CONTEMPORARY ALEATORICISMS

Rancière, Jacques. Althusser's Lesson. Trans. Emiliano Battista. New York: Continuum, 2011.
Many students, such as Jacques Rancière, distanced themselves from Althusser after the failures of the PCF, both to win the presidency from Charles de Gaulle, and also the broader issues related to PCF and Althusserian backlashes against student militantism, which caused students to pull out of the party.
Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Eds. Francois Matheron and Oliver Corpet. New York: Verso, 2006. xv-xlvii.
Ibid., 167-168.
Ibid., 193.
Ibid., 264.
Ibid., 196.
Ibid.,168-169.
Ibid. 176-177.
Ibid., 170.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarre and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial, 1962. 435.
Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. "Introducing New Materialisms."New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 3.
Althusser gains special attention by Coole and Frost, who draw upon Althusser's later writings of the ISA, RSA and even aleatoricism. Specifically excluding the early Althusser of Reading Capitalism, is I think a strategic attack against a world of structuralist and authoritarian interpretations of Marxism that, even if it was a major intellectual currency, is today politically and theoretically irrelevant—especially for a new materialist and anarchist such as myself.
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 36
Althusser, Louis. "The Only Materialist Tradition.' The New Spinoza. Trans. Warren Montage and Tim Stolze, Minneapolis: UMinnesota Press, 1997. 12
Bennet, Jane. "The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout." Public Culture 17(30). Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 446
Ibid., 448.
Ibid., 458-459.
Heidegger. 98.
Ibid., 103-104.
Harman, Graham. Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphsics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2002. 191.
Wirtz, James. "U.S. Policy on Preventive War and Preemption." Nonproliferation Review. Spring 2003.
The Department of Justice White Paper. "Lawfulness of L ethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa'ida or an Associated Force." ?
Bracketing for the moment the clearer premise that we create more anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists in carpet-bombing a country than we do with peace-offerings.
Klien, Allison."Police Enlist War Tech in Crime Fight." The Washington Post. 2/18//2003
Hansen, Mark. Feed-Forward. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2015. 35-36.
Hansen turns to Alfred Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze to unpack the turn towards a post-subjective and post-consciousness lens. An object which takes hold of agency thus destabilizes the position of the subject-agent. Destabilized become the 'who' and the 'why; of the subject, along with its point of view. Thus, the need for the Whiteheadian term superject comes into play—the broader agent-neutral category of a field of interconnected subject-object epistemology. A becoming-objective of the subject—a widening of agency and experience into an environmental analysis based on world-sensibility that is engaged in a broader mesh of nonhuman and posthuman epistemologies. Hansen also argues that the superjective model is a temporal model. The experience of time and duration are quite different between human and post and non-human time. In this sense, media (internet, soundbites, digital information) radically determine temporal experiences. How is this superject aleatory? The superject is the coming together, the encounter of a broader range of experience and phenomena. This posthuman analytics is spatial and temporal, and unfolds, as Hansen suggests, in both concrescence and the event. The concrescence encounter of things, vital and non-vital parts, bodies and experiences to constitute, for example, the experience of human-internet interaction first is determined by a material and spatial relationship (screens, glass, electronic parts, and viewing and typing practices), which are all concresceing contingently. Temporally, our experience of time (slower, faster, etc.) is also contingent on a particular encounter not only of human and internet, but all of the materializes and virtualities that make up and surround this superject. Finally, Hansen argues that modulating time, superjectively can affect future becomings, meaning that because time-consciousness alters with technology, not only does our experience of time chance for a brief concrescence, but can also, as an event, shape future becomings. One such evental shaping is the fact that the Millennial Generation has shorter attention-spans due to repeated exposure to new media's hyper-speed experience
Ibid., 140.
Ibid., 169.
Hansen, Mark. "Our Predictive Condition." The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis, U Minnesota Press, 2015. 106-107
Ibid., 107-108.
https://www.recordedfuture.com/defense-intelligence/
Ibid., 124.
A second case-example of the ways in which data analysis become a central theme of posthuman US Military strategy is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) research into operational neuroscience. Military experts viewing satellite images of targets are hooked-up to EKG-machines which read neural activity. Instead of reporting their own subjective experiences, the norm for most psychological evaluations, Hansen argues that "Information is extracted directly from the neural firing patterns captured by these readings; this technique—which leaves human…entirely outside of the informational circuit." The data-logical tendencies employed by US Military are structurally dehumanizing in at least three clear ways, the first being that in assuming that data itself is all they need, removing the qualitative and experiential reactions to the stimuli, which could augment their results. For example, if pure sensory data of the perception is one of fear, a drone strike on a village would be more readily likely than if the location was far more thought through in terms of its historical, regional, religious and political contexts. A second fear of dehumanization is the destruction of the agent. Without human agency involved in determining threat, then who will be accountable for the drone strike? Who will we ask about the mis-strikes that hit schools instead of 'enemy' bases? The final threat is, once again, without some subjective-recognition, how can we depend on data analytics to offer the truly human characteristic of care? If there is no subject on either side of the satellite imaging process, either stateside in the DoD or in the image of a Syrian town, what is there stopping us from Total War?
I think that true materialism, the materialism best suited to Marxism, is aleatory materialism.
—Louis Althusser Philosophy and Marxism.

All actual entities are related according to the determinations in this continuum; and all possible actual entities in the future must exemplify these determinations in their relations with the already actual world. The reality of the future is bound up with the reality of this continuum. It is the reality of what is potential.
— Alfred North Whitehead Process and Reality

In his final writings, Louis Althusser examines the 'philosophy of the encounter,' a materialist and aleatory tradition, which spans from Epicurus to Derrida. Althusser is searching for a new way to frame materialism after the crisis of the party in France post-1968, and tries to reframe the question of a materialist history, by the radical contingency encounter. How does aleatoricism reposition Althusser's intellectual and political legacy? What do we gain from interrogating Alhusser's late work, which is a major departure from his more widely written about theories of the ISA and the Dialectical Materialism as posited in Reading Capital and On The Humanist Controversy? Why have fewer thinkers attempted to wrestle with aleatory?
In this paper I will begin developing the concept of aleatoricism by way of unpacking its genealogy. I will also examine the work of newer inheritors of an aleatory turn. This would be an attempt to move forward with the themes I presented on: the risk taken by the underground current, historical contingency, Althusser's aleatory genealogy: Epicurus and Spinoza and Heidegger, and contemporary aleatoricism theorized by new materialist scholarship. I will work out how both Althusser's genealogy of thinkers and their theories fit into and expand the concept of Aleatory Materialism, moving through a reading of aleatoricism alongside other New Materialist, Vitalist and post-Heideggerian texts. My goal is to both re-read Althusser's Philosophy of the Encounter (new) materially, and, when the opportunity arises, attempt to develop my own theories of aleatoricism and contingency.
What would a new materialist or a Heideggerian re-reading do for the project of Althusser? I start from a point which understands most of Althusser's theories as not clearly grounded in the political, social and material world in which he lived. I find much of Althusser's project as dead weight. Therefor any experiment to re-vitalize him to be worthwhile, not only as a means to hold onto what is valuable (aleatory materialism and contingent history), but also to be able to position my own theories of aleatoricism among other 'Young Althusserians.'
LIFE OF A MATERIALIST
Louis Althusser, French Marxist Philosopher, was born in French Algeria in 1918, moving to France as a youth. It wasn't too long before Althusser began to embrace the radical vision of communism pervading the European scene. From early on he was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF), and only tacitly supported the maoist militant students he taught in Paris in 1968—remaining an authoritarian Marxist-Leninist, philosophically and politically, to the end of his days. This controversial position created major rifts, both within the PCF and among his students and followers.Althusser had a long battle with mental health issues. Famously, he wound up killing his wife, Helene, in a bout of insanity, in 1980, and then spent three years in a psychiatric hospital. It was in these last years of his life that Althusser took up aleatory materialism, as a final gesture pointing towards a previously underdeveloped connective tissue that would link the seemingly discontinuous work on history, encounters and materialism produced throughout his life.
Althusser frustratingly almost never wrote a single text that is grounded in the radically dynamic historical contingent in which he was placed—that of a world of radical French militant struggles of the 1960s-1970's. Althusser is only able to look back to Marx and create an authoritarian and gnostic reading of Marx's Capital, and much of Althusser's authorship comes off as quite dated. We materialists of the 21st Century are not quite as limited in examining the limits of the conjuncture of Althusser: scientificity, structuralism, theory, and Maoism. The one exception in my mind to the notion of Althusser's irrelevance in todays intellectual and political context is, as I will assert over the course of this paper, is aleatory materialism.
ALEATORICISM
Aleatory materialism exists as its own theoretical and political tendency among philosophers of a particular type of view of history and the world as being viewed contingently. As Althusser describes this in his last essay titled, "The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter." In this essay, Althusser describes this intellectual project as having as its goal:
To bring out: the existence of an almost completely unknown materialist tradition of the history philosophy; the 'materialism' of the rain, the swerve, the encounter, the take. I shall develop all of these concepts. To simplify matters, let us say, for now, a materialism of the encounter, and therefore of the aleatory and of contingency…The fact that this materialism of the encounter has been repressed by the philosophical tradition does not mean that it has been neglect by it: it was took dangerous for that."
The aleatory turn that Althusser identifies is the turn of a historical moment, and event that changes not only 'the course of history,' but a swerve in meaning as it relates to history—a swerve in meaning as such. In this sense, aleatoricism is materialist for its engagement with the way real matter has and does encounter to reframe the equally real world, its bodies, its means of production, and its histories. I will, over the course of the paper, go into more detail about what these encounters are and how they work, but I first want to examine his conception of danger. Althusser's genealogy of the encounter, which incorporates thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, can be highlighted through the vast philosophical and political threats each posed to their own historical conjecture.
Spinoza, a spiritual Jewish-atheist, was excommunicated—for his claim that all substance is one, that is God—refuting the mind/body dualism of Descartes. Spinoza also suggested that God is immanent to the World, that God is Nature, and, by extension God is us. Marx, more overtly politically dangerous, was directly involved in the revolutionary movement taking place in France, and whose radical political and economic writings have widely produced dissent, in particular within revolutionary labor movements. And Heidegger, a revolutionary thinker who systematically destroyed the philosophical inherence of the self, posited an entirely new mode of human's relationship and dependence on objects, and was a crucial part of the radical-right wing's political and philosophical critique of the bourgeoisie and liberal ideologies.
However, more intriguing than rehearsing a radical reading of this philosophical genealogy is to examine the dangers implicit in the concept aleatory. Etymologically, aleatoricism stems from the Greek word for dice-player. The roll of the die, to determine the outcome of some arrangement, like the betting on a game, is based largely on luck. If history occurs out of chance, there is quite a lot more history that did and does not happen. Investment in contingency, either to make money or to analyze history, is to take a risk, a fiscal risk, or a political and philosophical risk, implying the dangerous quality Althusser ascribed to this genealogy of thinkers of the encounter.
More specifically about aleatoricism's temporal and potentializing nature, Althusser argues that,"Every encounter is aleatory, not only in its origins but also in its effects. In other words, every encounter might not have taken place, although it did take place; but its possible nonexistence sheds light on the meaning of its being." Encounters are aleatory in all temporal modes, they do require a random, yet particular, arrangement in the past, which we only know exists because they affect us in the present. The future is equally contingent, and not-prefigurable, upon the present conjuncture. To understand aleatoricism is to accept it as a framing of the possiblizing of the possible, or a potentializing of the potential. And the final important potentiality is that of the non-occurrence of an event.
HISTORY
Another important aspect to the nature of aleatoricism is its relation to an unfixed and anti-teleological temporal flow that Althusser described, in an interview on Philosophy and Marxism, as,"There exists another word in German, Gesgichte, which designates not an accomplished history, but history in the present, doubtless determined in large part, yet only in part, by the already accomplished past; for history which is present, which is living, is also open to a future that is uncertain, unforeseeable not yet accomplished, and therefor aleatory." History, for Althusser, operates in a non-typical temporal framework that evades telos, linear accounts of time, progress-narratives, origins and ends. Instead, the past, what it means and how history changes, unravels in the present. The present is only some degree determined by its past. History is not a static or stagnant thing, history is a living and evolving organism located in the present. Therefor, history, living and open, allows itself space for the multitudinal and contingent futures—the potentiality of the potentials.
Furthermore, according to Althusser, the unexpectedly risky nature of the encounter, "Is what strikes everyone so forcefully during the commencements, turns or suspensions of history, whether of individuals, or of the world, when the dice, as it were, thrown back on the table." We see the radically ruptural and dangerous quality the encounter has on the consensus of the world. Althusser highlights there dangerous maneuvers, the risky position of the underground current to first see and believe in an Evental, and non-teleological history, second is the reframing we have to have of history, and third is the actual violence of these real encounters.
GENEALOGY
In order to read the "Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter" as a radically dangerous genealogy of philosophers who have thought the world, meaning, history and ruptures as contingent, based on chance and randomness, we must first understand how each thinker fits into the project as a whole, and how their thinking is shaped by the maneuvers of Althusser's aleatory materialism. In the interest of presenting a new materialist reading of aleatoricism, I will focus on three thinkers, Epicurus, Spinoza and Heidegger, all of whom allow for an opening into a deeper explication of real materiality than Althusser.
EPICURUS
Epicurus, the 3rd Century BCE Ancient Greek philosopher, held the belief that happiness in life can be found in absence of fear and absence of pain. More important to Althusser, however, are Epicurus' thoughts that the world is entirely comprised of atoms, which sever a certain function and follow a particular logic. To understand this logic, Althusser argues:
Epicurus tells us that, before the formation of the world, an infinity of atoms were falling parallel to each other in the void…This implies that before the formation of the world, there was nothing,…What causes an atom to swerve from its vertical fall, and, breaking the parallelism… induce an encounter with the atom next to it, and, from encounter to encounter, a pile-up and the birth of the world…The idea that the origin of every world, and therefor of all realty and all meaning, is due to a swerve.
Epicurus understands that before the world as such, there were atoms falling parallel, with no constancy, no intentionality and no direction. This was a world without world, without things as such, without symbolic reference, sense and meaning. All of this worldlesness stops at the moment of the swerve. The swerve, or the encounter, of atoms, by chance or by gravity, produced things, bodies, humans, meaning, history and the world itself.x
SPINOZA
17th Century spiritual, Dutch-Jewish philosopher of ethics, Baruch Spinoza, as outlined above, plays a radical role in the history of philosophy for his nuanced approach to the issues of the material world. As a non-dualist, Spinoza is able to maneuver past the dissection that Descartes makes that asserts that the mind and the material world, including bodies, are made of different substance, and therefore have trouble affecting each other. Spinoza allows philosophers to be better capable of seeing the material world as already inflected by god, vitality, affects which all shape, change, and materialize the subjective experience. Turning back to Althusser's reading of Spinoza helps us to theorize the encounter of attributes and with God:
Saying that one 'begins with God,' or the Whole…'one begins with nothing'…What , then is this Spinozist God? An absolute, unique, infinite substance, endowed with an infinite number of infinite attributes….The fact that there is an infinite number of them, and that they are unknown to us, leaves the door to their existence and their aleatory figures wide open…The attributes fall in the empty space if their determinations like raindrops that can undergo encounters.
An important trope in Spinozist scholarship is the relationship between the whole and the void The orignary position is the void, the nothingness that Epicurus sees as rain. This nothingness is also everything, because it is all potential, an élan vital of bodies waiting to encounter one another. Perhaps the void was waiting for the encounter with God as understood in Genesis, that it took for the world to cohere. Accordingly, all attributes have the aleatory potential to have an encounter, like the encounter of mind and body which makes humans human. It is also likely for Spinoza that the encounter between Moses and God was another historical and cultural swerve he depended on, but like Epicurus before him, the world, history and culture all have aleatory qualities about them.
HEIDEGGER.
20th Century German phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger, as we already outlined above, was a revolutionary philosopher, by unhinging himself both from the philosophical subject and also the flaws of empiricism. Instead, Heidegger examines themes of being, anxiety, throwness, fallenness, death, and equipment, on the grounds that philosophy must begin not in abstraction, but culled from our day-to-day experience of the world. He winds up being placed within Althusser's genealogy of the materialism of the encounter in the following ways:
We find in Heidegger a long series of developments center on the expression es gibt—'there is', 'this is what is given' that converge with Epicurus's inspiration. There is world and mater. There are people…It 'opens up'a prospect that restores a kind of transcendental contingency of the world, which into which we are 'thrown.'… The world is a 'gift' that we have not been given, the 'fact of the fact' that we have not chosen, and it 'opens up' before us in the factictiy of its contingency.
To understand why Althusser deploys Heidegger into his genealogy of the encounter, we have to unpack his terms used above. 'Es gibt' or there is, implies a way of relating to the world that we did not decide on, there is the world, there is history, we cannot change the fact that we were and always will be thrown into the world, into a world with other Beings, with sets of relations and meaning, into a historical moment. Factictiy is the concrete reality of history and the world we inherited but did not ask for. We also cannot help but the fact that we find ourselves falling towards inauthentic in our everyday and average being-in-the-world. Therefor, falling, throwness, facticity and there is all imply a randomness and a strong element of chance and aleatoricism that produces and frames, for Heidegger, Being, Meaning and the World.
As to a temporal logic, throwness and factictiy relate to a contingent past we cannot control, falling is a present moment we find ourselves in, and projection, destining and fate are the conditions of the future which Dasein has some grounds to orient or alter. Heidegger's analysis of our relationship with the past and the present are entry contingent. While past and present remain strictly aleatory, one serious complication to Althusser's completely aleatory reading of Heidegger is how we read the future—as an individual or collective destining. As part of the National Socialist historical conjecture of 1930s Germany, Heidegger unfortunately is thinking his idea of future as within the nationalist fate and Nazi project as such:
Once one has grasped the finitude of one's existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one—those of comfortableness, shirking and taking things lightly—and brings Dasein to the simplicity of its fate. This is how we designate Dasein's primordial historizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness.
Contingency exists inside the Heideggerian logic insofar as being has a 'multiplicity of possibilities' regarding the past, present and even immediate future of our Being. However, as Dasein makes the classically Heideggerian motions of confronting anxiety, death and finitude, and one begins to project oneself into authenticity, the move is a historicizing one—one where Dasein creates one path by understanding and moving towards fate.
This future appears teleological, not in the classical sense, but in the modern sense of an individualized destiny. Yet, if this individual destining is something one carves out for oneself, does this lock one into a fate that becomes fixed? Or, on the other hand, is Heidegger speaking towards a liberation from the standard progression of history in the sense that one carves ones own destiny as an authentic movement towards freedom? There are tremendous debates within Heidegger scholarship about whether authenticity and destining are claims towards determinism or freedom. Althusser would have read Heidegger liberally. I maintain for my own purpose, politically and philosophically, that freedom to create a new historical moment allows him this temporality a radical quality. The future is ruptural insofar as one has the opportunity to change and alter its course, and contingent because one has to be ready to make the leap into destining, which according to Heidegger is based on the chance that one is ready with resoluteness, which is necessitated by a whole host of psychological, political and historical factors which may or may not occur in one's development.
The final point to make is, in what ways is this future meant to bleed out into a broader communal project. Destining, fate and history-making do not exist in a vacuum, and so, more complicatedly we can either see the broader social project of destiny as deterministic, conservative and flatly nationalistic, or we can see this as a crucial moment for a freeing of determination for the collective and pluralistic vision of fates, a la Simon Critchley and Jean-Luc Nancy, which I am more ready to accept, politically and philosophically.
NEW MATERIALISM AND ALTHUSSER'S FAILURES
New materialism is a school of thought wherein the mode of analysis is more practical and the objects in focus become equipment, bodies, affect, human-nonhuman relations, commodities, and assemblages. This school attempts to address the political, economic, social and environmental problems that have developed as rapid globalization and technologization have gone unchecked. This task requires us to rethink and challenge the primacy of human agency, the precarity of our relations to objects, and more broadly, anthropocentrism as such.
One realm of intellectual terrain never charted by Althusser was a deep empirical and authentic material analysis of things-in-the-world. His genealogy of aleatory materialism described and analyzed, in great detail, the real phenomena, bodies, affects, tools and historical conditions of human and non-human life, in which they were situated, including: Epicurus, Spinoza, Machiavelli, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Althusser's writing is rarely grounded in the historical and political conjuncture, the militant uprisings in France in May 68. More broadly Althusser failed to, in my mind, live up to the radical commitment to articling a non-theoretical materialism. At almost no points in his oeuvre can we find him grappling with the real world, unlike the thousands of pages in Marx's Capital, detailing to a beautiful tedium machines, technology and the evolutions of the working conditions of factory and agricultural labor.
First, and foremost, I argue that the early Althusser of Reading Capital, Althusser develops a troubled binary between what he describes as the real object and the object of knowledge, between things and the way we conceptualize them. Althusser's assertion of this division is reactive again Empiricism. While Althusser claims to have derived his theories from Spinoza, I argue that Althusser's understanding of the world is trapped in a Cartesian view of objects, both in a reassertion of the dichotomy between thought and extension, and, more glaringly reproducing a tactic of philosophy wherein its goal is to conceptualize the real object as presence. Althusser thus misses his opportunity to think the material world otherwise.
Instead of going on to critique, ad nauseam, the troubles I find with placing Althusser's philosophy within the school of materialism, I propose, instead, re-reading the Althusserian theories of aleatoricism, the encounter, and the contingency of history according to the trends found in new materialism.
NEW MATERIALISMS
New Materialisms is a collection of essays broadly engaging the themes of materialism as a school of thinking object-oriented studies, actant-network theory and agency, vitalism, and post-marxism. The gesture for thinking materiality today, according to editors Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, seems to be caught up in a world of matter and bodies. The rationale for returning to a theoretical model to understand materiality has to do with the rapidity of development of new media, technology, neurological, ecological and social media analysis—all of which make newer and broader claims about both the complex materiality of the world, which posit a post-subjective turn via crowd analysis, and which suggest a need for broader (environmental) responsibility towards nonhumans.
This collection of essays understands itself to be in a tense dialogue with the materialists of the 19th Century, including Marx, Feuerbach and Freud, who were greatly motivated by physics and biology to assert their social analysis, but who did not spend enough time theorizing the ethics and politics of the physical and biological things themselves. Responding to Althusser's conjuncture, Coole and Frost assert, "The eclipse of materialism in recent theory can be negatively associated with the exhaustion of once popular materialist approaches, such as existential phenomenology or structural Marxism."This exhaustion is asserted by the social and political failures of the Marxism's of the 1960s-1970s, along with important critiques made by post-structuralists with regards to ethical, ontological and epistemological problems in the field of structuralist thought. Instead, new materialism exists as a non-dialectical materialist theory unbounded to the Marxist position of the primacy of human life, agency and history.
So, why do Coole and Frost continue to hold on to the Althusserian legacy? And, by extension, why might I? Why do Coole and Frost assert that aleatory materialism has a strong sense of, "Affinity with some of the new materialist ontologies"? Coole and Frost seem to appreciate the encounter, emptiness and chance for their capacity to enhance the idea that for "Multimodal materialist analysis of relationships of power, it is important to recognize their diverse temporalities by examining their more enduring structures and operations as well as their vulnerability to ruptures and transformations."Perhaps Frost and Coole read aleatoricism as a radical and revolutionary tool in the history of resistance, and the resistance of history. Aleatoricism offers a more concrete potentially more generative power wage war, theoretically and politically, against the seemingly endless struggle against ISA's and the RSA, which Althusser was also obsessively theorizing at the end of his life.
Why does Althusser offer us the radical theory of contingency as his last, dying gift? Where does aleatoricism lie, then, within an Althusserian genealogy? I would argue that aleatory materialism is only relevant today, for thinking about politics, uprisings, meaning and temporality because it marks the Epistemological Break in Althusser's thinking. Aleatoricism, as I will continue to argue over the course of this essay, is the most futural, and thereof most long-lasting theory in Althusser's oeuvre.
SPINOZA, VITALISM, ELAN VITAL
One of Spinoza's most influential intellectual pursuits was to produce a school of thought concerned with vitality–the examination of life and energy inherent to fleshy matter. This matter can be moved by affect, the emotional and embedded experience of intensities from external and internal environmental stimuli. Even Althusser, who decries spiritual materialism in On the Humanist Controversy, engages in the Spinozist question of vitality:
Should I add an extraordinary theory? Yes, that of the body, based on the famous parallelism of attributes. This body (our material organic body) of which we don't know 'all the powers, 'but of which we know that it is animated by the essential power of the conatus.
In this way we can see the body as an encounter with various fleshy parts. These fleshy parts need, in some way, the real movement of stimulation to be affected, to cohere—to encounter and become a body. The flesh of the world also needs this affective stimulation to move and be moved. But what of the vitality that liberated Althusser and moved to write? Elan vital is a life force, a presence, an intensity and a potential energy inherent in human and non-human things. There term was coined by 20th Century Philosopher of Perception, Henri Bergson, who limited vitality to a force that moved fleshy, living things, an attack on the overly mechanistic philosophies which overlooked what affected things to live and move. Gilles Deleuze takes up the concept in Bergsonism, but does not carry with him the separation between living and non-living thing. For Deleuze, all things are affected and moved by élan vital.
BENNET, VITAL MATTER, ASSEMBLAGES
Out of this vitalist tradition of Spinoza, Bergson and Deleuze comes Jane Bennet, theorist of a 'radical ecology of things.' Bennet, is concerned with understanding how non-human things function, what their sociality is, and how they come to relate, in a less hierarchical and anthropocentric way, with humans. Her theories of the assemblage come to the aid of trying to re-think the agents of events as being non-human as much as they are human. In her article "The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout," she does just this. Bennet offers a wonderful example of her theory of assemblages:
The electrical power grid is a good example of an assemblage. It is a material cluster of charged parts that have indeed affiliated, remming in sufficient proximity and coordination…The elements of this assemblage, while they include humans and their construction, also include some very active and powerful nonhumans: elections, trees, wind, electromagnetic fields.
The power grid, viewed as an assemblage allows us to truly comprehend and appreciate the material substance which makes things work. Bennet presents her notion of the contingent elements required for a power grid to function—to encounter, to include a host of human and non-human things. However, she expands agency and importance to non-human objects.
Bennet then moves to describe the aleatory North American blackout that struck in August in 2004, "The North American blackout was the endpoint of a cascade—of voltage collapses, self-protective withdrawals from the grid, human decisions and omissions. The grid includes shutdown valves and circuit breakers that disconnect parts form the assemblage whenever they are threaded by excessive heat." Bennet's materialist reading articulates well the various ways in which the power grid functions, and also the complex internal (fail-safes in the grids mechanisms) and external (human energy consumption) factors that cause a blackout.
However, this blackout in fact is an entirely ruptural example of aleatoricism. The power-grid assemblage is composed of elements which have long ago cohered to bring us energy. At some point, when the power-grid was first innovated, it was likely seen as a turn in the history of energy transmission. As time passes, we do not appreciate or understand the continent elements that bring us energy until they fail. The doubly ruptural and aleatory quality of the power grid is first, when it was innovated, continently, and the second is the equally contingent break of the blackout, when the pieces of the assemblage of power came undone, which was required for us to begin to understand the power-grid's aleatory nature.
In thinking distributive agency, Bennet addresses causation; defying the tradition of scholarship which ascribes causality to one particular agent in an event. Bennet's terminological and methodological solution to chart causality of assemblages, which she understands through a metaphor of the wider array of intent and action caused by a billiard ball:
If one extends the timeframe or widens the angle of vision on the action, such billiard-ball causality falters and appears as only one of the operative modes of causality. alongside singular and integral agents, one finds a more diffuse or distributed series of actant…Emergent causality is another way of conceiving a nonlinear, indirect causality, where instead of an effect obedient to a determinate, one finds circuits where effete and cause alternate potions.
The Billiard-ball, when struck, unlocks a whole host of activities, movements, interactions with the pool table, and other balls, implying that the activity itself has a host of actant causes: balls, cues, chalk, tables, walls, pockets, humans, friction, momentum, angles and localities. The releasing of an agent thus unwinds and unfolds a far broader network of causality.
The mode of a non-linear causality, the type Bennet calls 'emergent,' allies itself with a non-determinist, non-teleological approach to temporality. Because agency and causality are not singular nor pre-determined, then, a host of futural potentialities occur within Bennet's widened conception of causation. If causation implies action, then we have to understand it temporally, like Althusser and his own genealogy of the encounter. Non-linear causation first implies non-linear time, which is one condition for aleatoricism. The second condition, the potential for full potentiality of all futures to occur, or not, can be identified in the chance implicated in the billiards-metaphor. Billiards is not a precise science, it is a game with imprecise humans, who may or may not account for the varying elements of table-friction, momentum, angles and the after-effects of a hit. Even the best players always have the chance to mis-strike, which implies another deeply aleatory relationship to the already highly continent relationship of billiard's assemblagist causality and temporality. Finally the players could also decide not to play at all.
HEIDEGGER, EQUIPMENTALITY READINESS-TO-HAND
Much of what Heidegger addresses in Being and Time is the materiality that constitutes the worldhood of the world, including trees, mountains, stars, hammers, and people. Heidegger's analysis of the relationship humans have with nonhuman things is one of the most complex and compelling arguments he makes. Things are ontologically constructed as a particular type of Being, which do not reveal themselves if they are merely present-at-hand—the scientific and theoretical tradition of understanding objets stemming from Descartes, who saw non-human things as extension, distinct and separate from the human observer. The goal of this type of analysis was merely to categorize and describe the observable qualities from a distance.
However, Heidegger's, aim being a phenomenologist of the everyday world, is to analyze those things which are right under our nose. To this end, his major and radically materialist reading of things and their relations to humans is understood as ready-to-hand:
Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to is own measure (hammering with a hammer, for example); but in such dealings an entirety of this kind is not grasped thematically…The less we stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more unveiled it is…The hammering itself uncovers the specific 'manipulability' of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses…we call 'readiness-to-hand,' Zuhandenheit.
The hammerness of the hammer cannot be understood thematically, or theoretically from a distance. The hammer must be grasped, deployed, in use, made useful for one to position oneself in the capacity to understand the hammer. Thus, this radially pragmatic, and in my opinion, materialist understanding of things in the world rightly elevates the laborer's relationality to equipment over the philosopher's. The moment we take hold of the tool, put it to use, is the moment the object begins to unveil itself to us, make itself accessible and comprehendible though the mode of action which co-constructs and re-relates not just the hammer and the sense we and about it before, but also re-constitutes our own selves as having to necessarily change as action occurs—humans and hammers, change not only their epistemologies, but also their ontologies, in my opinion, during the act of hammering. Thus, ready-to-hand can be understood as that which was an inconspicuous familiarity, a pre-theoretical relationality, disclosed instrumentality, the original position of objects, and spatially proximal to Dasein.
As Heidegger also notes, some things which cannot avail themselves through action, such as a broken tool, can only thus be understood as present-at-hand:
The un-ready-to-hand can be encountered not only in the sense of that which is unusable or simply missing, but as something un-ready-to-hand which is not missing at all and not unusable, but which 'stands in the way' of our concern…With this obstinacy, the present-at-hand of the ready-to-hand makes itself known in a new way…The modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness and obstinacy all have the function of bringing to the fore the characteristic of present-at-hand.
The broken tool not only feels like it misses the easily accessible qualities that it once had, but the tool or object is still here, and without the basic functioning formula working, we are thus challenged to interpret it as foreign and concealed. Only in its loss do we now understand more clearly the function it served, and why we mourn it's former readiness-to-hand. What the breaking of the tool also implies is a rupture, a radical turn, not only in the material use of the now broken object, but also a turn in meaning, from useful and sense coming from action, to not useful and sense coming from theorization about why and how it broke. Thus we are able to see in every breaking of a tool an aleatory quality. When our computer 'randomly' breaks, we are only then able to determine all of the contingent elements required for it to function or not: the battery, keyboard, screen, mouse, power elements, RAM, motherboards and speakers.
POST-HEIDEGGERIAN TOOL-BEING
Heidegger's pragmatic materialist reading of tools as ready-to-hand has inspired a whole range of contemporary philosophies: metaphysical tool-being, assemblages, object oriented ontology, and speculative realism, which expand Heidegger's movement to take primacy away from human subjecthood, and towards a more complex and liberating reading of objects.
One such new materialist reading of Heidegger's account of readiness-to-hand is Graham Harman's Tool-Being. Harman, an object oriented theorists, posits that anthropocentric scholarship is incorrectly grounded unthinking that nonhumans depend on humans. Harman attacks the presumption of needing to examine objects as completely dependent on human-use and analysis for objects to bear force and meaning. Instead, nonhuman things need to be understood as agents, or as actants with tremendous relational strength over humans, and that ontologically, all relations, human and nonhuman, according to Harman are on equal footing:
I will show that objects themselves, far from the insipid physical bulks that one imagines, are already aflame with ambiguity, torn by vibrations and insurgencies, equalling those found in the most tortured human moods…inanimate objects are not just manipulable clods of matter…they are more like undiscovered planet, stony or gaseous worlds…most of them not yet invented.
This mode of thinghood and equipmentality implies a serious level of force objects have in shaping worlds, including passionate experiences of writing a book, playing music, and even environmental objects like storms. Objects and humans's ontology and sense of meaning and knowing radically shifts in their co-relations. This is so much the case that we humans temporarily lose track of our selfhoods and bodies when encountering objects such as the internet and other forms of new media.
Things are inherently over-coded with a realm of meaning and potential of their own, on the same scale as human moods. If we see and understand things as a vital assemblage, their energetic potential skyrockets, and allows for a greater rate of chance and contingency in their own interactions. Aleatoricism can most readily be drawn from the Harman's analogies of the undiscovered planet and the not-yet-invented objects, both of which assert the logic of an encounter which has not yet happened among tools, analysis, objects, meaning, sense and measurement. If this encounter does happen, then the object in question will change the way it frames itself—become ready-to-hand, or reveal to us in an evental mode, which also has the possibly of shaping future encounters with other non-discovered or non-revealed things.
MARK HANSEN, WAR AND DATA
Posthuman media theorist Mark Hansen examines quite thoroughly the role that potentiality plays in our contemporary political conjecture, examining the shift from the Bush doctrine of the 'unknown unknown' in addressing foreign policy to an Obama Administration politics of prediction. Military-expert James Wirtz describes the Bush-era approach to war as preventative: a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it is in our best interests now to go to war, based on the premise that the future might be worse without war. The rationale was outlined on an unknown unknown, a continent future we could never know about until the elements cohered and another 9/11 type attack would happen. The war on Imminent Threats that the Obama Administration is overseeing is a preemptive war of prediction, a more realistic military strategy based on data analysis to make threats clearer. This data-analytics is distanced from human epistemology, experience and affectivity—devaluing human experience in the era of new media and quantitate strategies of war. About predictive war CIA Director John Brennan says,"The condition that an operational leader present an 'imminent' threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future." The implications are that we are still fighting a preemptive war, but this war is based on a thick analysis of the present contingent elements which might take form in the immediate future as an act of resistance.
Both wars are war against chance, fought blindfolded in the dark. The US strategy under Bush wanted to eliminate the contingent elements of future potentiality for dissent, but was highly inaccurate in determining threat. The Obama politics and wars of prediction, employed by the military targeting foreign villages, are far more precise in their ability to understand the contingent threats in the present and their relation to potential futural strikes.
As we will come to see, Hansen is no posthuman optimist like Harman or Bennet. To understand the gravity of the current political conjuncture, we must first examine the moment of the data-logical world new media posed by Hansen, who asserts that human experience is transforming as it becomes entangled in an overdetermined network of media technology. The realm of human experience, meaning, self-conciseness and subjecthood are in a war with the quantitative and macroscopic modes of analysis. The site of humanness is what is being contested as data-centrists and subject-centrists go to battle. Subjectivity thus becomes atomized in the Epicurean sense of parallel elements falling like rain, and at some point turning, to create bodies, affects and experiences, human, nonhuman, and posthuman.
POTENTIALITY
Potentiality is the multiplicity of possible outcomes. Potentiality is an aleatory temporal logic acknowledging the multitude of present experiences and times offer the chance to produce the conditions for events in the future. Potentiality exerts itself in the widening of sensation, the distribution of agency, and the vanishing of selfhood in the experience of the posthuman turn. One example Hansen employs to help guide us in understanding the relationship between the posthuman experience and potentiality is 21st Century media, which offers us a hybrid experience of both human and machine sensing—a dispersing of time and experience—an expansion of potential perception. The data-logic of time thus understands itself as a distributed, micro-temporal sensibility. Hansen understands the broader implications of a posthuman distribution of agency and temporality:
If there is no you-awareness the causal effect informing this situation is spread across a set of presents, a set of quasi-autonomous sensory events that can only be gathered and assembled together…into a future synthesis-to-come.
The dispersal of selfhood, as a byproduct of the posthuman, implies that the I is no longer there, just a dispersal of random sensory data from an environment. However, beyond this deconstruction of self is a deconstruction of the linear flows of time. Hansen suggests there is a radically illogical temporality of multiple presents. These presents are all contemporaneous, and yet parallel. Those elements are waiting to cohere and turn into real perception. This multitude of presents, which implies a multitude of futures, are bound to potentiality and plurality.
This posthuman model is thus a model for pure potentiality—it marks a radical openness of the present, the future, and of the present unfolding into the future. This future of and in the present seems like either a reversal or the logical continuation of Marx's Gesgichte, the history in and of the present. We now see a completion of the aleatoric nature of temporality, not as a linear and chronological progression, but an non-linear unfolding of both the past and the future from the contingency of the present—that has the chance to re-determine and reorient meaning, location, swerves and the potential for events.
This disjunctive plurality of time and agency, which is pure pure potential in the Whiteheadian sense, exists in the broad environmental scanning and data-harvesting, data analysis is engaged not only in measuring potential, but articulating, shaping and producing it. Hansen continues his analysis of data-potential:
What data-mining reveals is not the event of the world manifestations but rather the potential for future events of manifestations…specifically, it is in the dative phase that the total relationally of the world is manifested as the source of potentiality for an incipient concrescence."
Data-mining presents us with the potential for all futures and all events, both by informing us and by shaping our potential for futural potentialities aleatorically. How thus can data be common to all events of manifestation? Perhaps because data has enormous potential for the growth specifically in the internet, smartphones, and social media that outpaces other types of (hard material) potentialities, to the degree to which the whole relational world of new media is enframed by and enmeshed in data. But is this this pure potential for all events unique to data?
POLITICS OF PREDICTION
Hansen's gravest concern is with the managerial power of the politics of prediction. As Michel Foucault outlined in Security, Territory, Population, the modern state has been marked by its managerial qualities. This managerial state can be understood as primarily engaged in surveying, categorizing, maintaining and growing its population, while diminishing threats. Population surveillance was only made available through the development of technologies in the human and natural sciences: censuses, maps, and forensics. The biopolitical logic of the state's growth and health depended upon these new analytic techniques to simultaneously control and grow its population.Thus data analysis deployed by the contemporary state, engaged thanopolitically, the right the managerial state has to kill, in the War on Terrorism, and also biopolitically, in on our own creation of technological and statistical analytics that measure and extend life and health.
Hanson understands the politics of prediction to be particularly situated in the CIA's shift from fighting unknown unknowns to fighting imminent threats, which are still extra-juridical in the sense that the 'terrorists' have not broken laws, yet, but it appears likely enough to merit striking before a criminal or terrorist act can be done. Hansen positions John Brennan break:
What this break with the Bush-era logic of preemption signals is a certain return to reality: decisions concerning the targeting of individuals for drone killing, will be made, not in virtue of an ultimate and ultimately unknowable source, but rather on the basis of a thorough analysis ."
The operational change here can be marked and understood as primarily a maneuver from striking at alternative ideologies in the dark, to striking them with a highly informed analytics of data amalgamated by what I call a higher level of the managerial state. Hansen goes on to describe in more depth the politics of potential in the new data-logical CIA:
Brennan attributes the distinction between military and juridical judgement to a distinction in temporal modality…namely the fact that predictive analysis of data for assessment of future probabilities generates information that is not there independently of the analysis…This kind of reality finds its philosophical name in Alfred North Whitehead's concept of real potentiality, which conceptualizes the operation of the future in the present.
The premise behind Brennan's shift in counterterrorism policy is a temporal one—no longer are we fighting on behalf of past grievances or guilt, but we are fighting over the radically aleatory potential futures, based on data from the present. This data shapes the potentiality for futures, and thus becomes an element in the aleatory relationship between temporality and action. Each temporality and experience contain the various levels of what could have been, what may be now, and what might occur; which all have their own unique logic of responses.
The reality in question is of course this new favoring of real data with realtime battles in the materialized calculus of predictive war, over the virtual and ideological struggles over the unknown unknown. Predictive war is more analytically realistic and also enacts the concept of real potential. Counterterrorist policy is, by definition, engaged in a struggle over the meaning and identity of contingent threats. Thus, both terrorism and counterterrorism are fighting to create their own and determine and limit the other one's potential for generating new events.
RECORDED FUTURE
Recorded Future is a case that Hansen refers to in his analysis of the contemporary politics of prediction. Recorded Future is a Swedish data analytics group that amalgamates current and historical public information from blogs, news articles, financial reports and social media posts, selling their data amalgamation and prediction services to banks, hedge funds and defense agencies and contractors, such as the CIA. Recorded Future is a quantitative methodology that operates on the level of amalgamating, synthesizing and ranking data according to the likelihood of various event's occurrences. This aleatory analysis of continent elements and factors to attempt to uncover a futures likelihood is, in all honesty relatively more banal when operationalized by a financial analyst then by an military went deciding who, where, and when to send a drone strike into an Afghani or Syrian village.
Once again, the weight and force of Recorded Future, just like all data analytics in a highly mediated world, is by no means the mere data collected, but instead the actuality of the future in the present—a future whose aleatory-nature can not only be, to a certain extent, predicted, but can also be augmented, amplified and changed.
How thus does Recored Future implicate the present conjuncture as an overtly political problem? If Recorded Future has been funded, developed and deployed by the CIA then, quite clearly we can see a problem of state power to future advance and legitimate its monopoly on violence. When military predictive engines have (seemingly or potentially) all the knowledge of the present, we thus are faced with two separate but totalizing dynamics in the field of the War on Terrorism. The first is tactical, with near or potentially total information about present, and futural conditions, dissent and resistance is made impossible. In addition to the already understood radical imbalance of resources between the state and non-state resistors, comes the tipping of the struggle over knowledge of attacks in the favor of the state. The entire power and logic of guerrilla war and terrorism the element of surprise. Without the potential for surprise, thanks to data analytics, the existential and performative power of terrorism is muted.
The second and more disheartening advantage that Recorded Future offers the CIA is the power of total control over the conditions of possibility for potentiality. Recorded Future and other data analytics employed in war, by its very nature, is designed to be more than an informational tool. Data analysis is always colored and jaded with intentionality and direction. The CIA's intention with this type of tool is, through examining the contingent elements of the present and thinking the varied and aleatory political and historical future events, is in fact invested in begin able to change and alter the future. This struggle between terrorism and counterterrorism is a war over aleatoricism itself. Terror, resistance, and guerrilla warriors would like to allow for the openness of a liberatory aleatoricism to remain free, whereas the US military and counter terrorism would exploit their complex analysis of aleatory events to end the chance for aleatoricism altogether. Whoever wins is able to set the conditions for the potential for the future — for the potential for potential itself, and it would appear that the state, with Recorded Future at its side, has undoubtedly the upper-hand.
WEAVING AND CONCLUDING
What are the stakes of reading Althusser as a new materialist? Are the differences between aleatory and new materialism purely nominative? If the differences seem like new materialism is addressing the flaws of anthropocentric scholarship by examining the agency and vitality of things themselves, then am I simply re-mapping Althusser and his genealogy onto a web already designed by Bennet, Harman, Frost and Coole? What does Althusser and aleatoricism bring to the table? For starters, Althusser brings a world of thinking temporality as radically based on myriad elements, all of which have to occur in order for the present to be present. Furthermore, his notion of future, as the pure potential for all evens to occur or not, based on various contingent elements set up in the present.
New materialism and assemblage theory benefit from aleatoricism. History is not the progress of human assent, but far more broadly, the random and material encounters of weather patterns, storms, geological shifts, animal movements, evolution, technological breakthroughs and human activity; all of which also have the aleatory likelihood either to be or not to be a part of a temporal and historic shift. Thus we have an aleatory view of an assemblage.We can also depict how actant-network-theory engages aleatoricism. Actant-networks describe a situation in which various human and non-human things, living and not-living, all occur to have equal potential for ontological force in relating to each other. Actant-network views tend to broaden and materialize the scoop for the contingent elements, and equalize their ontologies.
The internet, for example, is not some work of human innovation we simply 'plug into.' The internet is an assemblage of electrons, copper, wire, motherboards, mainframes, satellites, digital archives, data, memories and projections, all of which are the contingent and necessary parts for it to function, for the internet to be ready-to-hand. At any point, these various materials could have either never come into being, encountered one another, or could simply fail, all of which would have created the same reaction, the same present without the internet, without it ready-to-hand, demonstrates its very aleatory nature. As Heidegger and Harman assert, broken or missing thing have an entirely different referential framework than when they had functioned. However, as both Harman and Bennet would argue, not only is there radical potentiality in the ways human phenomenology changes in relation to things, as posited by Heidegger, but also in the vital, and therefor always aleatory nature of objects themselves.
One implicit demand of posthumanism and new materialism is they require a prefigurative framework to understand how they can be applied practically. To think and apply posthumanism, one would already have to have begun the relational navigation of how a posthuman framework can be felt and understood in everyday life. To that end, posthuman politics presumes a type of prefiguration—a process of connecting all of the theoretical threads new materialism and assemblage thinking present, and attempt to reframe ones life and perception in accordance to these new theoretical values. These values require an openness to the potential and chance for things to become otherwise. In this sense, posthumanism necessitates a prefiguration of aleatoricism. What is needed is a framing of one's direct psychological, social and political orientations to understand and appreciate the randomness, ruptures and contingency; not only of the potentiality of assemblages and tools to surprise us and change in their relations, but also a prefigured appreciation for aleatory time itself.
Connecting the temporal forms potentiality posited by Mark Hansen are important, as Hansen is one of very few contemporary thinkers who charts the impacts chance, time and history have on subjecthood and politics. The effects that Recorded Future has are quite profound. First of all, the movement out of the imprecise' psychological evaluation of the subject, and its replacement with the 'more accurate' data analysis of an environment of (post-subjective) behaviors, patterns of movements, already has potentially negative affects on the questions of choice and agency.
The CIA, in its continued 'Wars on Terror' throughout the Middle East, has, in the past, had only moderate luck in eliminating threats and defeating terrorism. Recorded Future and other data analytic software has offered higher potential for predicting and squelching dissent in the fight against 'Immanent Threats.' This calculative model is better at determining the contingent elements that make up the various potential futures which may or may not unfold. Thus, the CIA is ultimately engaged in a war of aleatoricism—in its deep understanding that there are myriad futures which are dependent on the various outcomes of a constellation of threatening elements (poverty, rage, repression, access to weapons, relations with the US, and most importantly body behaviors). But, more importantly, the War on Terror is a war over the very control of aleatoricism itself. The CIA wants to modify and eliminate the potential for all futures that dissenting rogue non-state actors can have in resisting the oppressions by the ISAs and RSA. Isn't political resistance, civil and guerrilla war, and terrorism based on the model of desisting the opening up space for the potentializing of the potential—the rupturing of and with history in order to offer the chance for more liberating futures?
What happens to aleatoricism when the future can not only be predicted, but modified? It seems that the prediction of future is based upon an analysis of contingent elements, but to determine one, or to alter one, seems to undermine the radical nature of political and historicized chance Althusser asserted. There is a real theoretical tension between the contingency of Althusser and that of the CIA. Who is right? Is it the right of a state to determine a future of a terrorist act and then destroy it? Or can the CIA and Recorded Future data analysis even determine, predict the future? What precent accuracy do they have, both in predicting various futural outcomes, and also in acting in the right way? Where does Althusser's far moire radially liberatory aleatoricism lie? The definitions of contingency, potential and chance as they relate to radically opposed notions of the aleatory event are high contested. On one hand, an analysis of potential is used to repress potential itself. On the other, we see chance, contingency and aleatoricism a radial potential, perhaps the only potential for opening up for new political, social and historical ruptures—those well needed.
What are Coole, Frost, Bennet and Harman's assumptions about the positive and negative potentialities of posthumanism? Are their attempts to theorize an assemblagist new foundlings for the ethical and political primacy of nonhumans wise or naive? I argue that the positive assertions made by new materialism is theoretically sound, in particular in attempting to address concerns around ecology and global and interconnected precarity. However, to think the practical concerns of how we might think policymaking in the broader network of vitalism, assemblages and new materialism. It would be simpler, albeit less virtuous, to return to the old, anthropocentric Marxist materialism of society and political economy.
Are Hansen's assertions of CIA data analytics and the posthuman dynamic, realistic or overly pessimistic? There is wisdom in resisting the romanticism of the posthuman, the cyborg and other technologizations of human life, which privilege statistical and quantifiable measurement that undo the importance of qualitative and phenomenal experiences of human life. However, Hansen's radically pessimistic and totalizing view of the repression of potential seems hyperbolic and more grounded in speculation than fact.
Where would Althusser lie along this new materialist genealogy? Where I have a hard time thinking he would fully endorse an assemblagist project, which radically reframes ethics, accountability and politics that are harder to adopt on a national scale, he would likely agree that the blackout, seen as a material assemblage, is an example of an aleatory event. Although Althusser does not go into detail about Heidegger's theorizes of equipment, he would still find Heidegger and Harman's tool-analysis, in particular the broken tool, to be phenomenally contingent. Since Althusser employs atomists and vitalists in his genealogy, he likely would not disparage my connections between aleatory and new materialisms. While Althusser would view data analytics as ideological, he not would only aim to resist the state's use of data in counter- terrorism, he would disagree with Hansen, Recorded Future and the CIA's argument that the state can ever be capable of fully predicting the future and augmenting or eliminating potential. History and temporality's aleatory nature—the potentiality of potential, fundamentally does not allow for such mechanisms for a single actor to dominate contingency of future events.
In keeping with Althusser's genealogy, I must also ask my genealogy, how is risk positioned by the theorists I have engaged? There is a great risk taken by posthumanists in their claims to make an ethics, politics and metaphysics based on the de-centering of the human subject, distributing agency across a network of assembled parts—a risk large enough for failure in its practical and political adaption. New materialism also takes an analytic risk in elevating non-human materiality; however, the larger risk is that, as a post-marxist framework, non-dialectical materialism could struggle in its capacities to offer a centralized political and economic organization—a risk I support as an anarchist. Hansen offers the opposite mode of risk by,asserting his hesitations of a positive reading. His critiques not only would undermine a radical account of aleatoricism, but will make his theories cast out by other posthumanists.
Finally, what risks did I take, what gamble did I make in order to contemporize Althusser and his aleatoricism, though a new materialist genealogy? First of all, I risked getting Althusser wrong in order to ground aleatoricism into our current conjuncture. Second, I spent quite some time unpacking and supporting, albeit up to a point, the theories of a politicly unsavory anti-spontaneous authoritarian. Third I took a gamble in placing my political and philosophical eggs in the naive hopes of a posthuman and new materialist revolution in our social reality. Fourth, in brining in Hansen and the case example of Recorded Future and the CIA, I wound up offering a counter-example of aleatoricism, a repression of the potentiality of potential. This case was strong enough as to force us to question the very notion of how and why Althusser reads chance as unpredictable and non-repressible, and therefor politically radical. The risk of brining in the skepticism of Hansen, for the purposes of questioning chance, in fact is the risk of undermining the purpose of examine the genealogy of the encounter.
Lastly, I took the risk of interrogating aleatoricism at large. This interrogation of risk, chance, danger and contingency place my paper in a theoretically radical milieu, which presupposes that I not only embrace and desire an open prefiguration in order to respond to the random encounters of the assemblages and the failures of broken-tools, but also radical and unpredictable political transformations. And, then I must ask myself, what if the next political aleatory turn was not to the left, but to the right?
Perhaps the largest risk of all is the risk of allowing aleatoricism to overshadow other historical and temporal modes. Having spent this much time thinking time and events as ruptural and aleatory tends to make me wonder, is it possible to read aleatoricism into everything? Is all time, history, futurity all aleatory? If so, that seems to take all of the theoretical weight from the concept. Creating boundaries in temporal logics is made difficult by contingency; which is not the necessary chances of events, but the possiblization of the possible. How can I determine the difference between regular and repetitive time, or know what to expect if everything is possiblized? The very the nature of logic of temporality is highly contradictory; the future is always repetitive and always continent.
Perhaps this might reassure the dialectal materialist that temporality and futurity are always radical overdetermined and complex. Perhaps overdetermination is the only mode to think aleatoric time thoroughly. If so, I wonder why Althusser focuses on the ruptural time? Is it because it was theoretically underdeveloped, or is it because, for Althusser, we are always in aleatory flows of time? In would argue, to conclude, that what makes the logic of aleatory time an eternal time is not that we are always in or experiencing the ruptural, evental and kairotic time—our experiences of time, in a Whiteheadian sense, are always existing in the potentiality for potential, the possiblization of the possible, and the chance of having a chance for the encounter with the aleatory as such.








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