Say Her Name: Remembering Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy in Thinking About Algorithmic Finitude and Digital Sufficiency with Foucault and Laruelle

Abstract

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault first articulates what he calls the empirico-transcendental doublet, a circular logic according to which the subject, unlike other objects, can at once be an empirical object in experience and the transcendental conditions that make experience of the empirical possible. This doublet structure is tied, moreover, to what Foucault calls the analytic of finitude, a circinate pattern vacillating between a psychology of represented needs and an anthropology of the finitude of human life. Foucault’s argument is that it is this paradoxical structure which forms the historical a priori of knowledge in the modern episteme and, we may surmise, undergirds the enclosing logics of disciplinary societies. In time, Foucault’s contemporary, Gilles Deleuze, will describe the emergence of novel ambient and modulatory conditions that provoke a partial remaking of the boundaries of the subject into the dividual, or data-individual. This transformation, while unparalleled in some ways, relies on many extractive and surveilling methods and technologies developed in the previous episteme. Similarly, the somatechnical facialisation capabilities of digital technologies – described variously as digital epidermalisation, digital phrenology, and recursive redlining – are, I hold, prefigured by plantation logics. But while these are important historical contextualisations, the new algorithmic architectures we are embedded in have occasioned a veritable structural reorganisation of the circularity of the empirico-transcendental doublet. This new recursive epistemological arrangement – or algorithmic-transcendental doublet – causes dividuals to continually be assimilated into computerised temporalities that elicit financialised closed-loop epistemologies and grant the digital illegitimate authority over the radical immanence of life as lived. In addressing the interrelated theses presented here, I invoke François Laruelle’s project on non-standard philosophy to propose an alternative posture – one which refuses the violence of sufficiency: a knowledge that doubles the world via a transcendental synthesis by which the structure of possibility is precipitated always as a doublet.