The Incomputable and Instrumental Possibility

This phrase was infamously used by Donald Rumsfeld in response to a question about the lack of evidence linking the government of Saddam Hussein to weapons of mass destruction: “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” For a possible outline of a genealogy of the paranoid white-male imagination see, Antonia Majaca: “Little Daniel Before the Law: Algorithmic Extimacy and the Rise of the Paranoid Apparatus,” e-flux journal 75 (September 2016) →.

In The Matrix trilogy, the protagonist’s name (Neo) means “novelty,” which is indistinguishable from an error in the system. The question is simply whether this error is fatal to the system or entirely anticipated.

Antoinette Rouvroy has brilliantly elaborated the new data epistemology and what she calls “data behaviorism,” where the correlation of data becomes the new truth regime leading, ultimately, to the death of causal reasoning and the end of critique.

In logic, abduction involves the possibility of inferring laws from observable events through the trial and error (induction) of explanation, driven by a hypothetical reasoning about unknown phenomena. In other words, it concerns reasoning coinciding not simply with evaluation, but with the formation of an entirely new theory.