<<TRANSMATHOME

V          Breeding Demons

‘...when demons are allowed to barter, bid and compete among themselves for resources, they begin to form “computational societies” which resemble natural ecologies (like an insect colony) or even human ecologies (like a marketplace). In other words, demons begin to acquire a degree of independence from their designers.’[378]

Philosophy and two thousand years of society built on the principles with which it has covered thought, like a caul, has designed women as weak, passive, sensitive, mad, imaginary, material, natural, disgusting, prudish, whorish, virginal, Amazonian, foolish, untrustworthy, ammoral, childish and incapable of learning (Kant says that educating women is ‘a malicious strategem of men’[379], and done only in the interests of male vanity). But, despite all this, men have still wanted to possess these peculiar, confusing and contrary animals. Kant says that even in a state of nature, women are domestic animals - already useful, if only to carry the bags. In  this respect it appears that the wilder aspects of designed women are- like the sublime - always situated in a context, in the socio-cultural context of women, that of domesticity and reproduction.

A demon is a figure in the process of generating independence from design principles - in other words for an element in a learning system, a bias towards concretizing real solutions, like a market, which operates not through the accumulation of information, as goods, but through interactions with other demons, in a heterarchical space (a Pandemonium), which is continuously mobile, and perceptible, although the principles of its mobility are imperceptible, escaping recognition. The survival of a demon is a function of its interaction with other demons in its locality, where locality is not a geographical position given in advance, but the consequence of connections generated amongst demons in the process of developing problem-solving strategies. The problem-solving strategies depend in part on what Manuel DeLanda, from whom this information on demons comes, calls “trust.”

Words such as this are dangerous, implying moral sensibilities dictating material interactions. Evelyn Fox-Keller has already been quoted in regard to this problem, of imposing human romances on nature. Fox-Keller located the critical question behind the apparent altruism of natural systems (their willingness to ‘die’ for the system) as a problem of quantifying the maximum degree of cost to themselves individuals will tolerate before any socially compliant character is disinvested - social in a bacterial, rather than human, sense. However, this is not sufficient, since it suggests there is an option for disinvestment through which the individual is retained, but in an isolated state. In systems where function and formation are inseparable, and where interaction generates a partial object, as an intensification of a movement or direction, disinvestment is equal to death, or more accurately, the complete eradication of the parameters in terms of which the inital problem was understood. So absence of tolerance to a system on the part of any element generated by it results in the extinction of that element, which in turn transforms the nature of the system.

The movement is that of the actual continuum, the basis of Kant’s dynamics, the material force of synthesis, the resource on which the subject draws, the detour he takes into the outside. What is missed when the position of women in philosophy is read solely in terms of their exclusion is precisely this movement, right at its heart. For philosophy has not simply been an abstract theoretical discipline, but has been instrumental in the organization of social, political, cultural, sexual, economic, legal, educational etc., etc, orders. In order to function as a real description of space - as Kant demands of transcendental philosophy - it has to have some account of real relations; in order for him to declare with confidence that from the court of reason ‘nothing can escape us’, it must understand where the possibilities of escape lie.[380] However, this is an impossible demand; something must always escape, unless the system is dead in advance, because life is an escape art, an art of destruction and creation, which is theorized under the name critique.