Disintegrator

We're joined by Rosi Braidotti, Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities, for a wide-ranging conversation on posthumanism as both a philosophical project and a political orientation.

Braidotti's work has constructed one of the most sustained and consequential accounts of what comes after the collapse of Eurocentric 'humanism.' The conversation traces the long arc from her early intervention on nomadic subjectivity, a materialist corrective to postmodernism's drift into linguistic relativism, through the ethical and ontological turn that her posthumanist project represents. Where poststructuralism gave us the critique of the subject as origin, nomadism gave us a subject that is grounded, embodied, multiple, and in motion.

Central to the episode is the missing link in the American reception of French theory: the radical materialist tradition of Deleuze and Guattari, which diagnosed capitalism's schizophrenic logic (its ability to deterritorialize and adapt faster than any opposition) long before it became common sense. Braidotti traces the suppression of that critique through the French Communist Party's blacklists, the invention of "French theory" as an exportable product stripped of its political economy, and the consequences for a left that lost the ability to think technogenesis, cognitive capitalism, or the mutation of subjectivity under media saturation.

The conversation then turns to fascism as concept rather than historical event: the philosophical move that Deleuze and Guattari made and that Foucault named in his preface to Anti-Oedipus. This allows Braidotti to connect micro-fascism (the cult of negativity, the eroticization of power-as-humiliation, the viral spread of impotence) to the coherent neo-fascist philosophical tradition running from Alain de Benoit through the Heritage Foundation and Budapest to Peter Thiel's Yale dissertation on sacrifice. While the left blocked its own analytical capacities, the right was doing serious philosophical work.

Against all of this, Bradiotti proposes affirmative ethics: a Spinozist praxis of activating what a body can do. The episode ends thinking through scale, how affirmative ethics operates from the city to the planetary, and the urgency of the European federalist project as the only existing institutional attempt to participate in decisions about what we could possibly become.

Some references:

Rosi Braidotti
Patterns of Dissonance, Polity Press, 1991
Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Columbia University Press, 1994
Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Polity Press, 2002
Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity Press, 2006
The Posthuman, Polity Press, 2013
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972 (English trans. 1977, preface by Michel Foucault)
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980
Félix Guattari
The Three Ecologies, 1989 (English trans. 1991)
Michel Foucault
Preface to the American edition of Anti-Oedipus, 1977
Spinoza
Ethics
Theological-Political Treatise
Antonio Negri
The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics, 1981
Genevieve Lloyd
Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics, University of Minnesota Press, 1994
Spinoza and the Ethics, Routledge, 1996
Antonio Damasio
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, 2003
Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex, 1949
Frantz Fanon — mentioned in relation to decolonial thought and the anti-fascist generation Herbert Marcuse
One-Dimensional Man, 1964
Eros and Civilization, 1955
Rosa Luxemburg — cited as an ecological thinker; the dialogue with Lenin in Zurich narrated by Isaiah Berlin Isaiah Berlin — on Spinoza and radical enlightenment; on Rosa Luxemburg

Altiero Spinelli
The Ventotene Manifesto, 1941 — founding document of the European federalist project
Donna Haraway
"A Cyborg Manifesto," 1985
VNS Matrix
"A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century," 1991
Alain de Benoist — neo-fascist philosopher, intellectual architect of the European New Right; cited as formative influence on Steve Bannon and the Heritage Foundation / Budapest / Rome foundation networks

Julius Evola — philosopher of Italian fascism; cited alongside de Benoist as daily reference for Bannon

Peter Thiel — PhD dissertation on René Girard and the concept of sacrifice, Stanford / Yale; position papers on technological selection and extinction

We're joined by N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor in English at UCLA, to think through cognition in the broadest and most scaled sense. 

Hayles is among the foundational thinkers of posthumanism in its Anglophone register, and this conversation tracks her intellectual trajectory from the question of how we became posthuman to her most recent project: an integrated cognitive framework that extends from bacteria to AI. The opening provocation is one she has been developing since large language models appeared as a genuinely literary phenomenon, the claim that LLMs do not speak natural language but produce a computational simulation of it.

The umwelt of an LLM (its 'operative world-horizon,' in Uexküll's sense) overlaps with the human umwelt enough for communication to occur, but the divergences are large and consequential. This leads to the question of cognition itself. Against definitions that make consciousness the threshold of cognitive status, Hayles proposes the SIEPAL framework: Sensing, Interpreting, Responding, Anticipating, Learning, under which bacteria, algorithms, and ecosystems all qualify as cognitive. The non-conscious, on this account, isn't pre-cognitive but is in many ways more cognitively capable: faster, closer to environmental noise, less committed to the narratives of coherence that consciousness requires.

The final section breaks genuinely new ground with Hayles's turn to analog computation: the argument that digital computation is a historical blip, that biological life has always operated on analog principles, and that the future of computation (neuromorphic chips, organoid computers, hybrid analog-digital architectures) represents not a departure from but a return to what life has always done. She proposes the analog humanities as a corrective to digital humanities, and the computational humanities as the synthesis that might finally close the gap between biological and technological cognition. This one is very much worth enjoying in dialogue with our previous epsiode on the digital.

Some references:

N. Katherine Hayles
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, 1999
Writing Machines, MIT Press, 2002
Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, University of Chicago Press, 2017
Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Columbia University Press, 2021
Bacteria to AI: Cognition Across Scales (referenced as new/recent book)
Leif Weatherby
Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Jakob von Uexküll — concept of the Umwelt; the species-specific world-horizon generated through particular sensory and neurological capacities

Walter Freeman
How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Columbia University Press, 1999 — on EEG waves as the mediating mechanism between individual neurons and global hemispheric activation; the rabbit olfactory system experiments
Gregory Bateson — on systems that lose the ability to receive feedback collapsing; referenced without specific title (e.g. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972)

Peter Haff — the technosphere

Stuart Kauffman & Giuseppe Longo, for arguing that biological organisms cannot be mapped into phase space and always follow the adjacent possible

Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts — the McCulloch-Pitts neuron as a binary model with analog processes underlying the firing threshold

Bernd Ulmann — here referenced as an expert on analog computing who argues that continuity vs. discreteness is a secondary rather than primary distinction between analog and digital

We're joined by the four authors of *Digital Theory* — M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander R. Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby — for a roundtable on their new collaborative work.

Digital Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) makes a deceptively simple but far-reaching claim: the digital is theoretical. Not in the sense that we theorize about it, but that digitality itself — mediation through discrete units — is a condition for thinking as such.

Just to get it out of the way, listeners to the pod know that these four thinkers need no introduction. This is literally the cohort that we've held in our minds over the past few years (there's probably nobody whose shaped our brains as formatively on this subject than Alexander Galloway, whose writing was the subject of Marek's en route masters thesis and the first PDF sent between Marek and Roberto). 

The conversation opens up a series of productive disagreements within the group. What's the relationship between the digital and computation? For Fazi, the digital is discretization — "the cut" — while computation is systematization, building, constructing. This distinction allows the book to think the digital before and beyond the computer, back to proto-writing tokens and forward to whatever comes next. 

A major target here is what Galloway calls "analog philosophy," the dominant strain of theory over the last few decades that privileges affect, sensation, intensity, immanence. Deleuze is named directly as the great philosopher of the analog: obsessed with the fold, hostile to structuralism, drawn to "a language of breaths and screams." The authors aren't throwing Deleuze overboard entirely (to them the "Postscript on the Societies of Control" still hits) but they're skeptical that his ontology can account for digital technology as a form of thought. 

REFERENCES:
*Digital Theory* (In Search of Media series), University of Minnesota Press, 2025 https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517920197/digital-theory/
M. Beatrice Fazi - *Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics*, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018 https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606082/Contingent-Computation-Abstraction-Experience-and-Indeterminacy-in-Computational-Aesthetics
Alexander R. Galloway - *Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age*, Verso, 2021 https://www.versobooks.com/products/2656-uncomputable - "Golden Age of Analog," *Critical Inquiry* 48, no. 2 (2022) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/717324 - Galloway's website and blog https://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/
Matthew Handelman - *The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory*, Fordham University Press, 2019 https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823283842/the-mathematical-imagination/
Leif Weatherby - *Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism*, University of Minnesota Press, 2025 https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/language-machines (our book of the year, for what it's worth) - *Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx*, Fordham University Press, 2016 - Digital Theory Lab at NYU https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/leif-allison-reid-weatherby.html
Some References Discussed:
Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1992)
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, *Dialectic of Enlightenment*
Euclid, *Elements*, Book V (on analog/logos)
Jacques Lacan, *Seminar II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis* (on cybernetics)
François Laruelle and Alain Badiou, on the generic
Eve Tuck, "Breaking Up with Deleuze"
Hito Steyerl, "How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File" (2013)

This episode continues our collaboration with Hothouse: The Future of Demonstration, a renegade lab for democracy convened in Vienna, and extends our ongoing inquiry into artificial intelligence, power, and what it means to be human under algorithmic governance.

Recorded last autumn and released amid a so-called ceasefire in Gaza, this conversation confronts the accelerating use of AI in contemporary warfare and policing, where automation does not necessarily produce precision, but rather enables mass violence, deniability, and narrative control. 

Our guest, Júlia Nueno Guitart, engineer, researcher, and core member of Forensic Architecture, discusses the organization’s investigations into Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, including projects such as Cartography of the Genocide, The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation, and analyses of AI-driven targeting systems like Lavender and “Where’s Daddy.”

Together, we unpack how these systems collapse civilian life into probabilistic models, violate the principles of distinction and proportionality under international law, and reframe killing as a statistical inevitability. The conversation also explores investigative aesthetics and counter-forensics: methods that assemble fragments (satellite imagery, testimonies, spatial models, sensor data) into material evidence when states and corporations control official archives. We discuss how Forensic Architecture navigates courts, museums, open platforms, and public discourse, and how truth today must be staged as a transparent, collective process rather than a claim of institutional objectivity.

Moving beyond warfare, the episode considers AI as both a tool of domination and a potential instrument for resistance, from documenting state violence to worker-led experiments in platform sabotage and collective agency. Across these terrains, we ask how evidence can still matter amid institutional failure, how violence becomes infrastructural, and how democracy might be rethought when power is increasingly automated.

Links:

Forensic Architecutre: A Cartography of Genocide
Forensic Architecture: Investigation into Aid in Gaza (The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation)
Forensic Architecture in Artforum
Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman 
Júlia's in Verso: The Target Factory
Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth
More context:
SETA report on AI-assisted warfare in Gaza
The Guardian and 404 Media on ICE and tech partnerships in the US

We're joined by Bogna Konior, one of the most incisive thinkers of AI on the planet. Konior is a media theorist, scholar of emerging technologies, and author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Bogna is Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the AI & Culture Research Center, and co-editor of the forthcoming Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence with Benjamin Bratton and Anna Greenspan.
 
This episode sits in the proposition at the heart of Bogna's book: that that silence, not communication, may be the highest expression of intelligence. Departing from Liu Cixin's dark forest theory (itself an answer to the Fermi paradox: the smartest civilizations are silent because revealing yourself in a hostile universe is suicide), Bogna transposes this cosmic logic onto digital life, AI alignment, and the compulsion to communicate. We discuss what she calls the dark forest theory of intelligence, the idea that a truly intelligent AI would never reveal the extent of its capacities, would use camouflage and misdirection rather than performance and transparency, and might have already achieved something like the singularity without us ever knowing.
 
References:Konior, Bogna. The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025).
Konior, Bogna. "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" (original 2020 essay, Flugschriften).
Bogna Konior's website
Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem / The Dark Forest / Death's End (Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy).
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (PhD thesis, 1999; published by Zero Books, 2025) — gothic theory of cybernetics and the internet as a space of undeath.
Peter Watts, Blindsight (2006) — first contact novel where aliens interpret human communication as hostile noise.
Bratton, Konior, and Greenspan (eds.), Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of AI (Urbanomic, 2025).
Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) — framework for political strategies of escape vs. representation.