Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

If our reality is governed by the aggregate data in which knowledge is always the knowledge of the (short-term) future—a predictive knowledge based on calculable and data—are we indeed facing what Antoinette Rouvroy has called the “end of critique?” “The “real time operationality” of devices functioning on algorithmic logic spares human actors the burden and responsibility of interpreting and evaluating the world. The crisis of the deductive model of reasoning seems to be pointing toward the crisis of the subject that is now drowning in the endless sea of data, incapable of deducing the truth. All the while, the thick verticality of algo-regime is built upon the entrepreneurship of the auto-exploitative reiterative Selves where subjectivity is flattened into data and entirely depleted of possibility of any other becoming (Subject). Is there a way out and, more importantly—back into reason and politics by other means and by other or indeed—othered and alien reasoning and for new ends? Instead of embracing the dystopian prospect of collective subjectivity already drowning within the sticky glue of algorithmic totality, should we not embrace what Isabel Stengers calls “a speculative commitment” to the possible against the inductive probable? The speculative commitment here would mean a belief that the system is not given but neither is the Subject of its truth production. In few words, the question is how to engineer Subjectivity and re-script the functions of a system capable of constructing images, conjuring narratives and truths beyond nervous conspiracies and systemic paranoias.