Text page
The Holes in the Machine
"The Holes in the Machine" uses feedback, automation, or machinic desire to describe modernity as a recursive system rather than a human-centered project.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The key claim is that cybernetic process and capitalist abstraction belong to the same field. Feedback, machinic desire, and recursive automation describe how modernity runs through distributed systems rather than sovereign subjects.
These pages make recursion operational by tying desire, signal, and control to technical process. Cybernetics becomes a vocabulary for understanding how abstraction feeds back through bodies, media, and institutions.
That matters because the archive's account of meltdown depends on feedback rather than simple linear progress. The future arrives here as recursive escalation, not as planned development.
How to read this text
Begin with the page's account of feedback or machinic desire, then move outward to its claims about culture or politics.
Track how automation, recursion, or systems language displaces centered agency. That shift usually reveals why the text sits in this section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
126: Nyx, a noctournal: ISSUE 7: MACHINES: SPRING/SUMMER 2012 NICHOLAS GLEDHILL: The first thing I want to ask you about is in relation to the talk you gave at the Signal:Noise conference earlier this year,1 where you were talking about algorithms being not just executors of programs but prehensive2 agencies that can evaluate data and use feedback systems to act by themselves within their own spatio-temporality.
Definition · paragraph 6
The question for me is to always try to open the human to the existence of other ontological objects, things or creatures. In my previous work [Abstract Sex] it was bacteria, in this work it’s algorithms, but what is important is firstly not to think of neoliberal capitalism as one whole incorporating, reproducing entity.
Stakes · paragraph 4
129: Nyx, a noctournal: ISSUE 7: MACHINES: SPRING/SUMMER 2012 or planned, or strategically predetermined, things will just emerge. So, there’s this idea that capitalism has adopted this form of an emerging and self-producing organism as it were, and that the aesthetic reflects this image of capitalism, this tendency of capitalism.
Stakes · paragraph 6
And that’s why I argue against neoliberal generative architecture, or generative algorithms, because that kind of aesthetic and the kind of overlapping of the technique onto capitalism just says to us, conveys the idea to us, of this kind of mega- organism that’s always-already reproducing whereas I think one has to oppose that.
Stakes · paragraph 4
NG: So an image of capitalism in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari talk about, with its tendency to constantly deterritorialise and reterritorialise everything it comes into contact with? LP: Exactly, yes, and because of the way algorithms are used to generate structure and the way they continuously evolve you have this conflating understanding of capitalism and technology.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.