Abstract: This presentation is based on presently ongoing joint work, where we deal with the sociological, emotional and intellectual impacts of mechanical reproduction of formal knowledge systems – such as those based on mathematical models – in the service of economies of endless repetition and mass reproduction. Symbols and formalisms can carry over across different paradigms of human existence, across both time and space, without the underlying meanings and subtleties necessarily being carryied along. Such nominalization of meanings only gets exacerbated under systems of massive mechanical reproduction. Mathematical models particularly are not just mere vehicles of computation, but play a paradigmatic role in the very realization of today’s political economy – being endlessly used to reproduce social relations that suit the interests of power and capital.
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