I’m delighted to kick off the Autumn/Fall with Felicia Jing’s essay here in the Math(s), Philosophy, History reading group.

Felicia Jing just completed a PhD in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University, is a visiting fellow at NYU’s Remarque Institute this Fall, and will be joining Brown University in the Spring 2027 for a postdoc in the Program of Science, Technology, and Society. The essay we read today is a condensed version of her dissertation’s first chapter that is forthcoming in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon.

This essay offers us a new and more materialist angle on the history and politics of computer science. The materiality of the algorithm is, following Marx, not only the economy of the hardware on which it runs, but also the socio-political logic that structures developments in hardware, software, and programming. The substitution of software for hardware when it comes to questions of its economy—a substition spirited in no small part in media studies by Friedrich Kittler’s infamous claim that “there is no software”—displaces rather than addressses the question of the politics and historicity of computing.

Jing shows that there is something about the logic of algorithms—and therefore of software, given code is treated as the materialization of algorithmic logic—that walks hand-in-hand with capital. Indeed, Jing’s gesture to this intimate contact between capital and computation builds on Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s chief insight, namely that one of the most conseqential results of capital’s perceptual physics [Best] on the division of labour is to conceptually separate the head from the hand, and therefore to valorize the labor that issues from the ‘intellect’ in a way that undermines the conscious and egalitarian contract of capital and the wage, that is, that all labour is exchangeable under the aegis of fair compensation.

Jing narrates the courting of these two concepts first by touching on the algorithm as an Althusserian ‘absent concept’, and then by firming it up as a Robinsonnade with reference to the Marxian critique of prehistory:

In a vanishing act of ‘hiding the machine’, algorithms are sanitized not only from the material development of hardware, its dirty industrial history, its dependency on the labor of earlier ‘human computers’ but also—importantly–from the state machine. That is, the centralized bureaucratic state, class antogonisms, and the legal forms of coercion were, at every moment, a site of struggle over and against the political form of an alorithm. Jing - Algorithm, pp.8-9

Jing goes on to show how the conceptual constitution of the ‘algorithm’ as prehistorical flattens the history of computer science into a crude, teleological account, geared towards a narrative of ever-advancing progress. This flattened conception squeezes the possibility of criticality, politicality, and thus an emancipatory politics from the entire enterprise of computing, readying it to be cast, like a ketchup wrapper, into the dustbins of history as a bone that could never stick in the throat of capital’s voracious appetite.

What I love about this essay is how Jing takes on Donald Knuth just as Marx did Adam Smith, i.e. as the originator of a mythology with real consequences. I think Knuth is the right figure to take on for a number of reasons, not least because it is also Knuth who establishes the idea of ‘literate programming’ as its idea, which is to say that Knuth argues that a program should be conceptualized as a work of art such a a novel, an artefact by analogy of literature chiefly, and not of industry. Jing’s argument shows how the Knuth’s analogical insistence in literate programming might hide another absent concept in the computer program. In its prehistorical guise as architected by a single and singular genius, the computer program becomes—like the novel—a form of expression distinctly fathered by modernity, and therefore by capital.

To mark the genealogical relation between computing and capital in this way is not the same, critically, as consigning computing and computer science to the collection of practices with which we must not dare to engage should we seek an emancipated future. On the contrary, following Marx’s engagement with the political economy of his day, it is to insist that we must read figures such as Donald Knuth again, symptomatically, to articulate more concretely how capital and computing are entangled as logical structures, what power one does and does not have over the other.

It is Jing’s keen engagement with this materiality of computing, a materiality truer than that which results from holding one’s eye up to the end of a fiber optic cable—as friend-of-the-pod Tung-Hui Hu once reported himself doing—that makes her essay an opportune way out of our group’s summer focus on the 19^th century, our 19^th century summer.

One of our group’s recurring themes is how we should think the materiality of mathematics in general, and the materiality of pure mathematics in particular, the algebraic turn that authors we have read such as Jeremy Gray and Erich Hörl have referred to variably as mathematics’ modernism or modernization. Algorithmic materiality, it seems to me, skips hand-in-hand with the materiality of calculus, at least when the song of capital is playing over the speakers. The conceptual divisions we have tracked in previous sessions, between applied and pure mathematics, between pure mathematics and mathematic physics, and between algebra and geometry: all these divisions should be thought in the light of capital’s surreptitously enforced division between head and hand, between intellectual-qua-immaterial and manual-qua-material labour. This is what Jing’s essay illuminates for us, and I’ll now turn over to her to say a few words about it before we open up for any and all questions and comments as usual.