, but at least one of their examples originates from the field of military camouflage tactics. This commentary highlights two further aspects, both of which confirm the insights articulated by Borbach and Kanderske. The former attempts to deepen their ethical-political framework. The latter extends the field of attention towards the interference fields of the computational and the virtual.

Counter-practices as minor practices

The ethical-political framing of counter-practice as proposed by Borbach and Kanderske lacks a key safeguard to support its concern and make it part of anti-authoritarian, anti-racist, non-identitarian, solidarity-oriented practices, which carefully avoids violence to the least possible degree. Therefore, I suggest a perspective evoked by a concept the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the anti-psychiatrist Felix Guattari first formulated in the mid-1970s called “becoming-minor” (1986: 27). This countermeasure, especially its later variant from A Thousand Plateaus, favours adaptation, the ephemeral and fugitive over a too narrow stubbornness and conservation of seemingly unchangeable facts, values, identities, concepts and traditions. Deleuze and Guattari propose that the “majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian” (2004: 106). Becoming minor, therefore, is always procedural; there is no end. Counter-practices are minor practices as long as they oppose major hegemonic, often fascist, powers, which themselves are merely hunting an unreachable ideal, such as the liberal white male hetero-sexual and fully able body with unlimited power, wealth and freedom. Becoming minor thus implies the recognition of “impasses” (Berlant, 2011: 4, 199). The current digital society, especially the earlier articulations in the realm of Guattari's and Deleuze's reading of Franz Kafka's works supports the argument. For them a writer is a “machine-man” (1986: 7) and since the dawn of the personal computer more kinds of writer-machines emerged: the hacker, the coder, the programmer and technologically-informed artist. Minor literature, in other words, minor software or minor code is not made by minor linguistic or programming elements, but uses a major language, a major programming language to create “the opposite dream” (1986: 27). Minor writing differs from everybody's dream, does not target the majority, but instead translates the matters of countering into machinic components, channels, gates, modules entangled with semiotic, symbolic and abstract meaning. In more technical terms, minor writing codes an abstract and conceptual model of the things to counter. At the same time, it also dismantles that model and its parts (1986: 47). This early version of becoming-minor comes very close to counter-practice, while at the same time it both amplifies its resistive disposition and intensifies its ethical-political embedding into adequate perspectives.

Virtuality and counter-modelling

Fortifying the base of approaches and perspectives, as I just proposed for counter-practice, facilitates also the growth of extensions. Most of the counter-practices studied by Borbach and Kanderske are rather based on short-sighted, one time actions instead of aiming to provide long-term insights and gateways to societal transformation. This is due to the image-based and vision-oriented cases they draw upon to critically study the codes, logic, and logistics of recent sensor-media societies. These cases are from the realm of machine and computer vision, about spoofing identities, which is to deceive by visual appearance, such as in camouflage, or on the exploitation of the automated narrowness of algorithmic systems based on object recognition. Borbach and Kanderske study practices, that harness and misuse the “logics of sensor algorithmic sensemaking” (2024: 13). Generally, they denounce and condemn practices of identification and capture, without alluding to what might come after the operation of their visualization, disruption and playful exploitation. More metaphorically formulated they studied cases which show how to counter or maybe even evade identification practices, but not how to transform the system – the dispositive in Foucauldian terms, that legitimates and automates operations of identification – nor how other algorithmic systems might operate without depending on processes of identification. Therefore, I propose to study the virtuality of algorithmic systems, that is what their hardware-software-user-programmer-network as linkages of material-mental-cognition-operations are in a latent manner offering, more closely (see Delanda, 2002: 33). Indeed Borbach and Kanderske offer us the way out of the impasses and dead ends of digital society by succinctly stating, that “we would have to habituate ourselves with a way of thinking that does not refer to images but to data patterns” (2024: 18). This, surely, opens up a plethora of ways out.

To get a glimpse into the vast virtuality of algorithmic systems, I elsewhere proposed an approach I then called “critical re-modelling” (Miyazaki, 2020), which suggested to use software and programming to learning more about the algorithmic specificity and operativity of an object, network or environment of study in order to re-model it. The approach is quite similarly to becoming-minor and the operations of translation and dismantling, which I was unaware of back then.

This method […] consists in prolonging, in accelerating, a whole movement that already is traversing the social field. It operates in a virtuality that is already real without yet being actual (the diabolical powers of the future that for the moment are only brushing up against the door). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 48)

The prefix ‘re’ in re-modelling hints to repetition, a replay and prolongation of a movement already existent and in action, but maybe a bit too small and too feeble. This weak mode of modelling is rather similar to what I criticized above. It mirrors existing systems and issues. Practices of counter-modelling, in contrast, would apply the virtuality of computer modelling and simulation not merely to oppose identification, but to show, unfold, actualize worlds and systems, which operate differently. One such virtuality of programming languages, which are since many decades mostly object-oriented, is simulation, especially the simulation of manifold interactions between operations, processes and agents as software objects and how such agents unfold and occur in decentralized, distributed and sometimes unforeseen dynamics (see Miyazaki, 2023a: 77–78). To inquire the virtuality or the vast possibility space, if you will, of agents-based-models might be one of the many directions to extend Borbach and Kanderske's counter-practice towards the horizon for instance of heterodox economics, as I have outlined in another context (see Miyazaki, 2023b).