Patricia Reed

The Game of Organizing Gesture:

On Prosthetic Agency

“An epistemological problem surges up against every proposition

struggling to describe the difference and the relation between
model and empirical reality; against every enterprise knotting
together ways of thinking that which, in the model, speaks of its
object; and against every placement, outside the model, of the
thing whose model it is.”1

Like the over-rehearsed quip “the map is not the territory,” a typical charge against models is
that their abstract nature cleaves them from concrete reality: Models are untrue because they
are sheer idealizations. The non-empirical status of a model casts doubt on its viability to
conjure epistemic claims upon reality: its detachment from concreteness renders it ineligible
to substantially address the Real. What is sacrificed in such castigation is the question of
intelligibility, for which models, although not empirically true, serve as vehicles for conceptual
and/or theoretical discovery. By emphasizing intelligibility qua models, the discussion shifts
from whether a model is real or not to how models enable (or disenable) ways of
understanding worlds and potential activity within them as a consequence. In other words,
the empirically fictional status of a model furnishes thought with a means to better
understand reality. From the invention of infinite populations as an unrealizable or impossible
basis through which to make bio-evolutionary processes comprehensible—processes,
additionally, that often take place at a humanly unobservable scale of time; to ether models
composed of “idle wheels located between rotating elastic solid vortices”2 from which derived
the first electromagnetic field equations in 1861. Such scientific fictions have served as
mediators in forging better accounts of physical processes. What we can infer from this
picturing of models is that for certain knowledge practices, it is necessary to invent
something that does not exist in order to better explain or understand processes and
phenomena that do exist in the physical world. In this scenario, models, and the often
abstract, representational mathematics that undergird them, function as an “engine of
discovery”—the outputs of which, in context-sensitive applications, have the equivalent
epistemic value as experimental (i.e., empirical) measurement.3

Outside the domain of physical, chemical and/or biological systems, notably in the fields of
economics/finance, the fictional status of models has served less as a mediator for
understanding behavior, but rather take on a performative function, effectively molding or
incentivizing activity to conform to the “truth-value” of the model. The detachment from an
accurate account of observable behavior is performed into existence, as a becoming “true” of
the model through applied interpellation driven by Bayesian expectation. Donald Mackenzie’s
exemplary case study of the Black-Scholes-Merton model (which serves as an index for the
birth of financialization) describes the proliferation of this particular model-function as it
became practically embedded as a result of endorsement by power-wielding interest groups.4
His account describes the model as “an engine, not a camera,” due to its uptake as an
instrument for pricing derivatives quickly adopted by traders, emphasizing how, at the outset,
the model bore little correlation to observable activity. For both Morrison and Mackenzie,
models rely on and execute fictional abstractions of reality, yet for Morrison this fictionality
serves as an engine of discovery for making certain existing systems and processes
intelligible, whereas for Mackenzie, models become engines for reality-making, acting with

1
Alain Badiou, The Concept of a Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics, trans. Z. L. Fraser and
T. Tho (Melbourne: re.press, 2007), 14.
2
Margaret Morrison, Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics and Simulations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 85.
3
Ibid., 51.
4
Donald Mackenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
prescriptive force to realize what was formerly non-existent into concrete existence. While
both model-concepts are instrumental, one deploys fictionality and abstraction theoretically to
understand empirical reality, while the other manufactures and manipulates behavioral reality
through its elevation into the status of a heuristic tool. It is in the movement between these
model-functions that The Form of Not is conceptually located, at the intersections of
epistemology (making intelligible) and realizability (constructive manipulation); intersections
that reflect the blurry distinctions between invention and discovery. As the third and last
season of the umbrella project The Unmanned, the world of The Form of Not is nourished by
the histories of its episodic precedence: sculptural installations, objects and performers have
been extracted and recomposed from The Everted Capital (season 2), recast and embedded
within a new fictional-model condition in both partially continuous and discontinuous ways.
The Form of Not furnishes us with an environment to physically and psychically inhabit the
space of a model and the encoding of a particular world—including its history—that it
mandates.

Models, Badiou writes, are what enable thought through participation, where participation is
understood as a mixture of the sensible and the intelligible.5 This notion of participation in the
context of art bears little resemblance to the incitement of audiences to become “active”
collaborators in a work but is rather more nuanced, manifesting as the construction of
sensorial conditions that embed the logics proper to the world of the artwork. Unlike the hard
sciences that are disciplinarily bound to discovering the what-is-ness of a world in greater
resolution, regardless of their often counterintuitive or inexperiential accounts, the domain of
art possesses no such disciplinary constraints of fidelity to what-is. This point ought to give
us pause in the face of the “epistemological project” of criticality subtending the self-narration
of art as a discipline through which to reveal the what-is-ness of forms of “social
dominance.”6 This epistemological project not only entrenches the givenness of a what-is
condition of a world through referential reproduction (in the negative, in a purely moral
register), it also implicitly imposes a constraint upon thought as that which must be consistent
with “experiential fact.”7 Despite the proliferation of claims to knowledge-production in
contemporary art that enact such a paradigmatic project, the consequence of this framework
is a conflation of the fact of experience with what can be thought. Because experience is
bound to what is given in the here and now, by aligning thought absolutely with the fact of
experience, intelligibility is constricted to an enclosure of immediacy, and such constrictions
that privilege immediacy do so at the cost of confusing what is phenomenologically local with
procedural possibilities of localization—a distinction to which we’ll later return. Normative
entrenchment within such a paradigm rehearses a sense of capture within the present,
reverberating with bell hooks’s observation that “critique can become merely an expression
of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture,” in what has become a
prevalent disciplinary disposition.8 In response to this cynical disposition, or what Amanda
Beech has identified as the “tragic,” “dysfunctional function” of art,9 the turn towards
speculation would seem to offer a way out of this entrenchment in the what-is-ness of a
world. However, when speculative thought is unleashed in arbitrary ways, entirely divorced
from the what-is and what-was of material and historical specificity, a heedless leap ensues
for the trivial gesture of manufacturing “difference for the sake of difference.”10 If participation
implies a mixture of the sensible (the experiential) and the intelligible (the thinkable), it is as
an activity transiting between empirical and speculative ways of thinking. Participation, then,
marks the relation between speculation and critique, for which Nathan Brown has proposed a
dialectical method of “rationalist empiricism”: a comparative pursuit of claim-checking “what
must be thought” (rationalism, or the capacity to think “beyond the limits of experience”) with

5
Badiou, The Concept of a Model, 91.
6
Amanda Beech, “How Art Ought to Think: Resuscitating the Epistemological Project,” Art and Reason, Contrapuntal Media 1
(Spring 2018). https://issuu.com/calarts/docs/cpm_final_ms_v1
7
Nathan Brown, Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (New York: Fordham University Press: 2021), 3.
8
bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (London: Routledge, 2003), xiv.
9
Beech, “How Art Ought to Think.”
10
Reza Negarestani, “What Does it Take to Make Anything at All,” The Poet Engineers: Reader (New York: Miguel Abreu
Gallery, 2021). http://miguelabreugallery.com/the-poet-engineers-reader/#rezanegarestani
“what is the case” (empiricism).11 For Brown, critique/empiricism denotes a space of
constraining thought to what is concretely sensible, whereas speculation/rationalism acts as
a movement of extending thought beyond what is available to the senses, and by insisting on
a movement between the two, neither mode can be upheld autonomously, nor regarded as
“superior to the other’s claims.”12 Resonating with Badiou’s assertion that “ideas would be
nothing if they were incapable of being accessed from what is given in the sensible,”13 at
work in rational empiricism as method is the ceaseless setting into relation of discrete
epistemic values such that they interfere with each other in mutually transformative ways.
The conception of thought as dialectical interference occasions the overcoming of
“epistemological obstacles” qua thinking in either its purely general (abstract/rationalist) or its
immediate (material/empirical) state,14 a process that can be extrapolated to the relation
between insensible structure and material/organizational ramifications of structure.

For Alan Turing, intelligence in human and machinic forms is dependent on interference,
namely stimuli.15 Interference is what enables an “unorganized machine” (a randomly
constructed machine, not designed for a specific purpose) to become organized via learning.
Interferences may be social (interhuman and animal communication), sensorial (visual,
olfactory or auditory stimuli), or substantive (encounters with tools, stuff and objects). Over
time, interferences gradually establish a metastable state, otherwise known as a
configuration, such that future interferences are conditioned by the frameworks of said
metastable (i.e., temporarily stable) configuration. The cortex of the human infant exemplifies
an unorganized machine, says Turing, stressing that the sheer existence of a cortex as an
autonomous entity shorn of interference is “virtually useless”.16 Two categories of
interference at play in Turing’s account echo the dialectical relation between the conceptual
and the material found in a rationalist empirical methodology: “screwdriver interference”
(mechanical changes, or physical transformations), and “paper interference” (theoretical
changes, transformation via information). Analogously, for fictional worlds adopting the
operations of an intelligent machine (not merely illustrating it), one requires both a material
environment and artifacts (“screwdriver” types of possible interference), as well as narrative,
informational and social interference (‘“paper” types of possible interference). Through the
mutual developments of emerging intelligence typified by protagonists of The Everted Capital
(585 BCE, 2022) (The Unmanned, season 2, episode 3), one embodied in the human infant
and another in the machinic-materiality of Cybèle, the installation The Form of Not is an
sculptural manifestation of the film, summoning us into the fictitious world of co-maturation, of
possible organization through various substrates of diverse thinking agents. While immersed
in the narrative problem of creating artificial memories in Cybèle to bestow her with a sense
of autonomous selfhood, we are simultaneously embedded in a material, artifactual world
prompting us to consider what it would be like to be props for an inhuman consciousness,
and how to refigure agency from such a standpoint of being. Dramaturgically, we inhabit an
organized machine (a material and narrative configuration) for the making intelligible of
unorganized possibility.

“Most still agreed that history was about how time shapes
experience and vice versa, about how memory is shaped by
power, loss and change. Less obvious was that it was also about
how stories about power, loss and change were told, how their
lessons, meanings and commandments were enshrined and
conveyed. It wasn’t just about the stories themselves, though. It
was about how memory was forced on the future. A better way to

11
Brown, Rationalist Empiricism, 3.
12
Ibid.
13
Badiou, The Concept of a Model, 92.
14
Gaston Bachelard, quoted in Brown, Rationalist Empiricism, 8.
15
Alan Turing, “Intelligent Machinery,” in Machine Intelligence 5, B. Melzer and D. Michie, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1969), 3-23. (Paper originally written in 1948.)
16
Ibid.
 put it was this: history was also about the methods used to store it
and the tools used to narrate it.”17

Distinct from early computational tapes and later memory chip storage, Cybèle’s mnemonic
medium for the construction of selfhood is colloidal particles of clay. Layer by layer, her
viscous mud evaporates into leathery strata, transforming every entity and trace entrapped
within her thickening, archaeological stew into a textured imprint. The agency of her oozing
materiality eventually fossilizes, arresting signatures of gesture, emotion, objects and tools
as self-conscious offerings from actors in her midst—actors that are her prosthetic,
exploratory appendages for the integration of interference upon her inchoately smooth,
unorganized form. Unlike monuments to supra-beings, the ensuing incineration does not
obliterate but concretizes a learning process, like a negative space biopsy of all she has
become sensitized to through exosomatic transference. The deliberate orchestration of an
archaeological record by the actors, who behave with ancestral consciousness, is an effort to
coordinate interference for an otherwise unorganized machine—to configure her sensitivity to
future interference. Cybèle’s concretized memory-record is the materialization of compressed
data, taking on the dimensionality of latent space in machine learning that simplifies details
for the trade-off of determining patterns: all memory is partial, no matter the figuration of any
omniscient entity which captures it, be it a god or a machine. It is the actors in The Everted
Capital (585 BCE, 2022) who possess agency in mutually configuring this mnemonic
partiality inducing Cybèle’s selfhood, but are themselves not its vessels of storage.

Imprinted memory stores are dissected into plinths supporting the objective world proper to
the fiction elaborated by The Everted Capital (585 BCE, 2022). The artifact on display—in the
first installment, the infant herself—are, like most artifacts, residues of the encoding of a
particular world configuration to which they belong. Artifacts open gateways of access
through which to read and piece together operational, semantic and normative histories that
may be entirely unfamiliar in time, narration and geography with what is experienced in the
given here and now. Because all worlds generate stuff, identification and behavior that are
coherent with their configuration, artifacts from those worlds can be said to stand in adaptive
relation to them; and our subsequent interaction with them reinforces the veracity, or
necessity-value of said world. Interaction with adaptive artifacts conditions receptions to
interference that confirm the settings of a given world, including the organization of thought
proper to said configuration. Simply stated, adaptive artifacts enable the rehearsal of habits
of thought belonging to a particular world, and what can be seen from within it. Artifacts serve
as external evidence for a given world, but, as Sylvia Wynter’s account of socio-historical
paradigms shows, the externalities of the socio-technical systems also imprint the
“neurochemistry of our brain’s opiate reward/punishment system to act [and think]
accordingly,” explicitly recognizing internal transformations of biochemical, cognitive settings
because of external interferences, for better and for worse.18 It is due to this internal-external
feedback dynamic that she refutes picturing the human as a noun, casting us as praxis-
based creatures (and therefore transformable); hybrid bios, mythos and logoi creatures for
which she proposes the moniker Homo narrans. Narrative creatures whose storytelling not
only contributes to valances of orientation for social arrangement but also marks the very
materiality of the human brain. Yet because narration alone does not account for the
procedures of substantive narrative uptake/externalization, Wynter’s “being human as
praxis,” can be given more specificity through the lens of interference, such that we may be
practically described as creatures of interference, namely as Homo interfatio.

In the non-fictional domain, historical worlds are sustained by a self-referential narration of

completeness through the establishment of a particular discursive configuration Wynter
identifies as a “grammar of regularities”19 that orient the appraisal of what is good, necessary,

17
Louis Chude-Sokei, “Anarchic Artificial Intelligence,” 2021. https://anarchic.ai/
18
Sylvia Wynter interviewed by Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species,” in Sylvia Wynter: Being
Human as Praxis, K. McKittrick, ed, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 10.
19
Sylvia Wynter, “A Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2, 12 (Spring-Autumn 1984), 19–70.
relevant, and/or possible. Considering that “grammar” establishes a set of rules, we can
diagram this as an enclosure of thought’s given, game-like possibility space scaffolded by the
metastable organization of a social machine, including the setting of criteria for “choosing
problems”.20 Worlds are not absolutely static, insofar as change can and does occur within
them; however, worlds remain generally entrenched so long as the degree of change is
within the spectrum of a world’s given possibility (rule) space, in what can be identified as a
compliant genre of possibility. The enclosure of a world analogously coincides with a
machinic/cognitive configuration that nurtures insensitivity to noncompliant interference,
reinforcing a state of unlearning21 while perpetuating habitual organizations of purpose,
meaning, value and taxonomy. The process through which a world configuration encodes
artifactual and informational encounters with interference is localization. What appears as
“local” is the result of such a process, the consequence of which is the creation of conditions
that train interactions with and within a world. Because localization operates in world-
preserving ways, transiting outside the constraints of self-referential enclosure (of general
sameness) entails the construction and recognition of extra-local “sites” or configurations for
situational embedding. Localization—as a constructive process of orientation—recognizes
the impossibility of thinking from nowhere but refuses indefinite capture by the immediately
local.

The “normative expectation” that contemporary art makes us think22 is trivial without
addressing how and what it makes think, as well as where it makes think from. This “where”
is more elaborate than an architectural or geographic space, but it includes the normative,
semantic, and axiological configurations of a world that constitute its site which embeds
thinking agents. If sensitivity to interference is a minimum criterion for the possible
transformation of a world, under what conditions can given world configurations of
insensitivity be suspended? How is it possible to localize conditions of otherworldly thought
that are not absolutely beholden to the here and now of the local belonging to a given world
configuration? In other words, how to localize speculative thought (which necessitates the
construction of a world to embed it), and what are the consequences of such activity on an
epistemological register?

It is in response to such questions where inductive reasoning falls short, since there are no
experiential or intellectual memories upon which to base predictive determinations from the
site (configuration) of an otherworld. The genre of thought required to think from without the
strict predeterminations of precedent is abduction, hypothesis generation, or thought in the
mode of creative discovery. Long regarded as ineffable or utterly random, abductive
reasoning has been rekindled as a pragmatic problem in computational developments of AI,
and these developments have aided in casting wider insight upon conceptions of inventive
cognition, human and otherwise. Abduction, however, as Charles Peirce noted is not an
endgame of thought unto itself, like a heedless leap into capricious ideas, but is more of an
“interrogative mood” that ultimately summons inductive reasoning for comparative scrutiny,23
similar to rational empiricism where distinct epistemic values are brought into relation. In
seeking to understand abduction, which is a question of how to justifiably think outside
enclosures of givenness that condition thought, Lorenzo Magnani has elaborated two modes
that are mobilized via external representation: theoretical and manipulative abduction.24
Recalling Turing’s genres of interference, manipulative abduction is to screwdriver
interference as theoretical abduction is to paper types of informational interference, both of
which broadly correspond to the relation between knowing by doing (tinkering) and knowing
20
Thomas S. Kuhn quoted in Derrick White, “Black Metamorphosis: A Prelude to Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of the Human,” CLR
James Journal 16 (2010), 127-148.
21
The term “unlearning” has proliferated in the field of contemporary art over the last years, and while I sympathize with the
general tone implying “dehabituation,” [more often used: “dishabituation”] I disagree with the term itself, since it downplays a
central quality of learning, which is fallibility, and the capacity to update concepts as well as normative commitments, such that
there is no “unlearning” possible without learning.
22
Beech, “How Art Ought to Think”.
23
Charles S. Peirce, correspondence with Lady Welby, 1905.
24
Lorenzo Magnani, Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning
(Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2009), 2.
by proposition (conceptual models, thought experiments). The localization of otherworldly
conditions of thought hinges on strategies of abductive integration, from the making sensitive
to hypothetical interference (what must be thought) via a material-sensible situation (what is
the case) through which such propositions are rendered participatory. Abductive integration
allows for the discovery of “margins of indeterminacy” in a world configuration projecting the
semblance of completeness, and it is through these margins that sensitivities to interference
can be cultivated.25

A concretely determinable and different world sheds light on the

problems we have on our hand here and now. These are problems
of which we are currently unaware because by virtue of inhabiting
a world and its rules, all potential problems look natural, as if they
are the intrinsic features of the world and not its cracks and
pathologies.26

The fictional world of The Everted Capital coupled with its material substrate, The Form of
Not, is an integrative experiment in abductive localization. Within the context of rational
empiricism, fiction yields potency less by the fact that it is a medium for storytelling than
because it affords the choosing of problems to mediate and elaborate. It is through such
hypothetical problem spaces that a comparative standpoint can be built, a frame of reference
from without the givenness of a world that is no flippant escape but the construction of what
can be described as a non-adaptive world. Just because a non-adaptive world may not be
actual in the here and now of a given historical world does not condemn it to utter speculative
arbitrariness, on the contrary. The propositional frames of reference belonging to non-
adaptive worlds take on ludic properties, where the game of participatory enablement is
driven by implicit or explicit rules mandating specific imaginings. A non-adaptive world comes
into sensibility when and where “fictional truths” can be made intelligible within its specific
problem space; and, not unlike scientific truths, these are not mere flights of random
hypothesizing but must be recognizable at a shareable dimension.27 Fictional truths index
that which must be imagined because the configuration of a world prescribes it thusly.

Ludic localization for a non-adaptive world is dependent on what Kendall Walton calls
“principles of generation” that orient or mandate imagination in a particular way.28 Less rigid
than explicit rules by fiat, yet nonetheless made transparent to consciousness, these
principles are rendered “objective” and sensible, in part, by way of props or artifacts that
furnish a world with shareable referentiality. In the non-adaptive world of The Everted Capital
(as fictional film) and its physical substantiation in The Form of Not, artifacts on display
function as material evidence for its fictional truth, enabling interference in an organized way.
Constitutive artifacts act as mediators for access to the particular grammar (structuring
game-space) of non-adaptive worlds, while their archaeological staging contextualizes them
“as if” manifest from a world independent of any imagination (experience) of it.29 The as-if
empiricism embodied by artifacts propped up by fossilized gestures operates as both
evidence and invitation. Artifacts of The Form of Not endow the fictional world of The Everted
Capital with “objective” interference—constructing empirical access to “what is the case”
(evidence) while the same props invite speculative departure (“what must be thought”) from
the configuration (rules) of this mandated world. In such an arrangement that brings
rationalist and empirical modes of thinking into interference, cues can be found for the
refiguring of epistemic considerations qua art, beyond forms of thinking tethered to the “what

25
Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. C. Malaspina and J. Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal,
2017), 17.
26
Negarestani, “What Does it Take to Make Anything at All”.
27
Kendall L. Watson, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1990), 35.
28
Ibid., 38.
29
“As if” is used in deference to Hans Vaihinger, whose philosophical program recognized the constitutive role the “consciously
false” plays in “science, world-philosophies, and life.” Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If’, trans. C. K. Ogden (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co., 1935).
is the case” status of the given world. The epistemic consequence of making anything at all
is, quite simply, always a doing, always manipulative, and through the integration of this
manipulative doing with the worlds for thought, such activity may enable a “redistribution” of
epistemological efforts “to manage objects and information” that can neither be immediately
externalized nor purely imagined internally, but can be diagrammed.30 In such an
epistemological schema, the agency of thought to unbind itself from a given world is bound to
the necessity of thought’s prosthetization.

While the manifestation of externalities is necessary for the prosthetization of thought, it is

through the integration of “conscious content” that said externalities enable, where the
boundaries of selfhood are disrupted beyond any body.31 Like the psychophysiological
rubber-hand illusion that serves as a conceptual simile for the formation of selfhood in
Cybèle, the transference of real experience occurs via the stroking of an external rubber arm
alongside one’s (hidden) actual arm. The conscious experience of being touched is not
locatable within the perimeters of flesh, despite the self-constituting “sense of ownership” the
experiment affords, in a process described as “phenomenal incorporation”.32 At play in
phenomenal incorporation (a prerequisite for any sense of ownership of an experience, and
thus selfhood) is a modeling of this incorporation as a distributed process of both sensible
(present) and insensible (nonpresent) contents, which are synthesized through
representational processes of cognition. In extrapolating from the premise of distributed
selfhood, the deliberate cleaving from reality endemic to the Unmanned series through the
elaboration of narrative and “objective” non-adaptive worlds is not an disavowal of reality,
rather, the construction of a situation from which to abductively participate.

30
Magnani, Abductive Cognition, 51.
31
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 75.
32
Ibid.