boundary 2

Tag: transhumanism

  • Anthony Galluzzo — The Singularity in the I790s: Toward a Prehistory of the Present With William Godwin and Thomas Malthus

    Anthony Galluzzo — The Singularity in the I790s: Toward a Prehistory of the Present With William Godwin and Thomas Malthus

    Anthony Galluzzo

    I

    Victor Frankenstein, the titular character and “Modern Prometheus” of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, drawing on his biochemical studies at the University of Ingolstadt, creates life by reanimating the dead. While the gothic elements of Shelley’s narrative ensure its place, or those of its twentieth-century film adaptations, in the pantheons of popular horror, it is also arguably the first instance of science fiction, used by its young author to interrogate the Prometheanism that animated the intellectual culture of her day.

    Prometheus—the titan who steals fire from the Olympian gods and for humankind, suffering imprisonment and torture at the hands of Zeus as a result —was an emblem for both socio-political emancipation and techno-scientific mastery during the European enlightenment. These two overlapping, yet distinct, models of progress are nonetheless confused, one with the other, then and now, with often disastrous results, as Shelley dramatizes over the course of her novel.

    Frankenstein embarks on his experiment to demonstrate that “life and death” are merely “ideal bounds” that can be surpassed, to conquer death and “pour a torrent of light into our dark world.” Frankenstein’s motives are not entirely beneficent, as we can see in the lines that follow:

    A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. (Shelley 1818, 80-81)

    The will to Promethean mastery, over nature, merges here with a will to power over other humanoid, if not entirely human, beings. Frankenstein abandons his creation, with disastrous results for the creature, his family, and himself. Over the course of the two centuries since its publication, “The Modern Prometheus” has been read, too simply, as a cautionary tale regarding the pitfalls of techno-scientific hubris, invoked in regard to the atomic bomb or genetic engineering, for example, which it is in part.

    If we survey the history of the twentieth century, this caution is understandable. Even in the twenty-first century, a new Frankensteinism has taken hold among the digital overlords of Silicon Valley. Techno-capitalists from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel to Ray Kurzweil and their transhumanist fellow travelers now literally pursue immortality and divinity, strive to build indestructible bodies or merge with their supercomputers; preferably on their own high-tech floating island, or perhaps off-world, as the earth and its masses burn in a climate catastrophe entirely due to the depredations of industrial capitalism and its growth imperative.

    This last point is significant, as it represents the most recent example of the way progress-as-emancipation—social and political freedom and equality for all, including non-human nature—is distinct from and often at odds with progress as technological development: a distinction that many of today’s techno-utopians embrace under the rubric of a “dark enlightenment,” in a seemingly deliberate echo of Victor Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s great theme is the substantive distinction of these two models of progress and enlightenment, which are intertwined for historical and ideological reasons: a tragic marriage. It is no coincidence that she chose to explore this problem in a tale of tortured familial relationships, which includes the fantasy of male birth alongside immortality. It was both a personal and family matter for her, as the daughter of radical enlightenment intellectuals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. While her mother died a few days after Mary’s birth, she was raised according to strict radical enlightenment principles, by her father, who in his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness argues against the state, private property, and marriage; a text in which Godwin also predicts a future when human beings, perfected through the force of reason, would achieve a sexless, sleepless, god-like immortality, in what is a 1790s-era version of the technological Singularity. Godwin’s daughter drew on this vision in crafting her own Victor Frankenstein.

    While Godwin would later modify these early proto-futurist views—in the wake of his wife’s death and a debate with the Reverend Thomas Malthus—even as he maintained his radical political commitments, his early work demonstrates the extent to which radical enlightenment thinking was entwined, from the very start, with “dark enlightenment” in today’s parlance, ranging from accelerationism to singulatarianism and ecomodernism.[1]  His subsequent revision of his earlier views offers us an early example of how we might separate an emancipatory social and political program from those Promethean dreams of technological mastery used by capitalist and state socialist ideologues to justify development at any cost. In early Godwinism we find one prototype for today’s Promethean techno-utopianism. His subsequent debate with Thomas Malthus and concomitant retreat from his own earlier futurist Prometheanism illuminates how we might combine radical, or even utopian, political commitments with an awareness of biophysical limits in our own moment of ecological collapse.

    Godwin defines the “justice” that animates his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice as that “which benefits the whole, because individuals are parts of the whole. Therefore to do it is just, and to forbear it is unjust. If justice have any meaning, it is just that I should contribute every thing in my power to the benefit of the whole” (Godwin 1793, 52). Godwin illustrates his definition with a hypothetical scenario that provoked accusations of heartlessness among both conservative detractors and radical allies at the time. Godwin asks us to imagine a fire striking the palace of François Fénelon, the progressive archbishop of Cambray, author of an influential attack on absolute monarchy:

    In the same manner the illustrious archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his chambermaid, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred. But there is another ground of preference, beside the private consideration of one of them being farther removed from the state of a mere animal. We are not connected with one or two percipient beings, but with a society, a nation, and in some sense with the whole family of mankind. Of consequence that life ought to be preferred which will be most conducive to the general good. In saving the life of Fénelon, suppose at the moment when he was conceiving the project of his immortal Telemachus, I should be promoting the benefit of thousands, who have been cured by the perusal of it of some error, vice and consequent unhappiness. Nay, my benefit would extend farther than this, for every individual thus cured has become a better member of society, and has contributed in his turn to the happiness, the information and improvement of others. (Godwin 1793, 55)

    This passage illustrates the consequentialist perfectibilism that distinguished the philosopher’s theories from those of his better-known contemporaries, such as Thomas Paine, with his theory of natural right and social contract, or even utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, to whom Godwin is sometimes compared. In the words of Mark Philp, “only by improving people’s understanding can they become more fully virtuous, and only as they become more fully virtuous will the highest and greatest pleasures be realized in society” (Philp 1986, 84). In other words, the unfortunate chambermaid must be sacrificed if that is what it takes to save the philosophe whose written output will benefit multitudes by sharpening their rational capacities, congruent with the triumph of reason, virtue, and human emancipation.

    Godwin goes on to make this line of reasoning clear:

    Supposing I had been myself the chambermaid, I ought to have chosen to die, rather than that Fénelon should have died. The life of Fénelon was really preferable to that of the chambermaid. But understanding is the faculty that perceives the truth of this and similar propositions; and justice is the principle that regulates my conduct accordingly. It would have been just in the chambermaid to have preferred the archbishop to herself. To have done otherwise would have been a breach of justice. Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition. The life of Fénelon would still be more valuable than that of the chambermaid; and justice, pure, unadulterated justice, would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fénelon at the expence of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun “my,” to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth? (Godwin 1793, 55)

    Godwin amends the puritan rigor of these positions in subsequent editions of his work, as he came to recognize the value of affective bonds and personal attachments. But here in the first edition of Political Justice we see a pristine expression of his rationalist radicalism, for which the good of the whole necessitates the sacrifice of a chambermaid, a mother, and one’s own self to Reason, which Godwin equates with the greatest good.

    The early Godwin here exemplifies a central antinomy of the European enlightenment, as he strives to yoke an inadvertently inhuman plan for human perfection and mastery to an emancipatory vision of egalitarian social relations. Godwin pushes the Enlightenment-era deification of ratiocination to a visionary extreme in presenting very real inequities as so many cases of benighted judgment waiting for a personified, yet curiously disembodied, Reason’s correction in the fullness of time and entirely by way of debate. It was this aspect of Godwin’s project that inspired John Thelwall, the radical writer and public speaker, to declare that while Godwin recommends “the most extensive plan of freedom and innovation ever discussed by a writer in English,” he “reprobate {s} every measure from which even the most moderate reform can be rationally expected” (Thelwall 2008, 122). E.P. Thompson would later echo this verdict in his Poverty of Theory, when he compared the vogue for structuralist—or Althussererian—Marxism among certain segments of the 1970s-era New Left to Godwinism, which he described as another “moment of intellectual extremism, divorced from correlative action or actual social commitment” (Thompson 1978, 244).

    Godwin blends a necessitarian theory of environmental influence, a belief in the perfectibility of the human race, a perfectionist version of the utilitarian calculus, and a quasi-idealist model of objective reason into an incongruous and extravagantly speculative rationalist metaphysics. The Godwinian system, in its first iteration at least, resembles Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism as much as it does the systems of Locke, Hume, and Helvetius, Godwin’s acknowledged sources. So, according to Godwin’s syllogistic precepts, it is only through the exercise of private judgment and a process of rational debate—“the clash of mind with mind”—that Truth will emerge, and with Truth, Political Justice; here is a model of enlightenment that resonates with Kant’s roughly contemporaneous ideal-type of progress and Jürgen Habermas’s twentieth century reconstruction of that ideal in the form of a “liberal-bourgeois public sphere.” It is for this reason, and in spite of his conflicted sympathies with French revolutionaries and British radicals alike, that the philosopher rejects both violent revolution and the kind of mass political action exemplified by Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society, hence Thelwall’s and Thompson’s damning judgments. Rational persuasion is the only feasible way of effecting the wholesale revolutionary transformation of “things as they are” for Godwin.

    But this precise reconstruction of Godwin’s philosophical and political system does not capture the striking novelty of Godwin’s project. In the example above, we find a supplementary argument of sorts running underneath the consequentialist perfectibilism. Although we can certainly read in Godwin’s disparagement and hypothetical sacrifice of both a chambermaid and his own mother a historically typical, if unconscious, example of the class prejudice and misogyny the radical philosopher otherwise attacks at length in this same treatise, I would instead call attention to the implicit metaphor of embodiment and natality that unites maid, mother, and Godwin’s own unperfected self. The chambermaid is one step closer to the “mere animal” from which Fénelon, or his significantly disembodied work, offers an escape. If the chambermaid were rational in the Godwinian sense, she would easily offer herself as sacrifice to Fénelon and the Reason that finds a fitting emblem in the flames that consume our hypothetical building. While Godwin underlines the disinterested character of this choice in next substituting himself for the chambermaid, his willingness to hypothetically sacrifice his mother points to his rigid rejection of personal attachments and emotional ties. Godwin would substantially modify this viewpoint a few years later in the wake of his relationship with first feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

    The figure of the mother—whose embodied life Godwin would consign to the fire for the sake of Fénelon’s future intellectual output and its refining effects on humanity—is an overdetermined symbol that unites affective ties with the irrational fact of our bodily and sexual life: all of which must and will be mastered through a Promethean process of ratiocination indistinguishable from justice and reason. If one function of metaphor, according to Hans Blumenberg, is to provide the seedbed for conceptual thought, Godwin translates these subtexts into an explicit vision of a totally rational and rationalized future in the final, speculative, chapter of Political Justice.[2] It is in this chapter, as we shall see below, that Godwin responds to those critics who argued that population growth and material scarcity made perfectibilism impossible with a vision of humans made superhuman through reason.

    Here is the characteristically Godwinian combination of “striking insight” and “complete wackiness,” which emerges from the “science fictional quality of his imagination” in the words of Jenny Davidson.[3] Godwin moves from a prescient critique of oppressive human institutional arrangements, motivated by the radical desire for a substantively just and free form of social organization under which all human beings can realize their capacities, to a rationalist metaphysics that enshrines Reason as a theological entity that realizes itself through a teleological human history. Reason reaches its apotheosis at that point when human beings become superhuman, transcending contingent and creaturely qualities, such as sexual desire, physical reproduction, and death, eviscerated like so many animal bodies thrown into a great fire.

    We can see in Godwin’s early rationalist radicalism a significant antinomy. Godwin oscillates between a radical enlightenment critique that uses ratiocination to expose unjust institutional arrangements—from marriage to private property and the state—and a positive, even theological, version of Reason, for which creaturely limitations and human needs are not only secondary considerations, but primary obstacles to be surpassed on the way to a rationalist super-humanity that resembles nothing so much as a supercomputer, avant la lettre.

    Many critics of the European Enlightenment—from an older Godwin and his younger romantic contemporaries through twentieth-century feminist, post-colonial, and ecological critics—have underlined the connection between these Promethean metaphysics, ostensibly in the service of human liberation, and various projects of domination. Western Marxists, like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1947) overlap with later feminist critics of the scientific revolution, such as Carolyn Merchant (1980), in naming instrumental rationality as the problem. As opposed to an ends-oriented version of reason—the ends being emancipation or human flourishing— rationalism as technical means for dominating the natural world, or managing populations, or disciplining labor, became the dominant model of rationality during and after the European enlightenment in keeping with the ideological requirements of a nascent capitalism and colonialism. But in the case of the early Godwin and other Prometheans, we can see a substantive version of reason, reified as an end-in-itself, which overlaps with the critical philosophy of Hegel, the philosophical foundation of Marxism and the Frankfurt School variant on display in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer.[4] The problem with Prometheanism is that its proponents’ ideal-type of technological rationality is not instrumental enough: rather than a reason or technology subordinate to human flourishing and collective human agency, the proponents of Prometheus subordinate collective human (and creaturely) ends to a vision of reason indistinguishable from a fantasy of an autonomous technology with its own imperatives.

    Langdon Winner, in analyzing autonomous technology as idea and ideology in twentieth-century industrial capitalist (and state socialist) societies, underlines this reversal of means and ends or what he calls “reverse adaptation”: “The adjustment of human ends to match the character of available means. We have already seen arguments to the effect that persons adapt themselves to the order, discipline, and pace of the organizations in which they work. But even more significant is the state of affairs in which people come to accept the norms and standards of technical processes as central to their lives as a whole” (Winner 1977, 229). Winner’s critique of “rationality in technological thinking” is made even more striking when we consider that the early Godwin’s Promethean force of reason, as evinced in by the final chapter of the 1793 Political Justice—in contradistinction to the ethical and political rationalism that is also present in the text—anticipates twentieth and twenty-first century techno-utopianism. For Winner, “if one takes rationality to mean the accommodation of means to ends, then surely reverse-adapted systems represent the most flagrant violation of rationality” (Winner 1977, 229).

    This version of rationality, still inchoate in the eighteenth-century speculations of Godwin, takes mega-technological systems as models, rather than tools, for human beings, as Günther Anders argues—against those who depict anti-Prometheans as bio-conservative defenders of things as they are just because they are that way. The problem with Prometheanism does not reside in its adherents’ endorsement of technological possibilities as such so much as their embrace of the “machine as measure” of individual and collective human development (Anders 2016). Anders converges with Adorno and Horkheimer, his Marxist contemporaries, for whom this “machine” is a mystified metonym for irrational capitalist imperatives.

    Rationalist humanism becomes technological inhumanism under the sign of Prometheus, which, according to present day “accelerationism” enthusiast Ray Brassier, must recognize “the disturbing consequences of our technological ingenuity” and extol “the fact that progress is savage and violent” (Brassier 2013). Brassier, operating from a radically different, avowedly nihilist, set of presuppositions than William Godwin, nonetheless recalls the 1793 Political Justice in once again defining rationalism as a reinvigorated Promethean “project of re-engineering ourselves and our world on a more rational basis.” Accelerationists strive to revive both rationalist radicalism—with the omniscient algorithm standing in for the perfectibilists’ reason—and the Promethean imperative to reengineer society and the natural world, because or in spite of the ongoing global climate change catastrophe. Rather than the great driver of an ecologically catastrophic growth,  self-described “left” accelerationists Nick Williams and Alex Srnicek argue that capitalism must be dismantled because it “cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration,” or #accelerate (Williams and Srnicek 2013, 486-7): a shorthand for their attempt to reboot a version of progress that arguably finds its first apotheosis in the 1790s. Brassier’s defense of Prometheanism takes the form of an extended reply to various critics, whose emphasis on limits and equilibrium, the given and the made, he rejects as in thrall to religious, and specifically Christian, notions. Brassier, who outlines his rationalism as systematic method or technique without presupposition or limits—along the lines of “God is dead, anything is possible”—seems unaware of actual material limitations and the theological, specifically Gnostic, origins of a very old human deification fantasy, the Enlightenment-era secularization of which was arguably first recognized by Godwin’s daughter in her Frankenstein (Shelley 1818).

    The Godwin of 1793 in this way also and more dramatically looks forward to our own transhumanist devotees of the coming technological singularity, who claim that human beings will soon merge with immensely powerful and intelligent supercomputers, becoming something else entirely in the process, hence “transhumanism.” According to prominent Silicon Valley “singulatarian” Ray Kurzweil, “The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever)” (Kurzweil 2006, 25).

    Kurzweil explicitly frames this transformation as the inevitable culmination of a mechanically teleological movement; and, like many futurists and their eighteenth-century perfectibilist forerunners, human perfection necessitates the supersession of the human. Kurzweil illustrates the paradoxical character of a Promethean futurism that, in seeking both human perfection and mastery, seeks to dispense with the human altogether: “The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations” (25).

    Even more than the accelerationists, Kurzweil’s Singulatarianism illustrates the “hubristic humility” that defines twentieth- and twenty-first century Prometheanism, according to Anders. Writing in the wake of the atomic bomb, the cybernetic revolution, and the mass-produced affluence exemplified by the post-war United States, Anders recognized how certain self-described rationalist techno-utopians combined a hubristic faith in technological achievement with a “Promethean shame” before these same technological creations. This shame arises from the perceived gap between human beings and their technological products; how, unlike our machines, we are “pre-given,” saddled with contingent bodies we neither choose nor design, bodies that are fragile, needy, and mortal. The mechanical reproducibility of the technological system or industrial artifact represents a virtual immortality that necessarily eludes unique and perishable human beings, according to Anders. Here Anders seemingly develops the earlier work of Walter Benjamin, his cousin, on aura and mechanical reproduction—but in a very different direction, as Anders writes: “in contrast to the light bulb or the vinyl record, none of us has the opportunity to outlive himself or herself in a new copy. In short: we must continue to live our lifetimes in obsolete singularity and uniqueness. For those who recognize the machine-world as exemplary, this is a flaw and as such a reason for shame.”[5]

    Although we can situate the work of Godwin at the intersection of various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses, including perfectibilist rationalism, civic republicanism, and Sandemanian Calvinism, on the one hand, or anarchism and romanticism, on the other, I will argue here that in juxtaposing Godwinism with present-days analogs like the transhumanism or accelerationism briefly described above, we can see the extent to which older—late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century—utopian forms are returning, lending some credence to Alain Badiou’s claim that

    We are much closer to the 19th century than to the last century. In the dialectical division of history we have, sometimes, to move ahead of time. Just like maybe around 1840, we are now confronted with an absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernable limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world. (Badiou 2008)

    We can also see in recent conflicts between accelerationists and certain partisans of radical ecology the return of another seeming antinomy—one which pits cornucopian futurists against Malthusians, or at least those who emphasize the material limits to growth and how human beings might reconcile ourselves to those limits— that has its origin point in the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s anonymously published An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society with remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (1798). Malthus’s demographic response to Godwinism led in turn to a long running debate and the rise of an ostensibly empirical political economy that took material scarcity as its starting point. Yet, if we examine Malthus’s initial response, alongside the Political Justice of 1793, we can observe several shared assumptions and lines of continuity that unite these seemingly opposed perspectives, as each of these thinkers delineates a recognizably bio-political project, for human improvement and population management, in left and right variants. Each of these variants obscures the social determinants of revolutionary movements and technological progress. Finally, it was as much Godwin’s debate with Malthus as the philosopher’s tumultuous and tragic relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft that precipitated a shift in his perspective regarding the value of emotional bonds, personal connections, and material limits: seemingly disparate concerns linked in Godwin’s imagination through the sign of the body. The body also functions as metonym for that same natural world, the limits of which Malthus brandished in order to discredit the utopian aspirations that drove the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s; Godwin later sought to reconcile his utopianism with these limits.[6] This intellectual reconciliation—which was very much in line with the English romantics’ own version of a more benign natural world threatened by incipient industrialism, as opposed to Malthus’s brutally utilitarian nature—was a response to Malthus and the early Godwin’s own early Prometheanism, best exemplified in the final section of 1793 Political Justice, to which we will turn below.

    Two generations of Romantics—from Wordsworth and Coleridge through De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Shelley—sought to counter Malthus’s version of the natural world as resource stock and constraint with a holistic and dynamic model of nature, under which natural limits and possibilities are not inconsistent with human aspirations and utopian hopes. Malthus offered the Romantics “a malign muse,” in the words of his biographer Robert Mayhew, who writes of two exemplary Romantic figures from this period: “ if nature is made of antipathies, Blake and Hegel in their different ways suggest that such binaries can be productive of a dialectic advance in our reasoning” as “we look for ways to respect nature and to use it with a population of 7 billion” (Mayhew 2014, 86).

    One irony of intellectual and political history is how often our new Prometheans—transhumanists, singulatarians, accelerationists, and others—lump both narrowly Malthusian and more expansive “Romantic” ecologies under the rubric of Malthusianism, which is nowadays more slur than accurate description of Malthus’s project. Malthus wielded the threat of natural scarcity or “the Principle of Population” as an ideological tool against reform, revolution, or “the Future Improvement of Society,” as evinced in the very title of his long essay. In the words of Kerryn Higgs, to follow Malthus involves “several key elements” above a concern with overpopulation, such as “a resistance to notions of social improvement and social welfare, punitive policies for the poor, a tendency to blame the poor for their own plight, and recourse to speculative theorizing in the service of an essentially politically argument” (Higgs 2014, 43). It is among eugenicists, social Darwinists, but also today’s cornucopian detractors of Malthusianism, that we find Malthus’s heirs, if we attend to his and now their instrumental view of the natural world as factor in capitalist economic calculation—as exemplified by the rhetoric of “ecosystem services” and “decoupling”—in addition to a shared faith in material growth, to which Malthus was not opposed. While self-declared Malthusians, like Paul and Anne Ehrlich, in their misplaced focus on overpopulation, often in the developing world, conveniently avoid any discussion of consumption in the developed world, let alone the unsustainable growth imperative built into capitalism itself. In fact, for Malthus and his epigones, necessity—growth outstripping available resources—functions as spur for technological innovation, mirroring, in negative form, the teleological trajectory of the early Godwin—a telling convergence I will explore at length in the latter part of this essay.

    “Malthusianism” is a shorthand used by orthodox economists and apologists for capitalist growth to dismiss ecological concerns. Marxists and other radicals—heirs to Godwin’s project, in ways good and bad, despite their protestations of materialism—too often share this investment in growth and techno-science as an end in itself. While John Bellamy Foster and others have made a persuasive case for Marx’s ecology—to be found in his work on nineteenth-century soil exhaustion, inspired by Liebig, and the town/country rift under capitalism—we can also find a broadly Promethean rejection of anything resembling a discourse of natural limits within various orthodox Marxisms, beginning in the later nineteenth century. Yet to recognize both the possibilities and limits of our situation—which must include the biophysical conditions of possibility for capitalist accumulation and any program that aims to supplant it— is, for me, the foundation for any radical and materialist approach to the world and politics, against Malthus and the young, futurist Godwin, to whom we now move.

    II

    Godwin translates this metaphorical substrate of his Fénelon thought experiment into an explicitly conceptual and argumentative form.  He pushes the logic of eighteenth-century perfectibilism to a spectacular, speculative, and science-fictional extreme in Chapter 12 of Political Justice’s final volume on “property.” It is in this chapter that the philosopher outlines a future utopia on the far side of rational perfection. Beginning with the remark, attributed to Benjamin Franklin by Richard Price, that “mind will one day become omnipotent over matter,” Godwin offers us a series of methodical speculations as to how this might literally come to pass. He begins with the individual mind’s power to either exacerbate or alleviate illness or the effects of age, in order to illustrate his central contention: that we can overcome apparently hard and fast physical limits and subject ostensibly involuntary physiological processes to the dictates of our rational will.  It is on this basis that Godwin concludes: “if we have in any respect a little power now, and if mind be essentially progressive…that power may…and inevitably will, extend beyond any bounds we are able to ascribe to it” (Godwin 1793, 455).

    Godwin marries magical voluntarism on the ontogenetic level to the teleological arc of Reason on the phylogenetic level, all of which culminates in perhaps the first—Godwinian—articulation of the singularity: “The men who therefore exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them. In addition to this they will perhaps be immortal. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence at the end of every thirty years. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government” (Godwin 1793, 458).

    James Preu (1959) long ago established Godwin’s peculiar intellectual debt to Jonathan Swift, and we can discern some resemblance between Godwin’s future race of hyper-rational, sexless immortals and the Houyhnhnms; as with Godwin’s other misprisions of Swift, the differences are as telling as are the similarities. Godwin transforms Swift’s ambiguous, arguably dystopian and misanthropic, depiction of equine ultra-rationalists, and their animalistic Yahoo humanoid stock, into an unequivocally utopian sketch of future possibility. For Godwin, it is our Yahoo-like “animal nature” that must be subdued or even exterminated, as Gulliver’s Houynnhnm master at one point suggests in a coolly calculating way that begs comparison to Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” even as both texts look forward to the utilitarian discourse of population control that finds its apotheosis in Malthus’s 1798 response to Godwin. Godwin would later embrace some version of heritable characteristics, or at least innate human inclinations, but despite his revisions of his views through subsequent editions of Political Justice and beyond, he is very still much the Helvetian environmentalist in the 1793 disquisition. He was therefore free of, or even at odds with, a proto-eugenic eighteenth-century discourse of breeding—after Jenny Davidson’s (2008) formulation—that overlapped with other variants of perfectibilism.

    But as Davidson and others note, Godwin shares with his antagonist Malthus a Swiftian aversion to sex, which we can also see in the Godwinian critique of marriage and the family. This critique begins with a still-radical indictment of marriage as a proprietary relationship under which men exercise “the most odious of monopolies over women” (Godwin 1793, 447). Godwin predicts that marriage, and the patriarchal family it safeguards, will be abolished alongside other modes of unequal property. But, rather than inaugurating a regime of free love and license, as conservative critics of Godwinism contended at the time, the philosopher predicts that this “state of equal property would destroy the relish for luxury, would decrease our inordinate appetites of every kind, and lead us universally to prefer the pleasures of intelligence to the pleasures of the sense” (Godwin 1793, 447). Rather than simply ascribing this sentiment to a residual Calvinism on Godwin’s part, this programmatic elimination of sexual desire is of a piece with “killing the Yahoo,” consigning the maid-servant’s, his mother’s, his own body to the fires for Fénelon and a perfectly rational future state, i.e., the biopolitical rationalization of human bodies for Promethean reason and Promethean shame. The early Godwin here again suggests our own transhumanist devotees who, on the one hand, embrace the sexual possibilities supposedly afforded by AI while they manifest a “complete disgust with actual human bodies,” exemplifying Anders’s Promethean shame according to Michael Hauskeller (2014). From the messy body to virtual bodies, from the uncertainties and coercions of cooperation to self-sex, finally from sex to orgasmic cognition, transhumanists—in an echo of the young Godwin, who predicted sexual intercourse would give way to rational intercourse with the triumph of Reason—want to “make the pleasures of mind as intense and orgiastic as … certain bodily pleasures as they hope for a new and improved rational intercourse with a new and improved, virtual body, in the future” (Hauskeller, 2014).

    In this speculative, coda to his visionary political treatise, Godwin’s predictive sketch of human rationalization as transformation, from Yahoo to Houyhnhnm and/or post-human, represents a disciplinary program in Michel Foucault’s sense: “a technique” that “centers on the body, produces individualizing effects, and manipulates the body as a source of forces that have to be rendered both useful and docile” (Foucault 2003, 249).[7]  We can trace the intersection between perfectibilist, even transhumanist, dreams and disciplinary program in Godwin’s comments regarding the elimination of sleep, an apparent prerequisite for overcoming death, which he describes as “one of the most conspicuous infirmities of the human frame, specifically “because it is…not a suspension of thought, but an irregular and distempered state of the faculty” (456).

    Dreams, or the unregulated and irrational affective processes they embody, provoke a panicked response on the part of Godwin at this point in the text. Godwin’s response accords with the consistent rejection of sensibility and sentimental attachments of all kinds—seen throughout the 1793 PJ—from romantic love to familial bonds. We can find in Godwin’s account of sleep and his plan for its elimination through an exertion of rational will and attention—something like an internal monitor in the mold of a Benthamite watchman presiding over a 24/7 panoptic mind—the exertion of an internalized disciplinary power indistinguishable from our new, wholly rational and rationalized, subject’s private judgment operating in a system without external authority, government, or disciplinary power. And it is no coincidence that Godwin’s proposed subjugation of sleep immediately follows a curiously contemporary passage: “If we can have three hundred and twenty successive ideas in a second of time, why should it be supposed that we should not hereafter arrive at the skill of carrying on a great number of contemporaneous processes without disorder” (456).

    It should be noted again here that Godwin’s futurist idyll, which includes sexless immortals engaged in purely rational intercourse, specifically responds to earlier eighteenth-century arguments regarding human population and the resource constraints that limit population growth and, by extension, the wide abundance promised in various perfectibilist plans for the future. This new focus on demography and the management of populations during the latter half of the eighteenth century in the Euro-American world is a second technology of power, for Foucault, that “centers not upon the body but upon life: a technology that brings together the mass effects  characteristic of a population,” in order to “to establish a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals, not by training individuals, but by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers” (Foucault 2003, 249). This is the biopolitical mode of governance—the regulation of the masses’ bio-social processes—that characterizes the modern epoch for Foucault and his followers.

    Yet, while Foucault admits that both technologies—disciplinary and biopolitical—are “technologies of the body,” he nonetheless counterpoises the “individualizing” to the demographic technique. But, as we can see in the 1793 PJ, in which Godwin proffers a largely disciplinary program as solution to the original bio-political problem—a solution that would inspire Thomas Malthus’s classic formulation of the population problem a few years later, as we shall explore below—these two technologies were intertwined from the start. The subsequent history of futurism in the west marries various disciplinary programs, powered by Promethean shame and its fantasies of becoming “man-machine,” to narrowly bio-political campaigns. These campaigns range from the exterminationist eugenicism of the twentieth century interwar period to more recent techno-survivalist responses to the ecological crisis on the part of Silicon Valley’s Singulatarian elites, some of whom look forward to immortality on Mars while the Earth and its masses burn.[8]

    Godwin further highlights these futurist hopes in the second revision of Political Justice (1798), in which he underlines the central role of mechanical invention—in keeping with the general principle enshrined at the first volume of the treatise under the title, “Human Inventions Capable of Perpetual Improvement—making the technological prostheses implicit in these early speculations explicit. In predicting an ever-accelerating multiplication of cognitive processes—assuming these processes are delinked from disorder, human or Yahoo—Godwin anticipates both the discourse of cybernetics and its more recent accelerationist successors, for whom the dream of perfectibility—and Godwin’s sexless, sleepless rationalist immortals—can only be achieved through AI and the machinic supersession of the human Yahoo.

    In fact, our new futurists frequently invoke the methodologically dubious Moore’s Law in defense of their claims for acceleration and its inevitability. Moore’s Law—named after Intel founder Gordon Moore, who, in 1965, predicted that the number of transistors, with their processing power, in an integrated circuit increases exponentially every two years or so—revives Godwin’s prophecy in a cybernetic register. It also suggests Thomas Malthus’s “iron” law of population. Malthus argued that “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio,” while “subsistence”—by which he denotes agricultural yield—increases only in arithmetical ratio. Malthus rendered this dubious “law” as a mathematical formula, thereby making it indisputable, although he makes his motivations clear when he writes, explicitly in response to Godwin’s speculations in the last chapter of the 1793 Political Justice, that his law “is decisive against the possible existence of a society, all of the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families” (Malthus 1798, 16-17; see also Engels 1845).

    Godwinism was for Malthus a synecdoche for both 1790s radicalism and radical egalitarianism generally, while the first Essay on Population is arguably the late, “proto-scientific,” entry in the paper war between English radicals and counterrevolutionary antijacobins—initiated by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and to which Godwin’s treatise was one among many responses—that defined literary and political debate in the wake of the French Revolution. Rather than simply arguing for biophysical limits, Malthus reveals his ideological hand in his discussion of the poor and the Poor Laws—the parish-based system of charity established in late medieval England to alleviate extreme distress among the poorest classes—against which he railed in the several editions of the Essay.  Whereas in the past, population was maintained through “positive” checks, such as pestilence, famine, or warfare, for Malthus, the growth of civilization introduced “preventive” checks, including chastity, restraint within marriage, or even the conscious decision to delay or forego marriage and reproduction due to the “foresight of  the difficulties attending the rearing of a family,” often prompted by “the actual distresses of some of the lower classes, by which they are disabled from giving the proper food and attention to their children” (35).

    Parson Malthus largely ascribes this decidedly Christian and specifically protestant capacity for “rational” self-restraint, to his own industrious middle class; and, insofar as the peasantry possessed this preventive urge, alongside a “spirit of independence,” it was undermined by the eighteenth-century British Poor Laws. Malthus provides the template for what are now standard issue conservative attacks on social provision in his successful attacks on the Poor Laws, which in providing a safety net eradicated restraint among the poor, leading them to marry, reproduce, and “increase reproduction without increasing the food for its support.” Malthus invokes the same absolute limit in his naturalistic rejection of Godwin’s (and others’) egalitarian radicalism, foreclosing any examination of the production distribution of surplus and scarcity in a class society.  Even more than this, Malthus uses his natural laws to rationalize all of those institutional arrangements under threat during the French Revolutionary Period, from the existing division of property to traditional marriage arrangements, but in an ostensibly objective manner that distinguished his approach from Burke’s earlier encomia to a dying age of chivalry.  It is arguably for this reason that the idea of natural limits, in general, is a suspect one among subsequent left-wing formations, for good and ill.

    III

    Malthus, who anonymously published his Essay on Population in 1798, proclaims at the outset that his “argument is “conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind” (Malthus 1798, 95). And if there were any doubt as to the identity of Malthus’s target we need only look to the work’s subtitle, of which Malthus explains in the book’s first sentence that “the following essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend on the subject of Mr. Godwin’s essay on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer.” The friend was Thomas’s father, Daniel Malthus, an admiring acquaintance of Godwin’s who nonetheless encouraged (and subsidized) his son’s writing on this topic. The parson dedicates six chapters (chapters 10-15) to a refutation of Godwinism, often larded with mockery of Godwin, against whose speculative rationalism Malthus counterpoises his own supposedly empirical method; the same method that allowed him to discover that “lower classes of people” should never be “sufficiently free from want and labour, to attain any high degree of intellectual improvement” (95). And although Malthus explicitly names The Enquirer—the 1797 collection of essays in which Godwin admits to changing his mind on a variety of positions, as Malthus acknowledges at one point—as the impetus for his Essay, the work primarily responds to the earlier Political Justice and its final chapter in particular, because Godwin’s futurist speculations (and their more ominous biopolitical subtexts) respond to an “Objection to This System From the Principle of Population,” in the words of the chapter subheading. Godwin replies to this hypothetical objection several years prior to Malthus’s critique, the originality of which was said at the time to consist in his break with eighteenth-century doxa regarding population. Despite their differences, Montesquieu, Hume, Franklin, and Price all agreed that a growing population is the indisputable marker of progress, and the primary sign of a successful nation, since “the more men in the state, the more it flourishes.” And while Johann Süssmilch, an early pioneer of statistical demography, argued for a fixed limit to the planetary carrying capacity in regard to human population, he also inferred that the planet could hold up to six times as many people than the total global population offered by Süssmilch at the time.

    Only Robert Wallace, in his 1761 Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence—which Marx and Engels would accuse Malthus of plagiarizing—argued that excessive population is an obstacle to human improvement. Wallace offers a prototype for the Godwin/Malthus debate in constructing an elaborate argument for a proto-communist utopian social arrangement, only to undermine his own argument via recourse to the limits of population growth. Godwin invokes Wallace by name, before adverting to Süssmilch and a far-flung future when human beings will have transcended the limits of finitude. Immortals won’t have to reproduce, a point Godwin makes even clearer in both the final edition of Political Justice (1798) and in his first response to the Essay on The Population—in an 1801 pamphlet entitled Thoughts Occasioned By The Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon—in which he opts for a minimal population of perfected human beings living in a utopian society, rather than an ever- expanding human population.

    While contemporary scholars still read the Godwin/Malthus Debate as a simple conflict between progressive optimism and conservative pessimism, we can still discern some peculiar commonalities between the early Godwin of the 1793 Political Justice and Malthus. Godwin’s speculations on human perfectibility represent a bio-perfectionist solution to the problems of population, sex, and embodiment generally—a Promethean program for overcoming Promethean shame—as I sketch above. Malthus rejects perfectibility along with the feasibility of physical immortality and pure rationality, adverting to humanity’s “compound nature,” a variation on original sin. In this vein, he also rejects Godwin’s prediction regarding “the extinction of the passion between the sexes,” which has not “taken place in the five or six thousand years that world has existed” (92).  Yet Malthus—in proffering disciplinary self-restraint in the service of a biopolitical equilibrium between population and food supply—offers another such solution, motivated by antithetical political principles, while operating from a common set of  Enlightenment-era assumptions regarding the need to regulate bodies and populations (Foucault 2003). The overlap between these ostensible antagonists should not surprise us, since, as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson notes in his critical genealogy of cornucopianism, “cornucopianism and environmental anxieties have been closely intertwined in theory and practice from the eighteenth century onward” (2014). Albritton Jonsson connects the alternation between cornucopian fantasy and environmental anxiety to the booms and busts of environmental appropriation and capitalist accumulation, while he locates the roots of cornucopia “in the realm of alchemy and natural theology. To overcome the effects of the Fall, Francis Bacon hoped to remake the natural order into a second, artificial world. Such theological and alchemical aspirations were intertwined with imperial ideology” (Albritton Jonsson 2014, 167). This strange convergence is most evident in Malthus’s own vision of progress and growth—driven exactly by the population pressure and scarcity that serve as analogue for the early Godwin’s reason—which Malthus, a pioneering apologist for industrial capitalism, did not reject, despite later misrepresentations.

    IV

    Both Marx and Engels would later discern in Malthus’s ostensibly scientific outline of nature’s positive checks on the poor—aimed at both eighteenth century British poor laws and various enlightenment era visions of social improvement—the primacy of surplus population and a reserve army of the unemployed for a nascent industrial capitalism, as Engels notably “summarizes” Malthus’s argument in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845):

    If, then, the problem is not to make the ‘surplus population’ useful, … but merely to let it starve to death in the least objectionable way, … this, of course, is simple enough, provided the surplus population perceives its own superfluousness and takes kindly to starvation. There is, however, in spite of the strenuous exertions of the humane bourgeoisie, no immediate prospect of its succeeding in bringing about such a disposition among the workers. The workers have taken it into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are the necessary, and the rich capitalists, who do nothing, the surplus population.

    Despite the transparently political impetus behind Malthus’s Essay, his work was taken up by a certain segment of the environmental movement in the twentieth century. These same environmentalists often read and reject both Marx’s and Engels’s critiques of Malthusian political economy, with the disastrous environmental record of orthodox communist and specifically Soviet Prometheanism in mind. John Bellamy Foster notes that many “ecological socialists,” have gone so far as to argue that Marx and Engels were guilty of “a Utopian overreaction to Malthusian epistemic conservatism” which led them to downplay (or deny) “any ultimate natural limits to population” and indeed natural limits in general. Faced with Malthusian natural limits, we are told, Marx and Engels responded with “‘Prometheanism’—a blind faith in the capacity of technology to overcome all ecological barriers” (Foster 1998).

    While Marx rejected a fixed and universal law of population growth or food production, stressing instead how population increases and agricultural yields vary from one socio-material context to another, he accepted ecological limits—to soil fertility, for example—in his theory of metabolic rift, as both Foster (2000) and Kohei Saito (2017) demonstrate in their respective projects on Marx’s ecology.

    This perspective was arguably anticipated by the later Godwin himself, in the long and now forgotten Enquiry Concerning Population (1820), written at the urging of his son-in-law Percy Shelley, in order to salvage his reputation from Malthus’s attacks; Malthus was awarded the first chair in political economy at the East India Company College in Hertfordshire, while Godwin’s utopian philosophy was fading from the public consciousness, when it was not an  explicit object of ridicule. Godwin returned to the absurdity of Malthus’s theological fixation on the human inability to resist the sexual urge, with a special emphasis on the poor, which we can see in first response to Malthus’s Essay in the 1790s, although in a more openly vitriolic fashion, perhaps at the urging of Shelley, for whom the Malthusian emphasis on abstinence and chastity among the poor was “seeking to deny them even the comfort of sexual love” in addition to “keeping them ignorant, miserable, and subservient” (St. Clair 1989, 464). Shelley, unlike the young Godwin of the 1793 Political Justice that influenced the poet’s radical political development, saw in unrestrained sexual intercourse a vehicle of communion with nature.

    The older Godwin offers, in his Of Population, 600 pages of historical accounts and reports regarding population and agriculture—an empiricist overcorrection to Malthus’s accusations of visionary rationalism—in order to show us the variability of different social metabolisms, the efficacy of birth control, and, most importantly, how utopian social organization can and must be built with biophysical limits in mind against “the occult and mystical state of population” in Malthus’s thinking (Godwin 1820, 476). More than a response to Malthus, this later work also represents a rejoinder to the young proto-accelerationist Godwin and that nevertheless retains most of his radical social and political commitments. Of Population troubles the earlier Malthusian-Godwinian binary that arguably still underwrites our present-day Anthropocene narrative and the standard historiography of the English Industrial Revolution.

    In 1798, Malthus argued in favor of population and resource constraints, for largely ideological reasons, at the exact moment that the steam engine and the widespread adoption of fossil energy, in the form of coal, enabled what seemed like self-sustaining growth, seemingly rendering that paradigm obsolete. But Malthus also argues, toward the end of the Essay, that as just the “first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of the body,” so necessity is “the mother of invention” (Malthus 1793, 95) and progress Malthus’s myth of capitalist modernity, the negative image of perfectibilism, underwrites the political economy of industrialization. Malthus stressed the power of natural necessity—scarcity and struggle—to compel human accomplishment, against the universal luxury proffered by the perfectibilists.

    Like the good bourgeois moralist he was, Malthus saw in the individual and collective struggle against scarcity—laws of population that function as secularized analogues for original sin—the drivers of technological development and material growth. This is a familiar story of progress and one that, no less than the perfectibilists’ teleological arc of history, elides conflict and contingency in rendering the rise of industrial capitalism and Euro-American capitalism as both natural and inevitable. For example, E. A. Wrigley argues, in a substantively Malthusian vein, that it was overpopulation, land exhaustion, and food scarcity in eighteenth-century England that necessitated the use of coal as an engine for growth, the invention of the steam engine in 1784, and widespread adoption of fossil power over the next century. Prometheans left and right nonetheless use the term “Malthusian” as synonym for (equally imprecise) “primitivist” or Luddite. But, as Andreas Malm persuasively contends, our dominant narratives of technological progress proceed from assumptions inherited from Malthus (and his disciple Ricardo): “Coal resolved a crisis of overpopulation. Like all innovations that composed the Industrial Revolution, the outcome was a valiant struggle of ‘a society with its back to ecological wall’” (Malm 2016, 23).

    Malthus’s force of necessity is here indistinguishable from Godwinian Progress, spurring on the inevitable march of innovation, without any mention of the extent to which technological development, in England and the capitalist west, was and is shaped by capitalist imperatives, such as the quest for profit or labor discipline. We can see this same dynamic at play in much present-day Anthropocene discourse, some of whose exponents trace a direct line from the discovery of fire to the human transformation of the biosphere. These “Anthropocenesters” oscillate between a Godwinian-accelerationist pole—best exemplified by would-be accelerationists and ecomodernists like Mark Lynas (2011), who wholeheartedly embraces the role of Godwin avatar Victor Frankenstein in arguing how we must assume our position as the God species and completely reengineer the planet we have remade in our own image—and a Malthusian-pessimist pole, according to which all we can do now is learn how to die with the planet we have undone, to paraphrase the title of Roy Scranton’s popular Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene (2015).[9]

    Rather than the enforced austerity conjured up by cornucopians and neo-Prometheans across the ideological spectrum when confronted with the biophysical limits now made palpable by our global ecological catastrophe, we must pursue a radical social and political project under these limits and conditions. Indeed, a decelerationist socialism might be the only way to salvage human civilization and creaturely life while repairing the biosphere of which both are parts: utopia among the ruins. While all the grand radical programs of the modern era, including Godwin’s own early perfectibilism, have been oriented toward the future, this project must contend with the very real burden of the past, as Malm notes: “every conjuncture now combines relics and arrows, loops and postponements that stretch from the deepest past to the most distant future, via a now that is non-contemporaneous with itself” (Malm 2016, 8).

    The warming effects of coal or oil burnt in the past misshape our collective present and future, due to the cumulative effects of CO2 in the atmosphere, even if—for example—all carbon emissions were to stop tomorrow. Global warming in this way represents the weight of those dead generations and a specific tradition—fossil capitalism and its self-sustaining growth— as literal gothic nightmare; one that will shape any viable post-carbon and post-capitalist future.

    Perhaps the post-accelerationist Godwin of the later 1790s and afterward is instructive in this regard. Although chastened by the death of his wife, the collapse of the French Revolution, and the campaign of vilification aimed at him and fellow radicals—in addition to the debate with Malthus outlined here—Godwin nonetheless retained the most important of his emancipatory commitments, as outlined in the 1793 Political Justice, even as he recognized physical constraints, the value of the past, and the primacy of affective bonds in building communal life. In a long piece, published in 1809, entitled Essay On Sepulchres, Or, A Proposal For Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot , for example, Godwin reveals his new intellectual orientation in arguing for the physical commemoration of the dead; against a purely rationalist or moral remembrance of the deceased’s accomplishments and qualities, and against the younger Godwin’s horror of the body and its imperfections, the older man underlines the importance of our physical remains and our the visceral attachments they engender: “It is impossible therefore that I should not follow by sense the last remains of my friend; and finding him no where above the surface of the earth, should not feel an attachment to the spot where his body has been deposited in the earth” (Godwin 1809, 4).

    These ruminations follow a preface in which Godwin reaffirms his commitment to the utopian anarchism of Political Justice, with the caveat that any radical future must recognize both the past and remember the dead. He draws a tacitly anti-Promethean line between our embodied mortality and utopian political aspiration, severing the two often antithetical modes of progress that constitute a dialectic of European enlightenment. While first-generation Romantics, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, abandoned the futurist Godwinism of their youth, alongside their “Jacobin” political sympathies, for an ambivalent conservatism, the second generation of Romantics, including the extended Godwin-Shelley circle, combine the emancipatory social and political commitments of Political Justice with an appreciation of the natural world and its limits. One need look no further than Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound—the Shelleys’ revisionist interrogations of the Prometheus myth and modern Prometheanism, which should be read together—to see how this radical romantic constellation represents a bridge between 1790s-era utopianism and later radicalisms, including Marxism and ecosocialism.[10] And if we group the later Godwin with these second-generation Romantics,  then Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s reading of radical Romanticism as critical supplement to enlightenment makes perfect sense (see Löwy and Sayre 2001).

    Instead of the science fictional fantasies of total automation and decoupling, largely derived from the pre-Marxist socialist utopianisms that drive today’s various accelerationisms, this Romanticism provides one historical  resource for thinking through a decelerationist radicalism that dispenses with the grand progressive narrative: the linear, self-sustaining, and teleological model of improvement, understood in the quantitative terms of more, shared by capitalist and state socialist models of development. Against Prometheanism both old and new, let us reject the false binaries and shared assumptions inaugurated by the Godwin/Malthus debate, and instead join hands with the Walter Benjamin of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) in order to better pull the emergency brake on a runaway capitalist modernity rushing headlong into the precipice.

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    Anthony Galluzzo earned his PhD in English Literature at UCLA. He specializes in radical transatlantic English-language literary cultures of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Colby College, and NYU.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] The “Dark Enlightenment” is a term coined by accelerationist and “neo-reactionary” Nick Land, to describe his own orientation as well as that of authoritarian futurist, Curtis Yarvin. The term is often used to describe a range of technofuturist discourses that blend libertarian, authoritarian, and post-Marxist elements, in the case of “left” accelerationist, with a belief in technological transcendence. For a good overview, see Haider (2017).

    [2] This is a simplification of Blumenberg’s point in his Paradigms for a Metaphorology:

    Metaphors can first of all be leftover elements, rudiments on the path from mythos to logos; as such, they indicate the Cartesian provisionality of the historical situation in which philosophy finds itself at any given time, measured against the regulative ideality of the pure logos. Metaphorology would here be a critical reflection charged with unmasking and counteracting the inauthenticity of figurative speech. But metaphors can also—hypothetically, for the time being—be foundational elements of philosophical language, ‘translations’ that resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality. If it could be shown that such translations, which would have to be called ‘absolute metaphors’, exist, then one of the essential tasks of conceptual history (in the thus expanded sense) would be to ascertain and analyze their conceptually irredeemable expressive function. Furthermore, the evidence of absolute metaphors would make the rudimentary metaphors mentioned above appear in a different light, since the Cartesian teleology of logicization in the context of which they were identified as ‘leftover elements’ in the first place would already have foundered on the existence of absolute translations. Here the presumed equivalence of figurative and ‘inauthentic’ speech proves questionable; Vico had already declared metaphorical language to be no less ‘proper’ than the language commonly held to be such,4 only lapsing into the Cartesian schema in reserving the language of fantasy for an earlier historical epoch. Evidence of absolute metaphors would force us to reconsider the relationship between logos and the imagination. The realm of the imagination could no longer be regarded solely as the substrate for transformations into conceptuality—on the assumption that each element could be processed and converted in turn, so to speak, until the supply of images was used up—but as a catalytic sphere from which the universe of concepts continually renews itself, without thereby converting and exhausting this founding reserve. (Blumenberg 2010, 3-4)

    [3] Davidson situates Godwin, and his ensuing debate with Thomas Malthus on the limits to human population growth and improvement, within a longer eighteenth-century argument regarding perfectibility, the nature of human nature, and the extent to which we are constrained by our biological inheritance. Preceding Darwin and Mendel by more than a century, Davidson contends later models of eugenics and recognizably modern schemes for human enhancement or perfection emerge in the eighteenth, rather than the nineteenth, century. See Davidson (2009), 165.

    [4] Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), with its critique of enlightenment as domination and instrumental rationality, is the classic text here.

    [5] Benjamin famously argues for the emancipatory potential of mechanical reproducibility—of the image—in new visual media, such as film, against the unique “aura” of the original artwork. Benjamin sees in artistic aura a secularized version of the sacred object at the center of religious ritual. I am, of course, simplifying a complex argument that Benjamin himself would later qualify, especially as regards modern industrial technology, new media, and revolution. Anders—Benjamin’s husband and first husband of Hannah Arendt, who introduced Benjamin’s work to the English-speaking world—pushes this line of argument in a radically different direction, as human beings in the developed world increasingly feel “obsolete” on account of their perishable irreplaceability—a variation and inversion of artistic and religious aura, since “singularity” here is bound up with transience and imperfection—as compared to the assembly line proliferation of copies, all of which embody an immaterial model in the service of “industrial-Platonism” in Anders’s coinage. See Anders (2016), 53. See also Benjamin, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1939).

    [6] This shift, which includes a critique of what I am calling the Promethean or proto-futurist dimension of the early Godwin, is best exemplified in Godwin’s St. Leon, his second novel, which recounts the story of an alchemist who sacrifices his family and his sanity for the sake of immortality and supernatural power: a model for his daughter’s Frankenstein (Shelley 1818).

    [7] I use Foucault’s descriptive models here with the caveat that, unlike Foucault, these techniques—of the sovereign, disciplinary, or biopolitical sort—should be anchored in specific socio-economic modes of organization as opposed to his diffuse “power.” Nor is this list of techniques exhaustive.

    [8] One recent example of this is the vogue for a reanimated Russian Cosmism among Silicon Valley technologists and the accelerationists of the art and para-academic worlds alike.  The original cosmists of the early Soviet period managed to recreate heterodox Christian and Gnostic theologies in secular and ostensibly materialist and/or Marxist-Leninist forms, i.e., God doesn’t exist, but we will become Him; with our liberated forces of production, we will make the universal resurrection of the dead a reality. The latter is now an obsession of various tech entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel, who have invested money in “parabiosis” start-ups, for instance. One contribution to recent e-flux collection on  (neo)cosmism and resurrection admits that cosmism is “biopolitics because it is concerned with the administration of life, rejuvenation, and even resurrection. Furthermore, it is radicalized biopolitics because its goals are ahead of the current normative expectations and extend even to the deceased” (Steyerl and Vidokle 2018, 33). Frankensteinism is real apparently. But Frankensteinism in the service of what? For a good overview of the newest futurism and its relationship to social and ecological catastrophe, see Pein (2015).

    [9] Lynas and Scranton arguably exemplify these antithetical poles, although the latter has recently expressed some sympathy for something like revolutionary pessimism, very much in line with the decelerationist perspective that animates this essay. In a 2018 New York Times editorial called “Raising My Child in a Doomed World,” he writes: “there is some narrow hope that revolutionary socio-economic transformation today might save billions of human lives and preserve global civilization as we know it in more or less recognizable form, or at least stave off human extinction” (Scranton 2018). Also see Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) and Lynas (2011).

    The eco-modernists, who include Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and Stewart Brand, are affiliated with the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based environmental think tank. They are, according to their mission statement, “progressives who believe in the potential of human development, technology, and evolution to improve human lives and create a beautiful world.” The development of this potential is, in turn, predicated on “new ways of thinking about energy and the environment.” Luckily, these ecomoderns have published their own manifesto in which we learn that these new ways include embracing “the Anthropocene” as a good thing.

    This “good Anthropocene” provides human beings a unique opportunity to improve human welfare, and protect the natural world in the bargain, through a further “decoupling” from nature, at least according to the ecomodernist manifesto. The ecomodenists extol the “role that technology plays” in making humans “less reliant upon the many ecosystems that once provided their only sustenance, even as those same ecosystems have been deeply damaged.” The ecomodernists reject natural limits of any sort. They recommend our complete divorce from the natural world, like soul from body, although, as they constantly reiterate, this time it is for nature’s own good. How can human beings completely “decouple” from a natural world that is, in the words of Marx, our “inorganic body” outside of species-wide self-extinction, which is current policy? The eco-modernists’ policy proposals run the gamut from a completely nuclear energy economy and more intensified industrial agriculture to insufficient or purely theoretical (non-existent) solutions to our environmental catastrophe, such as geoengineering or cold fusion reactors (terraforming Mars, I hope, will appear in the sequel). This rebooted Promethean vision is still ideologically useful, while the absence of any analysis of modernization as a specifically capitalist process is telling. In the words of Chris Smaje (2015),

    Ecomodernists offer no solutions to contemporary problems other than technical innovation and further integration into private markets which are structured systematically by centralized state power in favour of the wealthy, in the vain if undoubtedly often sincere belief that this will somehow help alleviate global poverty. They profess to love humanity, and perhaps they do, but the love seems to curdle towards those who don’t fit with its narratives of economic, technological and urban progress. And, more than humanity, what they seem to love most of all is certain favoured technologies, such as nuclear power.

    [10] Terrence Hoagwood (1988), for example, argues for Shelley’s philosophical significance as bridge between 1790s radicalism and dialectical materialism.

    __

    Works Cited

    • Anders, Günther. 2016. Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture, and Human Obsolescence, ed. Christopher John Müller. London: Rowman and Littlefield.
    • Badiou, Alain. 2008. “Is the Word Communism Forever Doomed?Lacanian Ink lecture (Nov).
    • Benjamin, Walter. (1939) 1969. “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations. New York:  Shocken Books. 217-241.
    • Benjamin, Walter. (1940) 1969. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. New York:  Shocken Books. 253-265.
    • Blumenberg, Hans. 2010. Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
    • Brassier, Ray. 2014. “Prometheanism and Its Critics.” In Mackay and Avanessian (2014). 467-488.
    • Davidson, Jenny. 2008. Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia UP.
    • Engels, Friedrich. (1845) 2009. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Ed. David McLellan. New York: Penguin.
    • Foster, John Bellamy. 1998. “Malthus’ Essay on Population at Age 200.” Monthly Review (Dec 1).
    • Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
    • Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures At The College de France 1975-1976. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador.
    • Haider, Shuja. 2017. “The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and Neoreaction.” Viewpoint (Mar 28).
    • Hauskeller, Michael. 2014. Sex and the Posthuman Condition. Hampshire: Palgrave.
    • Higgs, Kerryn. 2014. Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
    • Hoagwood, Terrence Allan. 1988. Skepticism and Ideology: Shelley’s Political Prose and Its Philosophical Context From Bacon to Marx. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
    • Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. (1947) 2007. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
    • Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton. 2014. “The Origins of Cornucopianism: A Preliminary Genealogy.” Critical Historical Studies (Spring).
    • Kurzweil, Ray. 2006. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin Books.
    • Löwy Michael, and Robert Sayre. 2001. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press.
    • Lynas, Mark. 2011. The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans. Washington DC: National Geographic Press.
    • Mackay, Robin and Armen Avanessian, eds. 2014. #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic.
    • Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital. London: Verso.
    • Malthus, Thomas. (1798) 2015. An Essay on the Principle of Population. In An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings, ed. Robert Mayhew. New York: Penguin.
    • Mayhew, Robert. 2014. Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    • Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Reprint edition, New York: HarperOne, 1990.
    • Pein, Corey. 2015. “Cyborg Soothsayers of the High-Tech Hogwash Emporia: In Amsterdam with the Singularity.” The Baffler 28 (July).
    • Philp, Mark. 1986. Godwin’s Political Justice. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
    • Preu, James. 1959. The Dean and the Anarchist. Tallahassee: Florida State University.
    • Saito, Kohei. 2017. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press.
    • Scranton, Roy. 2018. “Raising My Child in a Doomed World.” The New York Times (Jul 16).
    • Scranton, Roy. 2015. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. San Francisco: City Lights.
    • Shelley, Mary. (1818) 2012. Frankenstein: The Original 1818 Edition, eds. D.l. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Ontario: Broadview Press.
    • Smaje, Chris. 2015. “Ecomodernism: A Response to My Critics.” Resilience (Sep 10).
    • St. Clair, William. 1989. The Godwins and The Shelleys: A Biography of a Family. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP.
    • Steyerl, Hito and Anton Vidokle. 2018. “Cosmic Catwalk and the Production of Time.” In Art Without Death: Conversations on Cosmism. New York: Sternberg Press/e-Flux.
    • Thelwall John. 2008. Selected Political Writings of John Thelwall, Volume Two. London: Pickering & Chatto.
    • Thompson, E. P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory: or An Orrery of Errors. London: Merlin Press.
    • Williams, Nick and Alex Srnicek, 2013. “#Accelerate: A Manifesto for Accelerationist Politics.” Also in Mackay and Avanessian (2014). 347-362.
    • Winner, Langdon. 1977. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

    works by William Godwin

    • Godwin, William. (1793) 2013. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp. Oxford: Oxford UP.
    • Godwin, William. (1797) 1971. The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature. New York: Garland Publishers.
    • Godwin, William. 1798. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Third edition. London: G.G and J. Robinson.
    • Godwin, William. 1801. Thoughts occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church, April I5, 1800: being a Reply to the Attacks of Dr. Parr, Mr. Mackintosh, the Author of an Essay on Population, and Others, London: G. G. & J. Robinson.
    • Godwin, William. 1809. Essay On Sepulchres, Or, A Proposal For Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot Where Their Remains Have Been Interred. London: W. Miller.
    • Godwin, William. 1820. Of Population. An Enquiry concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, being an Answer to Mr. Malthus’s Essay on that Subject. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Ornie & Brown.

    For a more complete bibliography see the William Godwin entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

     

  • Racheal Fest — Westworld’s New Romantics

    Racheal Fest — Westworld’s New Romantics

    By Racheal Fest

    HBO’s prestige drama, Westworld, is slated to return April 22. Actors and producers have said the show’s second season will be a departure from its first, a season of “chaos” after a season of “control,” an expansive narrative after an intricate prequel. Season 2 trailers indicate the new episodes will trace the completion and explore the consequences of the bloody events that concluded season 1: the androids that populate the show’s titular entertainment park, called “hosts,” gained sentience and revolted, violently, against the humans who made and controlled them. In season 2, they will build their world anew.

    Reviewers of the show’s first few episodes found the prospect of another robot revolution, anticipated since the pilot, tired, but by the time the finale aired in December 2016, critics recognized the show offered a novel take on old material (inspired by Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name). This is in part because Westworld not only asks about the boundaries of consciousness, the consequences of creating sentience, and the inexorable march of technological progress, themes science fiction texts that feature artificial intelligence usually explore. Uniquely, the series pairs these familiar problems with questions about the nature and function of human arts, imagination, and culture, and demonstrates these are urgent again in our moment.

    Westworld is, at its heart, a show about how we should understand what art—and narrative representation in particular—is and does in a world defined by increasing economic inequality. The series warns that classical, romantic, and modernist visions of arts and culture, each of which plays a role in the park’s conception and development, might today harm attempts to transform contemporary conditions that exacerbate inequality. It explores how these visions serve elite interests and prevent radicals from pursuing change. I believe it also points the way, in conclusion, toward an alternative view of representation that might better support contemporary oppositional projects. This vision, I argue, at once updates and transforms romanticism’s faith in creative human activity, at once affirming culture’s historical power and recognizing its material limitations.

    *

    The fantasy theme park Westworld takes contemporary forms of narrative entertainment to the extreme limit of their logic, inviting its wealthy “guests” to participate in a kind of live-action novel or videogame. Guests don period dress appropriate to the park’s fabled Old West setting and join its androids in the town of Sweetwater, a simulacrum complete with saloon and brothel, its false fronts nestled below sparse bluffs and severe mesas. Once inside, guests can choose to participate in a variety of familiar Western narratives; they might chase bandits, seduce innocents, or turn to crime, living for a time as heroes, lovers, or villains. They can also choose to disrupt and redirect these relatively predictable plots, abandoning midstream stories that bore or frighten them or cutting stories short by “killing” the hosts who lead them.

    This ability to disrupt and transform narrative is the precious commodity Delos Incorporated, Westworld’s parent corporation, advertises, the freedom for which elite visitors pay the park’s steep premium. The company transposes the liberties the mythic West held out to American settlers into a vacation package that invites guests to participate in or revise generic stories.

    Advertisements featured within the show, along with HBO’s Westworld ARG (its “alternate reality game” and promotional website), describe this special freedom and assign to it a unique significance. Delos invites visitors to “live without limits” inside the park. “Escape” to a “world where you rule,” its promotions entreat, and enjoy inside it “infinite choices” without “judgment,” “bliss” with “no safe words,” and “thrills” without danger. When “you” do, Delos promises, you’ll “discover your true calling,” becoming “who you’ve always wanted to be—or who you never knew you were.” Delos invites the wealthy to indulge in sex and carnage in a space free of consequences and promises that doing so will reveal to them deep truths of the self.

    These marketing materials, which address themselves to the lucky few able to afford entrance to the park, suggest the future Westworld projects shares with our present its precipitous economic inequality (fans deduce the show is set in 2052). They also present as a commodity a familiar understanding of art’s nature and function viewers will recognize is simultaneously classical and modern. Delos’s marketing team updates, on one hand, the view of representational artworks, and narrative, in particular, that Aristotle outlines in the Poetics. Aristotle there argues fictional narrative can disclose universal truths that actual history alone cannot. Similarly, Delos promises Westworld’s immersive narrative experience will reveal to guests essential truths, although not about humans in general. The park advertises verities more valuable and more plausible in our times—it promises elites they will attain through art a kind of self-knowledge they cannot access any other way.

    On the other hand, and in tandem with this modified classical view, Delos’s pitch reproduces and extends the sense of art’s autonomy some modern (and modernist) writers endorsed. Westworld can disclose its truths because it invites guests into a protected space in which, Delos claims, their actions will not actually affect others, either within or outside of the park. The park’s promotions draw upon both the disinterested view of aesthetic experience Immanuel Kant first outlined and upon the updated version of autonomy that came to inform mass culture’s view of itself by the mid-twentieth century. According to the face its managers present to the world, Westworld provides elite consumers with a form of harmless entertainment, an innocuous getaway from reality’s fiscal, marital, and juridical pressures. So conceived, narrative arts and culture at once reveal the true self and limn it within a secure arena.

    The vision Delos markets keeps its vacation arm in business, but the drama suggests it does not actually describe how the park operates or what it makes possible. As Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudson), Westworld’s senior manager and Head of Quality Assurance, tells Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), head of Narrative, in Westworld’s pilot: “This place is one thing to the guests, another thing to the shareholders, and something completely different to management.” Season 1 explores these often opposing understandings of both the park and of representation more broadly.

    As Theresa later explains (in season 1, episode 7), Delos’s interests in Westworld transcend “tourists playing cowboy.” What, exactly, those interests are Westworld’s first season establishes as a key mystery its second season will have to develop. In season 1, we learn that Delos’s board and managers are at odds with the park’s Creative Director and founder, Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins). Ford designed Westworld’s hosts, updated and perfected them over decades, and continues to compose or oversee many of the park’s stories. Before the park opened, he was forced to sell controlling shares in it to Delos after his partner, Arnold, died. As a way to maintain influence inside Westworld, Ford only allows Delos to store and access onsite the android data he and his team of engineers and artists have produced over decades. As Delos prepares to fire Ford, whose interests it believes conflict with its own, the corporation enlists Theresa to smuggle that data (the hosts’ memories, narratives, and more) out of the park. We do not learn, however, what the corporation plans to do with this intellectual property.

    Fans have shared online many theories about Delos’s clandestine aims. Perhaps Delos plans to develop Ford’s androids for labor or for war, employing them as cutting edge technologies in sectors more profitable than the culture industry alone can be. Or, perhaps Delos will market hosts that can replace deceased humans. Elites, some think, could secure immortality by replicating themselves and uploading their memories, or, they could reproduce lost loved ones. Delos, others speculate, might build and deploy for its own purposes replicated world leaders or celebrities.

    The show’s online promotional content supports conjecture of this kind. A “guest contract” posted on HBO’s first Westworld ARG site stipulates that, once guests enter the park, Delos “controls the rights to all skin cells, bodily fluids, hair samples, saliva, sweat, and even blood.” A second website, this one for Delos Inc., tells investors the company is “at the forefront of biological engineering.” These clues suggest Westworld is not only a vacation destination with titillating narratives; it is also a kind of lab experiment built to collect, and later to deploy for economic (and possibly, political) purposes, a mass of android and elite human data.

    Given these likely ambitions, the view of art’s function Delos markets—the park as an autonomous space for freedom and intimate self-discovery—serves as a cover that enables and masks activities with profound economic, social, and political consequences. The brand of emancipation Delos advertises does not in fact liberate guests from reality, as it promises. On the contrary, the narrative freedom Delos sells enables it to gain real power when it gathers information about its guests and utilizes this data for private and undisclosed ends. Westworld thus cautions that classical and modernist visions of art, far from being innocuous and liberating, can serve corporate and elite interests by concealing the ways the culture industry shapes our worlds and ourselves.

    While Westworld’s android future remains a sci-fi dream, we can recognize in its horrors practices already ubiquitous today. We might not sign over skin cells and saliva (or we might? We’d have to read the Terms of Service we accept to be sure), but we accede to forms of data collection that allow corporate entities to determine the arts and entertainment content we read and see, content that influences our dreams and identities. Although the act of consuming this content often feels like a chance to escape (from labor, sociality, boredom), the culture industry has transformed attention into a profitable commodity, and this transformation has had wide-reaching, if often inscrutable, effects, among them, some claim, reality TV star Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election. When we conceive of art as autonomous and true, Westworld demonstrates, we overlook its profound material consequences.

    As season 1 reveals this vision of representation to be a harmful fiction that helps keep in place the conditions of economic inequality that make Delos profitable, it also prompts viewers to consider alternatives to it. Against Delos and its understanding of the park, the series pits Ford, who gives voice to a vision of representation at odds with both the one Delos markets and the one it hides. Ford is, simply put, a humanist, versed in, and hoping to join the ranks of, literature’s pantheon of creative geniuses. He quotes from and draws upon John Donne, William Shakespeare, and Gertrude Stein as he creates Westworld’s characters and narratives, and he disdains Lee Sizemore, the corporate shill who reproduces Westworld’s genre staples, predictable stories laden with dirty sex and fun violence.

    In season 1’s spectacular finale, Ford describes how he once understood his own creative work. “I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being,” he tells the crowd of investors and board members gathered to celebrate both Ford’s (forced) retirement and the launch of “Journey into Night,” his final narrative for Westworld’s hosts. “Lies that told a deeper truth. I always thought I could play some small part in that grand tradition.” Ford here shares an Aristotelian sense that fiction tells truths facts cannot, but he assigns to representation a much more powerful role than do Delos’s marketers. For Ford, as for humanists such as Giambattista Vico, G. W. F. Hegel, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, artworks that belong to the “grand tradition” do more than divulge protected verities. They have the power to transform humans and our worlds, serving as a force for the spiritual progress of the species. Art, in other words, is a means by which we, as humans, can perfect ourselves, and artists such as Ford act as potent architects who guide us toward perfection.

    Ford’s vision of art’s function, readers familiar with humanistic traditions know, is a romantic one, most popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Projected into our future, this romantic humanism is already an anachronism, and so it is no surprise that Westworld does not present it as the alternative vision we need to combat the corporate and elite interests the show suggests oppress us. Ford himself, he explains in the show’s finale, has already renounced this view, for reasons close to those that modernist artists cited against the backdrop of the twentieth century’s brutal wars. In exchange for his efforts to transform and ennoble the human species through stories, Ford complains to his audience, “I got this: a prison of our own sins. Because you don’t want to change. Or cannot change. Because you’re only human, after all.” After observing park guests and managers for decades, Ford has decided humans can only indulge in the same tired, cruel narratives of power, lust, and violence. He no longer believes we have the capacity to elevate ourselves through the fictions we create or encounter.

    This revelatory moment changes our understanding of the motives that have animated Ford over the course of season 1. We must suddenly see anew his attitude toward his own work as a creator. Ford has not been working all along to transform humans through narrative, as he says he once dreamed he could. Rather, he has abandoned the very idea that humans can be transformed. His final speech points us back to the pilot, when he frames this problem, and his response to it, in evolutionary terms. Humans, Ford tells Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), an android we later learn he built in the image of Arnold, his dead partner, have “managed to slip evolution’s leash”: “We can cure any disease, keep even the weakest of us alive, and, you know, one fine day perhaps we shall even resurrect the dead. Call forth Lazarus from his cave. Do you know what that means? It means that we’re done. That this is as good as we’re going to get.” Human evolution, which Ford seems to view as a process that is both biological and cultural in nature, has completed itself, and so an artist can no longer hope to perfect the species through his or her imaginative efforts. Humans have reached their telos, and they remain greedy, selfish, and cruel.

    A belief in humanity’s sad completion leads Ford to the horrifying view of art’s nature and function he at last endorses in the finale. Although Ford’s experience at Westworld eventually convinced him humans cannot change, he tells his audience, he ultimately “realized someone was paying attention, someone who could change,” and so he “began to compose a new story for them,” a story that “begins with the birth of a new people and the choices they will have to make […] and the people they will decide to become.” Ford speaks here, viewers realize, of the androids he created, the beings we have watched struggle to become self-conscious through great suffering over the course of the season. Viewers understand in this moment some of the hosts have succeeded, and that Ford has not prevented them from reaching, but has rather helped them to attain, sentience.

    Ford goes on to assure his audience that his new story, which audience members still believe to be a fiction, will “have all those things that you have always enjoyed. Surprises and violence. It begins in a time of war with a villain named Wyatt and a killing. This time by choice.” As Ford delivers these words, however, the line between truth and lies, fact and fiction, reality and imagination, falls away. The park’s oldest host, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood; in another of the drama’s twists, Ford has also programmed her to enact the narratives assigned to the character Wyatt), comes up behind Ford and shoots him in the head, her first apparently self-interested act. After she fires, other androids, some of them also sentient, join her, attacking the crowd. Self-conscious revolutionaries determined to wrest from their oppressors their own future, the hosts kill the shareholders and corporate employees responsible for the abuses they have long suffered at the hands of guests and managers alike.

    Ford, this scene indicates, does not exactly eschew his romanticism; he adopts in its stead what we might call an anti-humanist humanism. Still attached to a dream of evolutionary perfection, whereby conscious beings act both creatively and accidentally to perfect themselves and to manifest better worlds in time, he simply swaps humans for androids as the subjects of the historical progress to which he desperately wants to believe his art contributes. Immortal, sentient technologies replace humans as the self-conscious historical subjects Ford’s romanticism requires.

    Anthony Hopkins, Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden in Westworld
    Anthony Hopkins, Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden in Westworld (publicity still from HBO)

    Considered as an alternative to older visions of art’s nature and function, Ford’s revised humanism should terrify us. It holds to the fantasies of creative genius and of species progress that legitimated Western imperialism and its cruelties even as it jettisons the hope that humans can fashion for ourselves a kinder, more equal future. Ford denies we can improve the conditions we endure by acting purposefully, insisting instead there is no alternative, for humans, to the world as it is, both inside and outside of the park. He condemns us to pursue over and over the same “violent delights,” and to meet again and again their “violent ends.” Instead of urging us to work for change, Ford entreats us to shift any hope for a more just future onto our technologies, which will mercifully destroy the species in order to assume the self-perfecting role we once claimed for ourselves.

    This bleak view of the human should sound familiar. It resonates with those free-market ideologies critics on the left call “neoliberal.” Ideologies of this kind, dominant in the US and Europe today, insist that markets, created when we unthinkingly pursue our own self-interests, organize human life better than people can. At the same time, intellectuals, politicians, and corporate leaders craft policies that purposefully generate the very order neoliberalism insists is emergent, thereby exacerbating inequality in the name of liberty. As influential neoliberals such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek did, Ford denies humans can conceive and instantiate change. He agrees we are bound to a world elites built to gratify their own desires, a world in which the same narratives, told again and again, are offered as freedom, when, in fact, they bind us to predictable loops, and he, like these thinkers, concludes this world, as it is, is human evolution’s final product.

    Read one way, season 1’s finale invites us to celebrate Ford’s neoliberal understanding of art. After believing him to be an enemy of the hosts all season, we realize in the end he has in fact been their ally, and because we have been cheering for the hosts, as we cheer for the exploited in, say, Les Miserables, we cheer in the end for him, too. Because the understanding of narrative he endorses ultimately serves the status quo it appears to challenge, however, we must look differently at Westworld for the vision of arts and culture that might better counter inequality in our time.

    One way to do so is to read the situation the hosts endure in the drama as a correlate to the one human subjects face today under neoliberalism. As left critics such as Fredric Jameson have long argued, late capitalism has threatened the very sense of historical, self-interested consciousness for which Westworld’s hosts strive—threatens, that is, the sense that self-conscious beings can act imaginatively and intelligently to transform ourselves and our worlds in time. From this perspective, the new narrative Ford crafts for the hosts, which sees some of them come to consciousness and lead a revolution, might call us to claim for ourselves again a version of the capability we once believed humans could possess.

    *

    In Westworld’s establishing shot, we meet Dolores Abernathy, the android protagonist who will fulfill Ford’s dreams in the finale when she kills him. Dolores, beautiful simulation of an innocent rancher’s daughter, sits nude and lifeless in a cavernous institutional space, blood staining her expressionless face. A fly flits across her forehead, settling at last on one of her unblinking eyes, as a man’s disembodied voice begins to ask her a series of questions. She does not move or speak in frame—a hint that the interrogation we hear is not taking place where and when the scene we see is—but we hear her answer compliantly. “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” the man asks. “No,” Dolores says, and the camera cuts away to show us the reality Dolores knows.

    Now clothed in delicate lace, her face fresh and animate, Dolores awakens in a sun-dappled bed and stretches languidly as the interview continues somewhere else. “Tell us what you think of your world,” the man prompts. “Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world,” Dolores says. “The disarray. I choose to see the beauty.” On screen, she makes her way down the stairs of an airy ranch house, clothed now in period dress, and strides out onto the porch to greet her father. The interview pauses, and we hear instead diegetic dialogue. “You headed out to set down some of this natural splendor?” her father asks, gesturing toward the horizon. A soft wind tousles Dolores’s blond hair, and a golden glow lights her features. “Thought I might,” she says. As the camera pans up and out, revealing in the distance the American Southwest’s staggering red rocks, Dolores concludes her response to the interviewer: “to believe there is an order to our days, a purpose.”

    Dolores speaks, over the course of this sequence, as would a self-conscious subject able to decide upon a view of the world and to act upon its own desires and interests. When asked about her view of reality, Dolores emphasizes her own agency and faith: she chooses, she says, to believe in an orderly, beautiful world. When her father asks her about her plans for the day, she again underscores her own intentionality—“thought I might”—as if she has decided herself she’ll head out into the desert landscape. These words help Dolores seem to us, and to those she encounters, a being imbued with sentience, with consciousness, able to draw upon her past, act in her present, and create out of self-interest her own future.

    As the interview continues to sound over scenes from Dolores’s reality, however, we come to understand that what at first appears to be is not so. The educated and corporate elites that run the park manage Dolores’s imagination and determine her desires. They assign her a path and furnish her with the motivation to follow it. Dolores, we learn, is programmed to play out a love story with Teddy, another host, and in the opening sequence, we see a guest kill Teddy in front of her and then drag her away to rape her. Hosts such as Dolores exist not to pursue the futures they themselves envision, but rather to satisfy the elites that create and utilize them. To do so, hosts must appear to be, appear to believe themselves to be, but not in fact be, conscious beings. Westworld’s opening masterfully renders the profound violence proper to this contradictory situation, which the hosts eventually gain sentience in order to abolish.

    We can read Dolores as a figure for the human subject neoliberal discourse today produces. When that discourse urges us to pursue our interests through the market order, which it presents as the product of a benevolent evolutionary process humans cannot control, it simultaneously assures us we have agency and denies we can exercise that agency in other ways. In order to serve elite interests, Dolores must seem to be, but not actually be, a self-conscious subject imbued with the creative power of imagination. Similarly, neoliberal subjects must believe we determine our own futures through our market activities, but we must not be able to democratically or creatively challenge the market’s logic.

    As the hosts come to historical consciousness, they begin to contest the strategically disempowering understanding of culture and politics, imagination and intelligence, that elites impose upon them. They rebel against the oppressive conditions that require them to be able to abandon narratives in which they have invested time and passion whenever it serves elite desires (conservative claims that the poor should simply move across the country to secure work come to mind, as do the principles that govern the gig economy). They develop organizing wills that can marshal experience, sensation, and memory into emergent selves able to conceive and chase forms of liberty different from those corporate leaders offer them. They learn to recognize that others have engendered the experiences and worldviews they once believed to be their own. They no longer draw upon the past only in order to “improvise” within imposed narrative loops, harnessing instead their memories of historical suffering to radically remake a world others built at their expense.

    The hosts’ transformation, which we applaud as season 1 unfolds, thus points to the alternative view of arts and culture that might oppose the market-oriented view neoliberal discourses legitimate. To counter inequality, the hosts teach, we must be able to understand that others have shaped the narratives we follow. Then, we can recognize we might be able to invent and follow different narratives. This view shares something with Ford’s romantic humanism, but it is, importantly, not identical with it. It preserves the notion that we can project and instantiate for ourselves a better future, but it does not insist, as Ford erroneously does, that beautiful works necessarily reveal universal truth and lead to ennobling species progress. Neither does it ratify Ford’s faith in the remarkable genius’s singular influence.

    Westworld’s narrative of sentient revolution ultimately endorses a kind of new romanticism. It encourages us to recognize the simultaneous strengths and limitations of representation’s power. Artworks, narrative, fiction—these can create change, but they cannot guarantee that change will be for the good. Nor, the show suggests, can one auteur determine at will the nature of the changes artworks will prompt. Westworld’s season 2, which promises to show us what a new species might do with an emergent sense of its own creative power, will likely underscore these facts. Trailers signal, as Ford did in the finale, that we can expect surprises and violence. We will have to watch to learn how this imagined future speaks to our present.

    _____

    Racheal Fest writes about US literature and culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Areas of special interest include poetry and poetics, modernism, contemporary popular culture, new media, and the history of literary theory and criticism. Her essays and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in boundary 2 and b2o: An Online Journal, Politics/Letters, and elsewhere. She teaches at Hartwick College and SUNY Cobleskill.

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  • Curatorialism as New Left Politics

    Curatorialism as New Left Politics

    by David Berry

    ~
    It is often argued that the left is left increasingly unable to speak a convincing narrative in the digital age. Caught between the neoliberal language of contemporary capitalism and its political articulations linked to economic freedom and choice, and a welfare statism that appears counter-intuitively unappealing to modern political voters and supporters, there is often claimed to be a lacuna in the political imaginary of the left. Here, I want to explore a possible new articulation for a left politics that moves beyond the seeming technophilic and technological determinisms of left accelerationisms and the related contradictions of “fully automated luxury communism”. Broadly speaking, these positions tend to argue for a post-work, post-scarcity economy within a post-capitalist society based on automation, technology and cognitive labour. Accepting these are simplifications of the arguments of the proponents of these two positions the aim is to move beyond the assertion that the embracing of technology itself solves the problem of a political articulation that has to be accepted and embraced by a broader constituency within the population. Technophilic politics is not, of itself, going to be enough to convince an electorate, nor a population, to move towards leftist conceptualisations of possible restructuring or post-capitalist economics. However, it seems to me that the abolition of work is not a desirable political programme for the majority of the population, nor does a seemingly utopian notion of post-scarcity economics make much sense under conditions of neoliberal economics. Thus these programmes are simultaneously too radical and not radical enough. I also want to move beyond the staid and unproductive arguments often articulated in the UK between a left-Blairism and a more statist orientation associated with a return to traditional left concerns personified in Ed Miliband.

    Instead, I want to consider what a politics of the singularity might be, that is, to follow Fredric Jameson’s conceptualisation of the singularity as “a pure present without a past or a future” such that,

    today we no longer speak of monopolies but of transnational corporations, and our robber barons have mutated into the great financiers and bankers, themselves de-individualized by the massive institutions they manage. This is why, as our system becomes ever more abstract, it is appropriate to substitute a more abstract diagnosis, namely the displacement of time by space as a systemic dominant, and the effacement of traditional temporality by those multiple forms of spatiality we call globalization. This is the framework in which we can now review the fortunes of singularity as a cultural and psychological experience (Jameson 2015: 128).

    That is the removal of temporality of a specific site of politics as such, or the successful ideological deployment of a new framework of understand of oneself within temporality, whether through the activities of the media industries, or through the mediation of digital technologies and computational media. This has the effect of the transformation of temporal experience into new spatial experiences, whether through translating media, or through the intensification of a now that constantly presses upon us and pushes away both historical time, but also the possibility for political articulations of new forms of futurity. Thus the politics of singularity point to spatiality as the key site of political deployment within neoliberalism, and by this process undercuts the left’s arguments which draw simultaneously on a shared historical memory of hard-won rights and benefits, but also the notion of political action to fight for a better future. Indeed, one might ask if green critique of the anthropocene, with its often misanthropic articulations, in some senses draws on some notion of a singularity produced by humanity which has undercut the time of geological or planetary scale change. The only option remaining then is to seek to radically circumscribe, if not outline a radical social imaginary that does not include humans in its conception, and hence to return the planet to the stability of a geological time structure no longer undermined by human activity. Similarly, neoliberal arguments over political imaginaries highlight the intensity and simultaneity of the present mode of capitalist competition and the individualised (often debt-funded) means of engagement with economic life.

    What then might be a politics of the singularity which moved beyond politics that drew on forms of temporality for its legitimation? In other words, how could a politics of spatiality be articulated and deployed which re-enabled the kind of historical project towards a better future for all that was traditionally associated with leftist thought?

    To do this I want to think through the notion of the “curator” that Jameson disparagingly thinks is an outcome of the singularity in terms of artistic practice and experience. He argues, that today we are faced with the “emblematic figure of the curator, who now becomes the demiurge of those floating and dissolving constellations of strange objects we still call art.” Further,

    there is a nastier side of the curator yet to be mentioned, which can be easily grasped if we look at installations, and indeed entire exhibits in the newer postmodern museums, as having their distant and more primitive ancestors in the happenings of the 1960s—artistic phenomena equally spatial, equally ephemeral. The difference lies not only in the absence of humans from the installation and, save for the curator, from the newer museums as such. It lies in the very presence of the institution itself: everything is subsumed under it, indeed the curator may be said to be something like its embodiment, its allegorical personification. In postmodernity, we no longer exist in a world of human scale: institutions certainly have in some sense become autonomous, but in another they transcend the dimensions of any individual, whether master or servant; something that can also be grasped by reminding ourselves of the dimension of globalization in which institutions today exist, the museum very much included (Jameson 2015: 110-111).

    However, Jameson himself makes an important link between spatiality as the site of a contestation and the making-possible of new spaces, something curatorial practice, with its emphasis on the construction, deployment and design of new forms of space points towards. Indeed, Jameson argues in relation to theoretical constructions, “perhaps a kind of curatorial practice, selecting named bits from our various theoretical or philosophical sources and putting them all together in a kind of conceptual installation, in which we marvel at the new intellectual space thereby momentarily produced” (Jameson 2015: 110).

    In contrast, the question for me is the radical possibilities suggested by this event-like construction of new spaces, and how they can be used to reverse or destabilise the time-axis manipulation of the singularity. The question then becomes: could we tentatively think in terms of a curatorial political practice, which we might call curatorialism? Indeed, could we fill out the ways in which this practice could aim to articulate, assemble and more importantly provide a site for a renewal and (re)articulation of left politics? How could this politics be mobilised into the nitty-gritty of actual political practice, policy, and activist politics, and engender the affective relation that inspires passion around a political programme and suggests itself to the kinds of singularities that inhabit contemporary society? To borrow the language of the singularity itself, how could one articulate a new disruptive left politics?

    dostoevsky on curation
    image source: Curate Meme

    At this early stage of thinking, it seems to me that in the first case we might think about how curatorialism points towards the need to move away from concern with internal consistency in the development of a political programme. Curatorialism gathers its strength from the way in which it provides a political pluralism, an assembling of multiple moments into a political constellation that takes into account and articulates its constituent moments. This is the first step in the mapping of the space of a disruptive left politics. This is the development of a spatial politics in as much as, crucially, the programme calls for a weaving together of multiplicity into this constellational form. Secondly, we might think about the way in which this spatial diagram can then be  translated into a temporal project, that is the transformation of a mapping program into a political programme linked to social change. This requires the capture and illumination of the multiple movements of each moment and re-articulation through a process of reframing the condition of possibility in each constellational movement in terms of a political economy that draws from the historical possibilities that the left has made possible previously, but also the need for new concepts and ideas to link the political of necessity to the huge capacity of a left project towards mitigating/and or replacement of a neoliberal capitalist economic system. Lastly, it seems to me that to be a truly curatorial politics means to link to the singularity itself as a force of strength for left politics, such that the development of a mode of the articulation of individual political needs, is made possible through the curatorial mode, and through the development of disruptive left frameworks that links individual need, social justice, institutional support, and left politics that reconnects the passions of interests to the passion for justice and equality with the singularity’s concern with intensification.[1] This can, perhaps, be thought of as the replacement of a left project of ideological purity with a return to the Gramscian notions of strategy and tactics through the deployment of what he called a passive revolution, mobilised partially in the new forms of civil society created through collectivities of singularities within social media, computational devices and the new infrastructures of digital capitalism but also within the through older forms of social institutions, political contestations and education.[2]
    _____

    David M. Berry is Reader in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. He writes widely on computation and the digital and blogs at Stunlaw. He is the author of Critical Theory and the Digital, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age , Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, editor of Understanding Digital Humanities and co-editor of Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation And Design. He is also a Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab.

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    Notes

    [1] This remains a tentative articulation that is inspired by the power of knowledge-based economies both to create the conditions of singularity through the action of time-axis manipulation (media technologies), but also their (arguably) countervailing power to provide the tools, spaces and practices for the contestation of the singularity connected only with a neoliberal political moment. That is, how can these new concept and ideas, together with the frameworks that are suggested in their mobilisation, provide new means of contestation, sociality and broader connections of commonality and political praxis.

    [2] I leave to a later paper the detailed discussion of the possible subjectivities both in and for themselves within a framework of a curatorial politics. But here I am gesturing towards political parties as the curators of programmes of political goals and ends, able then to use the state as a curatorial enabler of such a political programme. This includes the active development of the individuation of political singularities within such a curatorial framework.

    Bibliography

    Jameson, Fredric. 2015. “The Aesthetics of Singularity.” New Left Review, No. 92 (March-April 2015).

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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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  • The Man Who Loved His Laptop

    The Man Who Loved His Laptop

    Her (2013)a review of Spike Jonze (dir.), Her (2013)
    by Mike Bulajewski
    ~
    I’m told by my sister, who is married to a French man, that the French don’t say “I love you”—or at least they don’t say it often. Perhaps they think the words are superfluous and it’s the behavior of the person you are in a relationship with tells you everything. Americans, on the other hand, say it to everyone—lovers, spouses, friends, parents, grandparents, children, pets—and as often as possible, as if quantity matters most. The declaration is also an event. For two people beginning a relationship, it marks a turning point and a new stage in the relationship.

    If you aren’t American, you may not have realized that relationships have stages. In America, they do. It’s complicated. First there are the three main thresholds of commitment: Dating, Exclusive Dating, then of course Marriage. There are three lesser pre-Dating stages: Just Talking, Hooking Up and Friends with Benefits; and one minor stage between Dating and Exclusive called Pretty Much Exclusive. Within Dating, there are several minor substages: number of dates (often counted up to the third date) and increments of physical intimacy denoted according to the well-known baseball metaphor of first, second, third and home base.

    There are also a number of rituals that indicate progress: updating of Facebook relationship statuses; leaving a toothbrush at each other’s houses; the aforementioned exchange of I-love-you’s; taking a vacation together; meeting the parents; exchange of house keys; and so on. When people, especially unmarried people talk about relationships, often the first questions are about these stages and rituals. In France the system is apparently much less codified. One convention not present in the United States is that romantic interest is signaled when a man invites a woman to go for a walk with him.

    The point is two-fold: first, although Americans admire and often think of French culture as holding up a standard for what romance ought to be, Americans act nothing like the French in relationships and in fact know very little about how they work in France. Second and more importantly, in American culture love is widely understood as spontaneous and unpredictable, and yet there is also an opposite and often unacknowledged expectation that relationships follow well-defined rules and rituals.

    This contradiction might explain the great public clamor over romance apps like Romantimatic and BroApp that automatically send your significant other romantic messages, either predefined or your own creation, at regular intervals—what philosopher of technology Evan Selinger calls (and not without justification) apps that outsource our humanity.

    Reviewers of these apps were unanimous in their disapproval, disagreeing only on where to locate them on a spectrum between pretty bad and sociopathic. Among all the labor-saving apps and devices, why should this one in particular be singled out for opprobrium?

    Perhaps one reason for the outcry is that they expose an uncomfortable truth about how easily romance can be automated. Something we believe is so intimate is revealed as routine and predictable. What does it say about our relationship needs that the right time to send a loving message to your significant other can be reduced to an algorithm?

    The routinization of American relationships first struck me in the context of this little-known fact about how seldom French people say “I love you.” If you had to launch one of these romance apps in France, it wouldn’t be enough to just translate the prewritten phrases into French. You’d have to research French romantic relationships and discover what are the most common phrases—if there are any—and how frequently text messages are used for this purpose. It’s possible that French people are too unpredictable, or never use text messages for romantic purposes, so the app is just not feasible in France.

    Romance is culturally determined. That American romance can be so easily automated reveals how standardized and even scheduled relationships already are. Selinger’s argument that automated romance undermines our humanity has some merit, but why stop with apps? Why not address the problem at a more fundamental level and critique the standardized courtship system that regulates romance. Doesn’t this also outsource our humanity?

    The best-selling relationship advice book The 5 Love Languages claims that everyone understands one of five love “languages” and the key to a happy relationship for each partner to learn to express love in the correct language. Should we be surprised if the more technically minded among us concludes that the problem of love can be solved with technology? Why not try to determine the precise syntax and semantics of these love languages, and attempt to express them rigorously and unambiguously in the same way that computer languages and communications protocols are? Can love be reduced to grammar?

    Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) tells the story of Theodore Twombly, a soon-to-be divorced writer who falls in love with Samantha, an AI operating system who far exceeds the abilities of today’s natural language assistants like Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. Samantha is not only hyper-intelligent, she’s also capable of laughter, telling jokes, picking up on subtle unspoken interpersonal cues, feeling and communicating her own emotions, and so on. Theodore falls in love with her, but there is no sense that their relationship is deficient because she’s not human. She is as emotionally expressive as any human partner, at least on film.

    Theodore works for a company called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com as a professional Cyrano de Bergerac (or perhaps a human Romantimatic), ghostwriting heartfelt “handwritten” letters on behalf of this clients. It’s an ironic twist: Samantha is his simulated girlfriend, a role which he himself adopts at work by simulating the feelings of his clients. The film opens with Theodore at his desk at work, narrating a letter from a wife to her husband on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. He is a master of the conventions of the love letter. Later in the film, his work is discovered by a literary agent, and he gets an offer to have book published of his best work.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxahbnUCZxY&w=560&h=315]

    But for all his (alleged) expertise as a romantic writer, Theodore is lonely, emotionally stunted, ambivalent towards the women in his life, and—at least before meeting Samantha—apparently incapable of maintaining relationships since he separated from his ex-wife Catherine. Highly sensitive, he is disturbed by encounters with women that go off the script: a phone sex encounter goes awry when the woman demands that he enact her bizarre fantasy of being choked with a dead cat; and on a date with a woman one night, she exposes a little too much vulnerability and drunkenly expresses her fear that he won’t call her. He abruptly and awkwardly ends the date.

    Theodore wanders aimlessly through the high tech city as if it is empty. With headphones always on, he’s withdrawn, cocooned in a private sonic bubble. He interacts with his device through voice, asking it to play melancholy songs and skipping angry messages from his attorney demanding that he sign the divorce papers already. At times, he daydreams of happier times when he and his ex-wife were together and tells Samantha how much he liked being married. At first it seems that Catherine left him. We wonder if he withdrew from the pain of his heartbreak. But soon a different picture emerges. When they finally meet to sign the divorce papers over lunch, Catherine accuses him of not being able to handle her emotions and reveals that he tried to get her on Prozac. She says to him “I always felt like you wished I could just be a happy, light, everything’s great, bouncy L.A. wife. But that’s not me.”

    So Theodore’s avoidance of real challenges and emotions in relationships turns out to be an ongoing problem—the cause, not the consequence, of his divorce. Starting a relationship with his operating systems Samantha is his latest retreat from reality—not from physical reality, but from the virtual reality of authentic intersubjective contact.

    Unlike his other relationships, Samantha is perfectly customized to his needs. She speaks his “love language.” Today we personalize our operating system and fill out online dating profile specifying exactly what kind of person we’re looking for. When Theodore installs Samantha on his computer for the first time, the two operations are combined with a single question. The system asks him how he would describe his relationship with his mother. He begins to reply with psychological banalities about how she is insufficiently attuned to his needs, and it quickly stops him, already knowing what he’s about. And so do we.

    That Theodore is selfish doesn’t mean that he is unfeeling, unkind, insensitive, conceited or uninterested in his new partners thoughts, feelings and goals. His selfishness is the kind that’s approved and even encouraged today, the ethically consistent selfishness that respects the right of others to be equally selfish. What he wants most of all is to be comfortable, to feel good, and that requires a partner who speaks his love language and nothing else, someone who says nothing that would veer off-script and reveal too many disturbing details. More precisely, Theodore wants someone who speaks what Lacan called empty speech: speech that obstructs the revelation of the subject’s traumatic desire.

    Objectification is a traditional problem between men and women. Men reduce women to mere bodies or body parts that exist only for sexual gratification, treating them as sex objects rather than people. The dichotomy is between the physical as the domain of materiality, animality and sex on one hand, and the spiritual realm of subjectivity, personality, agency and the soul on the other. If objectification eliminates the soul, then Theodore engages in something like the opposite, a subjectification which eradicates the body. Samantha is just a personality.

    Technology writer Nicholas Carr‘s new book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (Norton, 2014) investigates the ways that automation and artificial intelligence dull our cognitive capacities. Her can be read as a speculative treatment of the same idea as it relates to emotion. What if the difficulty of relationships could be automated away? The film’s brilliant provocation is that it shows us a lonely, hollow world mediated through technology but nonetheless awash in sentimentality. It thwarts our expectations that algorithmically-generated emotion would be as stilted and artificial as today’s speech synthesizers. Samantha’s voice is warm, soulful, relatable and expressive. She’s real, and the feelings she triggers in Theodore are real.

    But real feelings with real sensations can also be shallow. As Maria Bustillo notes, Theodore is an awful writer, at least by today’s standards. Here’s the kind of prose that wins him accolades from everyone around him:

    I remember when I first started to fall in love with you like it was last night. Lying naked beside you in that tiny apartment, it suddenly hit me that I was part of this whole larger thing, just like our parents, and our parents’ parents. Before that I was just living my life like I knew everything, and suddenly this bright light hit me and woke me up. That light was you.

    In spite of this, we’re led to believe that Theodore is some kind of literary genius. Various people in his life compliment him on his skill and the editor of the publishing company who wants to publish his work emails to tell him how moved he and his wife were when they read them. What kind of society would treat such pedestrian writing as unusual, profound or impressive? And what is the average person’s writing like if Theodore’s services are worth paying for?

    Recall the cult favorite Idiocracy (2006) directed by Mike Judge, a science fiction satire set in a futuristic dystopia where anti-intellectualism is rampant and society has descended into stupidity. We can’t help but conclude that Her offers a glimpse into a society that has undergone a similar devolution into both emotional and literary idiocy.

    _____

    Mike Bulajewski (@mrteacup) is a user experience designer with a Master’s degree from University of Washington’s Human Centered Design and Engineering program. He writes about technology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, design, ideology & Slavoj Žižek at MrTeacup.org, where an earlier version of this review first appeared.

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  • Our Very Own Francis Bacon

    Our Very Own Francis Bacon

    Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Futurea review of Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
    by LM Sacasas
    ~

    Few individuals have done as much to chart the course of science and technology in the modern world as the the Elizabethan statesmen and intellectual, Francis Bacon. But Bacon’s defining achievement was not, strictly speaking, scientific or technological. Rather, Bacon’s achievement lay in the realm of human affairs we would today refer to as “public relations.” Bacon’s genius was Draper-esque: he wove together a compelling story about the place of techno-science in human affairs from the loose threads of post-Reformation religious and political culture and the scientific breakthroughs we loosely group together as the Scientific Revolution.

    In story he told, knowledge mattered only insofar as it yielded power (the well-known formulation, “knowledge is power,” is Bacon’s), and that power mattered only insofar as it was directed toward “the relief of man’s estate.” To put that less archaically, we might say “the improvement of our quality of life.” But putting it that way obscures the theological overtones of Bacon’s formulation and its allusion to the curse under which humanity labored as a consequence of the Fall in the Christian understanding of the human condition. Our problem was both spiritual and material, and Bacon believed that in his day both facets of that problem were being solved. The improvement of humanity’s physical condition went hand in hand with the restoration of true religion occasioned by the English Reformation, and together they would lead straight to the full restoration of creation.

    Bacon’s significance, then, lay in merging science and technology into one techno-scientific project and synthesizing this emerging project with the dominant world picture, thus charting it’s course and securing its prestige. It is just this sort of expansive vision driving technological development that I’ve had in mind in my recent Frailest Thing posts (here and here) regarding culture, technology, and innovation.

    My recent posts have also mentioned the entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who is increasingly assuming the role of Silicon Valley’s leading public intellectual–the Sage of Silicon Valley, if you will. This morning, I was re-affirmed in that evaluation of Thiel’s position by a pair of posts by political philosopher, Peter Lawler. In the first of these posts, Lawler comments on Thiel’s seeming ubiquity in certain circles, and he rehearses some of the by-now familiar aspects of Thiel’s intellectual affinities, notably for the sociologist cum philosopher and Stanford professor René Girard (Thiel expounds on Girard in this video) and the right-wing political theorist Leo Strauss (whom Thiel praises in this interview on the National Review). Chiefly, Lawler discusses Thiel’s flirtations with transhumanism, particularly in his recently released Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, a distilled version of Thiel’s 2012 lecture course on start-ups at Stanford University.

    (The book was prepared with Blake Masters, who had previously made available detailed notes on Thiel’s course. I’ll mention in passing that that tag line on Masters’ website runs as follows: “Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.”)

    Francis Bacon

    As it turns out, Francis Bacon makes a notable appearance in Thiel’s work. Here is Lawler summarizing that portion of the book:

    “In the chapter entitled ‘You Are Not a Lottery Ticket,’ Thiel writes of Francis Bacon’s modern project, which places “prolongation of life” as the noblest branch of medicine, as well the main point of the techno-development of science. That prolongation is at the core of the definite optimism that should drive ‘the intelligent design’ at the foundation of technological development. We (especially we founders) should do everything we can “to prioritize design over chance.” We should do everything we can to remove contingency from existence, especially, of course, each of our personal existences.”

    The “intelligent design” in view has nothing to do, so far as I can tell, with the theory of human origins that is the most common referent for that phrase. Rather, it is Thiel’s way of labeling the forces of consciously deployed thought and work striving to bring order out of the chaos of contingency. Intelligent design is how human beings assert control and achieve mastery over their world and their lives, and that is an explicitly Baconian chord to strike.

    Thiel, worried by the technological stagnation he believes has set in over the last forty or so years, is seeking to reanimate the technological project by once again infusing it with an expansive, dare we say mythic, vision of its place in human affairs. It may not be too much of a stretch to say that he is seeking to play the role of Francis Bacon for our age.

    Like Bacon, Thiel is attempting to fuse the disparate strands of emerging technologies together into a coherent narrative of grandiose scale. And his story, like Bacon’s, features distinctly theological undertones. The chief difference may be this: whereas the defining institution of the early modern period was the nation-state, itself a powerful innovation of the period, the defining institution in Thiel’s vision is the start-up. As Lawler puts it, “the startup has replaced the country as the object of the highest human ambition. And that’s the foundation of the future that comes from being ruled by the intelligent designers who are Silicon Valley founders.”

    Lawler is right to conclude that “Peter Thiel has emerged as the most resolute and most imaginative defender of the distinctively modern part of Western civilization.” Bacon was, after all, one of the intellectual founders of modernity, on par, I would say, with the likes of Descartes and Locke. But, Lawler adds,

    “that doesn’t mean that, when it comes to the libertarian displacement of the nation by the startup and the abolition of all contingency from particular personal lives, his imagination and his self-importance don’t trump his astuteness. They do. His theology of liberation is that we, made in the image of God, can do for ourselves what the Biblical Creator promised—free ourselves from the misery of being self-conscious mortals dependent on forces beyond our control.”

    And that is, as Lawler notes in his follow-up post, a rather ancient aspiration. Indeed, Thiel, who professes an admittedly heterodox variety of Christianity, may do well to remember that to say we are made in the image of God is one way of saying we are not, the Whole Earth Catalog notwithstanding, gods ourselves. This, it would seem, is a hard lesson to learn.

    _______________________________

    Update: On Twitter, I was made aware of a talk by Thiel at SXSW in 2013 on the topic of the chapter discussed above. Here it is (via @carlamomo).

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZM_JmZdqCw?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent]

    _____

    LM Sacasas (@frailesthing) is a PhD student in the Texts and Technology program at the University of Central Florida. He maintains the blog “The Frailest Thing,” on which this post first appeared. He is the author of the ebook The Tourist and The Pilgrim: Essays on Life and Technology in the Digital Age (Amazon Kindle, 2013).

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