In Defense of Incalculable: Big Data and the Un-dead Theorist

Quick comment written after reading Ian Steadman's 'Big data, language and the death of the theorist' in Wired UK [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-01/25/big-data-end-of-theory]

A theorist can (and will) die, indeed, that is quite a probabble event. S/he can commit suicide as a result of a nervous breakdown, exhaustion, or loss of faith in something essentially humane. Theorist can also die in an accident caused by some crucial miscalculation. And death can be a calculable event as well——when it actually happens. But until then (when?) there is also a potential chance to make some incalculable reflections about this calculability.

It is the theorist who makes a resolution to understand The Data itself instead of competing with data crunching supercomputers. This concept of calculable realities, which is being propagated and exploited by the dominating contemporary techno-scientific discourse, was (and still is) tormenting many theorists. Wittgenstein was forced to make a paradigmic U turn after publishing his 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' and renounce the idea of calculability. Godel used the language of calculation itself——mathematics——while trying to prove that the result of a correct calculation can be wrong and thus arrived at his famous theorem.

And there is another aspect of this 'big data crunching ideology': it encloses the discourse within itself by remaining mute about the philosophical problems surrounding some of the fundamental constitutive elements of a techno-scientific reality: 'thinking', 'intelligence', 'reality', 'self', 'representation', etc. Here the premise of incalculability, or 'outside calculability'——i.e., also, 'outside-the-text'——functions not as a reference to some self-sustained Being outside-the-text per se, but rather points to something which can be identified as a potentiality, a human 'spirit'.

To defend the incalculable would also mean to defend the faculty of reflection. The 'death of a theorist'——or, rather, termination of reflection by rendering it obsolete as a faculty——would signal that the text is finally able to reflect upon itself, that it has become conscious of itself.