News/Research

Conference Grants: William Morgan on Machine Learning and the Digital Realization of Deleuze

30 Apr, 2020

Conference Grants: William Morgan on Machine Learning and the Digital Realization of Deleuze

William Morgan received a Spring 2020 BCNM Conference Grant to help cover his costs attending the 2020 Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India World Congress in Delhi, India. Morgan presented "‘What is (Machine) Philosophy?’: Machine Learning and the Digital Realization of Deleuze." Read more about his experience in his own words below.

In what seems a lifetime ago now—this past February—I traveled to Delhi for the 2020 Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India World Congress. There I gave a paper entitled “‘What is (Machine) Philosophy?’: Machine Learning and the Digital Realization of Deleuze”, wherein I argued that placing political hope in concepts like becoming, the aleatory or difference in itself have in a way run out of steam, as Bruno Latour might say. That is, with the novel machine learning techniques emerging from Silicon Valley we are witnessing the conversion of these erstwhile revolutionary conceptual modes into the properly productive data discourses of the technocratic elite.

In my paper, I sketched a broad overview of subversive forces becoming refigured as productive ones, reading from Marx to Marilyn Manson and arguing that a crucial factor that authorizes the re-descriptive maneuver is precisely the type of machine available at the moment of transgression. At the conference, I argued that with machine learning a new “type” of machine is active in the registering of deviant behavior, one which derives additional force from the opacity of its operating. As such, I argued that understandings of control must contend with machine learning as that which automates perception at an infrahuman level, correlating behavioral data on a scale heretofore unimaginable.

Two speakers at the conference also took up similar themes. Anne Sauvagnargues from Paris Nanterre, who gave a talk entitled, “The Ecological Turn in Metaphysics” and Daniel Smith from Purdue University whose talk was on “The Pure Form of Time and the Power of the False: Deleuze on Temporality and Truth”. It was a pleasure to converse with these scholars and others at the conference. I am grateful to BCNM for the generous grant, which helped make this trip possible.