Revenge of the machines: Deleuze, Luhmann and the sociality of data

Machines were at work in two of the authorships that defined the postclassical episteme: for Deleuze, the baroque tractional machines of Leibniz and Huygens; for Luhman, the non-trivial machines of von Foerster. These machines were kin. Tractional motion machines evolved into the Differential Engine of Vannevar Bush, which cued up the emergence of servomechanisms, cybernetics and what was colloquially called ‘automation’. What happens when machines born of this tradition of mathesis, namely algorithmic apparatuses, begin to produce a sociality that cannot be comprehended in terms of figures drawn from earlier periods of that tradition? In particular, what happens to the sociopoietic processes of control and communication that were so vital to the postclassical episteme? Here, drawing on the example of platformized music, I suggest that the figures of control and communication have been overtaken by a mode of sociopoiesis that might provisionally be called pre-emption. ‘Provisionally’, because we still do not have an adequate language for datafication, and perhaps ‘we’ never will.