Dear friends,

Just a heads up that next Friday I’ll be giving a paper called ‘Cybernetics after Whitehead’. It’ll be at the workshop The Bifurcation Operation: Forking Modernity, which takes place here at Leuphana University Lüneburg next Wednesday to Friday (26.-28.11.25), and which I’ve been organising together with Erich Hörl for the past year and a half.

I must say Erich and I are quite thrilled at the speakers and attendees who’ve agreed to attend. There’ll be Didier Debaise presenting the keynote, and then we’ll have papers by Anne Alombert, Donovan Stewart, Milan Stürmer, Melanie Sehgal, Daniel Weizman, as well as David Bates and Bruno Clarke travelling in all the way from the far reaches of the USA. See the programme for the workshop brief as well as everyone’s abstracts and bios.

The Bifurcation Operation revolves around the concept of bifurcation in the works of the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers and Bernard Stiegler. Should we be imagining change in today’s algorithmic societies as “bifurcations” which resist predictability? How can we moderns resist the “bifurcation” of reality into an abstract and insensible mode of reality which is superior to aa secondary mode available to the senses? Are there ways of thinking these two traditions together?

It works for me OK?

My paper will give a reading of the cybernetics which founds our algorithmic societies as in a way bifurcated, in terms of its history, by the early and later work of Whitehead. That of his pre-WWI collaboration with Bertrand Russell on a mathematical/symbolic logic, which was a milestone in the development of computer languages and neural network programming, and of the decade to follow in which Whitehead lays out his process philosophy on the basis of a critique of the “vicious bifurcation of nature“, which I argue was actually more important for the particular cybernetics of Norbert Wiener. The first story is well known and the basis for much of the critique of cybernetics (eg Heidegger), the latter has yet to be scratched. I think reading things in this light can help with thinking our cybernetic age in a different light.

Spaces are still free for the Bifurcation Operation: Forking Modernity if anyone wants to join. Just send me an email to reserve a place.

And then after the workshop I’ll be packing my things and moving back to the UK, sad to leave lovely Lüneburg but looking forward to the next chapter.

Yours - in paths forking,

Daniel

Oh and I’ve got a bit of a gap in my employment so if anyone knows of anything interesting going in the UK (or from it), whether postdocs, teaching, copy-editing, coding, graphic design (I made these posters!) or whatnot, then I’d love to hear more.

Goodbye Leuphana 👋 (Photo: Inga Luchs)

Greek pot featuring Athena handing Perseus the curved harpē with which to decapitate snake-haired Medusa.

Hello,

Welcome to my first newsletter.

Next week, Tuesday 24 June, 18:00-20:00 (C40.530, Leuphana University), I’ll be giving a talk about the final sentence from Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ (1990), which reads, ‘A snake's coils are even more intricate than a mole's burrow.’

What have snakes to do with the ‘societies of control’ that define our contemporary era, and the cybernetics upon which they are based?

I’ll be drawing on William Burroughs, Hardt and Negri, Aby Warburg, and especially Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne to explore the association of snakes and the art of controlling ships possessed by the Greek kubernétes (helmsman). As I’ll argue, modern cybernetics not only adopted its name from the latter, but also, at least in Norbert Wiener’s rendition of it, its snakiness. The talk will strive to offer a critical account of snakes and control that precludes the antisemitic trope of a snakish group who controls the world.

I’m afraid this is an in-person only talk, but if you’d like to read a draft of the paper just reply to this message and I’ll gladly share one with you, so long as you swear by the river Styx that it won’t be distributed further as it’s in the works for publication.

Guests are encouraged to read Deleuze’s short ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ for context if they haven’t already, and read the draft paper of the talk if they so wish. Contact me for either.

The colloquium is organised as a cooperation between Leuphana’s Center for Critical Studies (CCS) and the research initiative on the Disruptive Condition. Webpage here.

Wishing you all the best,

Daniel Nemenyi

Hopi priest performing the snake ritual discussed by Aby Warburg