This joint lecture attempts to show the relationship between culture and cultural expressions, and the way in which this relationship can be understood in an increasingly concrete and generative way.
Each cultural expression depends, among other things, on the given conditions of expression, which contain various relations to the totality of all possible expressions so conditioned. The history of this totality is, therefore, the history of the conditions themselves. This lecture examines recent changes in the conditions of expression and explores what these changes reveal about culture in the age of the information and computational revolution. In so far as intensities are tied to expressions, retroactively or otherwise, such a method of tracking changes in the conditions of expressivity can help us understand the way in which cultural production is intensified today. As conditions become more concrete, we can also use them as lenses to map intensities.
This interactive lecture gives examples to directly demonstrate how this method works.
The first part of the lecture deals with cultural production as intensive production in the Deleuzian sense. The fact that the reading of internet content is increasingly taking place at the meta-level (Caroline Busta) shows that any cultural expression can be further decyphered and that it’s this kind of deciphering that gives insight into not only the nature of the content and where it’s situated (Patricia Reed), but into its intensity as well.
In the age of social media, cultural production increasingly autonomously (or automatically) discovers and produces a wide variety of intensities, thus revealing patterns that can be recorded on the meta-level. Each pattern is a compression of intensities, and we gain insight into the intensities by looking at the ways in which they are (re)co(r)ded or systematised. By “reading” cultural expressions at the meta-level, we can infer the capacities of cultural production and understand the nature of intensities that the current level of cultural production is able to record and produce. The intensive production of culture thus becomes open to further inspection and intensification.
The second part of the lecture relates abstraction with freedom of (possibile) thought, expression and engineering by way of examples from voting and auction theory. To get to the idea of expressivity as such, the lecture makes use of lessons from computability theory. This then leads to the idea of a more general duality between classification and generation of expressions, and to questions about the expressive capacities of classification systems and the models of conceptualities themselves – classical systems such as lists, libraries, elements of art history and so on; probabilistic classification systems such as spam filters or prisoner and social media user models; and lastly the idea of vector embedding used in LLMs.
This perspective enables the exploration of failure modes of specific classification systems; the question whether the limits of expressive capacity limit intensities as such; and what can be learned from the progression of expressiveness about the progression of actual expressions. And as expressivity itself becomes subject to engineering (at least by the time of the onset of LLMs) we might expect it to become a medium of expression itself.