Sibylline Objectivity: Technē as Kosmetikhe

Technophany – “Technē and Feminism”

Call for Papers edited by Katerina Kolozova and Vera Bühlmann

*Note to reviewers:

This abstract was submitted on February 14, 2022 and it consists of 198 words. The

references to the author have been anonymised for review purposes.

Abstract:

The cosmic cave of the Cumaean Sibyl is not only a lyrical and evocative stage hosting

mystical performances. In pronouncing the sybil’s conjectures through “one hundred

openings murmuring one hundred chants” (Virgil), the grotto’s triangularisation of place,

body, and thought offers an advantageous site for experimenting with carnal yet non-personal

forms of objectivity which, by wrapping truths into mysteries, offer more than capture. This

sibylline objectivity – and its ‘grotesque’ flavour – might certainly invite revisiting Plato’s

allegory of the cave. More importantly, however, it could help us reactivating lost paths

aiming at conceiving the subject-object tension in more spectral terms by considering technē

as kosmetikhe: universal yet embodied forms of order and decorum (kosmos) that, by working

in systole and diastole, both amalgamate and distinguish various anatomies of reasoning

(technē) addressing everything that can be considered without saying it all. Their

simultaneous instrumentalization of ambiguity and contiguity neither describe facts nor

prescribe solutions, but is notoriously open to translation (open totality). The sibylline

objectivity characterising these kosmetikhe might thus fuel emancipatory forms of

contingency (týkhē) puzzling the linearity of industrial automation while engaging with the

probabilistic frameworks of the technicalities at work in the science and technology of the

21st century.

Keywords:

Objectivity, Cumaean Sibyl, Technē, Kosmetikhe, Cosmos, Contingency, Cave, Technology.

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A hundred tunnels transmuted into a hundred mouths murmur as many voices in the
sinuous caves dotting the Euboean cliff. They pronounce the riddles of the Cumaean
Sybil, who engenders prophecies in the form of accurate enigmas—she “tangles
truths and mysteries”1, so Virgil beautifully writes. Yet, how to conceive such
entanglements? And how to think of the plethora of voices carrying them through the
air? A Sybil is Sybil insofar as she engages with all what can be considered, yet
without saying it all, without exhausting things. Such engagement is of an objective
nature; it is not subordinated to an individual’s reasoning to be contended in
subjective terms, but it can be shared in common, it is of the universal, it potentially
participates in the reality of all things and events. The Sybil chants their fatum by
way of colourful verses that knit them through contingent and ambivalent relations of
proportionality: ratios that are sensible to the real and its materiality yet in exodus
and exile from an allegedly overarching rational background. Is there something to
be made of this rational yet mystical commitment, of this sybilline temperament? If
we think of it with respect to the question of a feminist-materialist engagement with
rationality, would the Sybil’s setup be an invitation to consider biological fate and
reason in gradual or even complementary terms? Could this gesture then activate
new variations and unknown resonances around the relationship between nature
and technology within contemporary feminisms? And is there something to be said of
the carnival of voices rushed by the whispering openings of the Sybil’s grotto in
relation to the “neutral silence”2 that Luce Irigaray invokes regarding Plato’s cave? Or
ought we rather to conceive such a grotesque set-up as akin to modes of thinking
that do not operate in terms of distance and detachment, but as a more direct and
material—a sonic perhaps?—engagement with reality?

1
Virgil, Aeneid, 10BC, p.101.
2
Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 257.

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I woud like to explore and cultivate these questions by maintaining that within Virgil’s
epic dramatization of the Cumaean Sybil beats a materialist-feminist notion of
objectivity whose polyvocal vocation might hold a promise: the possibility of
activating new somatophilic manners to think of the notion of techné by conceiving
rationality as coextensive to nature rather than as alienated or exterior to it.

An objectivity that would not slim down reality through a clinical representation
purging it from its contingent and ambivalent dimensions, but that accommodates
them by articulating and pronouncing things in multiplicitous terms yet without
excluding reason’ universal vocation. In analogy to the polyvocal chants of the Sybil,
I would like to consider feminist-materialist engagements with reality in light of an
objectivity that is computable yet remain mysterious, inexhaustible; an objectivity

objective engagements with reality address all what can be considered yet without
saying it all: the are computable yet remain mysterious, inexhaustible,

objectivity that remains mysterious yet it is computable, universal in its and

conversational, unable to represent a

Many chains and scales

Tangling truths and mysteries

Yet if we want to come up with a concept that does not describe the process but rather tries to capture
photosynthesis as something worth grasping in its own right, as a principle, we need at least to clarify
whether such a conception be a matter of epistemology or of ontology.

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“The vast flank of the Euboean cliff is pitted with caves,
from which a hundred wide tunnels, a hundred mouths lead,
from which as many voices rush: the Sibyl’s replies.”3

recreate the notions of subjectivy and obj

I read this tuning to an amorphous pitch-complex of resonating elements that remain

mobile and impossible to unite, as an interesting allegory, beyond the preparation of
the instrument, for the performance of Naldjorlak itself.

Tuning them in to a mobile complex, opening their resonances not in harmony but as
their unpredictable in-between; creating the invisible volume that they sound together
and in which we can sense their existence as simultaneous vibrations, as mobile
materialities that are not ‘this’ or ‘that’, but are the resonance of their indivisible
interbeing. Thus we hear the reality of each element in practice, in their resonating
together, producing the composition as a viscous and indivisible shape of different
things that are in conflict and even contradictory, searching for a vibrating line that
never unites.

I would like to cultivate and circulate through these questions by

moving and touching with respect to the sybil recites

Can we imagine and cultivate notions of objectivity that are not conceived in terms of
distance and detachment, but as a direct material engagement addressing all what
can be considered yet without saying it all? In brief: what would be a
feminist-materialist engagement with objectivity?

3
Virgil, Aeneid, Trans. A.S. Kline, (London: Roman Roads Media, 2015), 103.

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And which lost paths can it reactivate

A relative mode of thinking, but one that does not relate to epistemological keywords
like superstition, falsity, or the like.

In brief: what would be a feminist-materialist engagement with the notion of

objectivity?

Can we cultivate notions of objectivity that do not lodge themselves within an exterior plan in which
thought (lucidity) must triumph over what is thought (obscurity)?

- Address all what can be considered yet without saying it all (cosmos)?

- Are computable yet remain mysterious?

- Embrace contingency yet are not arbitrary?

- Are prophetic (contingent future) yet predictive (rational law)?

- Accentuate tuning and resonance (synthonization) over understanding and comprehension (empathy)?

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And how this could help us rethink

“The human would have been left naked and raw, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Prometheus, who thinks
ahead (or so the literal meaning of his name suggests), decided it would be best to steal from the gods fire and
techne.
Their ability would not be borne on their bodies, but would be something external they could use.”

If rationality is natural, then it is not based on distance.

What would be a feminist-materialist engagement with the notion of

objectivity?

Nakedness and Prometheus.

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The concepts of a chronopedia turn to light’s intensities, qualities, appear- ances—yet not via the path of

negation. Such genuine absence can only be masked, and it can only be masked as a “rest”—it is what rests

amidst any intellectual gesture that contrasts a postulated identity with its difference. We have been obsessed

with the Cogito long enough, Serres maintains; we ought to think about think- ing as we think about the weather.

We should begin to say that it thinks, just like we say that it rains. The voice that speaks in chronopedic terms is

a natural, and a generic voice, but it is the voice of a subject too. Like the weather, it is natural and universal,

and yet always locally situated. Genuine absence that can only be masked is the rest that remains when we try to

anticipate and predict the weather, understood in the ancient tradition of the meteora as the sum of all

measurable, and thus articulable, temporalities, durations, seasons.

This anonymous third person singular, the “it” in “it thinks” needs to be ad- dressed properly—and properly

means, so Serres, the inverse to its anonymity: the anonymous “without a name” must be addressed as an

impersonal persona, by calling it with any name. The voice in great narratives needs to be addressed by its

proper “any-name”: Serres calls this the nemo-panonym, panonyme, a six- fold name that is proper to the world

itself: Pantope (all of its places), Panchrone (all of its durations), Panurge (the universal worker, instead of the

demiurge, the public worker), Panglosse (all of the spoken tongues), Pangnose (all of knowledge), Panthrope

(all sexes, instead of only man as in “anthropos”).29

Photoshynthesis, Vera

The cho is what has aalready been said comes back, but it, these messages in a bottle
as echoes, they are sent out, not received, accumulation of the sound which would
that disappear, this accumulation, to be attracted towarads things dont work, where
the classes not only keep a piece, are a cause, look at all these things, but not to
classfiy better, but to conceive quasi objects that are more capacious thatn the ones
that are right now. minut 1 second 40.

Not at the expense of the clear concepts. What we have clear concepts for it is not
that it is clear. Like a frequency domain, you give one spectrum of frequencies, but if
you would ahve another partition scheme, then other phenomena becomes visible,
but they do not contradict each other, they coexist but they have different capacities:
they concdepts are not messy, not ambiguous, but their consistency does not
exhaustively describe what they render order. It is not the right classification or
wrong, accepting that there is no brightness in the future: there are not anymore
decision one has to do. It is much more interesting to explain stories, it is possible to
tell storey telling where comes responsability. It is an objective.

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1h, 16 minuts.

It rains: it is an imperason. There would not be any invention if cancelling one self out
woudn’t be possible and happening. Here is a creative act, here is an invention.

This is a moment in which the person has manage to neutralize him or herself. Lets
call it thinking. We should speak of thinking like we speak of raining.

It is not I think therefore I am, but we say it thinks. There is an agency, but it is
impersonal. it is an objective it. It is not an it that we do not attribute a political status.
But what is this it?

minute 50.

Relate this notion of the it to overcome the distinction AI and natural intelligence.
Mathemathics is not us, it is a universal reaonsong, but our reasoning works with the
same means: AI vs NI, is to be overcome. It is a technik and an organism. Bodies work
mechanically, it is not such a scandal to say so.

The word to be is a joker. The it that we say it hinks or it rains, it is a generic, the body
withbout qualities. It is generic. Body without properties. It is material, it is there, it
exists. The word to be exists as a blank domino. We can connect with it whenever we
try to think in general, abstractly. Thinking abstractly means that I am thinking, and
not that I am thinking something. Not to think something specific, but to think in the
sense of thinking.

The thinking that connects iwth this it, I can say I think, tehrefore I am no body. The
bar is a gatekeeper. Acrobatic way: gate keeping which asks for being transgressed.

Probabilidad y causalidad en la filosofía de Max

Born
Probability and Causality in the Philosophy of
Max Born
Ma Pilar GONZÁLEZ FERNÁNDEZ

P.259

CAUSALIDAD INDETERMINISTA
PROBABILIDAD OBJETIVA
WAVES OF PROBABILITY

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PROFECIA VS PREDICCION

FUTURO CONTINGENTE - GUSTAVO BUENO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVk6IWvODA4

The politicla possibility of sound - 101 - Nina Conti - Turbine Hall

Sibyl

But pious Aeneas sought the summits, where Apollo ruled on high, and the vast cavern
nearby, the secret place of the terrifying Sibyl, in whom the Delian prophet inspires
greatness of mind and spirit, and reveals the future. Soon they entered the grove of Diana,
and the golden house.
(Virgil, Aeneid, 102)

The vast flank of the Euboean cliff is pitted with caves, from which a hundred wide tunnels, a
hundred mouths lead, from which as many voices rush: the Sybil’s replies. They had come
to the threshold when the virgin cried out: “It is time to question the Oracle, behold, the god,
the god!” As she spoke in front of the doors, suddenly neither her face nor colour were the
same, nor did her hair remain bound, but her chest heaved, her heart swelled with wild
frenzy, she seemed taller, and sounded not-human, for now the power of the god is closer.
“Are you slow with your vows and prayers, Aeneas of Troy, are you slow?” she cried. “The
great lips of the House of Inspiration wil not open without”. And so saying she fell silent.
(Virgil, Aeneid, 103)

But the wild prophetess raged in her cavern, not yet submitting to Phoebus, as if she might
shake the great god from her spirit: yet he exhausted her raving mouth all the more, taming
her wild heart, shaping her by constraint. And now the shrine’s hundred mighty lips have
opened of themselves, and carry the seer’s answer through the air.
(Virgil, Aeneid, 103)

With such words, the Sibyl of Cumae chants fearful enigmas, from her shrine, echoing from
the cave, tangling truths and mysteries [envolviendo en términos oscuros cosas verdaderas]:
as she raves, Apollo thrashes the reins, and twists the spur under her breast. When the
frenzy quitens, and the mad mouth hushes, Aneas, the Hergo, begins.

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The reasoning that links what the gnomon indicates, that collects, recollects, sorts,
and calculates what the gnomon’s indexical records “recount,” is a wisdom that must
embrace contingency, that must give credit to more or less obscure intuitions. A
wisdom that is subtle, excitable in the sense of overly perceptive. It is smooth, vague,
volatile. Like the wisdom of the mechanic, it is saturated with finesse, we could
perhaps best say, from the Middle French finesse, for “artifice, delicate stratagem,
subtlety,” from the Old French fin, for “subtle, delicate.” Interestingly, finesse derives
from the noun fine, meaning “termination, end; end of life,” from the Old French fin,
“end, limit, boundary; death; fee, payment, finance, money,” from the Latin finis,
“end.” In Medieval Latin, it meant also “payment in settlement, fine or tax.”
How to make sense of the relevance of finesse in matters of exactitude? These are the
questions that drive all discourses on the arts, on aesthetics, on poetics as well as a
kind of reasoning that is euphoric, visited by spirits, demons, and genius. It is a
reasoning that is in touch with the infinite, reasoning that delights in outwitting some
apparent stated necessity, necessity as a “constraining power of circumstances,”
from the Old French nécessité, for “need, necessity; privation, poverty; distress,
torment; obligation, duty,” from the Latin necessitate, for “compulsion, need for
attention, unavoidableness, destiny.” Such reasoning takes contingency readily into
its accounts; it is perceptive reasoning that thrives through self-exposure to the touch
of event, from the Latin contingentem, present participle of contingere, “to touch.” It
is reasoning that is in contact with the infinite—it has the confidence to recognize
in-determinedness where others see destiny. It appreciates the reciprocal touching
(from tingere) of sums that do not add up when they are subsumed under a common
roof.

Mathematics and Information in the work of Michel Serres - p123

Sybil speaking:
Porque si hablaran todos, si hablaran al mismo tiempo, el rudio de fondo haría difícil,
sino imposible, ese proceso de redoblamiento que constituye el eco. El reflejo sonoro
sería alterado por la emisión simultánea de sonidos articulados por diversos
locutores. Sonidos que son por tanto, mal definidos, poco netos en sus contornos,
sin bordes bien trazados, sin formas determinadas, sin figuras que puedan ser
reflejadas, reproducidas. Si hablaran todos, y hablaran a la vez, el siloendo de los
otros y ano serivira de fondo al recorte y definición de las palabras de unos, de uno.
IDEA DEL SILENCIO. SUMATORIO DE SILENCIOS.
Y este eco, cuya relación con el amor femenion de Narciso, muerto en la virginidad,
ya ha señalado la mitología- encontraría aún mayor obstáculo si los encantadores
hablaran entre sí. Pues la interferencia de los encunciados, aquello que se transmite,
que transcurre en la conversación, ya no seriea reductible a ese blanco, ese silencio

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o ese intervalo, neutros, que permiten la discriminación, la demarcación, el
encuadramiento de las palabras y su repetición.
Plurideterminación, sobredeterminación, harían estallar el presente de la producción
reproducción.

Sentados, con la mirada dirigida hacia lo que está enfrente, dando la espalda a un
mismo origen, mismo y uno.

Levinas: Infinity, 48. > Levina’s thought that objetification involves subsuming all
thruths into mine: it is the reduction of the other to the same.

To not make the subject the sole motor of truth.

As the ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood has argued, however, these sorts of
schematization belie a historically-situated “truncated reversal” (121) of the Cartesian
schema: a misleading anthropocentric metaphysics, minus the mind, under which
“objects” are implicitly dualistically instrumentalized. Plumwood’s point is that by
leaving the dogmatic terms of the subject/object dualism unchallenged, a truncated
reversal strategy is bound to perpetuate anthropocentric instrumentalism rather than
facilitate an improvement in addressing the world on its own terms. It will do so
because a truncated reversal retains the hierarchical assumption that (material or
nonhuman) “objects” differ in kind from (human) “subjects” in a manner that
legitimates effectively viewing the former as a resource (i.e. something that can be
more-or-less exhaustively appropriated or possessed, both in the epistemic and wider
senses of the term). At the same time, this reversal leaves human subjects to be the
sole source of meaning and value. The identities of both relata of the dualism are
shaped in the historical context of anthropocentric colonialism. Plumwood argues,
therefore, that simply jettisoning the subject pole will not disrupt the residual
Cartesian political agenda since—largely because of its sedimented metatheoretical
assumptions—only a problematically impoverished conception of the
more-than-human world is left behind (47).

Text on phenomenology and correlationism.

LACUNAR BUT NOT LACONIC

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POLIGLOT OBJECTIVITY

KNOWLEDGE IS PERFORMATIVE AND NON-REPRESENTATIONAL

‘Objectivity, instead of being about offering an undistorted mirror image of the world,

OBJECTIIVITY AS DISTANCE, NOT THE CASE OF SYBILINE OBJECTIVITY

EL PROBLEMA DEL REALISME ES QUE DIU QUE LA REALITAT NOMES POT SER
UNA.

I read this tuning to an amorphous pitch-complex of resonating elements that remain

mobile and impossible to unite, as an interesting allegory, beyond the preparation of
the instrument, for the performance of Naldjorlak itself.

Tuning them in to a mobile complex, opening their resonances not in harmony but as
their unpredictable in-between; creating the invisible volume that they sound together
and in which we can sense their existence as simultaneous vibrations, as mobile
materialities that are not ‘this’ or ‘that’, but are the resonance of their indivisible
interbeing. Thus we hear the reality of each element in practice, in their resonating
together, producing the composition as a viscous and indivisible shape of different
things that are in conflict and even contradictory, searching for a vibrating line that
never unites.

While a masculine new materialism insists on the absence of the human to get to the
unthought, and thus ultimately proposes the end of philosophy in its own
mathematical probability, a sonico-feminine new materialism brings us to the creative
performance of matter and language not in words but on the body and on things:
doing, digging, gardening as a revocalization and rephysicalization of theory through
its intra-activitiy with things.

but sings as a subject in process on trial with other things, unfishined and
unfinishable but inexhaustible and expansive.

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