Disruptive Patterning, Interface, and Occlusion

What does it take to survive in a constantly disruptive present permeated by uncertainty and catastrophic fear?

Computing across its many narrations and iterations carries with it a promissory capacity to quell and manage such risk, not in the present but in an always and ever anticipatory future. It is a phantasmal promising in near future terms, a purported loophole toevade a current cacophony for the subtle din of an electrical hum; the resonant opiate of efficiency unqualified.¹ It is a promise laden with spurious tradeoffs and sacrificial claims. We are told that in the name of a future promised stability we must irrevocably disrupt the present—sacrifice our water for their servers, our electricity for their data centers, our attention for their profit, our cognition for their capture, our complexity for their models, our pulse for their sensors, our lives for their bottom line.

Paradoxically, it is the affective attachment to a promissory but seldom realized protection that requires confrontation with this cruel optimism (Berlant 2011). Put simply, how do we begin to rebuild the skills needed to be in relation to risk that might free us from the enclosed individual attachment to a cruel technological optimism?

Anne Dufourmantelle writes that “For risk—its object still indeterminate for now—opens an unknown space. How is it possible, as a living being, to think risk in terms of life rather than death? At the instant of decision, risk calls into question our intimaterelationship with time.” (Dufoumantelle, 2011, p.21). Risk is the uncertainty of time. It is a call to find our lives in the queer temporalities of living.²  Perhaps it is evenwhat separates a life, the noun, the subject/object, the possession; from the living —the task of being in action. Risk asks us what it means to be in an endured proximity to uncertainty, to recognize the living that happens there. It is a provocation to stay close to the trouble of uncertainty. And to ask how might such a proximity allow for the messy work of sharing risk together, instead of the violent clarity of prediction? Perhaps then it is risk that may serve as a teacher for the unknown edges of knowledge that Sylvia Wynter calls us to embrace—the blasphemous, the profane, the heretical, the sensual, the mythical, the long list of many effusive things that find gaps between digits and maladapt those sacrosanct rites of penance in the service of kink; collars for clergy and non. Uncertainty begs for the breaking of old patterns and the building of new. Making space for the unknown is essential for the mutations that compose evolution. To engage what may only appear as unfamiliar, illegible, and approximate. If the old patterns that form recognition are those that frame computational thought as a means of mitigating risk, then what patterns might we turn to that enable Dufoumantelle’s provocation to “risk in terms of life, rather than death”? What then might computing become that doesn’t succumb to an eschatological anxiety perpetually seeking to control an uncertain future into the the violently now?³ And in the words of Wynter, what ceremonies must be found that allow for such a rewritten knowledge? Knowledge is possible beyond either the assumed operational rationale of computing or the hallucinogenic thought of algorithmic unravel. Not a knowledge of Man but of contingency — of the tenuous early steps towards risky behavior held in liminal forms of kinship and relation.

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1 Michelle Murphy introduces the term phantasmagram in their work, The Economization of Life to name the affective attachments placed on large aggregated figures and calculated sums such as GDP.

2 This term comes from Kara Keeling’s work in Queer Times Black Futures. She expands on queer temporality as those social orders that thrive in relation to the risk of time.

³ Here I am thinking with Anita Say Chan’s work at the end of Predatory Data. Here she argues that continued use of predictive and computational technologies in their present power formations will only yield probably futures. She calls us instead to explore and fight for the improbable futures that disrupt such power.

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What follows is a attempt to interrogate the capture of knowledge through the regulative force of pattern. It is a provocation to speculate on the frayed edges of patterned ways of knowing and the poetics of decipherment held in the layering and overlappingfrenzy of aesthetics that extend kinship ties and resist enumeration and the sweeping changes of modernity that prefigure ourcomputational present.⁴ I wish to trouble the ease by which terms like pattern and recognition are uttered to take the place ofknowing and analysis and instead to turn to decipherment. To muddy the predictive gestures held in feature extraction and model refinement. To stretch pattern beyond its canonical presence in the works of Claude Shanon and Warren Weaver. To warp and sully and saunter towards its more offbeat offerings.⁵ Off-beat pattern making opens the space for a speculative form of knowing, encoding, and transmitting. One that requires the extended ties of kinship through diasporic rift to recognize and decode. Patternmaking as a instantiation of poesis of a different social and onto-epistemological ordering for information before being disciplined through pattern into data.

Computing has a short memory.

To engage the canon of computing histories is to find a continual deferment to pattern as a means of controlling complexity through acts of compression, extraction, recognition, and ultimately prediction. (Shannon and Weaver 1949, Minsky and Papert 1969, Simon 1969). In Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s, “Mathematical Theory of Communication”, they attempt to write communication as a probabilistic endeavor transmuting the process of encoding, transmitting, receiving, and decoding information as an engineering challenge. In order to control for complexity Shannon and Weaver deploy the contours of pattern in order to noteregularities within the structure of information. By using pattern as a controlling mechanism for reducing the complexity of a message, communication itself could be separated from the source of the communication. In this formation the flow of information is paramount. This prioritizes flow and the circulation of information over that which the information passes through, or even the meaning of the information itself. By negating materiality as having any effect on information material is relegated to the position of only maintaining the flow of data. This dispossesses materiality of itself, no longer a body but flesh made malleable, interchangeable, and fungible.

Katherine Hayles, elaborates on the impact of this decision writing, “a simplification necessitated by engineering considerationsbecomes an ideology in which a reified concept of information is treated as if it were fully commensurate with the complexities of human thought” (Halyes, 1999, p.54). This new emphasis on pattern, pattern making, and later pattern recognition become regulating aesthetic and categorical functions that when taken out of context come to redefine information, vision, truth, space, cognition, and alike giving rise to an increased attention to surface, interface, abstraction, and proxy measures as concealing agents obscuring the ‘necessary violence’ of modernity.⁶ Today pattern recognition is essential for the building of data infrastructures as it is the most viable way to extract meaning from massive seas of information by identifying and classifying regularities in datasets, extracting meaningful features, and making decisions or predictions based on emergent or predefined patterns. At the same time this question of separating signal from noise and making meaning from pattern always carries political dimensions born from specific decisions, assumptions, and goals.Pattern recognition is also a process of making the pattern itself, determining what counts as signal and what counts as noise. (Steyerl 2019).

Perhaps then it is time to make a shift from recognition to decipherment.

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⁴ My thinking on kinship as resistance to enumeration comes from Jennifer Morgan’s work in Reckoning with Slavery. Here she argues for an understanding of quantitative and empirical worldviews as being co-constituted with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the plantation. She argues that Black women understanding of these shifts in worldview turn to kinship as a means of combating being reduced into data, inventory, and commodity.

⁵ Robert Paris in Flash of Spirit refers to the African continuation of aesthetics into the New World as suspended accentuation patterning, speaking to the mutability and multiplicity of form found in Black patterning practices. Also see James Snead’s Repetition in Black Culture as a more detailed engagement with they ways that Black cultures build accidents into their processes in order to respond to uncertainty.

⁶ This formation of necessary violence comes from Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Towards a Global Idea of Race. In this text she shows how modern representations of knowledge are formulated through the violence of colonization and conquest as an epistemological and geographic imperative.

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Deciphering Recognition

While recognition operates from an assumption of natural occurrence, decipherment refuses observable phenomena as natural andinstead as situated within a larger cultural and material order: aesthetics. The aesthetic of pattern then is not a mere study of surface features but of the larger discursive cohering rules that in turn produce various social and material realities, what Wynter announces as a call to rethink aesthetics as a culturally derived order simultaneously produced alongside and continuing to produce human orders. She writes that its function is “to produce the ‘unitary system of meanings’ able to induce the altruistic psycho-affective field whose cohering mechanisms serve to integrate each specific mode of ultra sociality or ‘form of life,’ doing this as stably as do the genetically induced modes of kin-related altruism (AGKR) at the level of purely organic life (Wynter, 1992, p.244).

Aesthetics function as a core material structuring device that operates to cohere social practices of affinity as effectively as genetickinship. To say that aesthetics are productive is a gross understatement. Pattern then as the core aesthetic device present in earlytheories of data, information, and computation emerges from a particular cultural eschew. This patterned aesthetic caries with it the violent residues of slave ledgers, plantation production yields, artillery shells, Rand consultants, Cold War mania, and impossibly scaled desires for conquest. (Rosenthal 2019, Edwards 1997, Lee 2020, King 2016).

As a method of inquiry for bringing these aesthetic stakes to bear Wynter describes a practice of deciphering. On this she writes, “A deciphering practice proposes, therefore that the ways in which each culture-specific normal subject knows and feels about its social reality…should in no instance be taken as any index of what the empirical reality of our social universe is. Rather, these normal ways of knowing and feeling (together with the signifying practices which each induce these ‘normal ways’) should be taken as the index of how each such world must normally be known and felt about, as the indispensable condition of each such world being brought into existence by the collective behaviors which all such culture-specific normal ways of knowing and feeling about the world, including your own, rule-governedly orient and regulate” (Wynter, 1992, p.271).

Wynter’s practice of deciphering takes nothing on its surface but is aimed precisely at destabilization with the hopes to know how what is considered natural comes to be signified, understood, stabilized, replicated, and consumed. In short, how it is that recognition functions, not as a universal reflection of what is, but as a specific instantiation of meaning curtailed within the winnowed purview of those deemed fit for reason? How is it that Blackness continues to be rendered as the site of both a fixedracial logic and as the fungible exchange of a symbolic order signifying risk and value simultaneously, extraction and uncertainty, flesh and entropy (Fiori 2020)? It is this continued ‘hieroglyphics of the flesh’ that follow Blackness from the plantation to present, what Tiffany Lethal King calls a persistent pattern, the pattern of modernity forged through conquest (Spillers, 1987, p.446). This pattern informs a long dispossessive practice by which Blackness continues to be the flexible material through which managerial technologies and computational logics come into formation.⁷

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⁷ This is work I am currently extending into a larger manuscript critically investigating histories of pattern making, risk, Blackness, and resistance through diasporic textile traditions.

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These accrued patterns of association are now able to signify Blackness as risk without ever bothering to mention its name, instead it is hidden behind designations of zip code, income, and credit score.⁸ This marks a disruptive patterning that is simultaneously dependent on but occludes the associated forms of meaning that have marked modernity and racial inheritance as the marker of flesh without a body. In Hanna Rose Shell’s, “Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography and the Media of Reconnaissance, she defines disruptive patterning as, “mottled patterns corresponding to the animal’s habitat disrupt the contours of its silhouette, resulting in an impression of not being there” (Shell, 2012, p.26). In Shell’s understanding disruptive patterning becomes a key inspiration for later technical developments of camouflage as a specific tool for evading nascent techniques ofimaging, primarily the camera. This form of patterning does not erase something from space, it merely creates an impression of absence by breaking the contours of the body being concealed. What is perceived as absence is actually voluminous, anoperation quietly running background tasks. I evoke Shell’s work on camouflage because of the ways that she expands notions of camouflage beyond technique. In her understanding camouflage is a logic, a mode of “seeing into the world…into a structuredand ordered behavior” (Shell, 2012, p.23).

This emphasis on perception and patterned order is important as it relates directly to shifts in epistemology and empiricism within early pattern recognition. As mentioned earlier through the work of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver pattern was a crucial aesthetic feature that was used to determine what did and didn’t qualify as information, shifting emphasis away from positivist empiricism and into transmission, communication, and subjective experience. As pattern came to disrupt earlier positivist notions of external truth, perception became the crucial vehicle through which patterns were gleaned and analyzed (Halpern 2014). Thisautopoetic turn in part grants pattern an enhanced authority. It is now the ability to be patterned and recognize pattern that actively constructs our sense of external reality. By definition then disruptive patterning poses a means of visually rendering reality throughwhat it obscures. Here the pattern makes an absence, marking the boundary of what is intended to be known and what must remain unknown. Disruptive patterning is the primary normative aesthetic in operation within computational forms of patternrecognition; the eliding of the hieroglyphics of the flesh by encoding them in the language of enumeration and aggregate associations. It is born from the mutable and on-going violence of modernity by which the global continues to be organized according to those recognized within the gaze of the Human and those unrecognizably relegated to either commodity or threat.

Deciphering extends criticism in favor of a deep understanding of the coherence and repetition of certain sociogenically encodedsymbols of meaning that co-constitute our biological and social realities. Deciphering is a look at the longue dureé of how certaintypes of meaning and knowledge structures are beholden to their cosmologies, their origin stories. This would mean that the aesthetic forms of pattern that arise from modernity, their resolve for legibility and insulation from what they deem noise or disorder, may emerge from a shared underlying sociogenic principle while still differing in detail on the surface.

Such an act of decipherment as through a reworking of the aesthetics would mean that the ways in which Shannon, Weaver, or Minsky have contributed to the restructuring of information, communication, and computing are particular and autopoetically induced rather than natural eventualities or teleologically driven conclusions. As many others have shown, the process by which certain technological forms cohere is not always an attribute of the technology itself, whether that is it’s programming, engineering, physical properties, or even economic value, but a byproduct of the entangled competition between multiple different interests andactors (Marx 1994, Cowan 1983). In short this process of closure is one of power and discourse. Wynter refers to these powerful cohering forces as normative categories. She writes that they are “normative precisely because the structure of their lived experience is isomorphic with the representation that the order gives itself of itself” (Wynter, 1984, p.39). Such categories aredependent on naturalizing certain representations or subjects as axiomatic or originary. This would assume the impossibility that computing, knowledge, or information sharing could take any other form. As technologies, these forms are already settled and are only allowed to grow forward in a linear mass ofincreased applications and concentrations.This is the point where aesthetics and power meet. As Wynter has stressed earlier, aesthetics are the establishing cohering rules for legible social orders that operate at a symbolic and material level in creating kinship associations. As such, normative categories are those that reflect the aesthetics of power. To be absorbed by such categories is to be seamlessly represented within them. Its surfaces are smooth, unbothered by friction, heterodoxy, or outliers.

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⁸ For more see the investigation Machine Bias by Propublica.

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By contrast Wynter also describes liminal categories, as the “structural contradiction between their lived experience and the grammar of representations which generate the mode of reality by prescribing the parameters of collective behaviors that dynamically bring that ‘reality’ into being” (Wynter, 1984, p.39). These violently conflicting meanings produce different biologicalmatter and different experiences of self consciousness. Here liminal categories speak to the experience of being within but not of. It is a dropped stitch within the pattern, making the gap, the space from which to notice the construction of the pattern itself. This suspension from the surface provides a reprieve from the overly determined logics and structures of normative categories. It is a vantage marked by friction and the impossibility of occupying multiple positions at the same time, neither neat or orderly, but toppling, raucous, indeterminant, and contradictory. To operate in the liminal space is to act within the in-between, the space that creates the synapse. Wynter argues that a liminal frame provides an “outer view, from which perspective the grammars of regularities of boundary and structure-maintaining discourses are perceivable” (Wynter, 1984, p.39). Liminality is necessary for challenging normative aesthetics of pattern. It is how we first come to decipher normative patterns as specific impositions rather than naturalized eventualities. To exist in the liminal is to saunter in the offbeat, the space between notes, the din of overlapping layered and discordant melodies. It is the necessary site from which a mode of deciphering culls forth the contours that have bound discourse, marking its grammars as common sense, obvious to the point of being invisible and unaddressable. This outer view is an essential spatial and relational condition from which other social, epistemological, and material relations can come into focus. In this way, this mode of deciphering, fortified from the position of a liminal occupancy functions as a respective inverse to the concealing reach of disruptive patterning. While disruptive patterning positions the environment as a concealing agent, held together by a monoscopic fixed vantage that breaks the contours of specific formations rendering them invisible and unknowable,deciphering brings the construction of such contours back into focus. To decipher is to work from the dual position (stereoscopic) of being both within a context but not of it, the structural contradiction of living an experience in excess of the normative grammar of representation that autopoetically induces a certain reality.

This is the space from which a Black Computational Thought is possible and emerges. It emerges from the irresolution of Blackness to reside as either discrete or in flux. While the working definitions of computation can be made to be a representational system of making meaning within logical and quantitative methods, my interests are in the forms of computing that begin to break and diverge from this definition, and that understand and work from the intrinsic contingent nature of computation. ⁹

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⁹ Contingency marks a shift in understanding the aesthetic nature of computing. M. Beatrice Fazi explores this extensively in the text, Contingent Computation.

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I look for the slippages where what is called randomness must be understood within an particular aesthetic order, much like earlyforms of Black sonic culture could only be understood as noise because they broke the assumed aesthetics of meaning conscripted by a white eurocentric modernity. Rather, I am concerned with the simultaneous threat and dependence on Blacknessas a fixed inderminancy that carries microtonal shifts and modulates dominating patterns to adapt encoded messages for maroonage. This is what I mean by Black Computation Thought. This term arises from a desire to speak about the fungible ways that Blackness is created and engages inderminancy as a necessary working out of how social orders can be made in relation to an indeterminant flesh. In this way Blackness works as an Omega in mathematician Gregory Chaitin’s term as a discrete infinity, a productive contradiction within the logics of computing as both axiomatic (fixed) and random (indeterminant) (Chaitin 2005). Blackness contends that the dialectic of this dependence also opens the space for developing spatial and informational systems that are errant and move beyond the extractive logics of conquest.¹⁰

Such a practice could be said to be offbeat, errant or deviating from the norm. Crucially it is not in binaried opposition to normative categories. The liminal space is important because it doesn’t neatly cohere to a simply dichotomy of opposition, black or white, legible or illegible, signal or noise. Instead, the strength of the liminal space is that it disrupts and challenges the very imposition ofsuch categorical arrangements to begin with. Because of its indeterminacy existing between things, it makes the bounds of categories apparent and as such disarms them from an assumption of universality. In turn, this also does a dual service of showing the requirement for diametric opposition in order to uphold normative categories, white needs black, legibility needs illegibility, and signal needs noise. Without this structure the social ordering rules of aesthetics would lack cohesion, inviting the possibility ofalternate formations, and material reality built on a different set of ordering principles.

This would open the possibility that from another vantage, from another particular epistemic view, a different aesthetic can produce other forms of patterning that create alternative material relations of knowledge. It is the contention of this body of work that the aesthetic patterning traditions of the Black radical tradition bear a unique relationship to complexity and uncertainty. As I continue to develop a theory of Black Computational Thought it is my hope to articulate and recover such practices through this language of aesthetics and pattern towards othered arrangements of the material and relational forms of information and space in the computational age. In part I am asking, if not reproducing the aesthetic and logical frameworks that crafted the particular forms of information and spatial management present today, then what? What are the othered kin related aesthetic forms, cultural practices, relational logics that have given rise to other ways of sharing information, space, and uncertainty together? What has been bornfrom the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition that inscribes different cultures of data and movement? Here Blackness becomes the lens from which to suture errant patterns, offbeat, and noisy. Blackness as an analytic, as an anoriginal epistemological aesthetic, produces its own patterns, however from an outside view these patterns may appear as absence or as the existential dread of illegibility, lost to the cacophony of noise.

In short this means that the present formations of networked data sharing digital infrastructures, machine learning algorithms, predictive policing models, biometrically monitored borders, smart cities, and automated weaponized drones are born from the residual normative aesthetic categories nacently established first on the plantation now working to produce a constantly disruptivepresent by which more and more people find themselves forced into the liminal. However, the productive threat of a liminal position is to rearticulate such histories of technological development as contingent and partial. Instead the pursuit of Black Computational Thought is to work from the liminality inherent in a kind of Black alienation from the pervasive category of liberal humanism that in turn authors practices of information sharing, computing, and addressing uncertainty on wholly different grounds, no longer assumed absent or unknowable by a pervasive disruptive pattern. Rather, this form of decipherment is indebted to seeking the aesthetic arrangements that privilege an offbeat patterning, thriving in the indeterminacy that questions the very logics ofcategorization from which the normative is maintained. As I speak about aesthetics, normative categories, liminal positions, disruptive and offbeat patterning moving forward it is in the service of these acts of decipherment. Particularly, I want to build an argument for re-establishing the contours of contemporary computing practices as once again legible, elucidating the residual normative aesthetics that have and continue to shape their form. However, along side such normative impositions are also liminal ones, cumbersomely pulling at loose threads, building relationships to the fray, mending split seams into new patterns. This makes possible the ability to bring other practices of computing into focus, challenging its ascriptions ofuniversality, inviting a multiplicity of genre; fractal and indeterminant.¹¹ Perhaps then we can turn with an indisputable honesty to the unavoidable fact that risk has never been disciplined by enumeration. That it permeates and moves, molds, and transmutes our lives. It is the indeterminant, that place where land and water meet immediately undermining the material purity of each for the opaque offerings of the shoal.(King 2019). Where matter dissolves and assembles; what was once wall now pore. Perhaps risk is not the indelible Manichean threat from afar, from which the only rightful response is anticipation and attack. Perhaps it is the task of the living.

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¹⁰ This is something I have explored in another publication, “Voluptuous Disintegration: A Future History of Black Computational Thought”. In it I explore the contested history of the Freedom Quilts as an encoded form of information sharing and repertoire.

¹¹ For more on fractals and computing please see Ron Eglash’s work in African Fractals.

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