Table of Contents for Malicious Deceivers
Prologue: Beginning Philosophy
The Prologue recounts the author's personal experience of beginning philosophy—namely, an encounter with Descartes's philosophy—as an entry point into the book's subject matter, argument, and methodology. It gives context for the interest in the malicious deceiver and its specific deployment in this book: as a metaphor standing in for Cartesian metaphysics and the logic of (dis)simulation associated with it, as well as a frame for analyzing and theorizing the deceptive performances of various (dis)simulating machines and objects. Cartesian metaphysics grounds existence in an abstracting mode of thinking cut off from the senses and the sensible and provides a model of the construction of the real that is inescapably fake—or, more precisely, synthetic. The chapter also provides an overview of the book structure.
1.Enter the Malicious Deceiver
This chapter introduces the malicious deceiver scenario as presented in Descartes's experiment of radical doubt and shows how (dis)simulation—or post-truth—is its structuring logic and why it matters. It also restages the Cartesian experiment in its historical context: the Dutch tulipomania, one of the first market bubbles in the history of capitalism. The chapter thus begins to reveal global capitalism as the broader context for understanding the malicious deceiver. By building on the thought of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the chapter begins to unravel the twinning of Cartesian metaphysics and global capitalism as well as the link between Cartesian thought and computation. The chapter also connects the malicious deceiver scenario with some of its more recent iterations, such as Nick Bostrom's computer simulation hypothesis, Hilary Putnam's "brain in a vat" scenario, Robert Nozick's "experience machine" thought experiment, and The Matrix (directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski).
2.(Dis)simulating Thinking Machines
This chapter further unpacks the link between the logic of (dis)simulation and computation through an investigation of the kinds of thinking that computing machines perform. It highlights two modes of machine thinking: one is a function of the machine's actual operation and can be traced back to Descartes; the other is a function of the human–machine interaction at the interface and connects with Turing's imitation game. At play between these two modes of machine thinking is both the difference and the intimate connection between simulation and dissimulation. The chapter attends to performances of machine thinking theatrically staged by Annie Dorsen, culminating in an analysis of globalizing modernity's paradigmatic memory play, Shakespeare's Hamlet, as it is performed by algorithms in Dorsen's A Piece of Work: A Machine-made Hamlet.
Interlude: Auto-History
Working with an autobiographical method, this transitional chapter stages the context in which I first read Descartes: the Romanian transition to capitalism and consumerism and what preceded it. The chapter spotlights two malicious deceivers: (i) the communist apparatus of state deception sustained through a vast surveillance machine (read as a precursor to big data) and through a propaganda machine; and (ii) television, a (dis)simulation machine that symbolizes the transition from communism to capitalism and consumerism in Romania. Examining the televised revolution that marked the end of communism and beginning of capitalism in Romania, the chapter attends to the transformation of history into a circulated TV image that voids history and social context. One specific image it focuses on is that of the dictatorial couple put on trial during the revolution, as reenacted in the International Institute of Political Murder's theatre project, The Last Days of the Ceausescus.
3.Synthetica: (Un)picturing Plastic Worlds
This chapter follows a plastic bag floating from communist Romania across the waters of the ocean, shifting shapes as it moves across different times and places and yet stubbornly remaining the same. The chapter shows how synthetic plastic—the material for money as well as for a form of payment and credit that is intimately tied to big data—is a malicious deceiver with Cartesian flavors. Both hyper-visible and imperceptible, synthetic plastic is a product of simulation and an agent of deception that tricks perception. The chapter explores theatrical performances that involve labor-intensive practices of gathering plastic things by Pinar Yoldas, Chris Jordan, Alejandro Durán, and Nao Bustamante. These performances stage different kinds of encounters with a world permeated by plastics, expanding perception and experience through practices of world/sense-making.
4.On Circulation: Virality and Internet Performances
This chapter explores the memetic circulation of information, ideas, images, habits, and objects—and the virality that characterizes it—as it connects with the internet. The internet is a preeminent (dis)simulation machine of our times that has featured prominently in common understandings of post-truth. Through a focus on fake news and other kinds of viral content, this chapter highlights how the internet embodies the logic of (dis)simulation and looks to performance and theatricality for ways of countering, refusing, and displacing this logic and the virality associated with it. Specifically, it engages with an online performance that I directed and co-created as well as with works by American Artist and Hassan Khan.
Epilogue: Notes Toward a Living Practice
In place of a conclusion, the Epilogue returns to a play that I wrote and directed, Resistance (Happening), as the starting point for an open-ended reflection on a living practice of refusing and countering abstraction in a historical moment in which some have seen the beginnings of a new Cold War.