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Tag: Sigmund Freud

  • Moira Weigel — Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School

    Moira Weigel — Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School

    Moira Weigel

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by “The New Extremism” special issue editors (Adrienne Massanari and David Golumbia), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

    Since the election of Donald Trump, a growing body of research has examined the role of digital technologies in new right wing movements (Lewis 2018; Hawley 2017; Neiwert 2017; Nagle 2017). This article will explore a distinct, but related, subject: new right wing tendencies within the tech industry itself. Our point of entry will be an improbable document: a German language dissertation submitted by an American to the faculty of social sciences at J. W. Goethe University of Frankfurt in 2002. Entitled Aggression in the Life-World, the dissertation aims to describe the role that aggression plays in social integration, or the set of processes that lead individuals in a given society to feel bound to one another. To that end, it offers a “systematic” reinterpretation of Theodor Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity (1973). It is of interest primarily because of its author: Alexander C. Karp.[1]

    Karp, as some readers may know, did not pursue a career in academia. Instead, he became the CEO of the powerful and secretive data analytics company, Palantir Technologies. His dissertation has inspired speculation for years, but no journalist or scholar has yet analyzed it. Doing so, I will argue that it offers insight into the intellectual formation of an influential network of actors in and around Silicon Valley, a network articulating ideas and developing business practices that challenge longstanding beliefs about how Silicon Valley thinks and works.

    For decades, a view prevailed that the politics of both digital technologies and most digital technologists were liberal, or neoliberal, depending on how critically the author in question saw them. Liberalism and neoliberalism are complex and contested concepts. But broadly speaking, digital networks have been seen as embodying liberal or neoliberal logics insofar as they treated individuals as abstractly equal, rendering social aspects of embodiment like race and gender irrelevant, and allowing users to engage directly in free expression and free market competition (Kolko and Nakamura, 2000; Chun 2005, 2011, 2016). The ascendance of the Bay Area tech industry over competitors in Boston or in Europe was explained as a result of its early adoption of new forms of industrial organization, built on flexible, short-term contracts and a strong emotional identification between workers and their jobs (Hayes 1989; Saxenian 1994).

    Technologists themselves were said to embrace a new set of values that the British media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron dubbed the “Californian Ideology.” This “anti-statist gospel of cybernetic libertarianism… promiscuously combine[d] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies,” they wrote; it answered the challenge posed by the social liberalism of the New Left by “resurrecting economic liberalism” (1996, 42 & 47). Fred Turner attributed this synthesis to the “New Communalists,” members of the counterculture who “turn[ed] away from questions of gender, race, and class, and toward a rhetoric of individual and small group empowerment” (2006, 97). Nonetheless, he reinforced the broad outlines that Barbrook and Cameron had sketched. Turner further showed that midcentury critiques of mass media, and their alleged tendency to produce authoritarian subjects, inspired faith that digital media could offer salutary alternatives—that “democratic surrounds” would sustain democracy by facilitating the self-formation of democratic subjects (2013). 

    Silicon Valley has long supported Democratic Party candidates in national politics and many tech CEOs still subscribe to the “hybrid” values of the Californian Ideology (Brookman et al. 2019). However, in recent years, tensions and contradictions within Silicon Valley liberalism, particularly between commitments to social and economic liberalism, have become more pronounced. In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, several software engineers emerged as prominent figures on the “alt-right,” and newly visible white nationalist media entrepreneurs reported that they were drawing large audiences from within the tech industry.[2] The leaking of information from internal meetings at Google to digital outlets like Breitbart and Vox Popoli suggests that there was at least some truth to their claims (Tiku 2018). Individual engineers from Google, YouTube, and Facebook have received national media attention after publicly criticizing the liberal culture of their (former) workplaces and in some cases filing lawsuits against them.[3] And Republican politicians, including Trump (2019a, 2019b), have cited these figures as evidence of “liberal bias” at tech firms and the need for stronger government regulation (Trump 2019a; Kantrowitz 2019).

    Karp’s Palantir cofounder (and erstwhile roommate) Peter Thiel looms large in an emerging constellation of technologists, investors, and politicians challenging what they describe as hegemonic social liberalism in Silicon Valley. Thiel has been assembling a network of influential “contrarians” since he founded the Stanford Review as an undergraduate in the late 1980s (Granato 2017). In 2016, Thiel became a highly visible supporter of Donald Trump, speaking at the Republican National Convention, donating $1.25 million in the final weeks of Trump’s campaign for president (Streitfeld 2016a), and serving as his “tech liaison” during the transition period (Streitfeld 2016b). (Earlier in the campaign, Thiel had donated $1 million to the Defeat Crooked Hillary Super PAC backed by Robert Mercer, and overseen by Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway; see Green 2017, 200.) Since 2016, he has met with prominent figures associated with the alt-right and “neoreaction”[4] and donated at least $250,000 to support Trump’s reelection in 2020 (Federal Election Commission 2018). He has also given to Trump allies including Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who has repeatedly attacked Google and Facebook and sponsored multiple bills to regulate tech platforms, citing the threat that they pose to conservative speech.[5]

    Thiel’s affinity with Trumpism is not merely personal or cultural; it aligns with Palantir’s business interests. According to a 2019 report by Mijente, since Trump came into office in 2017, Palantir contracts with the United States government have increased by over a billion dollars per year. These include multiyear contracts with the US military (Judson 2019; Hatmaker 2019) and with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (MacMillan and Dwoskin 2019); Palantir has also worked with police departments in New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles (Alden 2017; Winston 2018; Harris 2018).

    Karp and Thiel have both described these controversial contracts using the language of “nation” and “civilization.” Confronted by critical journalistic coverage (Woodman 2017, Winston 2018, Ahmed 2018) and protests  (Burr 2017, Wiener 2017), as well as internal actions by concerned employees (MacMillan and Dwoskin, 2019), Thiel and Karp have doubled down, characterizing the company as “patriotic,” in contrast to its competitors. In an interview conducted at Davos in January 2019, Karp said that Silicon Valley companies that refuse to work with the US government are “borderline craven” (2019b). At a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in July 2019, Thiel called Google “seemingly treasonous” for doing business with China, suggested that the company had been infiltrated by Chinese agents, and called for a government investigation (Thiel 2019a). Soon after, he published an Op Ed in the New York Times that restated this case (Thiel 2019b).

    However, Karp has cultivated a very different public image from Thiel’s, supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016, saying that he would vote for any Democratic presidential candidate against Trump in 2020 (Chafkin 2019), and—most surprisingly—identifying himself as a Marxist or “neo-Marxist” (Waldman et al. 2018, Mac 2017, Greenberg 2013). He also refers to himself as a “socialist” (Chafkin 2019) and according to at least one journalist, regularly addresses his employees on Marxian thought (Greenberg 2013). On one level, Karp’s dissertation clarifies what he means by this: For a time, he engaged deeply with the work of several neo-Marxist thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. On another level, however, Karp’s dissertation invites further perplexity, because right wing movements, including Trump’s, evince special antipathy for precisely that tradition.

    Starting in the early 1990s, right-wing think tanks in both Germany and the United States began promoting conspiratorial narratives about critical theory. The conspiracies allege that, ever since the failure of “economic Marxism” in World War I, “neo-“ or “cultural Marxists” have infiltrated academia, media, and government. From inside, they have carried out a longstanding plan to overthrow Western civilization by criticizing Western culture and imposing “political correctness.” To the extent that it attaches to real historical figures, the story typically begins with Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács, goes through Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and other wartime émigrés to the United States, particularly those involved in state-sponsored mass media research, and ends abruptly with Herbert Marcuse and his influence on student movements of the 1960s (Moyn 2018; Huyssen 2017; Jay 2011; Berkowitz 2003).

    The term “Cultural Marxism” directly echoes the Nazi theory of “Cultural Bolshevism”; the early proponents of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory were more or less overt antisemites and white nationalists (Berkowitz 2003). However, in the 2000s and 2010s, right wing politicians and media personalities helped popularize it well beyond that sphere.[6] During the same time, it has gained traction in Silicon Valley, too.  In recent years, several employees at prominent tech firms have publicly decried the influence of Cultural Marxists, while making complaints about “political correctness” or lack of “viewpoint diversity.”[7]

    Thiel has long expressed similar frustrations.[8] So how is it that this prominent opponent of “cultural Marxism” works with a self-described neo-Marxist CEO? Aggression in the Life World casts light on the core beliefs that animate their partnership. The idiosyncratic adaptation of Western Marxism that it advances does not in fact place Karp at odds with the nationalist projects that Thiel has advocated, and Palantir helps enact. On the contrary, by attempting to render critical theoretical concepts “systematic,” Karp reinterprets them in a way that legitimates the work he would go on to do. Shortly before Palantir began developing its infrastructure for identification and authentication, Aggression in the Life-World articulated an ideology of these processes.

    Freud Returns to Frankfurt

    Tech industry legend has it that Karp wrote his dissertation under Jürgen Habermas (Silicon Review 2018; Metcalf 2016; Greenberg 2013). In fact, he earned his doctorate from a different part of Goethe University than the one in which Habermas taught: not at the Institute for Social Research but in the Division of Social Sciences. Karp’s primary reader was the social psychologist Karola Brede, who then held a joint appointment at Goethe University’s Sociology Department and at the Sigmund Freud Institute; she and her younger colleague Hans-Joachim Busch appear listed as supervisors on the front page. The confusion is significant, and not only because it suggests an exaggeration. It also obscures important differences of emphasis and orientation between Karp’s advisors and Habermas. These differences directly shaped Karp’s graduate work.

    Habermas did engage with psychoanalysis early in his career.  In the spring and summer of 1959, he attended every one of a series of lectures organized by the Institute for Social Research to mark the centenary of Freud’s birth (Müller-Doohm 2016, 79; Brede and Mitscherlich-Nielsen 1996, 391). He went on to become close friends and even occasionally co-teach  (Brede and Mitscherlich-Nielsen 1996, 395) with one of the organizers and speakers of this series, Alexander Mitscherlich, who had long campaigned with Frankfurt School founder Max Horkheimer for the funds to establish the Sigmund Freud Institute and became the first director when it opened the following year. In 1968, shortly after Mitscherlich and his wife, Margarete, published their influential book, The Inability to Mourn, Habermas developed his first systemic critical social theory in Knowledge and Human Interests (1972). Nearly one third of that book is devoted to psychoanalysis, which Habermas treats as exemplary of knowledge constituted by the “critical” or “emancipatory interest”—that is, the species interest in engaging in critical reflection in order to overcome domination. However, in the 1970s, Habermas turned away from that book’s focus on philosophical anthropology toward the ideas about linguistic competence that culminated in his Theory of Communicative Action; in 1994, Margarete Mitscherlich recounted that Habermas had “gotten over” psychoanalysis in the process of writing that book (1996, 399). Karp’s interest in the theory of the drives, and in aggression in particular, was not drawn from Habermas but from scholars at the Freud Institute, where it was a major focus of research and public debate for decades.

    Freud himself never definitively decided whether he believed that a death drive existed. The historian Dagmar Herzog has shown that the question of aggression—and particularly the question of whether human beings are innately driven to commit destructive acts—dominated discussions of psychoanalysis in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. “In no other national context would the attempt to make sense of aggression become such a core preoccupation,” Herzog writes (2016, 124). After fascism, this subject was highly politicized. For some, the claim that aggression was a primary drive helped to explain the Nazi past: if all humans had an innate drive to commit violence, Nazi crimes could be understood as an extreme example of a general rule. For others, this interpretation risked naturalizing and normalizing Nazi atrocities. “Sex-radicals” inspired by the work of Wilhelm Reich pointed out that Freud had cited the libido as the explanation for most phenomena in life. According to this camp, Nazi aggression had been the result not of human nature but of repressive authoritarian socialization. In his own work, Mitscherlich attempted to elaborate a series of compromises between the conservative position (that hierarchy and aggression were natural) and the radical one (that new norms of anti-authoritarian socialization could eliminate hierarchy entirely; Herzog 2016, 128-131). Klaus Horn, the long-time director of the division of social psychology at the Freud Institute, whose collected writings Karp’s supervisor Hans-Joachim Busch edited, contested the terms of the disagreement. The entire point of sophisticated psychoanalysis, Horn argued, was that culture and biology were mutually constitutive and interacted continuously; to name one or the other as the source of human behavior was nonsensical (Herzog 2016, 135).

    Karp’s primary advisor, Karola Brede, who joined the Sigmund Freud Institute in 1967, began her career in the midst of these debates (Bareuther et al. 1989, 713). In her first book, published in 1972, Brede argued that “psychosomatic” disturbances had to be understood in the context of socialization processes. Not only did neurotic conflicts play a role in somatic illness; such illness constituted “socio-pathological” expressions of an increase in the forms of repression required to integrate individuals into society (Brede 1972). In 1976, Brede published a critique of Konrad Lorenz, whose bestselling work, On Aggression, had triggered much of the initial debate with Alexander Mitscherlich and others at the Institute, in the journal Psyche (“Der Trieb als humanspezifische Kategorie”; see Herzog 2016, 125-7).  Since the 1980s, her monographs have focused on work and workplace sociology, and on the role that psychoanalysis should play in critical social theory. Individual and Work (1986) explored the “psychoanalytic costs involved in developing one’s own labor power.” The Adventures of Adjusting to Everyday Work (1995) drew on empirical studies of German workplaces to demonstrate that psychodynamic processes played a key role in professional life, shaping processes of identity formation, authoritarian behavior, and gendered self-identity in the workplace. In that book, Brede criticizes Habermas for undervaluing psychoanalytic concepts—and unconscious aggression in particular—as social forces. Brede argues that the importance that Habermas assigned to “intention” in Theory of Communicative Action prevented him from recognizing the central role that the unconscious played in constituting identity, action, and subjectivity (1995, 223 & 225). At the same time, she was editing multiple volumes on psychoanalytic theory, including feminist perspectives in psychoanalysis, and in a series of journal articles in the 1990s, developed a focus on antisemitism and Germany’s relationship to its troubled history (Brede 1995, 1997, 2000).

    During his time as a PhD student, Karp seems to have worked very closely with Brede. The sole academic journal article that he published he co-authored with her in 1997. (An analysis of Daniel Goldhagen’s bestselling 1996 study, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the article attempted to build on Goldhagen’s thesis by characterizing a specific, “eliminationist” form of antisemitism that Karp and Brede argued could only be understood from the perspective of Freudian psychoanalytic theory; see Brede and Karp 1997, 621-6.) Karp wrote the introduction for a volume of the Proceedings of the Freud Institute, which Brede edited (Brede et al. 1999, 5-7). The chapter that Karp contributed to that volume would appear in his dissertation, three years later, in almost identical form. Karp’s dissertation itself also closely followed the themes of Brede’s research.

    Aggression in the Life World

    The full title of Karp’s dissertation captures its patchwork quality: Aggression in the Life-World: Expanding Parsons’ Concept of Aggression Through a Description of the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture. “This work began,” the opening sentences recall, “with the observation that many statements have the effect of relieving unconscious drives, not in spite, but because, of the fact that they are blatantly irrational” (Karp 2002, 2). Karp proposes that such statements provide relief by allowing a speaker to have things both ways: to acknowledge the existence of a social order and, indeed, demonstrate specific knowledge of that order while, at the same time, expressing taboo wishes that contravene social norms. As result, rather than destroy social order, such irrational statements integrate the speaker into society while also providing compensation for the pains of being integrated. To describe these kinds of statements Karp indicates that he will borrow a concept from the late work of Adorno: “jargon.” However, Karp announces that he will critique Adorno for depending too much on the very phenomenological tradition that his Jargon of Authenticity is meant to criticize. Adorno’s concept is not a concept at all, Karp alleges, but a “reservoir for collecting Adorno-poetry” (Sammelbecken Adornoscher Dichtung) (2002, 58). Karp’s own goal is to clarify jargon into an analytical concept that could then be incorporated into a classical sociological framework. As synecdoche for classical sociology, Karp takes the work of Talcott Parsons.

    The second chapter of Karp’s dissertation, a reading and critique of Parsons, had appeared in the Freud Institute publication, Cases for the Theory of the Drives. In his editor’s introduction to that volume, Karp had stated that the goal of their group had been to integrate psychoanalytic concepts in general and Freud’s theory of the drives in particular into frameworks provided by classical sociology. The volume begins with an essay by Brede on the failure of sociology as a discipline to account for the role that aggression plays in social integration. (Brede 1999, 11-45, credits Georg Simmel with having developed an account of the active role that aggression played in creating social cohesion; more on that below.) Karp reiterates Brede’s complaint, directing it against Parsons, whose account of aggression he calls “incomplete” or “watered down” (2002, 11). In the version that appears in his dissertation, several sections of literature review establish background assumptions and describe what Karp takes to be Parsons’ achievement: integrating the insights of Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. Taking, from Durkheim, a theory of how societies develop systems of norms, and from Freud, how individuals internalize them, Parsons developed an account of culture as the site where the integration of personality and society takes place.

    For Parsons, pace Karp, culture itself is best understood as a system constituted through “interactions.” Karp credits Parsons with shifting the paradigm from a subject of consciousness to a subject in communication—translating the Freudian superego into sociological form, so that it appears, not as a moral enforcer, but as a psychic structure communicating cultural norms to the conscious subject. Yet, Karp protests that there are, in fact, parts of personality not determined by culture, and not visible to fellow members of a culture so long as an individual does not deviate from established norms of interaction. Parsons’ theory of aggression remains incomplete on at least two counts, then. First, Karp argues, Parsons fails to recognize aggression as a primary drive, treating it only as a secondary result that follows when the pleasure principle finds itself thwarted. Karp, by contrast, adopts the position that a drive toward death or destruction is at least as fundamental as the pleasure principle. Second, because Parsons defines aggression in terms of harms to social norms, he cannot explain how aggression itself can become a social norm, as it did in Nazi Germany. For an explanation of how aggressive impulses come to be integrated into society, Karp turns instead to Adorno.

    In Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity, Karp found an account of how aggression constitutes itself in language and, through language, mediates social integration (2002, 57). Adorno’s lengthy essay, which he had originally intended to constitute one part of Negative Dialectics, resists easy summary. The essay begins by identifying theological overtones that, Adorno says, emanate from the language used by German existentialists—and by Martin Heidegger in particular. Adorno cites not only “authenticity,” but terms like “existential,” “in the decision,” “commission,” “appeal,” and “encounter,” as exemplary” (3). While the existentialists claim that such language constitutes a form of resistance to conformity, Adorno argues that it has in fact become highly standardized: “Their unmediated language they receive from a distributor” (14). Making fetishes of these particular terms, the existentialists decontextualize language in several respects. They do so at the level of the sentence—snatching certain, favored words out of the dialectical progression of thought as if meaning could exist without it. At the same time, the existentialist presents “words like ‘being’ as if they were the most concrete terms” and could obviate abstraction, the dialectical movement within language. The function of this rhetorical practice is to make reality seem simply present, and give the subject an illusion of self-presence—replacing consciousness of historical conditions with an illusion of immediate self-experience. The “authenticity” generated by jargon therefore depends on forgetting or repressing the historically objective realities of social domination.

    Beyond simply obscuring the realities of domination, Adorno continues, the jargon of authenticity spiritualizes them.  For instance, Martin Heidegger turns the real precarity of people who might at any time lose their jobs and homes into a defining condition of Dasein: “The true need for residence consists in the fact that mortals must first learn to reside” (26). The power of such jargon—which transforms the risk of homelessness into an essential trait of Dasein—comes from the fact that it expresses human need, even as it disavows it. To this extent, jargon has an a- or even anti-political character: it disguises current and contingent effects of social domination into eternal and unchangeable characteristics of human existence. “The categories of jargon are gladly brought forward, as though they were not abstracted from generated and transitory situations but rather belonged to the essence of man,” Adorno writes. “Man is the ideology of dehumanization” (48). Jargon turns fascist insofar as it leads the person who uses it to perceive historical conditions of domination—including their own domination—as the very source of their identity. “Identification with that which is inevitable remains the only consolation of this philosophy of consolation.” Adorno writes. “Its dignified mannerism is a reactionary response to the secularization of death” (143, 144).

    Karp says at the outset that his goal is to make Adorno’s collection of observations about jargon “systematic.” In order to do so, he approaches the subject from a different perspective than Adorno did: focused on the question of what psychological needs jargon fulfills. For Karp, the achievement of jargon lies in its “double function” (Doppelfunktion). Jargon both acknowledges the objective forces that oppress people and allows people to adapt or accommodate themselves to those same forces by eternalizing them—removing them from the context of the social relations where they originate, and treating them as features of human existence in general. Jargon addresses needs that cannot be satisfied, because they reflect the realities of living in a society characterized by domination, but also cannot be acted upon, because they are taboo. For Karp, insofar as jargon is a kind of speech that designates speakers as belonging to an in-group, it also expresses an unconscious drive toward aggression. In jargon we see the aggression that drives individuals to exclude others from the social world doing its binding work. It is on these grounds that Karp argues that aggression is a constitutive part of jargon—its ever-present, if unacknowledged, obverse.

    Karp grants that Adorno is concerned with social life. The Jargon of Authenticity investigates precisely the social function of ontology, or how it turns “authenticity” into a cultural form, circulated within mass culture. Adorno also alludes to the specifically German inheritance of jargon—the resemblance between Heidegger’s celebration of völkisch rural life and Nazi celebration of the same (1973, 3). Yet, Karp argues, Adorno does not provide an account of how a deception or illusion of authenticity came to be a structure in the life-world. Even as he criticizes phenomenological ontology, Adorno relies on a concept of language that is itself phenomenological. Echoing critiques by Axel Honneth (1991) of Horkheimer and Adorno’s failures to account for the unique domain of “the social,” Karp turns to the same thinkers Karola Brede used in her article on “Social Integration and Aggression”: Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel.

    In that article, Brede develops a reading that joins Freud and Simmel’s accounts of the role of the figure of “the stranger” in modern societies. In Civilization and its Discontents, Brede argues, Freud described “strangers” in terms that initially appear incompatible with the account Simmel had put forth in his famous 1908 “Excursus on the Stranger.” Simmel described the mechanisms whereby social groups exclude strangers in order to eliminate danger—thereby controlling the “monstrous reservoir of aggressivity” that would otherwise threaten social structure. (The quote is from Parsons.) Freud wrote that, despite the Biblical commandment to love our neighbors, and the ban on killing, we experience a hatred of strangers, because they make us experience what is strange in us, and fear what in them cannot be fit into our cultural models. Brede concludes that it is only by combining Freudian psychodynamics with Simmel’s account of the role of exclusion in social formation that critical social theory could account for the forms of violence that dominated the history of the twentieth century (Brede 199, 43).

    Karp contrasts Adorno with both Freud and Simmel, and finds Adorno to be more pessimistic than either of these predecessors. Compared to Freud, who argued that culture successfully repressed both libidinal and destructive drives in the name of moral principles, Karp writes that Adorno regarded culture as fundamentally amoral. Rather than successfully repressing antisocial drives, Karp writes, late capitalist culture sates its members with “false satisfactions.” People look for opportunities to express their needs for self-preservation. However, since they know that their needs cannot be fully satisfied, they simultaneously fall over themselves to destroy the memory of the false fulfillment they have had. Repressed awareness of the false nature of their own satisfaction produces the ambient aggression that people take out on strangers.

    For Simmel, the stranger is part of all modern societies, Karp writes. For Adorno, the stranger extends an invitation to violence. Jargon gains its power from the fact that those who speak, and hear, it really are searching for a lost community. The very presence of the stranger demonstrates that such community cannot be simply given; jargon is powerful precisely in proportion to how much the shared context of life has been destroyed.  It therefore offers a “dishonest answer to an honest longing” for intersubjectivity, gaining strength in proportion to the intensity the need that has been thwarted (Karp 2002, 85).  Wishes that contradict social norms are brought into the web of social relations (Geflecht der Lebenswelt), in such a way that they do not need to be sanctioned or punished for violating social norms (91). On the contrary, they serve to bind members of social groups to one another.

    Testing Jargon

    As a case study to demonstrate the usefulness of his modified concept of jargon, Karp takes up a notorious episode in post-wall German intellectual history: a speech that the celebrated novelist Martin Walser gave in October 1998, at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt. The occasion was Walser’s acceptance of the 1998 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The novelist had traveled a complex political itinerary by the late 1990s. Documents released in 2007 would uncover the fact that as a teenager, during the final years of the Second World War, Walser joined the Nazi Party and fought as a member of the Wehrmacht. But he first became publicly known as a left-wing writer. In the 1950s, Walser attended meetings of the informal but influential German writer’s association Gruppe 47 and received their annual literary prize for his short story, “Templones Ende”; in 1964 he attended the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, where low ranking officials were charged and convicted for crimes that they had perpetrated during the Holocaust. In his 1965 essay about that experience, “Our Auschwitz,” Walser insisted on the collective responsibility of Germans for the horrors of the Nazi period; indeed he criticized the emphasis on spectacular cruelty at the trial, and in the media, to the extent that this emphasis allowed the public to maintain an imaginary distance between themselves and the Nazi past (Walser 2015, 217-56). Walser supported Social Democratic Party member Willy Brandt for Chancellor and even joined the German Communist Party during that decade. By the 1980s, however, Walser was widely perceived to have migrated back to the right. And when he gave his speech “Experiences Composing a Sermon” on the sixtieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, he used the occasion to attack the public culture of Holocaust remembrance. Walser described this culture as a “moral cudgel” or “bludgeon” (Moralkeule).

    “Experiences Composing a Sermon” adopts a stream of consciousness, rather than argumentative, style in order to explain why Walser refused to do what he said was expected of him: to speak about the ugliness of German history. Instead, he argued that no further collective memorialization of the Holocaust was necessary. There was no such thing, he said, as collective or shared conscience at all: conscience should be a private matter. Critics and intellectuals he disparaged as “preachers” were “instrumentalizing” and “vulgarizing” memory, when they exhorted the public constantly to reflect on the crimes of the Nazi period. “There is probably such a thing as the banality of good,” Walser quipped, echoing Hannah Arendt (2015, 513). He did not spell out what ends he thought that these “preachers” aimed to instrumentalize German guilt for. He concluded by abruptly calling on the newly elected president Roman Herzog, who was in attendance, to free the former East German spy, Rainer Rupp, from prison. Walser’s speech received a standing ovation—though not, notably, from Ignatz Bubis, then the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who was also in attendance. The next day, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bubis called the speech an act of “intellectual arson” (geistiges Brandstiftung). The controversy that followed generated a huge amount of debate among German intellectuals and in the German and international media (Cohen 1998). Two months later, the offices of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung hosted a formal debate between the two men. It lasted for four hours. FAZ published a transcript of their conversation in a special supplement (Walser and Bubis 1999).

    In February and March 1999, Karola Brede delivered two lectures about the controversy at Harvard University, which she subsequently published in Psyche (2000, 203-33). Brede examined both the text of Walser’s original speech and the transcript of his debate with Bubis in order to determine, first, why Walser’s speech had been received so enthusiastically, and second, whether Walser, despite eschewing explicitly antisemitic language, had in fact “taken the side of anti-Semites.” In order to explain why Walser’s speech had attracted so much attention, Brede carried out a close textual analysis. She found that, although Walser had not presented a very cogent argument, he had successfully staged a “relieving rhetoric” (Entlastungsrhetorik) that freed his audience from the sense of awkwardness or self-consciousness that they felt talking about Auschwitz in public and replaced these negative feelings with a positive sense of heightened self-regard. Brede argued that Walser used jargon, in the sense of Adorno’s “jargon of authenticity,” in order to flatter listeners into thinking that they were taking part in a daring intellectual exercise, while in fact activating anti-intellectual feelings. (In a footnote she recommended an “unpublished paper” by Karp, presumably from his dissertation, for further reading; Brede 2000, 215). She concluded that indeed Walser had taken the side of antisemites because, in both his speech and his subsequent debate with Bubis, he constructed a point of identification for listeners (“we Germans”) that systematically excluded German Jews (203). By organizing his speech entirely around “perpetrators” and the “critics” who shamed them, Walser elided the perspective of the Nazi’s victims. Invoking Simmel’s essay on “The Stranger” again, Brede argued that Walser’s behavior during his debate with Bubis offered a model of how unconscious aggression could drive social integration through exclusion. Regardless of what Walser said he felt, to the extent that his rhetoric excluded Bubis from his definition of “we Germans” as a Jew, his conduct had been antisemitic.

    In the final chapter of his dissertation, Karp also offers a reading of Walser’s prize acceptance speech, arguing that Walser made use of jargon in Adorno’s sense. Like Brede, Karp bases his argument on close textual analysis. He catalogs several specific literary strategies that, he says, enabled Walser to appeal to the unconscious or repressed emotions of his listeners without having to convince them. First, Karp tracks how Walser played with pronouns in the opening movement of the speech in order to eliminate distance and create identification between himself and his audience. Walser shifted from describing himself in the third person singular (the “one who had been chosen” for the prize) to the first-person plural (“we Germans”). At the same time, by making vague references to intellectuals who had made public remembrance and guilt compulsory, Walser created the sensation that he and the listeners he has invited to identify with his position (“we”) were only responding to attacks from outside—that “we” were the real victims. (In her article, Brede had quipped that this narrative of victimhood “could have come from a B-movie Western”; Brede 2000, 214). Through this technique, Karp writes, Walser created the impression that if “we” were to strike back against the “Holocaust preachers,” this would only be an act of self-defense.

    Karp stresses that the content of “Experiences Composing a Sermon” was less important than the effect that these rhetorical gestures had of making listeners feel that they belonged to Walser’s side. In the controversy that followed Walser’s acceptance speech, critics often asked which “intellectuals” he had meant to criticize; these critics, Karp says, missed the point. It was not the content of the speech, but its form, that mattered. It was through form that Walser had identified and addressed the psychological needs of his audience. That form did not aim to convince listeners; it did not need to. It simply appealed to (repressed) emotions that they were already experiencing.

    For Adorno, the anti-political or fascist character of jargon was directly tied to the non-dialectical concept of language that jargon advanced. By eliminating abstraction from philosophical language, and detaching selected words from the flow of thought, jargon made absent things seem present. By using such language, existentialism attempted to construct an illusion that the subject could form itself outside of history. By raising historically contingent experiences of domination to defining features of the human, jargon presented them as unchangeable. And by identifying humanity itself with those experiences, it identified the subject with domination.

    Karp does not demonstrate that Walser’s “jargon” performed any of these functions, precisely. Rather, he focuses on the psychodynamics motivating his speech. Karp proposes that the pain (Leiden) that Walser’s speech expressed resembled the “domination” (Zwang) that Adorno recognized in jargon. While Adorno’s jargon made the absent or abstract seem present, through an act of linguistic fetishization, Walser’s jargon embodied the obverse impulse: to wish the discomfort created by the presence of history’s victims away.

    Karp is less concerned with the history of domination, that is, than with Freudian drives. For Adorno, the purpose of carrying out a determinate negation of jargon was to create the conditions of possibility for critical theory to address the real needs to which jargon constituted a false response. For Karp, the interest of the project is more technical: his goal is to uncover forms and patterns of speech that admit aggression into social life and give it a central role in consolidating identity. By combining culturally legitimated expressions with taboo ones, Karp argues, Walser created an environment in which his controversial opinion could be accepted as “obvious” or “self-evident” (selbstverständlich) by his audience. That is, Walser created a linguistic form through which aggression could be integrated into the life-world.

    Unlike Adorno (or Brede), Karp refrains from making any normative assessment of this achievement. His “systematization” of the concept of jargon empties that concept of the critical force that Adorno meant for it to carry. If anything, the tone of the final pages of Aggression in the Life-World is forgiving. Karp concludes by arguing that Walser was not necessarily aware of the meaning of his speech—indeed, that he probably was not. By allowing his audience to express their taboo wishes to be done with Holocaust remembrance, Karp writes, Walser convinced them that, “these taboos should never have existed.” Then he cuts to his bibliography.

    Grand Hotel California Abyss

    The abruptness of the ending of Aggression in the Life-World is difficult to interpret. At one level, Karp’s apparent lack of interest in the ethical and political implications of his case study reflects his stated goals and methods. From the beginning, he has set out to reveal that the social is constituted through acts of unconscious aggression, and that this aggression becomes legible in specific linguistic interactions, rather than to evaluate the effects of aggression itself. Reading Walser, Karp explicitly privileges form over content, treating the former as symptomatic of unstated meanings and effects. Granting the critic authority over the text he is analyzing, such an approach presumes the author under analysis to be ignorant, if not innocent, of what he really has at stake; it treats conscious attitudes and overt arguments as holding, at most, a secondary interest. At another level, the banal explanations for Karp’s tone and brevity may be the most plausible. He was writing in a non-native language; like many graduate students, he may have finished in haste.[9] In any case, his decision to eschew the kinds of judgments made by both his subject, Adorno, and his mentor, Brede is striking—all the more so because Karp is descended from German Jews and “grew up in a Jewish family” (Karp 2019a). This choice reflects a different mode of engagement with critical theory than scholars of either digital media or digitally mediated right-wing movements have observed.

    Historians have shown that the Frankfurt School critiques of mass media helped shape the idea that digital media could constitute a more democratic alternative. Fred Turner has argued that the research Adorno conducted on the role of radio and cinema in shaping the authoritarian personality, as well as the proximity of Frankfurt School scholars to the Bauhaus and other practicing artists, generated a set of beliefs about the democratic character of interactivity (Turner 2013). Orit Halpern is more critical of the essentially liberal assumptions of media and technology critique in which she, too, places Adorno (2015, 18-19). However, like Turner, Halpern identifies the emergence of interactivity as a key epistemic shift away from the Frankfurt School paradigm that opposed “attention” and “distraction.”  Cybernetics redefined the problem of “spectatorship” by transforming the spectator from an individual into a site of perceptions and cognitions—an “interface or infrastructure for information processing.” Where radio, cinema, and television had promoted conformity and passivity, cybernetic media promised to facilitate individual choice and free expression (2015, 224-6).

    More recently, critics and scholars attempting to account for the phobic fascination that new right-wing movements show for “cultural marxism” have analyzed it in a variety of ways. The least sophisticated take at face value the claims of “alt-right” figures that they are only reacting to the ludicrous and pernicious excesses of their opponents.[10] More substantial interpretations have described the far right fixation on the Frankfurt School as a “dialectic of counter-Enlightenment” or form of “inverted appropriation.” Martin Jay (2011) and Andreas Huyssen (2017, 2019) both argue that the attraction of critical theory for the right lies in the dynamics of projection and disavowed recognition that it sets in motion. As Huyssen puts it, “wider circles of American white supremacists and their publications… have been drawn to critique and deconstruction because, on those traditions, they project their own destructive and nihilistic tendencies” (2017).

    Aggression in the Life World does none of these things. Karp’s dissertation does not take up the critiques of mass media or the authoritarian personality that were canonized in the Anglo-American world at all, much less use them to develop democratic alternatives. Nor does it project its own penchant for destruction onto its subjects. In contrast with the “lunatic fringe” (Jay, 30) Karp does not carry out an “inverted appropriation” of critical theory, so much as a partial one.  He adapts Frankfurt School concepts for technical purposes, making them more instrumentally useful to the disciplines of sociology or social psychology by abstracting them from their contexts. In the process, he also abandons the Frankfurt School commitment to emancipation. It is at this level of abstraction that his neo-Marxism—from which Marx and materialism have all but disappeared—can coexist with the nationalism that he and Thiel invoke to defend Palantir.

    I asked at the beginning of this paper what beliefs Karp shares with Peter Thiel and what their common commitments might reveal about the self-consciously “contrarian” or “heterodox” network of actors that they inhabit. One answer that Aggression in the Life World makes evident is that both men regard the desire to commit violence as a constant, founding fact of human life. Both also believe that this drive expresses itself in social forms like language or group structure, even if speakers or group members remain unaware of their own motivations. These are ideas that Thiel attributes to the work of the eclectic French theorist René Girard, with whom he studied at Stanford, and whose theories of mimetic desire, scapegoating, and herd mentality he has often cited. In 2006 Thiel’s nonprofit foundation established an institute to promote the study of Girard and support the further development of mimetic theory; this organization, Imitatio, remains one of the foundation’s three major projects (Daub 2020, 97-112).

    The text that Karp chose to analyze, as his case study, also shares a set of concerns with Thiel’s writings and statements against campus multiculturalism and political correctness; Walser’s speech became a touchstone of debates about historical memory in Germany, in which the newly imported Americanism politische Korrektheit circulated widely. In his dissertation, Karp does not celebrate Walser’s taboo speech in the same way that Thiel and his associates have sometimes celebrated violations of speech norms.[11] However, he does assert that jargon, and the unconscious aggression that it expresses, plays a role in the formation of all social groups, and refrains from evaluating whether Walser’s jargon was particularly problematic. Of course, the term “jargon” itself became a commonplace during the U. S. culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s, used to accuse academics and university administrators who purported to be speaking for vulnerable populations of in fact deploying obscure terms to aggrandize themselves. Thiel and his co-author David O. Sacks devote a chapter of The Diversity Myth to an account of how the vagueness of the word “multiculturalism” enabled activists and administrators at Stanford to use it in this manner (1995, 23-49). The idea that such terms express ressentiment and a will to power is consistent with the theoretical framework that Karp went on to develop.

    Ironically, by attempting to expunge jargon of its subjective or impressionistic content, Karp renders it less materially objective. Rather than locating jargon in specific experiences of modernity, he transforms it into an expression of drives that, because they are timeless, are merely psychological. Karp makes a version of the eternalizing move that Adorno criticizes in Heidegger, in other words. Rather than elevating precarity into the essence of the human, Karp makes aggressive violence the substance of the social. In the process, he empties the concept of jargon of its critical power. When he arrives at the end of Walser’s speech, a speech that Karp characterizes as consolidating community based on unspeakable aggression, he can conclude only that it was effective.

    A still greater irony in retrospect may be how, in Karp’s telling, Adorno’s jargon anticipates the software tools Palantir would develop. By tracing the rhetorical patterns that constitute jargon in literary language, Karp argues that he can reveal otherwise hidden identities and affinities—and the drive to commit violence that lies latent in them. By looking back to Adorno, he points toward a possible critique of big data analytics as a kind of authenticity jargon. That is, a way of generating and eternalizing false forms of selfhood. In data analysis, the role of the analyst is not to demystify and dispel reification. On the contrary, it is precisely to fix identity from its digital traces and to make predictions on the basis of the same. For Adorno, jargon is a form of language that seems to authenticate identity—but only seems to. The identities it makes available to the subject are based on an illusion that jargon sustains by suppressing the self-difference that historicity introduces into language. The illusion it offers is of timeless “human” experience. It covers for domination insofar as it makes the human condition—or rather, human conditions as they are at the time of speaking—appear unchangeable.

    Big data analytics could be said to constitute an authenticity jargon in this sense: although they treat the data set under analysis as having something like an unconscious, they eliminate the temporal gaps and spaces of ambiguity that drive psychoanalytic interpretation. In place of interpretation, data analytics substitutes correlations that it treats simply as given. To a machine learning algorithm that has been trained on data sets that include zip codes and rates of defaulting on mortgage payments, for instance, it does not matter why mortgagees in a given zip code may have been more likely to default in the past. Nor will the algorithm that recommends rejecting a loan application necessarily explain that the zip code was the deciding factor. Like the existentialist’s illusion of immediate experience these procedures generate an aura of incontestable self-evidence.

    As in Adorno, here, the loss of particular contexts can serve to conceal, and thus perpetuate, domination. Algorithms take the histories of oppression embedded in training data and project them into the future, via predictions that powerful institutions then act on. If the identities constituted in this way are false, the reifications they generate do real work, and can cause real harm. And yet, to read these figures historically is to recognize that they need not come true. This is not an interpretive path that Karp pursues. But for those of us concerned about the relationship between digital technologies and justice, this repressed insight of his dissertation is the most critical to follow.

    _____

    Moira Weigel is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and an editor and cofounder of Logic Magazine. She received her PhD from the combined program in Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies at Yale University in 2017.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] Translations from German are mine unless otherwise noted.

    [2] In 2017, when activists doxxed the founder of the neofascist blog the Right Stuff and the antisemitic podcasts Fash the Nation and The Daily Shoah, who went by the alias Mike Enoch, they revealed that he was in fact a programmer named Michael Peinovich (Marantz 2019, 275-9). Curtis Yarvin, who wrote a widely read blog advocating the end of democracy under the name Mencius Moldbug, also worked as a software engineer (Gray 2017). Several journalists have documented the interest that figures in or adjacent to the tech industry evince with Yarvin’s Neoreaction (NRx) or Dark Enlightenment (Gray 2017; Goldhill 2017). Prominent white nationalist media entrepreneurs also claim to have substantial followings in the tech industry. In 2017, Andrew Anglin told a Mother Jones reporter that Santa Clara County was the highest source of inbound traffic to his website, The Daily Stormer; Chuck Johnson said the same about his (now defunct) website Got News (Harkinson 2017). In response to an interview question about his “average” supporter, the white nationalist Richard Spencer claimed that, “many in the Alt-Right are tech savvy or actually tech professionals” (Hawley 2017, 78).

    [3] James Damore, the engineer who wrote the July 2017 memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” and was subsequently fired, toured the right wing speaking circuit (Tiku 2019, 85-7). Brian Amerige, the Facebook engineer who identified himself to the New York Times in July 2018 as the creator of a conservative group on Facebook’s internal forum, Workplace, and then left the company, did the same (Conger and Frankel 2018). Shortly after, it was reported that Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey’s departure from the company in 2017 had also been driven by conflicts with management over his support of Donald Trump (Grind and Hagey 2018); Luckey has since publicly claimed to speak on behalf of a silent majority of “tech conservatives” (Luckey 2018). Arne Wilberg, a long time recruiter of technical employees for Google and YouTube, filed a reverse discrimination suit in 2018, alleging that he had been fired for “opposing illegal hiring practices… systematically discriminating in favor of job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, against Caucasian and Asian men” (Wilberg v. Google 2018). Most recently, in August 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that the former Google engineer Kevin Cernekee had been fired in 2017 in retaliation for expressing “conservative” viewpoints on internal listservs (Copeland 2019). Former colleagues subsequently published screenshots showing that, among other things, Cernekee had proposed raising money for a bounty for finding the masked protestor who punched Richard Spencer at the Presidential inauguration in 2017 using WeSearchr, the now-defunct fundraising platform run by Holocaust “revisionist” Chuck C. Johnson. They also shared screenshots showing that Cernekee had defended two neo-Nazi organizations, The Traditionalist Workers Party and Golden State Skinheads, suggesting that they should “rename themselves to something normie-compatible like ‘The Helpful Neighborhood Bald Guys’ or the ‘Open Society Institute’” (Wacker 2019; Tiku 2019, 84). Like Damore, Amerige, and Wilberg, Cernekee received national media coverage.

    [4] For instance, emails that BuzzFeed reporter Joe Bernstein obtained from Breitbart.com stated that Thiel invited Curtis Yarvin to watch the 2016 election results at his home in Hollywood Hills, where he had previously hosted Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos; New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz reported running into Thiel at the “DeploraBall” that took place on the eve of Trump’s inauguration (2019, 47-9).

    [5] Thiel supported Hawley’s campaign for Attorney General of Missouri in 2016 (Center for Responsive Politics); in that office, Hawley initiated an antitrust investigation of Google (Dave 2017) and a probe into Facebook exploitation of user data (Allen 2018). Thiel later donated to Hawley’s 2018 Senate campaign (Center for Responsive Politics); in the Senate, Hawley has sponsored multiple bills to regulate tech platforms (US Senate 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2019d, 2019e, 2019f, 2019g). These activities earned him praise from Trump at a White House Social Media Summit on the theme of liberal bias at tech companies, where Hawley also spoke (Trump 2019a).

    [6] Pat Buchanan devoted a chapter to the subject, entitled “The Frankfurt School Comes to America,” in his 2001 Death of the West. Breitbart editor Michael Walsh published an entire book about critical theory, in which he described it as “the very essence of Satanism” (Walsh 2016, 50). Andrew Breitbart himself devoted a chapter to it in his memoir (Breitbart 2011, 113). Jordan Peterson more often rails against “postmodernism,” or “political correctness.” However, he too regularly refers to “Cultural Marxism”; at time of writing, an explainer video that he produced for the pro-Trump Epoch Times, has tallied nearly 750,000 views on YouTube (Peterson 2017).

    [7] The memo that engineer James Damore circulated to his colleagues at Google presented a version of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy in its endnotes, as fact. “As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their ‘capitalist oppressors,’” Damore wrote, “the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics” (Conger 2017). The group that Brian Amerige started on Facebook Workplace was called “Resisting Cultural Marxism” (Conger and Frankel 2018).

    [8] The Stanford Review, which Thiel founded late in his sophomore year and edited throughout his junior and senior years at the university, devoted extensive attention to questions of speech on Stanford’s campus, which became a focal point of the US culture wars and drew international media attention when the academic senate voted to (slightly) revise its core curriculum in 1988 (see Hartman 2019, 227-30). In 1995, with fellow Stanford alumnus (and later PayPal Chief Operating Officer) David O. Sacks, Thiel published The Diversity Myth, a critique of the “debilitating” effects of “political correctness” on college campuses that, among other things, compared multicultural campus activists to “the bar scene from Star Wars” (xix). In 2018 he moved to Los Angeles, saying that political correctness in San Francisco had become unbearable (Peltz and Pierson 2018; Solon 2018) and in 2019 Founders Fund, the venture capital firm where he is a partner, announced that they would be sponsoring a conference to promote “thoughtcrime” (Founders Fund 2019).

    [9] Aggression in the Life World is significantly shorter than either of the other two dissertations submitted to the sociology department at Frankfurt that year: Margaret Ann Griesese’s The Brazilian Women’s Movement Against Violence clocked in at 314 pages, and Konstantinos Tsapakidis, Collective Memory and Cultures of Resistance in Ancient Greek Music at 267; Karp’s is 129.

    [10] Angela Nagle (2017) put forth an extreme version of this argument, arguing that the excesses of “social justice warrior” identity politics provoked the formation of the alt-right and that trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos were only replicating tactics of “transgression” that had been pioneered by leftist intellectuals like bell hooks and institutionalized on liberal campuses and in liberal media. Kakutani similarly argued that the Trumpist right was simply taking up tactics that the relativism of “postmodernism” had pioneered in the 1960s (2018, 18).

    [11] In The Diversity Myth Sacks and Thiel describe on instance of resistance to the Stanford speech code, which was adopted in May 1990 and revoked in March 1995, as heroic. The incident took place on the night of January 19, 1992, when three members of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, Michael Ehrman, Keith Rabois, and Bret Scher, were walking home from a party through one of Stanford’s residential dormitories. Rabois, then a first year law student, began shouting slurs at the home of a resident tutor in the dormitory, who had been involved in the expulsion of Ehrman’s brother Ken from residential housing four years earlier, after Ken called the resident tutor assigned to him a “faggot.” “Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!” Rabois shouted. “Can’t wait until you die, faggot.” He later confirmed and defended these statements in a letter to the Stanford Daily. “Admittedly, the comments made were not very articulate, nor very intellectual nor profound,” he wrote. “The intention was for the speech to be outrageous enough to provoke a thought of ‘Wow, if he can say that, I guess I can say a little more than I thought.” The speech code, which had not until that point been used to punish any student, was not used to punish Rabois; however, Thiel and Sacks describe the criticism of Rabois from administrators and fellow students that followed as a “witch hunt” (1995, 162-75). Rabois subsequently transferred to Harvard but later worked with Thiel at PayPal and later as a partner at Founders Fund. More recently, the blog post that Founders Fund published to announce the Hereticon conference cited in Footnote 8, described violating taboos on speech as its goal: “Imagine a conference for people banned from other conferences. Imagine a safe space for people who don’t feel safe in safe spaces. Over three nights we’ll feature many of our culture’s most important troublemakers in the fields of knowledge necessary to the progressive improvement of our civilization” (2019).

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    Works Cited

  • Jonathan Beller — The Computational Unconscious

    Jonathan Beller — The Computational Unconscious

    Jonathan Beller

    God made the sun so that animals could learn arithmetic – without the succession of days and nights, one supposes, we should not have thought of numbers. The sight of day and night, months and years, has created knowledge of number, and given us the conception of time, and hence came philosophy. This is the greatest boon we owe to sight.
    – Plato, Timaeus

    The term “computational capital” understands the rise of capitalism as the first digital culture with universalizing aspirations and capabilities, and recognizes contemporary culture, bound as it is to electronic digital computing, as something like Digital Culture 2.0. Rather than seeing this shift from Digital Culture 1.0 to Digital Culture 2.0 strictly as a break, we might consider it as one result of an overall intensification in the practices of quantification. Capitalism, says Nick Dyer-Witheford (2012), was already a digital computer and shifts in the quantity of quantities lead to shifts in qualities. If capitalism was a digital computer from the get-go, then “the invisible hand”—as the non-subjective, social summation of the individualized practices of the pursuit of private (quantitative) gain thought to result in (often unknown and unintended) public good within capitalism—is an early, if incomplete, expression of the computational unconscious. With the broadening and deepening of the imperative toward quantification and rational calculus posited then presupposed during the early modern period by the expansionist program of Capital, the process of the assignation of a number to all qualitative variables—that is, the thinking in numbers (discernible in the commodity-form itself, whereby every use-value was also an encoded as an exchange-value)—entered into our machines and our minds. This penetration of the digital, rendering early on the brutal and precise calculus of the dimensions of cargo-holds in slave ships and the sparse economic accounts of ship ledgers of the Middle Passage, double entry bookkeeping, the rationalization of production and wages in the assembly line, and more recently, cameras and modern computing, leaves no stone unturned. Today, as could be well known from everyday observation if not necessarily from media theory, computational calculus arguably underpins nearly all productive activity and, particularly significant for this argument, those activities that together constitute the command-control apparatus of the world system and which stretch from writing to image-making and, therefore, to thought.[1] The contention here is not simply that capitalism is on a continuum with modern computation, but rather that computation, though characteristic of certain forms of thought, is also the unthought of modern thought. The content indifferent calculus of computational capital ordains the material-symbolic and the psycho-social even in the absence of a conscious, subjective awareness of its operations. As the domain of the unthought that organizes thought, the computational unconscious is structured like a language, a computer language that is also and inexorably an economic calculus.

    The computational unconscious allows us to propose that much contemporary consciousness (aka “virtuosity” in post-Fordist parlance) is a computational effect—in short, a form of artificial intelligence. A large part of what “we” are has been conscripted, as thought and other allied metabolic processes are functionalized in the service of the iron clad movements of code. While “iron clad” is now a metaphor and “code” is less the factory code and more computer code, understanding that the logic of industrial machinery and the bureaucratic structures of the corporation and the state have been abstracted and absorbed by discrete state machines to the point where in some quarters “code is law” will allow us to pursue the surprising corollary that all the structural inequalities endemic to capitalist production—categories that often appear under variants of the analog signs of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, etc., are also deposited and thus operationally disappeared into our machines.

    Put simply, and, in deference to contemporary attention spans, too soon, our machines are racial formations. They are also technologies of gender and sexuality.[2] Computational capital is thus also racial capitalism, the longue durée digitization of racialization and, not in any way incidentally, of regimes of gender and sexuality. In other words inequality and structural violence inherent in capitalism also inhere in the logistics of computation and consequently in the real-time organization of semiosis, which is to say, our practices and our thought. The servility of consciousness, remunerated or not, aware of its underlying operating system or not, is organized in relation not just to sociality understood as interpersonal interaction, but to digital logics of capitalization and machine-technics. For this reason, the political analysis of postmodern and, indeed, posthuman inequality must examine the materiality of the computational unconscious. That, at least, is the hypothesis, for if it is the function of computers to automate thinking, and if dominant thought is the thought of domination, then what exactly has been automated?

    Already in the 1850s the worker appeared to Marx as a “conscious organ” in the “vast automaton” of the industrial machine, and by the time he wrote the first volume of Capital Marx was able to comment on the worker’s new labor of “watching the machine with his eyes and correcting its mistakes with his hands” (Marx 1867: 496, 502). Marx’s prescient observation with respect to the emergent role of visuality in capitalist production, along with his understanding that the operation of industrial machinery posits and presupposes the operation of other industrial machinery, suggests what was already implicit if not fully generalized in the analysis: that Dr. Ure’s notion, cited by Marx, of the machine as a “vast automaton,” was scalable—smaller machines, larger machines, entire factories could be thus conceived, and with the increasing scale and ubiquity of industrial machines, the notion could well describe the industrial complex as a whole. Historically considered, “watching the machine with his eyes and correcting the mistakes with his hands” thus appears as an early description of what information workers such as you and I do on our screens. To extrapolate: distributed computation and its integration with industrial process and the totality of social processes suggest that not only has society as a whole become a vast automaton profiting from the metabolism of its conscious organs, but further that the confrontation or interface with the machine at the local level (“where we are”) is an isolated and phenomenal experience that is not equivalent to the perspective of the automaton or, under capitalism, that of Capital. Given that here, while we might still be speaking about intelligence, we are not necessarily speaking about subjects in the strict sense, we might replace Althusser’s relation of S-s—Big Subject (God, the State, etc) to small subject (“you” who are interpellated with and in ideology)—with AI-ai— Big Artificial Intelligence (the world system as organized by computational capital) and “you” Little Artificial Intelligence (as organized by the same). Here subjugation is not necessarily intersubjective, and does not require recognition. The AI does not speak your language even if it is your operating system. With this in mind we may at once understand that the space-time regimes of subjectivity (point-perspective, linear time, realism, individuality, discourse function, etc.) that once were part of the digital armature of “the human,” have been profitably shattered, and that the fragments have been multiplied and redeployed under the requisites of new management. We might wager that these outmoded templates or protocols may still  also meaningfully refer to a register of meaning and conceptualization that can take the measure of historical change, if only for some kind of species remainder whose value is simultaneously immeasurable, unknown and hanging in the balance.

    Ironically perhaps, given the progress narratives attached to technical advances and the attendant advances in capital accumulation, Marx’s hypothesis in Capital Chapter 15, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” that “it would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt” (1867, 563), casts an interesting light on the history of computing and its creation-imposition of new protocols. Not only have the incredible innovations of workers been abstracted and absorbed by machinery, but so also have their myriad antagonisms toward capitalist domination. Machinic perfection meant the imposition of continuity and the removal of “the hand of man” by fixed capital, in other words, both the absorption of know-how and the foreclosure of forms of disruption via automation (Marx 1867, 502).

    Dialectically understood, subjectivity, while a force of subjugation in some respects, also had its own arsenal of anti-capitalist sensibilities. As a way of talking about non-conformity, anti-sociality and the high price of conformity and its discontents, the unconscious still has its uses, despite its unavoidable and perhaps nostalgic invocation of a future that has itself been foreclosed. The conscious organ does not entirely grasp the cybernetic organism of which it is a part; nor does it fully grasp the rationale of its subjugation. If the unconscious was machinic, it is now computational, and if it is computational it is also locked in a struggle with capitalism. If what underlies perceptual and cognitive experience is the automaton, the vast AI, what I will be referring to as The Computer, which is the totalizing integration of global practice through informatic processes, then from the standpoint of production we constitute its unconscious. However, as we are ourselves unaware of our own constitution, the Unconscious of producers is their/our specific relation to what Paolo Virno acerbically calls, in what can only be a lamentation of history’s perverse irony, “the communism of capital” (2004, 110). If the revolution killed its father (Marx) and married its mother (Capitalism), it may be worth considering the revolutionary prospects of an analysis of this unconscious.

    Introduction: The Computational Unconscious

    Beginning with the insight that the rise of capitalism marks the onset of the first universalizing digital culture, this essay, and the book of which it is chapter one, develops the insights of The Cinematic Mode of Production (Beller 2006) in an effort to render the violent digital subsumption by computational racial capital that the (former) “humans” and their (excluded) ilk are collectively undergoing in a manner generative of sites of counter-power—of, let me just say it without explaining it, derivatives of counter-power, or, Derivative Communism. To this end, the following section offers a reformulation of Marx’s formula for capital, Money-Commodity-Money’ (M-C-M’), that accounts for distributed production in the social factory, and by doing so hopes to direct attention to zones where capitalist valorization might be prevented or refused. Prevented or refused not only to break a system which itself functions by breaking the bonds of solidarity and mutual trust that formerly were among the conditions that made a life worth living, but also to posit the redistribution of our own power towards ends that for me are still best described by the word communist (or perhaps meta-communist but that too is for another time). This thinking, political in intention, speculative in execution and concrete in its engagement, also proposes a revaluation of the aesthetic as an interface that sensualizes information. As such, the aesthetic is both programmed, and programming—a privileged site (and indeed mode) of confrontation in the digital apartheid of the contemporary.

    Along these lines, and similar to the analysis pursued in The Cinematic Mode of Production, I endeavor to de-fetishize a platform—computation itself—one that can only be properly understood when grasped as a means of production embedded in the bios. While computation is often thought of as being the thing accomplished by hardware churning through a program (the programmatic quantum movements of a discrete state machine), it is important to recognize that the universal Turing machine was (and remains) media indifferent only in theory and is thus justly conceived of as an abstract machine in the realm of ideas and indeed of the ruling ideas. However, it is an abstract machine that, like all abstractions, evolves out of concrete circumstances and practices; which is to say that the universal Turing Machine is itself an abstraction subject to historical-materialist critique. Furthermore, Turing Machines iterate themselves on the living, on life, reorganizing its practices. One might situate the emergence and function of the universal Turing machine as perhaps among the most important abstract machines in the last century, save perhaps that of capital itself. However, both their ranking and even their separability is here what we seek to put into question.

    Without a doubt, the computational process, like the capitalist process, has a corrosive effect on ontological precepts, accomplishing a far-reaching liquidation of tradition that includes metaphysical assumptions regarding the character of essence, being, authenticity and presence. And without a doubt, computation has been built even as it has been discovered. The paradigm of computation marks an inflection point in human history that reaches along temporal and spatial axes: both into the future and back into the past, out to the cosmos and into the sub-atomic. At any known scale, from plank time (10^-44 seconds) to yottaseconds (10^24 seconds), and from 10^-35 to 10^27 meters, computation, conceptualization and sense-making (sensation) have become inseparable. Computation is part of the historicity of the senses. Just ask that baby using an iPad.

    The slight displacement of the ontology of computation implicit in saying that it has been built as much as discovered (that computation has a history even if it now puts history itself at risk) allows us to glimpse, if only from what Laura Mulvey calls “the half-light of the imaginary” (1975, 7)—the general antagonism is feminized when the apparatus of capitalization has overcome the symbolic—that computation is not, so far as we can know, the way of the universe per se, but rather the way of the universe as it has become intelligible to us vis-à-vis our machines. The understanding, from a standpoint recognized as science, that computation has fully colonized the knowable cosmos (and is indeed one with knowing) is a humbling insight, significant in that it allows us to propose that seeing the universe as computation, as, in short, simulable, if not itself a simulation (the computational effect of an informatic universe), may be no more than the old anthropocentrism now automated by apparatuses. We see what we can see with the senses we have—autopoesis. The universe as it appears to us is figured by—that is, it is a figuration of—computation. That’s what our computers tell us. We build machines that discern that the universe functions in accord with their self-same logic. The recursivity effects the God trick.

    Parametrically translating this account of cosmic emergence into the domain of history, reveals a disturbing allegiance of computational consciousness organized by the computational unconscious, to what Silvia Federici calls the system of global apartheid. Historicizing computational emergence pits its colonial logic directly against what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney identify as “the general antagonism” (2013, 10) (itself the reparative antithesis, or better perhaps the reverse subsumption of the general intellect as subsumed by capital). The procedural universalization of computation is a cosmology that attributes and indeed enforces a sovereignty tantamount to divinity and externalities be damned. Dissident, fugitive planning and black study – a studied refusal of optimization, a refusal of computational colonialism — may offer a way out of the current geo-(post-)political and its computational orthodoxy.

    Computational Idolatry and Multiversality

    In the new idolatry cathetcted to inexorable computational emergence, the universe is itself currently imagined as a computer. Here’s the seductive sound of the current theology from a conference sponsored by the sovereign state of NYU:

    As computers become progressively faster and more powerful, they’ve gained the impressive capacity to simulate increasingly realistic environments. Which raises a question familiar to aficionados of The Matrix—might life and the world as we know it be a simulation on a super advanced computer? “Digital physicists” have developed this idea well beyond the sci-fi possibilities, suggesting a new scientific paradigm in which computation is not just a tool for approximating reality but is also the basis of reality itself. In place of elementary particles, think bits; in place of fundamental laws of physics, think computer algorithms. (Scientific American 2011)

    Science fiction, in the form of “the Matrix,” is here used to figure a “reality” organized by simulation, but then this reality is quickly dismissed as something science has moved well beyond. However, it would not be illogical here to propose that “reality” is itself a science fiction—a fiction whose current author is no longer the novel or Hollywood but science. It is in a way no surprise that, consistent with “digital physics,” MIT physicist, Max Tegmark, claims that consciousness is a state of matter: Consciousness as a phenomenon of information storage and retrieval, is a property of matter described by the term “computronium.” Humans represent a rather low level of complexity. In the neo-Hegelian narrative in which the philosopher—scientist reveals the working out of world—or, rather, cosmic—spirit, one might say that it is as science fiction—one of the persistent fictions licensed by science—that “reality itself” exists at all. We should emphasize that the trouble here is not so much with “reality,” the trouble here is with “itself.” To the extent that we recognize that poesis (making) has been extended to our machines and it is through our machines that we think and perceive, we may recognize that reality is itself a product of their operations. The world begins to look very much like the tools we use to perceive it to the point that Reality itself is thus a simulation, as are we—a conclusion that concurs with the notion of a computational universe, but that seems to (conveniently) elide the immediate (colonial) history of its emergence. The emergence of the tools of perception is taken as universal, or, in the language of a quantum astrophysics that posits four levels of multiverses: multiversal. In brief, the total enclosure by computation of observer and observed is either reality itself becoming self-aware, or tautological, waxing ideological, liquidating as it does historical agency by means of the suddenly a priori stochastic processes of cosmic automation.

    Well! If total cosmic automation, then no mistakes, so we may as well take our time-bound chances and wager on fugitive negation in the precise form of a rejection of informatic totalitarianism. Let us sound the sedimented dead labor inherent in the world-system, its emergent computational armature and its iconic self-representations. Let us not forget that those machines are made out of embodied participation in capitalist digitization, no matter how disappeared those bodies may now seem. Marx says, “Consciousness is… from the very beginning a social product and remains so for as long as men exist at all” (Tucker 1978, 178). The inescapable sociality and historicity of knowledge, in short, its political ontology, follows from this—at least so long as humans “exist at all.”

    The notion of a computational cosmos, though not universally or even widely consented to by scientific consciousness, suggests that we respire in an aporiatic space—in the null set (itself a sign) found precisely at the intersection of a conclusion reached by Gödel in mathematics (Hofstadter 1979)—that there is no sufficiently powerful logical system that is internally closed such that logical statements cannot be formulated that can neither be proved nor disproved—and a different conclusion reached by Maturana and Varela (1992), and also Niklas Luhmann (1989), that a system’s self-knowing, its autopoesis, knows no outside; it can know only in its own terms and thus knows only itself. In Gödel’s view, systems are ineluctably open, there is no closure, complete self-knowledge is impossible and thus there is always an outside or a beyond, while in the latter group’s view, our philosophy, our politics and apparently our fate is wedded to a system that can know no outside since it may only render an outside in its own terms, unless, or perhaps, even if/as that encounter is catastrophic.

    Let’s observe the following: 1) there must be an outside or a beyond (Gödel); 2) we cannot know it (Maturana and Varela); 3) and yet…. In short, we don’t know ourselves and all we know is ourselves. One way out of this aporia is to say that we cannot know the outside and remain what we are. Enter history: Multiversal Cosmic Knoweldge, circa 2017, despite its awesome power, turns out to be pretty local. If we embrace the two admittedly humbling insights regarding epistemic limits—on the one hand, that even at the limits of computationally—informed knowledge (our autopoesis) all we can know is ourselves, along with Gödel’s insight that any “ourselves” whatsoever that is identified with what we can know is systemically excluded from being All—then it as axiomatic that nothing (in all valences of that term) fully escapes computation—for us. Nothing is excluded from what we can know except that which is beyond the horizon of our knowledge, which for us is precisely nothing. This is tantamount to saying that rational epistemology is no longer fully separable from the history of computing—at least for any us who are, willingly or not, participant in contemporary abstraction. I am going to skip a rather lengthy digression about fugitive nothing as precisely that bivalent point of inflection that escapes the computational models of consciousness and the cosmos, and just offer its conclusion as the next step in my discussion: We may think we think—algorithmically, computationally, autonomously, or howsoever—but the historically materialized digital infrastructure of the socius thinks in and through us as well. Or, as Marx put it, “The real subject remains outside the mind and independent of it—that is to say, so long as the mind adopts a purely speculative, purely theoretical attitude. Hence the subject, society, must always be envisaged as the premises of conception even when the theoretical method is employed” (Marx: vol. 28, 38-39).[3]

    This “subject, society” in Marx’s terms, is present even in its purported absence—it is inextricable from and indeed overdetermines theory and, thus, thought: in other words, language, narrative, textuality, ideology, digitality, cosmic consciousness. This absent structure informs Althusser’s Lacanian-Marxist analysis of Ideology (and of “the ideology of no ideology,” 1977) as the ideological moment par excellance: an analog way of saying “reality” is simulation) as well as his beguiling (because at once necessary and self-negating) possibility of a subjectless scientific discourse. This non-narrative, unsymbolizeable absent structure akin to the Lacanian “Real” also informs Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious as the black-boxed formal processor of said absent structure, indicated in his work by the term “History” with a capital “H” (1981).  We will take up Althusser and Jameson in due time (but not in this paper). For now, however, for the purposes of our mediological investigation, it is important to pursue the thought that precisely this functional overdetermination, which already informed Marx’s analysis of the historicity of the senses in the 1844 manuscripts, extends into the development of the senses and the psyche. As Jameson put it in The Political Unconscious thirty-five years ago: “That the structure of the psyche is historical and has a history, is… as difficult for us to grasp as that the senses are not themselves natural organs but rather the result of a long process of differentiation even within human history”(1981, 62).

    The evidence for the accuracy of this claim, built from Marx’s notion that “the forming of the five senses requires the history of the world down to the present” has been increasing. There is a host of work on the inseparability of technics and the so-called human (from Mauss to Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari, and Bernard Stiegler) that increasingly makes it possible to understand and even believe that the human, along with consciousness, the psyche, the senses and, consequently, the unconscious are historical formations. My own essay “The Unconscious of the Unconscious” from The Cinematic Mode of Production traces Lacan’s use of “montage,” “the cut,” the gap, objet a, photography and other optical tropes and argues (a bit too insistently perhaps) that the unconscious of the unconscious is cinema, and that a scrambling of linguistic functions by the intensifying instrumental circulation of ambient images (images that I now understand as derivatives of a larger calculus) instantiates the presumably organic but actually equally technical cinematic black box known as the unconscious.[iv] Psychoanalysis is the institutionalization of a managerial technique for emergent linguistic dysfunction (think literary modernism) precipitated by the onslaught of the visible.

    More recently, and in a way that suggests that the computational aspects of historical materialist critique are not as distant from the Lacanian Real as one might think, Lydia Liu’s The Freudian Robot (2010) shows convincingly that Lacan modeled the theory of the unconscious from information theory and cybernetic theory. Liu understands that Lacan’s emphasis on the importance of structure and the compulsion to repeat is explicitly addressed to “the exigencies of chance, randomness, and stochastic processes in general” (2010, 176). She combs Lacan’s writings for evidence that they are informed by information theory and provides us with some smoking guns including the following:

    By itself, the play of the symbol represents and organizes, independently of the peculiarities of its human support, this something which is called the subject. The human subject doesn’t foment this game, he takes his place in it, and plays the role of the little pluses and minuses in it. He himself is an element in the chain which, as soon as it is unwound, organizes itself in accordance with laws. Hence the subject is always on several levels, caught up in the crisscrossing of networks. (quoted in Liu 2010, 176)

    Liu argues that “the crisscrossing of networks” alludes not so much to linguistic networks but to communication networks, and precisely references the information theory that Lacan read, particularly that of George Gilbaud, the author of What is Cybernetics?. She writes that, “For Lacan, ‘the primordial couple of plus and minus’ or the game of even and odd should precede linguistic considerations and is what enables the symbolic order.”

    “You can play heads or tails by yourself,” says Lacan, “but from the point of view of speech, you aren’t playing by yourself – there is already the articulation of three signs comprising a win or a loss and this articulation prefigures the very meaning of the result. In other words, if there is no question, there is no game, if there is no structure, there is no question. The question is constituted, organized by the structure” (quoted in Liu 2010, 179). Liu comments that “[t]his notion of symbolic structure, consistent with game theory, [has] important bearings on Lacan’s paradoxically non-linguistic view of language and the symbolic order.”

    Let us not distract ourselves here with the question of whether or not game theory and statistical analysis represent discovery or invention. Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and information theory formalized the statistical basis that one way or another became a global (if not also multiversal) episteme. Norbert Wiener, another father, this time of cybernetics, defined statistics as “the science of distribution” (Weiner 1989, 8). We should pause here to reflect that, given that cybernetic research in the West was driven by military and, later, industrial applications, that is, applications deemed essential for the development of capitalism and the capitalist way of life, such a statement calls for a properly dialectical analysis. Distribution is inseparable from production under capitalism, and statistics is the science of this distribution. Indeed, we would want to make such a thesis resonate with the analysis of logistics recently undertaken by Moten and Harney and, following them, link the analysis of instrumental distribution to the Middle Passage, as the signal early modern consequence of the convergence of rationalization and containerization—precisely the “science” of distribution worked out in the French slave ship Adelaide or the British ship Brookes. For the moment, we underscore the historicity of the “science of distribution” and thus its historical emergence as socio-symbolic system of organization and control. Keeping this emergence clearly in mind helps us to understand that mathematical models quite literally inform the articulation of History and the unconscious—not only homologously as paradigms in intellectual history, but materially, as ways of organizing social production in all domains. Whether logistical, optical or informatic, the technics of mathematical concepts, which is to say programs, orchestrate meaning and constitute the unconscious.

    Perhaps more elusive even than this historicity of the unconscious grasped in terms of a digitally encoded matrix of materiality and epistemology that constitutes the unthought of subjective emergence, may be that the notion that the “subject, society” extends into our machines. Vilém Flusser, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, tells us,

    Apparatuses were invented to simulate specific thought processes. Only now (following the invention of the computer), and as it were in hindsight, it is becoming clear what kind of thought processes we are dealing with in the case of all apparatuses. That is: thinking expressed in numbers. All apparatuses (not just computers) are calculating machines and in this sense “artificial intelligences,” the camera included, even if their inventors were not able to account for this. In all apparatuses (including the camera) thinking in numbers overrides linear, historical thinking. (Flusser 2000, 31)

    This process of thinking in numbers, and indeed the generalized conversion of multiple forms of thought and practice to an increasingly unified systems language of numeric processing, by capital markets, by apparatuses, by digital computers requires further investigation. And now that the edifice of computation—the fixed capital dedicated to computation that either recognizes itself as such or may be recognized as such—has achieved a consolidated sedimentation of human labor at least equivalent to that required to build a large nation (a superpower) from the ground up, we are in a position to ask in what way has capital-logic and the logic of private property, which as Marx points out is not the cause but the effect of alienated wage- (and thus quantified) labor, structured computational paradigms? In what way has that “subject, society” unconsciously structured not just thought, but machine-thought? Thinking, expressed in numbers, materialized first by means of commodities and then in apparatuses capable of automating this thought. Is computation what we’ve been up to all along without knowing it? Flusser suggests as much through his notion that 1) the camera is a black box that is a programme, and, 2) that the photograph or technical image produces a “magical” relation to the world in as much as people understand the photograph as a window rather than as information organized by concepts. This amounts to the technical image as itself a program for the bios and suggests that the world has long been unconsciously organized by computation vis-à-vis the camera. As Flusser has it, cameras have organized society in a feedback loop that works towards the perfection of cameras. If the computational processes inherent in photography are themselves an extension of capital logic’s universal digitization (an argument I made in The Cinematic Mode of Production and extended in The Message is Murder), then that calculus has been doing its work in the visual reorganization of everyday life for almost two centuries.

    Put another way, thinking expressed in numbers (the principles of optics and chemistry) materialized in machines automates thought (thinking expressed in numbers) as program. The program of say, the camera, functions as a historically produced version of what Katherine Hayles has recently called “nonconscious cognition” (Hayles 2016). Though locally perhaps no more self-aware than the sediment sorting process of a riverbed (another of Hayles’s computational examples) the camera nonetheless affects purportedly conscious beings from the domain known as the unconscious, as, to give but one shining example, feminist film theory clearly shows: The function of the camera’s program organizes the psycho-dynamics of the spectator in a way that at once structures film form through market feedback, gratifies the (white-identified) male ego and normalizes the violence of heteropatriarchy, and does so at a profit. Now that so much human time has gone into developing cameras, computer hardware and programming, such that hardware and programming are inextricable from the day to day and indeed nano-second to nano-second organization of life on planet earth (and not only in the form of cameras), we can ask, very pointedly, which aspects of computer function, from any to all, can be said to be conditioned not only by sexual difference but more generally still, by structural inequality and the logistics of racialization? Which computational functions perpetuate and enforce these historically worked up, highly ramified social differences ? Structural and now infra-structural inequalities include social injustices—what could be thought of as and in a certain sense are  algorithmic racism, sexism and homophobia, and also programmatically unequal access to the many things that sustain life, and legitimize murder (both long and short forms, executed by, for example, carceral societies, settler colonialism, police brutality and drone strikes), and catastrophes both unnatural (toxic mine-tailings, coltan wars) and purportedly natural (hurricanes, droughts, famines, ambient environmental toxicity). The urgency of such questions resulting from the near automation of geo-political emergence along with a vast conscription of agents is only exacerbated as we recognize that we are obliged to rent or otherwise pay tribute (in the form of attention, subscription, student debt) to the rentier capitalists of the infrastructure of the algorithm in order to access portions of the general intellect from its proprietors whenever we want to participate in thinking.

    For it must never be assumed that technology (even the abstract machine) is value-neutral, that it merely exists in some uninterested ideal place and is then utilized either for good or for ill by free men (it would be “men” in such a discourse). Rather, the machine, like Ariella Azoulay’s understanding of photography, has a political ontology—it is a social relation, and an ongoing one whose meaning is, as Azoulay says of the photograph, never at an end (2012, 25). Now that representation has been subsumed by machines, has become machinic (overcoded as Deleuze and Guattari would say) everything that appears, appears in and through the machine, as a machine. For the present (and as Plato already recognized by putting it at the center of the Republic), even the Sun is political. Going back to my opening, the cosmos is merely a collection of billions of suns—an infinite politics.

    But really, this political ontology of knowledge, machines, consciousness, praxis should be obvious. How could technology, which of course includes the technologies of knowledge, be anything other than social and historical, the product of social relations? How could these be other than the accumulation, objectification and sedminentation of subjectivities that are themselves an historical product? The historicity of knowledge and perception seems inescapable, if not fully intelligible, particularly now, when it is increasingly clear that it is the programmatic automation of thought itself that has been embedded in our apparatuses. The programming and overdetermination of “choice,” of options, by a rationality that was itself embedded in the interested circumstances of life and continuously “learns” vis-à-vis the feedback life provides has become ubiquitous and indeed inexorable (I dismiss “Object Oriented Ontology” and its desperate effort to erase white-boy subjectivity thusly: there are no ontological objects, only instrumental epistemic horizons). To universalize contemporary subjectivity by erasing its conditions of possibility is to naturalize history; it is therefore to depoliticize it and therefore to recapitulate its violence in the present.

    The short answer then regarding digital universality is that technology (and thus perception, thought and knowledge) can only be separated from the social and historical—that is, from racial capitalism—by eliminating both the social and historical (society and history) through its own operations. While computers, if taken as a separate constituency along with a few of their biotic avatars, and then pressed for an answer, might once have agreed with Margaret Thatcher’s view that “there is no such thing as society,” one would be hard-pressed to claim that this post-sociological (and post-Birmingham) “discovery” is a neutral result. Thatcher’s observation, that “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” while admittedly pithy, if condescending, classist and deadly, subordinates social needs to existing property-relations and their financial calculus at the ontological level. She smugly valorizes the status quo by positing capitalism as an untranscendable horizon since the social product is by definition always already “other people’s money.” But neoliberalism has required some revisioning of late (which is a polite way of saying that fascism has needed some updating): the newish but by now firmly-established term “social media” tells us something more about the parasitic relation that the cold calculus this mathematical universe of numbers has to the bios. To preserve global digital apartheid requires social media, the process(ing) of society itself cybernetically-interfaced with the logistics of racial-capitalist computation. This relation, a means of digital expropriation aimed to profitably exploit an equally significant global aspiration towards planetary communicativity and democratization, has become the preeminent engine of capitalist growth. Society, at first seemingly negated by computation and capitalism, is now directly posited as a source of wealth, for what is now explicitly computational capital and actually computational racial capital. The attention economy, immaterial labor, neuropower, semio-capitalism: all of these terms, despite their differences, mean in effect that society, as a deterritorialized factory, is no longer disappeared as an economic object; it disappears only as a full beneficiary of the dominant economy which is now parasitical on its metabolism. The social revolution in planetary communicativity is being farmed and harvested by computational capitalism.

    Dialectics of the Human-Machine

    For biologists it has become au courant when speaking of humans to speak also of the second genome—one must consider not just the 26 chromosomes of the human genome that replicate what was thought of as the human being as an autonomous life-form, but the genetic information and epigenetic functionality of all the symbiotic bacteria and other organisms without which there are no humans. Pursuant to this thought, we might ascribe ourselves a third genome: information. No good scientist today believes that human beings are free standing forms, even if most (or really almost all) do not make the critique of humanity or even individuality through a framework that understands these categories as historically emergent interfaces of capitalist exchange. However, to avoid naturalizing the laws of capitalism as simply an expression of the higher (Hegalian) laws of energetics and informatics (in which, for example ATP can be thought to function as “capital”), this sense of “our” embeddedness in the ecosystem of the bios must be extended to that of the materiality of our historical societies, and particularly to their systems of mediation and representational practices of knowledge formation—including the operations of  textuality, visuality, data visualization and money—which, with convergence today, means precisely, computation.

    If we want to understand the emergence of computation (and of the anthropocene), we must attend to the transformations and disappearances of life forms—of forms of life in the largest sense. And we must do so in spite of the fact that the sedimentation of the history of computation would neutralize certain aspects of human aspiration and of humanity—including, ultimately, even the referent of that latter sign—by means of law, culture, walls, drones, derivatives, what have you. The biosynthetic process of computation and human being gives rise to post-humanism only to reveal that there were never any humans here in the first place: We have never been human—we know this now. “Humanity,” as a protracted example of maiconaissance—as a problem of what could be called the humanizing-machine or, better perhaps, the human-machine, is on the wane.

    Naming the human-machine, is of course a way of talking about the conquest, about colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and the racializing, sex-gender norm-enforcing regimes of the last 500 years of capitalism that created the ideological legitimation of its unprecedented violence in the so-called humanistic values it spat out. Aimé Césaire said it very clearly when he posed the scathing question in Discourse on Colonialism: “Civilization and Colonization?” (1972). “The human-machine” names precisely the mechanics of a humanism that at once resulted from and were deployed to do the work of humanizing planet Earth for the quantitative accountings of capital while at the same time divesting a large part of the planetary population of any claims to the human. Following David Golumbia, in The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009), we might look to Hobbes, automata and the component parts of the Leviathan for “human” emergence as a formation of capital. For so many, humanism was in effect more than just another name for violence, oppression, rape, enslavement and genocide—it was precisely a means to violence. “Humanity” as symptom of The Invisible Hand, AI’s avatar. Thus it is possible to see the end of humanism as a result of decolonization struggles, a kind of triumph. The colonized have outlasted the humans. But so have the capitalists.

    This is another place where recalling the dialectic is particularly useful. Enlightenment Humanism was a platform for the linear time of industrialization and the French revolution with “the human” as an operating system, a meta-ISA emerging in historical movement, one that developed a set of ontological claims which functioned in accord with the early period of capitalist digitality. The period was characterized by the institutionalization of relative equality (Cedric Robinson does not hesitate to point out that the precondition of the French Revolution was colonial slavery), privacy, property. Not only were its achievements and horrors inseparable the imposition of logics of numerical equivalence, they were powered by the labor of the peoples of Earth, by the labor-power of disparate peoples, imported as sugar and spices, stolen as slaves, music and art, owned as objective wealth in the form of lands, armies, edifices and capital, and owned again as subjective wealth in the form of cultural refinement, aesthetic sensibility, bourgeois interiority—in short, colonial labor, enclosed by accountants and the whip, was expatriated as profit, while industrial labor, also expropriated, was itself sustained by these endeavors. The accumulation of the wealth of the world and of self-possession for some was organized and legitimated by humanism, even as those worlded by the growth of this wealth struggled passionately, desultorily, existentially, partially and at times absolutely against its oppressive powers of objectification and quantification. Humanism was colonial software, and the colonized were the outsourced content providers—the first content providers—recruited to support the platform of so-called universal man. This platform humanism is not so much a metaphor; rather it is the tendency that is unveiled by the present platform post-humanism of computational racial capital. The anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape, as Marx so eloquently put the telos of man. Is the anatomy of computation the key to the anatomy of “man”?

    So the end of humanism, which in a narrow (white, Euro-American, technocratic) view seems to arrive as a result of the rise of cyber-technologies, must also be seen as having been long willed and indeed brought about by the decolonizing struggles against humanism’s self-contradictory and, from the point of view of its own self-proclaimed values, specious organization. Making this claim is consistent with Césaire’s insight that people of the third world built the European metropoles. Today’s disappearance of the human might mean for the colonizers who invested so heavily in their humanisms, that Dr. Moreau’s vivisectioned cyber-chickens are coming home to roost. Fatally, it seems, since Global North immigration policy, internment centers, border walls, police forces give the lie to any pretense of humanism. It might be gleaned that the revolution against the humans has also been impacted by our machines. However, the POTUSian defeat of the so-called humans is double-edged to say the least. The dialectic of posthuman abundance on the one hand and the posthuman abundance of dispossession on the other has no truck with humanity. Today’s mainstream futurologists mostly see “the singularity” and apocalypse. Critics of the posthuman with commitments to anti-racist world-making have clearly understood the dominant discourse on the posthuman as not the end of the white liberal human subject but precisely, when in the hands of those not committed to an anti-racist and decolonial project as a means for its perpetuation—a way of extending the unmarked, transcendental, sovereign, subject (of Hobbes, Descartes, C.B. Macpherson)—effectively the white male sovereign who was in possession of a body rather than forced to be a body. Sovereignty itself must change (in order, as Guiseppe Lampedusa taught us, to remain the same), for if one sees production and innovation on the side of labor, then capital’s need to contain labors’ increasing self-organization has driven it into a position where the human has become an impediment to its continued expansion. Human rights, though at times also a means to further expropriation, are today in the way.

    Let’s say that it is global labor that is shaking off the yoke of the human from without, as much as it the digital machines that are devouring it from within. The dialectic of computational racial capital devours the human as a way of revolutionizing the productive forces. Weapon-makers, states, and banks, along with Hollywood and student debt, invoke the human only as a skeuomorph—an allusion to an old technology that helps facilitate adoption of the new. Put another way, the human has become a barrier to production, it is no longer a sustainable form. The human, and those (human and otherwise) falling under the paradigm’s dominion, must be stripped, cut, bundled, reconfigured in derivative forms. All hail the dividual. Again, female and racialized bodies and subjects have long endured this now universal fragmentation and forced recomposition and very likely dividuality may also describe a precapitalist, pre-colonial interface with the social. However we are obliged to point out that this, the current dissolution of the human into the infrastructure of the world-system, is double-edged, neither fully positive, nor fully negative—the result of the dialectics of struggles for liberation distributed around the planet. As a sign of the times, posthumanism may be, as has been remarked about capitalism itself, among those simultaneously best and worst things to ever happen in history. On the one hand, the disappearance of presumably ontological protections and legitimating status for some (including the promise of rights never granted to most), on the other, the disappearance of a modality of dehumanization and exclusion that legitimated and normalized white supremacist patriarchy by allowing its values to masquerade as universals. However, it is difficult to maintain optimism of the will when we see that that which is coming, that which is already upon us may also be as bad or worse, in absolute numbers, is already worse, for unprecedented billions of concrete individuals. Frankly, in a world where the cognitive-linguistic functions of the species have themselves been captured by the ambient capitalist computation of social media and indeed of capitalized computational social relations, of what use is a theory of dispossession to the dispossessed?

    For those of us who may consider ourselves thinkers, it is our burden—in a real sense, our debt, living and ancestral—to make theory relevant to those who haunt it. Anything less is betrayal. The emergence of the universal value form (as money, the general form of wealth) with its human face (as white-maleness, the general form of humanity) clearly inveighs against the possibility of extrinsic valuation since the very notion of universal valuation is posited from within this economy. What Cedric Robinson shows in his extraordinary Black Marxism (1983) is that capitalism itself is a white mythology. The history of racialization and capitalization are inseparable, and the treatment of capital as a pure abstraction deracinates its origins and functions – both its conditions of possibility as well as its operations—including those of the internal critique of capitalism that has been the basis of much of the Marxist tradition. Both capitalism and its negation as Marxism have proceeded through a disavowal of racialization. The quantitative exchange of equivalents, circulating as exchange values without qualities, are the real abstractions that give rise to philosophy, science, and white liberal humanism wedded to the notion of the objective. Therefore, when it comes to values, there is no degree zero, only perhaps nodal points of bounded equilibrium. To claim neutrality for an early digital machine, say, money, that is, to argue that money as a medium is value-neutral because it embodies what has (in many respects correctly, but in a qualified way) been termed “the universal value form,” would be to miss the entire system of leveraged exploitation that sustains the money-system. In an isolated instance, money as the product of capital might be used for good (building shelters for the homeless) or for ill (purchasing Caterpillar bulldozers) or both (building shelters using Caterpillar machines), but not to see that the capitalist-system sustains itself through militarized and policed expropriation and large-scale, long-term universal degradation is to engage in mere delusional, utopianism and self-interested (might one even say psychotic?) naysaying.

    Will the apologists calmly bear witness to the sacrifice of billions of human beings so that the invisible hand may placidly unfurl its/their abstractions in Kubrikian sublimity? 2001’s (Kubrick 1968) cold longshot of the species lifespan as an instance of a cosmic program is not so distant from the endemic violence of postmodern—and, indeed, post-human—fascism he depicted in A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick 1971). Arguably, 2001 rendered the cosmology of early Posthuman Fascism while A Clockwork Orange portrayed its psychology. Both films explored the aesthetics of programming. For the individual and for the species, what we beheld in these two films was the annihilation of our agency (at the level of the individual and of the species) —and it was eerily seductive, Benjamin’s self-destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order taken to cosmic proportions and raised to the level of Art (1969).

    So what of the remainders of those who may remain? Here, in the face of the annihilation of remaindered life (to borrow a powerfully dialectical term from Neferti Tadiar, 2016) by various iterations of techné, we are posing the following question: how are computers and digital computing, as universals, themselves an iteration of long-standing historical inequality, violence, and murder, and what are the entry points for an understanding of computation-society in which our currently pre-historic (in Marx’s sense of the term) conditions of computation might be assessed and overcome? This question of technical overdetermination is not a matter of a Kittlerian-style anti-humanism in which “media determine our situation,” nor is it a matter of the post-Kittlerian, seemingly user-friendly repurposing of dialectical materialism which in the beer-drinking tradition of “good-German” idealism, offers us the poorly historicized, neo-liberal idea of “cultural techniques” courtesy of Cornelia Vismann and Bernhard Siegert (Vismann 2013, 83-93; Siegert 2013, 48-65). This latter is a conveniently deracinated way of conceptualizing the distributed agency of everything techno-human without having to register the abiding fundamental antagonisms, the life and death struggle, in anything. Rather, the question I want to pose about computing is one capable of both foregrounding and interrogating violence, assigning responsibility, making changes, and demanding reparations. The challenge upon us is to decolonize computing. Has the waning not just of affect (of a certain type) but of history itself brought us into a supposedly post-historical space? Can we see that what we once called history, and is now no longer, really has been pre-history, stages of pre-history? What would it mean to say in earnest “What’s past is prologue?”[6] If the human has never been and should never be, if there has been this accumulation of negative entropy first via linear time and then via its disruption, then what? Postmodernism, posthumanism, Flusser’s post-historical, and Berardi’s After the Future notwithstanding, can we take the measure of history?

    Hollerith punch card (image source: Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mcc/023/0008.jpg)
    Figure 1. Hollerith punch card (image source: Library of Congress)

    Techno-Humanist Dehumanization

    I would like to conclude this essay with a few examples of techno-humanist dehumanization. In 1889, Herman Hollerith patented the punchcard system and mechanical tabulator that was used in the 1890 censuses in Germany, England, Italy, Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. A national census, which normally took eight to ten years now took a single year. The subsequent invention of the plugboard control panel in 1906 allowed for tabulators to perform multiple sorts in whatever sequence was selected without having to be rebuild the tabulators—an early form of programming. Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company merged with three other companies in 1911 to become the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, which renamed itself IBM in 1924.

    While the census opens a rich field of inquiry that includes questions of statistics, computing, and state power that are increasingly relevant today (particularly taking into account the ever-presence of the NSA), for now I only want to extract two points: 1) humans became the fodder for statistical machines and 2) as Vince Rafael has shown regarding the Philippine census and as Edwin Black has shown with respect to the holocaust, the development of this technology was inseparable from racialization and genocide (Rafael 2000; Black 2001)

    Rafael shows that coupled to photographic techniques, the census at once “discerned” and imposed a racializing schema that welded historical “progress” to ever-whiter waves of colonization, from Malay migration to Spanish Colonialism to U.S. Imperialism (2000) Racial fantasy meets white mythology meets World Spirit. For his part, Edwin Black (2001) writes:

    Only after Jews were identified—a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately—could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed.

    But IBM’s Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company’s custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.

    IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich’s needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed (Black 2001).

    The sorting of populations and individuals by forms of social difference including “race,” ability and sexual preference (Jews, Roma, homosexuals, people deemed mentally or physically handicapped) for the purposes of sending people who failed to meet Nazi eugenic criteria off to concentration camps to be dispossessed, humiliated, tortured and killed, means that some aspects of computer technology—here, the Search Engine—emerged from this particular social necessity sometimes called Nazism (Black 2001). The Philippine-American War, in which Americans killed between 1/10th and 1/6th of the population of the Philippines, and the Nazi-administered holocaust are but two world historical events that are part of the meaning of early computational automation. We might say that computers bear the legacy of imperialism and fascism—it is inscribed in their operating systems.

    The mechanisms, as well as the social meaning of computation, were refined in its concrete applications. The process of abstraction hid the violence of abstraction, even as it integrated the result with economic and political protocols and directly effected certain behaviors. It is a well-known fact that Claude Shannon’s landmark paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” proposed a general theory of communication that was content-indifferent (1948, 379-423). This seminal work created a statistical, mathematical model of communication while simultaneously consigning any and all specific content to irrelevance as regards the transmission method itself. Like use-value under the management of the commodity form, the message became only a supplement to the exchange value of the code. Elsewhere I have more to say about the fact that some of the statistical information Shannon derived about letter frequency in English used as its ur-text, Jefferson The Virginian (1948), the first volume of Dumas Malone’s monumental six volume study of Jefferson, famously interrogated by Annette Gordon-Reed in her Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings: An American Controversy for its suppression of information regarding Jefferson’s relation to slavery (1997).[7] My point here is that the rules for content indifference were themselves derived from a particular content and that the language used as a standard referent was a specific deployment of language. The representative linguistic sample did not represent the whole of language, but language that belongs to a particular mode of sociality and racialized enfranchisement. Shannon’s deprivileging of the referent of the logos as referent, and his attention only to the signifiers, was an intensification of the slippage of signifier from signified (“We, the people…”) already noted in linguistics and functionally operative in the elision of slavery in Jefferson’s biography, to say nothing of the same text’s elision of slave-narrative and African-American speech. Shannon brilliantly and successfully developed a re-conceptualization of language as code (sign system) and now as mathematical code (numerical system) that no doubt found another of its logical (and material) conclusions (at least with respect to metaphysics) in post-structuralist theory and deconstruction, with the placing of the referent under erasure. This recession of the real (of being, the subject, and experience—in short, the signified) from codification allowed Shannon’s mathematical abstraction of rules for the transmission of any message whatsoever to become the industry standard even as they also meant, quite literally, the dehumanization of communication—its severance from a people’s history.

    In a 1987 interview, Shannon was quoted as saying “I can visualize a time in the future when we will be to robots as dogs are to humans…. I’m rooting for the machines!” (1971). If humans are the robot’s companion species, they (or is it we?) need a manifesto. The difficulty is that the labor of our “being” such that it is/was is encrypted in their function. And “we” have never been “one.”

    Tara McPherson has brilliantly argued that the modularity achieved in the development of UNIX has its analogue in racial segregation. Modularity and encapsulation, necessary to the writing of UNIX code that still underpins contemporary operating systems were emergent general socio-technical forms, what we might call technologies, abstract machines, or real abstractions. “I am not arguing that programmers creating UNIX at Bell Labs and at Berkeley were consciously encoding new modes of racism and racial understanding into digital systems,” McPherson argues, “The emergence of covert racism and its rhetoric of colorblindness are not so much intentional as systemic. Computation is a primary delivery method of these new systems and it seems at best naïve to imagine that cultural and computational operating systems don’t mutually infect one another.” (in Nakamura 2012, 30-31; italics in original)

    This is the computational unconscious at work—the dialectical inscription and re-inscription of sociality and machine architecture that then becomes the substrate for the next generation of consciousness, ad infinitum. In a recent unpublished paper entitled “The Lorem Ipsum Project,” Alana Ramjit (2014) examines industry standards for the now-digital imaging of speech and graphic images. These include Kodak’s “Shirley cards” for standard skin tone (white), the Harvard Sentences for standard audio (white), the “Indian Head Test Pattern” for standard broadcast image (white fetishism), and “Lenna,” an image of Lena Soderberg taken from Playboy magazine (white patriarchal unconscious) that has become the reference standard image for the development of graphics processing. Each of these examples testifies to an absorption of the socio-historical at every step of mediological and computational refinement.

    More recently, as Chris Vitale, brought out in a powerful presentation on machine learning and neural networks given at Pratt Institute in 2016, Facebook’s machine has produced “Deep Face,” an image of the minimally recognizable human face. However, this ur-human face, purported to be, the minimally recognizable form of the human face turns out to be a white guy. This is a case in point of the extension of colonial relations into machine function. Given the racialization of poverty in the system of global apartheid (Federici 2012), we have on our hands (or, rather, in our machines) a new modality of automated genocide. Fascism and genocide have new mediations and may not just have adapted to new media but may have merged. Of course, the terms and names of genocidal regeimes change, but the consequences persist. Just yesterday it was called neo-liberal democracy. Today it’s called the end of neo-liberalism. The current world-wide crisis in migration is one of the symptoms of the genocidal tendencies of the most recent coalescence of the “practically” automated logistics of race, nation and class. Today racism is at once a symptom of the computational unconscious, an operation of non-conscious cognition, and still just the garden variety self-serving murderous stupidity that is the legacy of slavery, settler colonialism and colonialism.

    Thus we may observe that the statistical methods utilized by IBM to find Jews in the Shtetl are operative in Weiner’s anti-aircraft cybernetics as well as in Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. But, the prevailing view, even if it is not one of pure mathematical abstraction, in which computational process has its essence without reference to any concrete whatever, can be found in what follows. As an article entitled “Traces of Israel’s Iron Dome can be found in Tech Startups” for Bloomberg News almost giddily reports:

    The Israeli-engineered Iron Dome is a complex tapestry of machinery, software and computer algorithms capable of intercepting and destroying rockets midair. An offshoot of the missile-defense technology can also be used to sell you furniture. (Coppola 2014)[8]

    Not only is war good computer business, it’s good for computerized business. It is ironic that te is likened to a tapestry and now used to sell textiles – almost as if it were haunted by Lisa Nakamura’s recent findings regarding the (forgotten) role of Navajo women weavers in the making of early transistor’s for Silicon Valley legend and founding father, as well as infamous eugenicist, William Shockley’s company Fairchild.[9] The article goes on to confess that the latest consumer spin-offs that facilitate the real-time imaging of couches in your living room capable of driving sales on the domestic fronts exist thanks to the U. S. financial support for Zionism and its militarized settler colonialism in Palestine. “We have American-backed apartheid and genocide to thank for being able to visualize a green moderne couch in our very own living room before we click “Buy now.”” (Okay, this is not really a quotation, but it could have been.)

    Census, statistics, informatics, cryptography, war machines, industry standards, markets—all management techniques for the organization of otherwise unruly humans, sub-humans, posthumans and nonhumans by capitalist society. The ethos of content indifference, along with the encryption of social difference as both mode and means of systemic functionality is sustainable only so long as derivative human beings are themselves rendered as content providers, body and soul. But it is not only tech spinoffs from the racist war dividends we should be tracking. Wendy Chun (2004, 26-51) has shown in utterly convincing ways that the gendered history of the development of computer programming at ENIAC in which male mathematicians instructed female programmers to physically make the electronic connections (and remove any bugs) echoes into the present experiences of sovereignty enjoyed by users who have, in many respects, become programmers (even if most of us have little or no idea how programming works, or even that we are programming).

    Chun notes that “during World War II almost all computers were young women with some background in mathematics. Not only were women available for work then, they were also considered to be better, more conscientious computers, presumably because they were better at repetitious, clerical tasks” (Chun 2004, 33)  One could say that programming became programming and software became software when commands shifted from commanding a “girl” to commanding a machine. Clearly this puts the gender of the commander in question.

    Chun suggests that the augmentation of our power through the command-control functions of computation is a result of what she calls the “Yes sir” of the feminized operator—that is, of servile labor (2004). Indeed, in the ENIAC and other early machines the execution of the operator’s order was to be carried out by the “wren” or the “slave.” For the desensitized, this information may seem incidental, a mere development or advance beyond the instrumentum vocale (the “speaking tool” i.e., a roman term for “slave”) in which even the communicative capacities of the slave are totally subordinated to the master. Here we must struggle to pose the larger question: what are the implications for this gendered and racialized form of power exercised in the interface? What is its relation to gender oppression, to slavery? Is this mode of command-control over bodies and extended to the machine a universal form of empowerment, one to which all (posthuman) bodies might aspire, or is it a mode of subjectification built in the footprint of domination in such a way that it replicates the beliefs, practices and consequences of  “prior” orders of whiteness and masculinity in unconscious but nonetheless murderous ways.[10] Is the computer the realization of the power of a transcendental subject, or of the subject whose transcendence was built upon a historically developed version of racial masculinity based upon slavery and gender violence?

    Andrew Norman Wilson’s scandalizing film Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011), the making of which got him fired from Google, depicts lower class, mostly of color workers leaving the Google Mountain View campus during off hours. These workers are the book scanners, and shared neither the spaces nor the perks with Google white collar workers, had different parking lots, entrances and drove a different class of vehicles. Wilson also has curated and developed a set of images that show the condom-clad fingers (black, brown, female) of workers next to partially scanned book pages. He considers these mis-scans new forms of documentary evidence. While digitization and computation may seem to have transcended certain humanistic questions, it is imperative that we understand that its posthumanism is also radically untranscendent, grounded as it is on the living legacies of oppression, and, in the last instance, on the radical dispossession of billions. These billions are disappeared, literally utilized as a surface of inscription for everyday transmissions. The dispossessed are the substrate of the codification process by the sovereign operators commanding their screens. The digitized, rewritable screen pixels are just the visible top-side (virtualized surface) of bodies dispossessed by capital’s digital algorithms on the bottom-side where, arguably, other metaphysics still pertain. Not Hegel’s world spirit—whether in the form of Kurzweil’s singularity or Tegmark’s computronium—but rather Marx’s imperative towards a ruthless critique of everything existing can begin to explain how and why the current computational eco-system is co-functional with the unprecedented dispossession wrought by racial computational capitalism and its system of global apartheid. Racial capitalism’s programs continue to function on the backs of those consigned to servitude. Data-visualization, whether in the form of selfie, global map, digitized classic or downloadable sound of the Big Bang, is powered by this elision. It is, shall we say, inescapably local to planet earth, fundamentally historical in relation to species emergence, inexorably complicit with the deferral of justice.

    The Global South, with its now world-wide distribution, is endemic to the geopolitics of computational racial capital—it is one of its extraordinary products. The computronics that organize the flow of capital through its materials and signs also organize the consciousness of capital and with it the cosmological erasure of the Global South. Thus the computational unconscious names a vast aspect of global function that still requires analysis. And thus we sneak up on the two principle meanings of the concept of the computational unconscious. On the one hand, we have the problematic residue of amortized consciousness (and the praxis thereof) that has gone into the making of contemporary infrastructure—meaning to say, the structural repression and forgetting that is endemic to the very essence of our technological buildout. On the other hand, we have the organization of everyday life taking place on the basis of this amortization, that is, on the basis of a dehistoricized, deracinated relation to both concrete and abstract machines that function by virtue of the fact that intelligible history has been shorn off of them and its legibility purged from their operating systems. Put simply, we have forgetting, the radical disappearance and expunging from memory, of the historical conditions of possibility of what is. As a consequence, we have the organization of social practice and futurity (or lack thereof) on the basis of this encoded absence. The capture of the general intellect means also the management of the general antagonism. Never has it been truer that memory requires forgetting – the exponential growth in memory storage means also an exponential growth in systematic forgetting – the withering away of the analogue. As a thought experiment, one might imagine a vast and empty vestibule, a James Ingo Freed global holocaust memorial of unprecedented scale, containing all the oceans and lands real and virtual, and dedicated to all the forgotten names of the colonized, the enslaved, the encamped, the statisticized, the read, written and rendered, in the history of computational calculus—of computer memory. These too, and the anthropocene itself, are the sedimented traces that remain among the constituents of the computational unconscious.

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    Jonathan Beller is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute. His books include The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (2006); Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-Media System (2006); and The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (2017). He is a member of the Social Text editorial collective..

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] A reviewer of this essay for b2o: An Online Journal notes, “the phrase ‘digital computer’ suggests something like the Turing machine, part of which is characterized by a second-order process of symbolization—the marks on Turing’s tape can stand for anything, & the machine processing the tape does not ‘know’ what the marks ‘mean.’” It is precisely such content indifferent processing that the term “exchange value,” severed as it is of all qualities, indicates.

    [2] It should be noted that the reverse is also true: that race and gender can be considered and/as technologies. See Chun (2012), de Lauretis (1987).

    [3] To insist on first causes or a priori consciousness in the form of God or Truth or Reality is to confront Marx’s earlier acerbic statement against a form of abstraction that eliminates the moment of knowing from the known in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,

    Who begot the first man and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself it that question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is a perverse one. Ask yourself whether such a progression exists for a rational mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man you are abstracting in so doing from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say give up your abstraction and you will give up your question. Or, if you want to hold onto your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely man and nature. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you postulate everything as nothing and yet want yourself to be?” (Tucker 1978, 92)

    [4] If one takes the derivative of computational process at a particular point in space-time one gets an image. If one integrates the images over the variables of space and time, one gets a calculated exploit, a pathway for value-extraction. The image is a moment in this process, the summation of images is the movement of the process.

    [5] See Harney and Moten (2013). See also Browne (2015), especially 43-50.

    [6] In practical terms, the Alternative Informatics Association, in the announcement for their Internet Ungovernance Forum puts things as follows:

    We think that Internet’s problems do not originate from technology alone, that none of these problems are independent of the political, social and economic contexts within which Internet and other digital infrastructures are integrated. We want to re-structure Internet as the basic infrastructure of our society, cities, education, heathcare, business, media, communication, culture and daily activities. This is the purpose for which we organize this forum.

    The significance of creating solidarity networks for a free and equal Internet has also emerged in the process of the event’s organization. Pioneered by Alternative Informatics Association, the event has gained support from many prestigious organizations worldwide in the field. In this two-day event, fundamental topics are decided to be ‘Surveillance, Censorship and Freedom of Expression, Alternative Media, Net Neutrality, Digital Divide, governance and technical solutions’. Draft of the event’s schedule can be reached at https://iuf.alternatifbilisim.org/index-tr.html#program (Fidaner, 2014).

    [7] See Beller (2016, 2017).

    [8] Coppola writes that “Israel owes much of its technological prowess to the country’s near—constant state of war. The nation spent $15.2 billion, or roughly 6 percent of gross domestic product, on defense last year, according to data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a U.K. think-tank. That’s double the proportion of defense spending to GDP for the U.S., a longtime Israeli ally. If there’s one thing the U.S. Congress can agree on these days, it’s continued support for Israel’s defense technology. Legislators approved $225 million in emergency spending for Iron Dome on Aug. 1, and President Barack Obama signed it into law three days later.”

    [9] Nakamura (2014).

    [10] For more on this, see Eglash (2007).

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    Works Cited

    • Althusser, Louis. 1977. Lenin and Philosophy. London: NLB.
    • Azoulay, Ariella. 2012. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. London: Verso.
    • Beller, Jonathan. 2006. Cinematic Mode of Reproduction. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.
    • Beller, Jonathan. 2016. “Fragment from The Message is Murder.” Social Text 34:3. 137-152.
    • Beller, Jonathan. 2017. The Message is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital. London: Pluto Press.
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  • Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence

    Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence

    By Dale Carrico
    ~

    Science fiction is a genre of literature in which artifacts and techniques humans devise as exemplary expressions of our intelligence result in problems that perplex our intelligence or even bring it into existential crisis. It is scarcely surprising that a genre so preoccupied with the status and scope of intelligence would provide endless variations on the conceits of either the construction of artificial intelligences or contact with alien intelligences.

    Of course, both the making of artificial intelligence and making contact with alien intelligence are organized efforts to which many humans are actually devoted, and not simply imaginative sites in which writers spin their allegories and exhibit their symptoms. It is interesting that after generations of failure the practical efforts to construct artificial intelligence or contact alien intelligence have often shunted their adherents to the margins of scientific consensus and invested these efforts with the coloration of scientific subcultures: While computer science and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence both remain legitimate fields of research, both AI and aliens also attract subcultural enthusiasms and resonate with cultic theology, each attracts its consumer fandoms and public Cons, each has its True Believers and even its UFO cults and Robot cults at the extremities.

    Champions of artificial intelligence in particular have coped in many ways with the serial failure of their project to achieve its desired end (which is not to deny that the project has borne fruit) whatever the confidence with which generation after generation of these champions have insisted that desired end is near. Some have turned to more modest computational ambitions, making useful software or mischievous algorithms in which sad vestiges of the older dreams can still be seen to cling. Some are simply stubborn dead-enders for Good Old Fashioned AI‘s expected eventual and even imminent vindication, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. And still others have doubled down, distracting attention from the failures and problems bedeviling AI discourse simply by raising its pitch and stakes, no longer promising that artificial intelligence is around the corner but warning that artificial super-intelligence is coming soon to end human history.

    alien planet

    Another strategy for coping with the failure of artificial intelligence on its conventional terms has assumed a higher profile among its champions lately, drawing support for the real plausibility of one science-fictional conceit — construction of artificial intelligence — by appealing to another science-fictional conceit, contact with alien intelligence. This rhetorical gambit has often been conjoined to the compensation of failed AI with its hyperbolic amplification into super-AI which I have already mentioned, and it is in that context that I have written about it before myself. But in a piece published a few days ago in The New York Times, “Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing Test,” Benjamin Bratton, a professor of visual arts at U.C. San Diego and Director of a design think-tank, has elaborated a comparatively sophisticated case for treating artificial intelligence as alien intelligence with which we can productively grapple. Near the conclusion of his piece Bratton declares that “Musk, Gates and Hawking made headlines by speaking to the dangers that A.I. may pose. Their points are important, but I fear were largely misunderstood by many readers.” Of course these figures made their headlines by making the arguments about super-intelligence I have already rejected, and mentioning them seems to indicate Bratton’s sympathy with their gambit and even suggests that his argument aims to help us to understand them better on their own terms. Nevertheless, I take Bratton’s argument seriously not because of but in spite of this connection. Ultimately, Bratton makes a case for understanding AI as alien that does not depend on the deranging hyperbole and marketing of robocalypse or robo-rapture for its force.

    In the piece, Bratton claims “Our popular conception of artificial intelligence is distorted by an anthropocentric fallacy.” The point is, of course, well taken, and the litany he rehearses to illustrate it is enormously familiar by now as he proceeds to survey popular images from Kubrick’s HAL to Jonze’s Her and to document public deliberation about the significance of computation articulated through such imagery as the “rise of the machines” in the Terminator franchise or the need for Asimov’s famous fictional “Three Laws of Robotics.” It is easy — and may nonetheless be quite important — to agree with Bratton’s observation that our computational/media devices lack cruel intentions and are not susceptible to Asimovian consciences, and hence thinking about the threats and promises and meanings of these devices through such frames and figures is not particularly helpful to us even though we habitually recur to them by now. As I say, it would be easy and important to agree with such a claim, but Bratton’s proposal is in fact somewhat a different one:

    [A] mature A.I. is not necessarily a humanlike intelligence, or one that is at our disposal. If we look for A.I. in the wrong ways, it may emerge in forms that are needlessly difficult to recognize, amplifying its risks and retarding its benefits. This is not just a concern for the future. A.I. is already out of the lab and deep into the fabric of things. “Soft A.I.,” such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon recommendation engines, along with infrastructural A.I., such as high-speed algorithmic trading, smart vehicles and industrial robotics, are increasingly a part of everyday life.

    Here the serial failure of the program of artificial intelligence is redeemed simply by declaring victory. Bratton demonstrates that crying uncle does not preclude one from still crying wolf. It’s not that Siri is some sickly premonition of the AI-daydream still endlessly deferred, but that it represents the real rise of what robot cultist Hans Moravec once promised would be our “mind children” but here and now as elfen aliens with an intelligence unto themselves. It’s not that calling a dumb car a “smart” car is simply a hilarious bit of obvious marketing hyperbole, but represents the recognition of a new order of intelligent machines among us. Rather than criticize the way we may be “amplifying its risks and retarding its benefits” by reading computation through the inapt lens of intelligence at all, he proposes that we should resist holding machine intelligence to the standards that have hitherto defined it for fear of making its recognition “too difficult.”

    The kernel of legitimacy in Bratton’s inquiry is its recognition that “intelligence is notoriously difficult to define and human intelligence simply can’t exhaust the possibilities.” To deny these modest reminders is to indulge in what he calls “the pretentious folklore” of anthropocentrism. I agree that anthropocentrism in our attributions of intelligence has facilitated great violence and exploitation in the world, denying the dignity and standing of Cetaceans and Great Apes, but has also facilitated racist, sexist, xenophobic travesties by denigrating humans as beastly and unintelligent objects at the disposal of “intelligent” masters. “Some philosophers write about the possible ethical ‘rights’ of A.I. as sentient entities, but,” Bratton is quick to insist, “that’s not my point here.” Given his insistence that the “advent of robust inhuman A.I.” will force a “reality-based” “disenchantment” to “abolish the false centrality and absolute specialness of human thought and species-being” which he blames in his concluding paragraph with providing “theological and legislative comfort to chattel slavery” it is not entirely clear to me that emancipating artificial aliens is not finally among the stakes that move his argument whatever his protestations to the contrary. But one can forgive him for not dwelling on such concerns: the denial of an intelligence and sensitivity provoking responsiveness and demanding responsibilities in us all to women, people of color, foreigners, children, the different, the suffering, nonhuman animals compels defensive and evasive circumlocutions that are simply not needed to deny intelligence and standing to an abacus or a desk lamp. It is one thing to warn of the anthropocentric fallacy but another to indulge in the pathetic fallacy.

    Bratton insists to the contrary that his primary concern is that anthropocentrism skews our assessment of real risks and benefits. “Unfortunately, the popular conception of A.I., at least as depicted in countless movies, games and books, still seems to assume that humanlike characteristics (anger, jealousy, confusion, avarice, pride, desire, not to mention cold alienation) are the most important ones to be on the lookout for.” And of course he is right. The champions of AI have been more than complicit in this popular conception, eager to attract attention and funds for their project among technoscientific illiterates drawn to such dramatic narratives. But we are distracted from the real risks of computation so long as we expect risks to arise from a machinic malevolence that has never been on offer nor even in the offing. Writes Bratton: “Perhaps what we really fear, even more than a Big Machine that wants to kill us, is one that sees us as irrelevant. Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all.”

    But surely the inevitable question posed by Bratton’s disenchanting expose at this point should be: Why, once we have set aside the pretentious folklore of machines with diabolical malevolence, do we not set aside as no less pretentiously folkloric the attribution of diabolical indifference to machines? Why, once we have set aside the delusive confusion of machine behavior with (actual or eventual) human intelligence, do we not set aside as no less delusive the confusion of machine behavior with intelligence altogether? There is no question were a gigantic bulldozer with an incapacitated driver to swerve from a construction site onto a crowded city thoroughfare this would represent a considerable threat, but however tempting it might be in the fraught moment or reflective aftermath poetically to invest that bulldozer with either agency or intellect it is clear that nothing would be gained in the practical comprehension of the threat it poses by so doing. It is no more helpful now in an epoch of Greenhouse storms than it was for pre-scientific storytellers to invest thunder and whirlwinds with intelligence. Although Bratton makes great play over the need to overcome folkloric anthropocentrism in our figuration of and deliberation over computation, mystifying agencies and mythical personages linger on in his accounting however he insists on the alienness of “their” intelligence.

    Bratton warns us about the “infrastructural A.I.” of high-speed financial trading algorithms, Google and Amazon search algorithms, “smart” vehicles (and no doubt weaponized drones and autonomous weapons systems would count among these), and corporate-military profiling programs that oppress us with surveillance and harass us with targeted ads. I share all of these concerns, of course, but personally insist that our critical engagement with infrastructural coding is profoundly undermined when it is invested with insinuations of autonomous intelligence. In “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin pointed out that when philosophers talk about the historical force of art they do so with the prejudices of philosophers: they tend to write about those narrative and visual forms of art that might seem argumentative in allegorical and iconic forms that appear analogous to the concentrated modes of thought demanded by philosophy itself. Benjamin proposed that perhaps the more diffuse and distracted ways we are shaped in our assumptions and aspirations by the durable affordances and constraints of the made world of architecture and agriculture might turn out to drive history as much or even more than the pet artforms of philosophers do. Lawrence Lessig made much the same point when he declared at the turn of the millennium that “Code Is Law.”

    It is well known that special interests with rich patrons shape the legislative process and sometimes even explicitly craft legislation word for word in ways that benefit them to the cost and risk of majorities. It is hard to see how our assessment of this ongoing crime and danger would be helped and not hindered by pretending legislation is an autonomous force exhibiting an alien intelligence, rather than a constellation of practices, norms, laws, institutions, ritual and material artifice, the legacy of the historical play of intelligent actors and the site for the ongoing contention of intelligent actors here and now. To figure legislation as a beast or alien with a will of its own would amount to a fetishistic displacement of intelligence away from the actual actors actually responsible for the forms that legislation actually takes. It is easy to see why such a displacement is attractive: it profitably abets the abuses of majorities by minorities while it absolves majorities from conscious complicity in the terms of their own exploitation by laws made, after all, in our names. But while these consoling fantasies have an obvious allure this hardly justifies our endorsement of them.

    I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that the collapse of global finance in 2008 represented the working of inscrutable artificial intelligences facilitating rapid transactions and supporting novel financial instruments of what was called by Long Boom digerati the “new economy.” I wrote:

    It is not computers and programs and autonomous techno-agents who are the protagonists of the still unfolding crime of predatory plutocratic wealth-concentration and anti-democratizing austerity. The villains of this bloodsoaked epic are the bankers and auditors and captured-regulators and neoliberal ministers who employed these programs and instruments for parochial gain and who then exonerated and rationalized and still enable their crimes. Our financial markets are not so complex we no longer understand them. In fact everybody knows exactly what is going on. Everybody understands everything. Fraudsters [are] engaged in very conventional, very recognizable, very straightforward but unprecedentedly massive acts of fraud and theft under the cover of lies.

    I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that our discomfiture in the setting of ubiquitous algorithmic mediation results from an autonomous force over which humans intentions are secondary considerations. I wrote:

    [W]hat imaginary scene is being conjured up in this exculpatory rhetoric in which inadvertent cruelty is ‘coming from code’ as opposed to coming from actual persons? Aren’t coders actual persons, for example? … [O]f course I know what [is] mean[t by the insistence…] that none of this was ‘a deliberate assault.’ But it occurs to me that it requires the least imaginable measure of thought on the part of those actually responsible for this code to recognize that the cruelty of [one user’s] confrontation with their algorithm was the inevitable at least occasional result for no small number of the human beings who use Facebook and who live lives that attest to suffering, defeat, humiliation, and loss as well as to parties and promotions and vacations… What if the conspicuousness of [this] experience of algorithmic cruelty indicates less an exceptional circumstance than the clarifying exposure of a more general failure, a more ubiquitous cruelty? … We all joke about the ridiculous substitutions performed by autocorrect functions, or the laughable recommendations that follow from the odd purchase of a book from Amazon or an outing from Groupon. We should joke, but don’t, when people treat a word cloud as an analysis of a speech or an essay. We don’t joke so much when a credit score substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen deserves the chance to become a homeowner or start a small business, or when a Big Data profile substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen should become a heat signature for a drone committing extrajudicial murder in all of our names. [An] experience of algorithmic cruelty [may be] extraordinary, but that does not mean it cannot also be a window onto an experience of algorithmic cruelty that is ordinary. The question whether we might still ‘opt out’ from the ordinary cruelty of algorithmic mediation is not a design question at all, but an urgent political one.

    I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that so-called Killer Robots are a threat that must be engaged by resisting or banning “them” in their alterity rather than by assigning moral and criminal responsibility on those who code, manufacture, fund, and deploy them. I wrote:

    Well-meaning opponents of war atrocities and engines of war would do well to think how tech companies stand to benefit from military contracts for ‘smarter’ software and bleeding-edge gizmos when terrorized and technoscientifically illiterate majorities and public officials take SillyCon Valley’s warnings seriously about our ‘complacency’ in the face of truly autonomous weapons and artificial super-intelligence that do not exist. It is crucial that necessary regulation and even banning of dangerous ‘autonomous weapons’ proceeds in a way that does not abet the mis-attribution of agency, and hence accountability, to devices. Every ‘autonomous’ weapons system expresses and mediates decisions by responsible humans usually all too eager to disavow the blood on their hands. Every legitimate fear of ‘killer robots’ is best addressed by making their coders, designers, manufacturers, officials, and operators accountable for criminal and unethical tools and uses of tools… There simply is no such thing as a smart bomb. Every bomb is stupid. There is no such thing as an autonomous weapon. Every weapon is deployed. The only killer robots that actually exist are human beings waging and profiting from war.

    “Arguably,” argues Bratton, “the Anthropocene itself is due less to technology run amok than to the humanist legacy that understands the world as having been given for our needs and created in our image. We hear this in the words of thought leaders who evangelize the superiority of a world where machines are subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity… This is the sentiment — this philosophy of technology exactly — that is the basic algorithm of the Anthropocenic predicament, and consenting to it would also foreclose adequate encounters with A.I.” The Anthropocene in this formulation names the emergence of environmental or planetary consciousness, an emergence sometimes coupled to the global circulation of the image of the fragility and interdependence of the whole earth as seen by humans from outer space. It is the recognition that the world in which we evolved to flourish might be impacted by our collective actions in ways that threaten us all. Notice, by the way, that multiculture and historical struggle are figured as just another “algorithm” here.

    I do not agree that planetary catastrophe inevitably followed from the conception of the earth as a gift besetting us to sustain us, indeed this premise understood in terms of stewardship or commonwealth would go far in correcting and preventing such careless destruction in my opinion. It is the false and facile (indeed infantile) conception of a finite world somehow equal to infinite human desires that has landed us and keeps us delusive ignoramuses lodged in this genocidal and suicidal predicament. Certainly I agree with Bratton that it would be wrong to attribute the waste and pollution and depletion of our common resources by extractive-industrial-consumer societies indifferent to ecosystemic limits to “technology run amok.” The problem of so saying is not that to do so disrespects “technology” — as presumably in his view no longer treating machines as properly “subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity” would more wholesomely respect “technology,” whatever that is supposed to mean — since of course technology does not exist in this general or abstract way to be respected or disrespected.

    The reality at hand is that humans are running amok in ways that are facilitated and mediated by certain technologies. What is demanded in this moment by our predicament is the clear-eyed assessment of the long-term costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific interventions into finite ecosystems to the actual diversity of their stakeholders and the distribution of these costs, risks, and benefits in an equitable way. Quite a lot of unsustainable extractive and industrial production as well as mass consumption and waste would be rendered unprofitable and unappealing were its costs and risks widely recognized and equitably distributed. Such an understanding suggests that what is wanted is to insist on the culpability and situation of actually intelligent human actors, mediated and facilitated as they are in enormously complicated and demanding ways by technique and artifice. The last thing we need to do is invest technology-in-general or environmental-forces with alien intelligence or agency apart from ourselves.

    I am beginning to wonder whether the unavoidable and in many ways humbling recognition (unavoidable not least because of environmental catastrophe and global neoliberal precarization) that human agency emerges out of enormously complex and dynamic ensembles of interdependent/prostheticized actors gives rise to compensatory investments of some artifacts — especially digital networks, weapons of mass destruction, pandemic diseases, environmental forces — with the sovereign aspect of agency we no longer believe in for ourselves? It is strangely consoling to pretend our technologies in some fancied monolithic construal represent the rise of “alien intelligences,” even threatening ones, other than and apart from ourselves, not least because our own intelligence is an alienated one and prostheticized through and through. Consider the indispensability of pedagogical techniques of rote memorization, the metaphorization and narrativization of rhetoric in songs and stories and craft, the technique of the memory palace, the technologies of writing and reading, the articulation of metabolism and duration by timepieces, the shaping of both the body and its bearing by habit and by athletic training, the lifelong interplay of infrastructure and consciousness: all human intellect is already technique. All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture.

    Bratton wants to narrate as a kind of progressive enlightenment the mystification he recommends that would invest computation with alien intelligence and agency while at once divesting intelligent human actors, coders, funders, users of computation of responsibility for the violations and abuses of other humans enabled and mediated by that computation. This investment with intelligence and divestment of responsibility he likens to the Copernican Revolution in which humans sustained the momentary humiliation of realizing that they were not the center of the universe but received in exchange the eventual compensation of incredible powers of prediction and control. One might wonder whether the exchange of the faith that humanity was the apple of God’s eye for a new technoscientific faith in which we aspired toward godlike powers ourselves was really so much a humiliation as the exchange of one megalomania for another. But what I want to recall by way of conclusion instead is that the trope of a Copernican humiliation of the intelligent human subject is already quite a familiar one:

    In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud notoriously proposed that

    In the course of centuries the naive self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the center of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus… The second blow fell when biological research de­stroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin… though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on un­consciously in the mind.

    However we may feel about psychoanalysis as a pseudo-scientific enterprise that did more therapeutic harm than good, Freud’s works considered instead as contributions to moral philosophy and cultural theory have few modern equals. The idea that human consciousness is split from the beginning as the very condition of its constitution, the creative if self-destructive result of an impulse of rational self-preservation beset by the overabundant irrationality of humanity and history, imposed a modesty incomparably more demanding than Bratton’s wan proposal in the same name. Indeed, to the extent that the irrational drives of the dynamic unconscious are often figured as a brute machinic automatism, one is tempted to suggest that Bratton’s modest proposal of alien artifactual intelligence is a fetishistic disavowal of the greater modesty demanded by the alienating recognition of the stratification of human intelligence by unconscious forces (and his moniker a symptomatic citation). What is striking about the language of psychoanalysis is the way it has been taken up to provide resources for imaginative empathy across the gulf of differences: whether in the extraordinary work of recent generations of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholars re-orienting the project of the conspicuously sexist, heterosexist, cissexist, racist, imperialist, bourgeois thinker who was Freud to emancipatory ends, or in the stunning leaps in which Freud identified with neurotic others through psychoanalytic reading, going so far as to find in the paranoid system-building of the psychotic Dr. Schreber an exemplar of human science and civilization and a mirror in which he could see reflected both himself and psychoanalysis itself. Freud’s Copernican humiliation opened up new possibilities of responsiveness in difference out of which could be built urgently necessary responsibilities otherwise. I worry that Bratton’s Copernican modesty opens up new occasions for techno-fetishistic fables of history and disavowals of responsibility for its actual human protagonists.
    _____

    Dale Carrico is a member of the visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley from which he received his PhD in 2005. His work focuses on the politics of science and technology, especially peer-to-peer formations and global development discourse and is informed by a commitment to democratic socialism (or social democracy, if that freaks you out less), environmental justice critique, and queer theory. He is a persistent critic of futurological discourses, especially on his Amor Mundi blog, on which an earlier version of this post first appeared.

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