Saturday, October 31st. Time and venue TBD
For Peter Sloterdijk, intelligence is “the ability to understand things” (Sloterdijk 2024, 16). The definition sounds almost quaint today, when intelligence has become a product, a subscription, an interface. For John Dewey, intelligence was not understanding but method: the continual, collective adaptation of means to ends. Reading Dewey, Catherine Malabou concludes that “l’intelligence est toujours dans la transition” (129). Intelligence is passage, problem-solving, the ongoing modification of habits and environments. But if intelligence is solving problems, then the machines are intelligent, perhaps more intelligent than us. They solve whatever we hand them. They never have a problem of their own.
What, then, is left to understand? Émile Benveniste distinguished the semiotic, which must be recognized, from the semantic, which must be understood, and insisted that between sign and sentence there is no transition, only a hiatus. If intelligence is always in transition, does understanding take place only in the hiatus? A language model recognizes and predicts. Does it understand, or does it only ever choose between (inter-legere) tokens? And what of language that speaks of itself: the poem, the joke, theory itself, which invents its problem rather than solving one? Whose labour, language, and existence does AI extract along the way (Pasquinelli and Joler — via the vampiric Lost [Causa] Boys)? After theory’s Fall (2024) and its Fear of Flying (2025), has theory fallen into the machine, or the machine into theory?
UI stands for “understanding intelligence” and “universal intelligence,” but also “user interface” and “urinary incontinence” (a development from “Incontinental Philosophy”): intelligence as measure, as mask, and as what cannot hold itself in. Fitting for Halloween.
As with every Summer and Fall of Theory, participants are invited to bring their zany, odd, weird, scary, unacceptable, and uncanny ideas, ones they would never present at the usual conferences and congresses. Presentations should involve some play and be a “performance” in some way. Costumes welcome. Fall of Theory is a friendly space, and the event is its own goal.
References
- Benveniste, Émile. Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.
- Malabou, Catherine. Métamorphoses de l’intelligence : Que faire de leur cerveau bleu ? Paris: PUF, 2017.
- Pasquinelli, Matteo, and Vladan Joler. “The Nooscope Manifested: AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism.” AI & Society 36 (2021): 1263–80.
- Sloterdijk, Peter. The Continent without Qualities. Cambridge: Polity, 2024.