Core Post: Thoughts on ontological and epistemological continuity

This week I chose to read Jussi Parikka’s “Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media” and Matteo Pasquinelli’s “Four Regimes of Entropy.” I was immediately struck by how both authors make a case for ecology understood in terms that are ontologically and epistemologically continuous. For Parikka, this gesture occurs in the erasure of a distinction between nature and culture. He writes:

The idea of media as a contraction and folding of time and space underlines the insight that time and space are not just solid and stable backgrounds for action or communication. They are themselves in continuous movement and mutation and are attached to the relations in which they are formed. Nature and media are subsequently to be understood not as distinct ontological regimes but both are to be seen in terms of processuality and becoming in the manner that the recent Deleuzian wave of theory has suggested (36).

I agree with Parikka that space and time are not just solid, stable backgrounds for action and also think that accounting for ecological and ontological continuity is incredibly urgent. However, I’m suspicious of the assertion that our knowledge of this continuity is self-evident. Again, eco-critical and new materialist ontologies may be more important now than ever. That said, we might also need to continue remembering the ways that knowledge itself has limits, discrepancies and is intimately tied to interpretation, politics and power.

In this respect, I found myself both fascinated and frustrated by Pasquinelli’s essay. Fascinated because the inorganic ecology and geology he lays out is unexpected and compelling. That being said, I wonder to what extent substituting the gene for the cell as a unit of study displaces the problems of figurative language rather than solves them. After all, the premise of his essay is a questioning of the continuity of technical metaphor and biological metaphor. For Pasquinelli, moving from the gene to the cell seems to imply a shift from the figurative to the real. This is an interesting move and set of questions, but unfortunately I don’t think there’s any way to bypass the figurative and its interpretation.

I myself know almost nothing about genetics and cell biology, so I will avoid commenting on those parts of the essay. Where I found myself irritated was the portion where the author claims that a digital logos is outside of an economy of energy. He writes, “Digital networks are purely mathematical spaces: no gravity, no friction, no entropy whatsoever. The ethics and aesthetics of the digital, its Free Culture and Remix Culture, are possible thanks to such a virtually zero-energy engine,” (64). As we read in Nathan Ensmenger and Mél Hogan’s article, both of which I liked very much, this simply isn’t true. My contention isn’t that ontological continuity is irrelevant, but that obscuring figurative knowledge (as well as the limits of such knowledge) risks reifying something like a non-entropic digital logos as self-evident truth.

All this said, Pasquinelli’s paper also contains elements that allow for an alternative reading. He briefly comments on the etymology of the word organism, that it derives from the Greek ergon, which he translates to energy. I would add that ergon doesn’t just mean energy, but work measured in terms of energy’s expenditure. As work, the term not only designates expenditure, but the delimitation of a field: that which is properly work and that which isn’t. I couldn’t help thinking of another post-structuralist thinker’s interpretation of the ergon, Derrida’s. For him, the ergon’s coherence as a unified field depends on something like a frame: the parergon. This frame is both continuous and discontinuous with the ergon. Like a parasite, the parergon contaminates the ergon from the inside. It is at once the ergon’s condition of possibility as well as the point where that possibility is threatened with destruction. Instead of fetishizing continuity for itself, a concept like Derrida’s parergon allows us to think both continuity and rupture. More importantly, it recognizes how practices of knowledge may always depend on the transcendental while also situating spaces that avoid overdetermination, spaces where we might think critique and change.