Mapping the Posthuman (Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture) [1 ed.] 1032334614, 9781032334615

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: An Orientation
Part I ELIZA (1964–1966)
Chapter 1 Posthuman Bodies: Why They (Still) Matter
Chapter 2 Quantum Machine Intelligence
Chapter 3 Berty
Chapter 4 Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop
Chapter 5 An Object Misplaced in Time
Part II Anansi (1526)
Chapter 6 An Interview with Rosi Braidotti
Chapter 7 Technogenesis as White Mythology
Chapter 8 The First VIRS
Chapter 9 In the Lap of the Synth
Chapter 10 Utopianism in the Technological Age
Part III R.U.Radius (1921)
Chapter 11 Raised by Robots: Imagining Posthuman “Maternal” Touch
Chapter 12 Tender Bodies
Chapter 13 Smartwatch
Chapter 14 The Tablet Stroker, Redux
Chapter 15 CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY: A Reflection on Machines, Meanings, and Metaphors
Chapter 16 Biospheres
Part IV Anansi, Reprised (1526)
Chapter 17 Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics
Chapter 18 The World After, Lost Eons
Chapter 19 Hello, World! Hello, Poetic Zombies!
Chapter 20 Foreign Bodies
Chapter 21 Melanin Object
Chapter 22 An Interview with Jes Fan
Part V Potnia Theron (6000 BC)
Chapter 23 Beyond Transcendence: From “human” to “Human” in Tchaikovsky’s Children Series
Chapter 24 Scoby skin, Yellow soup
Chapter 25 Posthuman Spirituality
Chapter 26 The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay: Intersecting Technology and Folk Belief in Posthuman Spirituality
Chapter 27 Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities: Staying with Environmental Violence, Ecological Grief, and the Trouble of Consumption
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Mapping the Posthuman

This book works to delineate some of the major routes by which science and art intersect. Structured according to the origin myths of the posthuman that continue to shape the idea of the human in our technological modernity, this volume gives space to narratives of alter-modernity that resonate with Ursula K. Le Guin’s call for a new kind of story which exposes the violence and exploitation driven by a sustained belief in human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, and cultural superiority. In this context, the posthuman myths of multispecies flourishing given in this collection, which are situated across a range of historical times and locations, and media and modalities, are to be thought of as kernels of possible futures that can only be realized through collective endeavour. Grant Hamilton is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He teaches and writes in the areas of literary theory, twentieth-century world literatures, African literature, and computational literary studies. He is the author of The London Object (2021), The World of Failing Machines (2016), and On Representation (2011). He is the co-editor of A Companion to Mia Couto (2016), and editor of Reading Marechera (2013). Carolyn Lau teaches and researches on global speculative fictions, contemporary literature, and narrative futures in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Posthuman Subjectivity in the Novels of J.G. Ballard (2023).

Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture Series Editor: Karen Raber University of Mississippi, USA

Literary and cultural criticism has ventured into a brave new world in recent decades: posthumanism, ecocriticism, critical animal studies, the new materialisms, the new vitalism, and other related approaches have transformed the critical environment, reinvigorating our encounters with familiar texts, and inviting us to take note of new or neglected ones. A vast array of non-human creatures, things, and forces are now emerging as important agents in their own right. Inspired by human concern for an ailing planet, ecocriticism has grappled with the question of how important works of art can be to the preservation of something we have traditionally called “nature.” Yet literature’s capacity to take us on unexpected journeys through the networks of affiliation and affinity we share with the earth on which we dwell—and without which we die—and to confront us with the drama of our common struggle to survive and thrive has not diminished in the face of what Lyn White Jr. called “our ecological crisis.” From animals to androids, non-human creatures and objects populate critical analyses in increasingly complex ways, complicating our conception of the cosmos by dethroning the individual subject and dismantling the comfortable categories through which we have interpreted our existence. Until now, however, the elements that compose this wave of scholarship on non-human entities have had limited places to gather to be nurtured as a collective project. “Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture” provides that local habitation. In this series, readers will find creatures of all descriptions, as well as every other form of biological life; they will also meet the non-biological, the microscopic, the ethereal, the intangible. It is our goal for the series to provide an encounter zone where all forms of human engagement with the non-human in all periods and national literatures can be explored, and where the discoveries that result can speak to one another, as well as to scholars and students. Mapping the Posthuman Edited by Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau For more information about this series, please visit: www​.routledge​.com​ /Perspectives​-on​-the​-Non​-Human​-in​-Literature​-and​-Culture​/book​-series​/ PNHLC

Mapping the Posthuman

Edited by Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau

Designed cover image: © Getty Images | DKosig First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hamilton, Grant, editor. | Lau, Carolyn, 1990- editor. Title: Mapping the posthuman / edited by Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Perspectives on the non-human in literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023020794 (print) | LCCN 2023020795 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032334615 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032345239 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003322603 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Posthumanism in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays. Classification: LCC PN56.P556 M37 2023 (print) | LCC PN56.P556 (ebook) | DDC 809/.93353--dc23/eng/20230629 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020794 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020795 ISBN: 9781032334615 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032345239 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003322603 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603 Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Vincent & For M.H.4

Contents

List of Figures x List of Contributors xi Acknowledgements xiv

Introduction: An Orientation

1

GRANT HAMILTON AND CAROLYN LAU

PART I

ELIZA (1964–1966) 1 Posthuman Bodies: Why They (Still) Matter

25 29

N. KATHERINE HAYLES

2 Quantum Machine Intelligence

49

ALESSANDRA DI PIERRO AND LUCA VIGANÒ

3 Berty

56

ANGELA SU

4 Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop

61

KENNY K.N. CHOW

5 An Object Misplaced in Time

77

JULE OWEN

PART II

Anansi (1526) 6 An Interview with Rosi Braidotti

81 85

GRANT HAMILTON, CAROLYN LAU, AND ROSI BRAIDOTTI



viii Contents 7 Technogenesis as White Mythology

92

STEPHEN CAVE AND KANTA DIHAL

8 The First VIRS

99

DANBEE KIM

9 In the Lap of the Synth

103

STEPHEN ORAM

10 Utopianism in the Technological Age

107

LIZZIE O’SHEA

PART III

R.U.Radius (1921)

111

11 Raised by Robots: Imagining Posthuman “Maternal” Touch

115

AMELIA DEFALCO AND LUNA DOLEZAL

12 Tender Bodies

133

ZHENG MAHLER

13 Smartwatch

139

JENNIFER L. ROHN

14 The Tablet Stroker, Redux

143

CHRISTINE AICARDI

15 CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY: A Reflection on Machines, Meanings, and Metaphors

151

SANDRA RODRIGUEZ

16 Biospheres

165

TA-WEI CHI, TRANSLATED BY ARI LARISSA HEINRICH

PART IV

Anansi, Reprised (1526)

175

17 Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics

179

CAROLYN LAU

18 The World After, Lost Eons

199

DAVID BLANDY

19 Hello, World! Hello, Poetic Zombies! WINNIE SOON AND SUSAN SCARLATA

203

Contents  ix 20 Foreign Bodies

206

PIPPA GOLDSCHMIDT

21 Melanin Object

213

ARI LARISSA HEINRICH

22 An Interview with Jes Fan

218

ARI LARISSA HEINRICH AND JES FAN

PART V

Potnia Theron (6000 BC)

223

23 Beyond Transcendence: From “human” to “Human” in Tchaikovsky’s Children Series

227

SHERRYL VINT

24 Scoby skin, Yellow soup

245

HSURAE

25 Posthuman Spirituality

253

FRANCESCA FERRANDO AND DEBASHISH BANERJI

26 The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay: Intersecting Technology and Folk Belief in Posthuman Spirituality

258

EVELYN WAN

27 Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities: Staying with Environmental Violence, Ecological Grief, and the Trouble of Consumption

280

CECILIA ÅSBERG AND MARIETTA RADOMSKA

Bibliography 301 Index 326

Figures

3.1 Angela Su, Augustina (2019). Ink on drafting film. 170.6 × 72.1 cm. Private collection 57 3.2 Angela Su, Chimeric Antibodies 1 (2011). Ink on drafting film. 170 × 75 cm. Kadist Art Foundation, France and USA 58 3.3 Angela Su, ䷄ (2013). Ink on drafting film. 225 × 85 cm. Private collection 59 4.1 The interconnection between computer simulation and mental simulation 63 4.2 Lunar Land incrementally lights up from “crescent” to “full moon” based on the number of phones rested on its base 72 12.1 Zheng Mahler, The Master Algorithm (2019) 133 12.2 Zheng Mahler, A Season in Shell (2013–2016) 134 12.3 Zheng Mahler, Mountains of Gold and Silver Are Not as Good as Mountains of Green and Blue (2020) 135 12.4 Zheng Mahler, Bubalus bubalis 16hz–40,000hz (2021) 136 15.1 CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY VR installation picture – VR experience with physical monolith 151 15.2 A VR screenshot of the CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY experience 157 19.1 readme.SpamPoem: A Room In Your Dream 204 19.2 readme.SpamPoem: Just Rent the Data 204 19.3 readme.SpamPoem: Before I Was Confused 205 19.4 readmeSpamPoem: Make Your Site Erect 205 21.1 Xenophoria (2020) 214 24.1 Two single-celled organisms 245 24.2 Passport skin 247 24.3 The body without skin 249 24.4 The coprolite 251



Contributors

Christine Aicardi  Senior Research Fellow in Science, Technology and Society at King’s College London, UK. Cecilia Åsberg  Professor and Chair of Gender, Nature, Culture at Tema Genus, Linköping University, Sweden. Director of the multi-university research group the Posthumanities Hub. Debashish Banerji  Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and the Doshi Professor of Asian Art at the California Institute of Integral Studies, USA. David Blandy  Artist based in London and Brighton, UK, who works with the image in the digital world. Rosi Braidotti  Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Stephen Cave  Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Philosophy, and Fellow of Hughes Hall at the University of Cambridge, UK. Ta-wei Chi  Writer and Associate Professor of Taiwanese Literature at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Kenny K.N. Chow  Associate Professor in the College of Communication at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Amelia DeFalco  Professor of Contemporary Literature in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. Alessandra Di Pierro  Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Verona, Italy. Kanta Dihal  Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, UK.



xii Contributors Luna Dolezal  Professor of Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter, UK. Jes Fan  Artist born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, USA. Francesca Ferrando  Professor of Philosophy at New York University’s School of Liberal Studies and Co-Founder of the Global Posthuman Network. Pippa Goldschmidt  Fiction writer based in Berlin, Germany. Grant Hamilton  Associate Professor of English Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. N. Katherine Hayles  James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature at Duke University, USA. Ari Larissa Heinrich  Professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. HSURAE  Artist and educator from Taipei, Taiwan, currently based in New York, USA, and teaching at the New School, New York University, and the School of Visual Arts New York City. Danbee Kim  Field neuroscientist, teacher, and author. Carolyn Lau  Lecturer in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lizzie O’Shea  Lawyer, activist, founder, and Chair of Digital Rights Watch, and author of Future Histories (2019). Stephen Oram  Author of two novels, Fluence (2015) and Quantum Confessions (2014), and three collections of sci-fi shorts, Extracting Humanity (2023), Biohacked & Begging (2019), and Eating Robots (2017). Jule Owen  Author and technologist. Marietta Radomska  Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, and Founding Director of the Eco- and Bioart Lab. Sandra Rodriguez  Lecturer and Visiting Scholar at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, USA. Jennifer Rohn  Novelist, Professor and Head of the Centre for Urological Biology at University College London, UK.

Contributors  xiii Susan Scarlata  Taught most recently at the Savannah College of Art & Design in Hong Kong. She is a published author and has worked as a speechwriter, editor, and communications director. Winnie Soon  Hong Kong-born artist, coder, Course Leader at Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London, and Associate Professor in the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. Angela Su  Hong Kong artist whose work investigates the perception and imagery of the body through metamorphosis, hybridity, and transformation. Luca Viganò  Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Cyber­ security Group, Department of Informatics, King’s College London, UK. Sherryl Vint  Director of Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program and Professor of Media & Cultural Studies and English at the University of California, Riverside, USA. Evelyn Wan  Assistant Professor of Media, Arts, and Society in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Zheng Mahler  An artist (Royce Ng) and anthropologist (Daisy Bisenieks) art duo based in Hong Kong that collaboratively examines the mutual influence and relational networks connecting global trade, nature, and technology.

Acknowledgements

This project was conceived and begun during the early days of the COVID pandemic. For overcoming the profound challenges made both to private and working likes, the editors would first like to acknowledge the professionalism, resilience, bonhomie, and—perhaps above all else—patience of the contributors to this volume. As an interdisciplinary project, this book benefits from artwork that some contributors have graciously allowed us to reprint. To this end, we would like to thank Angela Su and Blindspot Gallery for granting permission to reprint Augustina (2019), Chimeric Antibodies 1 (2011), ䷄ (2013); Kenny K.N. Chow for permission to reprint images of “Lunar Land”; Dr Danbee Kim, PhD for granting permission to reprint pages 136–139 of the graphic novel The First VIRS (2021); the art duo Zheng Mahler for permission to reprint The Master Algorithm (2019), A Season in Shell (2013–2016), Mountains of Gold and Silver are Not as Good as Mountains of Green and Blue (2020), and Bubalus bubalis 16hz–40,000hz (2021); Sandra Rodriguez, National Film Board of Canada, and SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER for granting permission to reprint images of the CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY virtual reality installation; David Blandy for granting permission to reprint four pages from the manual to his role-playing game, The World After: Lost Eons (2021); Winnie Soon and Susan Scarlata for permission to reprint “A Room In Your Dream,” “Just Rent the Data,” “Before I Was Confused,” and “Make Your Site Erect” from their artwork, readme.SpamPoem; Jess Fan and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong for permission to use a still from Xenophoria (2020); and HSURAE for permission to reprint images of her artworks “Two single-celled organisms,” “Passport skin,” “The body without skin,” and “The coprolite.” Finally, Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska would like to note that their research was generously supported by FORMAS – A Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development [grant number 2022-01728].



Introduction An Orientation Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau

In the popular imagination, the posthuman has come to signal an end of things. It is the figure that emerges from the common misgiving that a science which ignored Mary Shelley’s early warnings has unleashed an uncontrollable and irreversible technological future on humanity.1 Call it “the singularity.”2 Such an irrepressible technology is not quite with us, even though most feel the gravity of its approach.3 But when it finally does arrive, the singularity will beckon a new age. The subtitle of American futurist Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near makes clear the limen of such a new age – it will be “When Humans Transcend Biology” (Kurzweil 2005). Importantly, it is this post-biological future for the human that most equate with the notion of the posthuman. For some, it is a utopian state of being to be embraced,4 while for others it is an emergent dystopian future to be resisted.5 Either way, the posthuman is seen to emerge at the expense of the human form. While the posthuman does indeed signal an end of things, it does not signal the literal end of the human in a post-biological future. That is the fever-dream of transhumanism.6 Rather, the posthuman announces the end to a particular way of thinking the human. In this new economy of thought, the posthuman is that which arises from the ashes of a liberal humanist subject that necessarily gives way under the revisionary analysis of what it means to be human in the context of the naturecultures and mediacultures which describe late capitalism.7 Regardless of the particular inflection that one has in mind,8 posthuman thought – posthumanism – rarely recalls the ablative vision of the future found in culturally conservative critiques of this mode of enquiry. The challenge to human nature and human value(s) that critics such as Francis Fukuyama think of as an existential threat to human life is precisely the means by which posthuman thought proves itself to proceed by catenation.9 In stark contrast to the caricature of a deleterious intellectual phenomenon that strips humanity away from the human, posthumanism in fact looks to lengthen, broaden,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-1

2  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau and deepen the idea of the human as it was initially imagined and penned by European Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment thinkers. The charge made by posthuman critics, writers, and artists is that the image of the human that emerges from humanism is one that is shot through with unacknowledged and exclusionary prejudices and assumptions.10 Being careful to maintain the important distinction between a humanism understood as “a set of themes” and the Enlightenment understood as “a set of events and complex historical processes,” Michel Foucault reminds us that regardless of intention: it is a fact that, at least since the seventeenth century, what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion, science, or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is, after all, obliged to take recourse. (Foucault 1984, 44) Rosi Braidotti makes clear the consequence of this culturally modulated constitution of the supposedly universal notion of the human in the opening sentences of her book The Posthuman: Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that. Some of us are not even considered fully human now, let alone at previous moments of Western social, political and scientific history. Not if by “human” we mean that creature familiar to us from the Enlightenment and its legacy. (Braidotti 2013, 1) That the reference has always been to “Man” perhaps makes the point a little too quickly; it certainly overwrites the complex inheritance of exclusion that makes its way to us through humanism. A little later in the same book, Braidotti patiently explains how the classical idea of “man as the measure of all things” set the standards for both individuals and cultures. In this way, humanism developed into a model for civilization that allowed Hegel to figure Europe as “not just a geo-political location, but rather a universal attribute of the human mind” (Braidotti 2013, 14). Once understood like this, Europe announced itself as the site of a critical consciousness that organized a “universal” logic of identity and otherness.11 Such a logic posited difference as pejorative, and in so doing exposed the imperialistic extension of humanism. “All Humanisms, until now, have been imperial,” Tony Davies writes. “They speak of the human in the accents and the interests of a class, a sex, a race, a genome” (Davies 1997, 131). Put another way, an always male, European, rational humanism suffocates

Introduction  3 “the sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, who are reduced to the less than human status of disposable bodies” (Braidotti 2013, 15). Posthuman thought works to confront this imperialistic aspect of humanism and, as such, looks to enfranchize those “others” lost to the epistemic assumptions that have underscored the dominant ways of thinking in Europe since at least the sixteenth century. As a mode of critique, posthumanism typically begins with the proposition that the human as most understand the figure today only emerged through and after the work of Immanuel Kant. As Michel Foucault makes clear in The Order of Things, Kant’s work marked an important transition in understanding the limits of thought itself. Whereas previous generations had thought of knowledge production as either a matter of resemblance between things (Renaissance thought) or the employ of ideas to represent the object of thought (Classical thought),12 Kant maintained that knowledge might (at times) begin in something other than representation.13 Indeed, this is the root to Kant’s interest in the notion of a transcendental subjectivity.14 However, writers such as Johann Gottfried Herder had already been exploring the possibility that knowledge had its foundation in something other than representation. Herder’s early work, such as On Diligence in Several Learned Languages (1764) and Fragments on Recent German Literature (1767–1768),15 argued that the very ideas that powered representation were in fact dependent on language itself. This meant that as language changed over time, so did the ideas that were made possible. Thought of like this, knowledge became an historically bounded and therefore eminently transient and pliable (rather than universal) phenomenon. It is in this context of a more elastic account of knowledge that Foucault organizes his critique of the idea of “Man.” While the human has always been the locus of knowledge,16 it took the work of Kant to formalize it as an epistemological concept.17 Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656), the very painting that initiates Foucault’s investigation into the human sciences, shows the painter in the painting, the object become subject, absence inhabited. In short, it shows the composer as the composed, and the resultant complex deformation and deflation of both.18 This is the epistemological concept of the human to which Foucault refers – the Kantian transcendental subject and empirical object which is at the same time both the locus and source of representation – when he makes his infamous claim: Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist – any more than the potency of life, the fecundity of labour, or the historical density of language. He is a quite recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago. (Foucault 2005, 336)

4  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau So it is not that Man did not exist before Kant because there was no idea of the human as a species or as a private, social, or political being, but because there simply was no sense of the human as simultaneously the subject and object, the founded and founding, of a particular arrangement of knowledge. But such an observation concerning the relatively young age of Man does not capture the full significance of this provocative statement. When Foucault writes that the human is fabricated by the “demiurge of knowledge,” he makes clear that every idea of the human has always been invented as a consequence of the episteme of the age. Understood broadly as an epistemological field which largely operates below the limen of consciousness but nonetheless forms the condition of possibility for knowledge itself (Foucault 2005, xxiii–xxiv), it is the episteme which mutates over time, and in so doing makes possible radically different configurations of the human. Thus, our changing ideas of the human have simply been “the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge” (Foucault 2005, 422). Importantly, it is just such a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge that those who conceptualize the posthuman have detected. Over the years there have been many and various attempts to outline the changing conditions of possibility for knowledge in the era of late capitalism,19 but this volume follows the work begun by Ihab Hassan. As early as 1977, Hassan was sketching the contours of an emergent episteme in his remarkable and (remarkably) flamboyant essay “Prometheus as Performer.” Contending that “the human form – including human desire and all its external representations – may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned,” Hassan continues: We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism. The figure of Vitruvian Man, arms and legs defining the measure of all things, so marvellously drawn by Leonardo, has broken through its enclosing circle and square, and spread across the cosmos. (Hassan 1977, 843) For Hassan, the convergence of imagination and science (written otherwise as the convergence of myth and technology) in the collective consciousness of those embroiled in the cultures of late capitalism has conditioned the core of a new episteme that heralds the transmutation of the “human form.” “Both imagination and science are agents of change, crucibles of values,” Hassan reminds us, “modes not only of representation but also transformation.” And as such, “their interplay may be the vital performing principle in culture and consciousness – a key to posthumanism” (Hassan

Introduction  5 1977, 838). It is certainly a key to the notion of posthumanism that this volume explores. Hassan’s sense of posthumanism sits in a genealogy of the term that finds its crucial moment of unfolding in the new physics of the twentieth century. Quantum mechanics strategically abandoned the three fundamental laws of logic in pursuit of what have become the most accurate predictive models known to science,20 and in so doing collapsed the previously unnavigable distance between science and art. Unrepentant in its violation of the laws of classical physics, the physics of relativity and quanta unveiled a world that could only be approached by the pioneering scientist who was willing to trade her skills of deduction for what Max Planck called the products of “an artistically creative imagination” (Planck 1950, 109). Moving in an environment in which elementary particles could only be thought of as forming “a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts” (Heisenberg 1989, 128), the new scientist found unanticipated and revelatory knowledge pool in precisely those moments when the scientist became artist,21 and when science no longer ignored the philosophical implications of its findings.22 The science of the artist, a science of “vivid intuitive imagination” (Planck 1950, 109) and restless philosophical reflection, introduced to the world the paradoxes that nonetheless seem to describe the operation of material reality: particle-wave duality, superposition, entanglement, quantum fluctuation …. Indeed, it continues to be exactly these corybantic fictions of the material world that make possible our impulse to reflect on, investigate, and extend the “intimate relationship between man, the fundamental constants of nature, and the initial moments of space and time” (Lovell 1975).23 Put another way, it is the delirious science of the artist that has allowed for “a genuine alteration in our modes of feeling and thought and performance” (Hassan 1977, 844).24 To live alongside, amongst, and within a world of artificial intelligence (AI), genomic editing, global information networks, and quantum supremacy has changed again the way in which we think of ourselves.25 Kant’s figuration of the epistemological concept of Man yields to a transformation that is wrought in response to the birth of a new episteme – one that, in line with Hassan’s suggestion, we ought to call “Posthuman.” If Renaissance thought conceptualized knowledge in relation to a resemblance between things, classical thought positioned it as the representation of things, and modern thought organized it as a function of human finitude, then posthuman thought holds that knowledge has the potential to emerge as a product of the nonhuman or ahuman world.26 Although there are three lines of affect of this kind that converge in the posthuman subject – those drawn from zoe (or “the life of all living things”), bios (or “the life of humans organized in society”), and

6  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau technology (Braidotti 2019, 10) – each can be thought of as the unknown and unknowable product of unsupervised algorithms.27 To this extent, the posthuman episteme is that of the algorithm. Today, knowledge is a product of quiet calculations that are fashioned and executed by computers in the absence of the human.28 It is a literally post-human arrangement of knowledge that engineers new geographies of the posthuman subject.29 Outside of knowledge production, those entangled in the cultures of late capitalism find themselves fully dislocated from Abrahamic notions of human exceptionalism and Renaissance humanist ideals of human perfectibility.30 But at the same time, the posthuman subject finds itself embedded as a fundamental part of, rather than apart from, “the environmental, socio-economic, and affective and psychic dimensions of our ecologies of belonging” (Braidotti 2019b, 32).31 Here, the posthuman knowing subject is an “embodied and embedded, affective and accountable entity” (Braidotti 2019b, 31), which is to say, a subject that acknowledges (even if it does not fully comprehend) its complex relationship with the world. The significance of such an acknowledgement of being-with the world cannot be overstated. Rather than a rehearsal of Martin Heidegger’s Mitsein,32 the posthuman acknowledgement of its own situatedness makes clear that the human species sits in relation not only to itself (anthropos, bios) but to all nonhuman beings (zoe, technology). As such, the a priori transcendental condition of the posthuman subject is disclosed in terms of a radical relationality that can no longer think of living matter (of any kind) as something to be “codified as the exclusive property or the unalienable right of one species […] over all others” (Braidotti 2013, 60). Beingwith the world, the posthuman finds kinship in all things, and in so doing undoes the very possibility of the most rapacious moments of capitalist modernity.33 This then marks the revolutionary potential of the posthuman, even if it is only articulated at times in a minor key. The posthuman compels the reimagining of modernity in light of an affirmative ethics born of a (revitalized) reverence for the networks of relationship in which the posthuman both recognizes and knows itself rather than an ethics of exchange born of the logos of the merchant.34 In this way, the posthuman provides us with a figure by which to enliven the many possibilities unleashed by the range of new futures that it calls forth. Call it a conceptual persona,35 the posthuman is a vehicle of this kind – one that allows us to “ground our powers of understanding within the shifting landscapes of the present” (Braidotti 2013, 75). And so the posthuman inevitably points towards the formation of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called an “altermodernity,” which is to say a vision of modernity that “marks conflict with modernity’s hierarchies” by orienting forces of resistance in such a way

Introduction  7 that they begin to shape a genuine alternative to the hegemonic models of modernity (Hardt and Negri 2009, 102). First in the project to fashion such an altermodernity is the need both to acknowledge those minoritarian subjectivities over-written by Enlightenment thinking and to make the space necessary for exploring the new subjectivities made possible by developments in science and technology. Here, the findings of those working in the overlapping fields of science and technology studies, feminist technoscience studies, and materialist feminism are important.36 Such engagements with science and technology continue to trace the way in which the practice and products of modern science must be understood as “interested,” and because of this recognized as always being in service to hegemonic forces. It is argued that neither the science nor the scientist should be thought of as removed from the messy human world of the political and the ideological. As evolutionary biologist Richard Lowentin has made clear, “Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience” (1991, 1). It is a simple observation, but one that reveals the first chink in the myth of scientific objectivity – science is authored by humans, and no human can be separated from the socio-political concerns of the world in which they live. Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have found that the notion of objectivity, which many continue to understand as an immutable concept, is in fact something that has changed in character across the centuries.37 Under a critical gaze, objectivity falls to the whims of a changing episteme. Scientific practice may put in place checks against the kinds of implicit bias suggested by Lowentin and others, but it would be unthinkable to insist that such biases do not still find their way into modern science. Indeed, this is precisely the claim of those who have begun to pay attention to the increasingly algorithmic nature of the posthuman world. From an emerging body of scholarship within African American studies, it is becoming clear that what have always been supposed to be neutral forms of digital technology are in fact forms with biopolitical consequences that reinforce existing social and racial hierarchies.38 In this vein, Ruha Benjamin has written compellingly of the prevalence of the algorithms that either intentionally or unintentionally favour one particular section of society over another. For Benjamin, the modern technological world is one that has founded a “New Jim Code” – a moniker that purposely recalls the discriminatory injustice of the Jim Crow laws that enforced US segregation. The association is surely an uncomfortable one for modern scientific discourse to acknowledge, but it is one that it must confront and work against if it is to allay fears that it is responsible for continuing to naturalize exclusionary models in the name of objectivity.39

8  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau In staging such critiques of science, posthuman thought moves in step with minority critical discourses which demand a simultaneous reprogramming of biological and cultural constructions of subjectivity and kinship.40 It is a reprogramming that not only carries out the important task of rehistoricizing the Judeo-Christian and Cartesian “Man of Reason,” but also compels one to move towards “a certain ideal of humanism – a dissonant, a non-identitarian, but nonetheless comprehensive and planetary humanism” (Scott and Wynter 2000, 121). As Katherine McKittrick notes, such a planetary humanism undoes the assertions of a biocentric system of knowledge “that assumes we are, totally and completely and purely, biological beings, beholden to evolution and its attendant teleological temporalities” and in so doing instigates a sense of the human that also recognizes that we are “physiological story-makers, both bios and mythoi, who produce fictive evolutionary stories about our biological selves” (McKittrick 2021, 2, n4). In this way, McKittrick restates the importance of storytelling to our sense of what it means to be human, and it is this aspect of the posthuman condition to which this volume pays close attention. Using science fiction as a key pivot within posthuman thought, this book works to delineate some of the major routes by which science and art contact each other. Science fiction is a unique literary genre that consistently reorders the past and the future so that readers can discover new understandings of the present. As Amanda Rees and Iwan Morus note, the significance of science fiction authors like H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, and Aldous Huxley is not to be found in their prescience, but in the fact that: all three writers reflected a particular understanding of science that emerged within a given social context. The key point is that they did not explore their scientific imaginings within an abstracted realm, but situated them, together with their consequences, within a living social world. (2019, 2) Put another way, these are authors who anticipated J.G. Ballard’s call for the composition of “myths of the near future” (1982) – stories of the future that tell us about what it means to be human today. Such myths can only challenge those stories told by a modernity that returns too quickly to an exclusionary Eurocentric, universalist, and hierarchical discourse.41 And in the challenge, new subjectivities, new communities, and new social collectives based on a renewed understanding of the human and its kinship with the nonhuman world are formed. In this context, science fiction seems to function as both a reflection as well as a contribution to what Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Huyn Kim have called “sociotechnical imaginaries,”

Introduction  9 which is to say “instrumental and futuristic […] visions of what is good, desirable, and worth attaining for a political community” (2015, 123). But caution is also necessary here. Ballard is well known for staging the other, darker side of such communities. As Laurence Coupe writes, “the drive towards completion and unity can create not only powerfully imaginative stories, but also systematic violence” (2009, 8), a violence that John Gray has shown emerges at the moment when progressive utopian movements trip over into states of repression (Gray 2008). For this reason, it would be wrong to conclude that posthuman myths of the near future are always expectant. Rather, it is perhaps better to say that they are sanguine – both optimistic and, in acknowledgement of the etymology of the term, also of blood. Nonetheless, as “a disclosure of unprecedented worlds, an opening on to other possible worlds which transcend the established limits of our actual world” (Ricouer 1991, 490), such myths speculate on the otherwise, and in this align with the posthuman impulse to figure new embodied subjectivities from the rhizomic connections of contemporary techno-modernity. That said, rather than thinking of such myths as a point of conclusion in understanding the terrain of the posthuman, one should rather be conscious of the fact that there is “a collective, politically-invested process of sharing in and contributing to the making of myths” (Braidotti 2002, 21–22) that means it is always and already in the process of becoming – of being made, of being shaped, of being figured. This is important to note because, as Donna Haraway reminds us: Figuring is a way of thinking or cogitating or meditating or hanging out with ideas. I’m interested in how figures help us avoid the deadly fantasy of the literal […]. Figures help us avoid the fantasy of “the one true meaning.” They are simultaneously visual and narrative as well as mathematical. They are very sensual. (Kenney and Haraway 2015, 231) This book is structured according to four such mythical aspects of the posthuman that continue to shape the idea of the human in our technological modernity. The stories of these figures are enumerated in the work collected in this volume and together resonate with Ursula K. Le Guin’s call for a new kind of story (1986) – which is to say, a story that challenges a teleological understanding of human history and progress; a story that exposes the violence and exploitation driven by a sustained belief in human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, and cultural superiority. Haraway calls such stories, “stories of becoming-with” (2016, 117) – narratives that recognize the dynamic constitution of entities, and in light of this encourage

10  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau one to think with different cultures and species in order to achieve multispecies flourishing. In this context, the posthuman myths given in this volume, which are situated across a range of historical times and locations, media and modalities, are to be thought of as kernels of possible futures that can only be realized through collective endeavour. It is, then, the immanent revolutionary condition of the posthuman that has exercised the critics, theorists, philosophers, technologists, scientists, and artists who have been brought together in this volume. Each has engaged with a particular dimension of the réseau that both gives rise to the transversal subjectivity of the posthuman and describes the environment in which the posthuman is and acts.42 Under the organizing principle that dates reflect the point of emergence of a particular set of intensities working away within an event,43 the first part of this volume (re)introduces the reader to the period 1964–1966. It was during these years that Joseph Weizenbaum developed a relatively simple software program that by means of pattern matching and substitution algorithms ultimately convinced many users of its intelligence. Named after the ingénue in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, ELIZA played the role of a Rogerian psychotherapist – “speaking” to patients by asking formulaic questions that reflected the patient’s own statements back towards them. In this way, ELIZA became so convincing that practising psychiatrists began to think that the computer program could soon grow into a nearly completely autonomous form of psychotherapy.44 However, dismayed at how readily such professionals had cast the role of therapist as simply “an information processor and decision maker with a set of decision rules which are closely linked to short-range and long-range goals” (Colby et al. 1966, 151) rather than as an engaged human being acting as a healer, Weizenbaum spent the rest of his career considering the darker implications of artificial intelligence. Key to this was trying to understand the intimate emotional attachment that he had witnessed many users develop with ELIZA. About his own secretary, Weizenbaum writes: Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room. (Weizenbaum 1976, 6) For Weizenbaum, this was “clear evidence that people were conversing with the computer as if it were a person who could be appropriately addressed in intimate terms” (1976, 7). And of course, the computer simply was not this kind of “person.” Nonetheless, such episodes of

Introduction  11 intimacy signalled the beginning of a deep communion of human and machine worlds in the twentieth century – a communion that in turn announced a nouveau régime of simulation and (co-)agency which has today opened out into spaces for new domains of knowledge production. Put simply, ELIZA can be thought of as the first step in convincing the contemporary Western subject of the possibility and value of posthuman knowledges.45 For this reason, and if one is allowed a certain degree of latitude, one might reasonably claim that ELIZA was the mother of the unsupervised algorithm – the unsupervised algorithm, that is, which allows for the global technological modernity in which we all sit (however unequally). The second and fourth parts of this volume are given over to the year 1526 and the Akan demi-god Anansi. Known by many names – Hapanzi, Nanzi, Aunt Nancy, Kwaku Ananse, Ba Anansi, Kompa Nanzi, Sis’ Nancy –, this important cultural figure of west Africa is celebrated for bringing stories to the world. But far from being simple moments of entertainment, Anansi’s stories have always been instruments for the dissemination of profound wisdom. Through story, Anansi has not only taught social, moral, and ethical lessons to untold generations of west Africans, but also, to those who carefully listened, the need to confront those in overwhelming positions of power, the need to foster your own quick wit and intelligence, and the need to change your attitude (in all senses of the word) as situations demand. Such are the apodictic truths that sit at the core of Anansi’s stories – the truths that migrated with those Africans who first endured the trauma of the Middle Passage. “In 1526,” so the story of the colonization of the United States is told, “Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon of Spain, with a large number of colonists and slaves, established the colony of San Miguel de Gualdape.” The tale continues: Its exact location is unknown; it was planted along the southeast coast of the United States, somewhere between the Carolinas and Georgia. There are several “firsts” associated with this colony: it was the first colony founded on current US soil; the African slaves were the first imported to the continent (and their uprising was the first slave rebellion in North America); and a ship the colonists constructed was the first built within the present limits of the United States. (Cameron and Vermette 2012, 291) “The first slave rebellion ….” It was almost as if Anansi was whispering into the ears of those who could not forget him. The stories travelled, and the lessons learned long ago matured into an uprising that in turn became a story for future generations – a story that, importantly, allows for a different, competing, competitive, narrative of colonization to erupt alongside

12  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau those told by the hegemon. This is an-Other story, another story, which just through the fact of its being necessarily complicates the royal road to truth traversed by dominant discourses. Here, the uncontested becomes the contested, the absolute becomes relative, and in this way new possibilities attain the potential to trip over into new realities. Such is the importance of storytelling, of mythmaking, to the posthuman project. Czech writer Karel Čapek once told a story by the name of R.U.R., and the third part of this volume returns the reader to the date of its first performance. On 2 January 1921, an unexpecting amateur theatre group based in the ancient city of Hradec Králové gave the world premiere of Rossum’s Universal Robots, a tale of the defeat of humanity by a global robot workforce that has been integrated into every facet of material production. Exposing the nightmarish potential of a technology that at the same time promises the full and final emancipation of the human from a future of labour, Čapek’s play reminds us of the wager that is placed with the release of every new piece of technology. It certainly chimes with what seems to be a deep-seated human suspicion of technological advancement. And to this end, it is eerily resonant with contemporary debates about the emergence of artificial general intelligence (otherwise known as “strong intelligence’) and the pending obsolescence of the human (workforce).46 Such luminaries as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking have all warned of the threat of an AI that would have the capacity to further its own intelligence in a runaway feedback loop of self-improvement. But such proclamations perhaps mistake “both the nature of intelligence and the behaviour of recursively self-augmenting systems” (Chollet 2017). François Chollet, the creator of the hugely influential Keras deep learning library and a main developer of the widely used TensorFlow machine learning framework, explains that the intelligence explosion theory fails to recognize that intelligence is necessarily part of a broader system. He continues: A brain is just a piece of biological tissue, there is nothing intrinsically intelligent about it. Beyond your brain, your body and senses – your sensorimotor affordances – are a fundamental part of your mind. Your environment is a fundamental part of your mind. Human culture is a fundamental part of your mind. These are, after all, where all of your thoughts come from. You cannot dissociate intelligence from the context in which it expresses itself. (Chollet 2017) As such, Chollet insists that the majority of what we consider our intelligence is not actually within our brain, but is instead externalized to our civilization:

Introduction  13 Cognitive prosthetics surround us, plugging into our brain and extending its problem-solving capabilities. Your smartphone. Your laptop. Google search […]. The most fundamental of all cognitive prosthetics is of course language itself – essentially an operating system for cognition, without which we couldn’t think very far. These things are not merely knowledge to be fed to the brain and used by it, they are literally external cognitive processes, non-biological ways to run threads of thought and problem-solving algorithms – across time, space, and importantly, across individuality. (Chollet 2017) The shorthand of this is that “we are our tools” (Chollet 2017), and the contention is that an artificial general intelligence will always lack these aspects of general intelligence. But is Chollet also falling to a certain blindness here? There is the possibility that a machinic intelligence could situate itself in a way that is fundamentally alien to the human imagination. There is the possibility that a machinic intelligence could be “smeared” across the internet in a way that negates the need for external cognitive processes. And there is a possibility that the environmental bottlenecks that seem to have stifled human intelligence simply do not apply to machinic intelligence. Importantly, Chollet penned this essay just before Google announced it had achieved quantum supremacy, which is to say the point at which a quantum computer dramatically outperformed a classical computer in a computational task.47 What other forms of calculation could a super-intelligence conceive that might not even occur to the human mind? Significantly, the robot Radius who leads the rebellion in Čapek’s play does so because he has access to the whole of human knowledge. Placed in charge of a library by the well-meaning Helena so that he “could read everything, understand everything [and] prove to the whole world that Robots are our equals” (Čapek 2004, 37), Radius instead learns of a fundamental compulsion that drives humanity – a compulsion present in the very earliest of written records: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:26–28)

14  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau Literature teaches Radius time and again of the human compulsion to have dominion over the material world, to dominate, to become master. And thus he announces, “I do not want a master. I want to be the master of others. I want to be the master of people” (Čapek 2004, 37).48 Despite Chollet’s confidence, it seems that the wager placed by humanity every time a new piece of technology is released into the world remains firmly in place. The figure of Radius stands as the absolute reminder of such. The final part of this volume leaves the reader at the beginning of things – in 6000 BC with “Our Lady of the Beasts,” the Potnia Theron. The title is one that is thought to have been given first to a Minoan Goddess, but it is a conceptual persona that came to the later Homer from much earlier in the human imagination.49 Potnia Theron refers to a recurrent – or better, insistent – motif in ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern art. In each image, a female figure is seen flanked by (or grasping) two animals. Common wisdom has it that the image captures she “who must be won over to the side of the hunters” (Burkert 1987, 172); she who is “of the whole of wild nature, of the fish of the water, the birds of the air, lions and stags, goats and hares” (Burkert 1987, 149). To court such sympathy for the hunt is seemingly a sentiment so widespread and ingrained in the human psyche that noted German mythologist Walter Burkert felt comfortable enough to suggest that it arose from deep within the Palaeolithic mind (Burkert 1987, 149), and indeed the oldest example of such iconography reaches out to us today in the shape of a baked clay statuette that was fashioned some 8,000 years ago – the “Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük,” a figurine unearthed from Turkish sands by English archaeologist James Mellaart in 1961. But it is the way in which the Potnia Theron seems to place the feminine in the European imagination that has struck a note of interest within posthuman thought.50 Here, the feminine becomes a topological description of the wild – of nature and the world of animals. And so clear is the association that this motif of the divine feminine is allowed to transform at times into a winged form or one with the head of a Gorgon. At its most extreme, Potnia Theron takes the shape of a Rankenfrau or a masked Tendril Goddess, and in this instantiation, she who is herself “wild and uncanny” (Burkert 1987, 149) becomes truly monstrous. But if it becomes difficult to regard the true face of the Potnia Theron in this guise, it is only because of the profound challenge that the form issues to an ontoepistemology that rests on a strong schism between human and nonhuman worlds. The image of the Potnia Theron strides across such divisions. In the marriage of woman and nature, the motif fundamentally stages an acknowledgement of the complex entanglements of human and nonhuman worlds – inextricable entanglements upon which every human ultimately depends for survival. After all, to live is to be successful in the hunt. In this way, the Potnia Theron has carried a message down through the millennia

Introduction  15 for future generations. It is a message that undoes anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism in favour of an ontology of profound situatedness and relationality, a message of human/nonhuman co-dependence. 1964–1966, 1526, 1921, 6000 BC – ELIZA, Anansi, Radius, Potnia Theron – these are some of the fundamental intensities working away within the event of the posthuman. And in order to accommodate such diversity of engagement with the posthuman, this book has by necessity become a map of sorts. Certainly, it presents a collection of features that when read together give the contours of the broad landscape of posthuman thought. But more importantly, it is also a map in the sense outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus: What distinguishes the map […] is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields […]. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12). It is hoped that the book you hold in your hands will be read and used in all of these ways. At every turn, proscription has been abandoned in the curatorial act in favour of respecting the articulation of the unique within a wider assemblage of thought. For this reason, the reader is invited to read across the sections that have been put in place in order only to offer some semblance of structure to the ideas addressed in this collection. The given structure is a mirage. The invitation to the reader is to draw one’s own trajectories of interest by identifying and tracking ideas across the various contributions to this volume – much as one would follow the roads and pathways that connect two sites of interest on a map. Read backwards. Read forwards. Read transversally. Borrow from ancient cultures, and craft songs that will guide a traveller through a constantly evolving terrain,51 and in so doing be mindful of the fact that only this kind of situated knowledge can give the objective vision that is merely promised by the moment of transcendence or the splitting of subject and object (Haraway 1988, 583). At their best, maps “offer us a compendium of open pathways – shared ways of knowing – that can be mixed and combined to make new interconnections” (Crawford 2021, 10). But Kate Crawford is right to note that “there are also maps of domination, those national maps where

16  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau territory is carved along the fault lines of power” (Crawford 2021, 10). No claims to territory are made here. This book is a mapmaking exercise that openly contests the logic of possession. Ours is a Deleuzian map – “a heteromorphous object made of schematic forms, iconic shapes, drawn lines, and printed or drawn language [that] can be a machine of ‘becoming’ in the hands of the user who will redirect the meanings it seems to inspire” (Conley 1998, 128). Although conceived during the period of pandemic lockdowns, this book is a celebration of the urge to trade and disseminate ideas through the crossing of boundaries. By trespassing the borders erected between ways of knowing, seeing, and being, this book is situated in what Gloria Anzaldúa defines as the borderlands – which “in both its geographical and metaphoric meanings – represent intensely painful yet also potentially transformational spaces where opposites converge, conflict, and transform” (Keating 2009, 319). These are indeed the spaces of experimentation and creativity. Notes 1 I refer, of course, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). 2 Shanahan attributes the first use of the term “singularity” in the context of the evolution of technology to Neumann. See Shanahan (2015, 233). 3 Today’s “connected person” sits at the centre of an accrescent Internet of Things while feeling at the same time, and rather perversely, more alone than ever. See Adams (2014), Miranda (2015), and Bilton (2013). 4 See, for example, More (2013). 5 See, for example, Fukuyama (2002). 6 This is a useful way of marking a caesura between the often confused and conflated notions of posthumanism and transhumanism. Nick Bostrom has shown that transhumanism is a movement born from the pens of rational humanists who chased Renaissance notions of human perfectibility (Bostrom 2005). Given that it makes no attempt to challenge the ontological and epistemological place of the human that is written into humanism, transhumanism should therefore be seen as “an intensification of humanism” (Wolfe 2010, xv). Posthumanism, on the other hand, is precisely that which seeks to interrogate and rethink the ontological and epistemological place of the human in such schemas of thought. 7 On “naturecultures,” see Haraway (2003). On “mediacultures,” see Parikka (2015). 8 Rosi Braidotti has compiled a list of posthumanisms that is indicative (rather than exhaustive) of the sheer range of approaches to posthuman thought. Her list of the different kinds of posthumanism written today include “the insurgent” (Papadopoulos, 2010), “the speculative” (Sterling, 2014: Roden, 2014), “the cultural” (Herbrechter, 2013), and “the literary” (Nayar, 2013). “Transhumanism” (Bostrom, 2014), “metahumanism” (Ferrando, 2013), and “a-humanism” (MacCormack, 2014) also make the list. See Braidotti (2019b, 53n1). 9 In his book Our Posthuman Future, Fukuyama writes, “The aim of this book is to argue that [Aldous] Huxley was right, that the most significant threat posed

Introduction  17 by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history” (2002, 7). 10 “Humanism” is employed here as a convenient wrapper for the many different varieties of thought that properly describe humanism. But in order to form this wrapper, an implicit claim must be made: that each variety of humanism shares a line of thinking that takes as its cardinal points the inherent value, agency, and potential of the human. If one is unwilling to draw such a line through the various instantiations of humanism, then one must agree with Michel Foucault that the concept is “too supple, too diverse, too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection” (1984, 44). As such, one can do no other than abandon the concept in toto. 11 Rosi Braidotti writes, “Subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality, and self-regulating ethical behaviour whereas Otherness is defined as its negative and specular counterpart” (Braidotti 2013, 15). 12 Somewhat idiosyncratically, Foucault organizes his period of “classical thought” as the philosophy which took place between the work of René Descartes (1596– 1650) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). For Foucault, “modern thought” begins with Kant. Orthodox histories of Western philosophy will typically cite Descartes’s infamous dictum “I think, therefore I am” as the point of genesis for modern philosophy. 13 It is perhaps important to stress here that Kant did not reject the “classical” position that knowledge involved ideas representing objects of thought. It is just that his questioning of the assumption enlivened a quite different attitude to knowledge – one that is aligned with distinctly modern possibilities. To this extent, Foucault thinks of Kant’s work as a properly transitional moment between classical and modern thought. 14 See Kant (1998). 15 See Menze et al. (1992). 16 After all, it is the human who possesses the ideas that represent the world. 17 Foucault argues that in distinction to modern thought, the classical episteme exhibited “no epistemological consciousness of man as such” (Foucault 2005, 336). 18 I borrow both “deformation” and “deflation” from the lexicon of archaeology. 19 See, for example, Jameson (1991), Kolbert (2014), and Franklin (2015). I am inclined to borrow Werner Sombart’s chronology of capitalism when thinking more broadly about the notion of “late capitalism.” See Sombart (1928). 20 See Hamilton (1860) for a history of the three traditional laws of logic, especially “Lecture V.” 21 For example, Planck argues, “the fact that in the endeavor to improve continually the expansion of systematic interrelations, it is necessary to use definitions and concepts which diverge more and more from traditional forms and intuitive notions, is sometimes cited as a reproach against theoretical research, and is even viewed as indicating that theoretical research is entirely on the wrong track. Nothing could be more short-sighted than such a view” (1950, 104). 22 See, for example, Heisenberg (1989) and Capra (1992). 23 These well-defined scientific notions can be thought of as “corybantic fictions” to the extent that they are descriptions of phenomena which rest on the cusp of sense and reason. 24 Importantly, it was also the delirious art of the artist-become-scientist, which is to say those who turned to science in order to explore new potentialities of artistic expression, that enlivened the changes that Hassan notes here. See, for example, work by such recognized masters as George Seurat and David

18  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau Hockney, as well as that of contemporary artists such as Jen Stark, Luke Jerram, Susan Aldworth, and Janet Saad-Cook. 25 Karen Barad’s work on “agential realism” perhaps only scratches the surface of the deeply profound challenges that such a technological modernity raises for the notion of the human and the production of knowledge. See Barad (2007). 26 The schema I am adapting and extending here is obviously Foucault’s. See Foucault (2005). 27 Advances in machine learning have exposed the way in which complex systems such as evolution can indeed be thought of as the result of, say, a recursive neural network. See Medsker and Jain (1999). On algorithms in society, see Abiteboul and Dowek (2020). 28 See for example Knight (2017) and Hodson (2015). 29 However, Barad’s notion of “intra-action” makes one hesitate when talking of a posthuman subject. See Barad (2007). 30 Again, that is best aligned with transhumanist thought. See Wolfe (2010, xv). 31 Here, Braidotti is describing the concept of the Anthropocene by drawing on the work of Félix Guattari. See Guattari (2000). 32 See Heidegger (1962). 33 The claim here is that the radical relationality of the posthuman unsettles the operation(s) of the subject/object split which underscored the thinking that powered classical modernity. Fredric Jameson has argued that little else allows one to periodize the slippery concept of “the modern” so incisively as marking the strict split between the subject and object inaugurated by Descartes’ rationalism. Indeed, the partition of the world into thinking subjects (the cogito) and unthinking objects instructed a distance between the human and the world that not only crystallized a sense that the world was “over there” and therefore separate from the human in quality and form, but that it was also always-already “for us” – the very sense of things that capitalism grasped early on and translated into a discourse that reads the material world as simply a resource ripe for the picking. As such, a world that is understood to be not “for us” but of which we are a part profoundly disturbs this economy of things. See Jameson (2002). 34 Raoul Vaneigem gives perhaps the clearest sense of what is meant by an “ethics of exchange.” He writes of contemporary capitalist society as that which is “based on exchange value, the pleasures of business, the dignity of labour, restrained desires, survival – and on their opposites, pure value, gratuitousness, parasitism, instinctive brutality and death.” Vaneigem concludes, “This is the filthy tub that human faculties have been bubbling in for nearly two centuries” (1983, 33–34). On the “logos of the merchant,” see Lefebvre (1991, 269). 35 See Deleuze and Guattari (1994). 36 Early theorizations of feminist science and technology studies (STS) include Harding (1986, 1991), Star (1995), Mayberry, Subramaniam, Weasel (2001). Influenced by intersectional studies (Bilge and Collins 2020, Collins 2019), there is an ongoing postcolonial turn in the field, such as Harding (2006, 2008), Vandana Shiva (2016), and Subramaniam et al. (2017). Recently, there are new assemblages of queer theory and feminist STS, such as Cipolla, Gupta, Rubin, and Willey (2017). For an introduction to feminist technoscience, see Åsberg and Lykke (2010). For an introduction to feminist materialism, see Gimenez (2000). 37 See Galison and Daston (2007). 38 See Benjamin (2019) and Noble (2018). 39 While the study of the indispensable role of empire in modern science has been an established area of study in the history of science, to decentre this historical

Introduction  19 development is only a recent trend. Examples include Goss (2021), Reidy and Rozwadowski (2014). 40 See Wynter (1987). 41 For clarification on the continuum of Enlightenment and mythology, see Adorno and Horkheimer (2007). 42 On the notion of transversal subjectivity, see Braidotti (2019, 40). 43 See Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 3–4). 44 See Colby, Watt, and Gilbert (1966). 45 Of course, such posthuman knowledges should not be thought exclusively in terms of products of technological environments. For example, it is clear that posthuman knowledges also emerge from, say, nonhuman biological contexts. 46 The collapse of the human workforce and the dramatic changes such would bring to societal systems is implicit to Klaus Schwab’s work on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. See Schwab (2017). 47 Google confirmed quantum supremacy on 23 October 2019. In a paper published in Nature, Google claimed that its Sycamore (quantum) processor took only 200 seconds to perform a calculation that would take a state-of-the-art (classical) supercomputer approximately 10,000 years to complete. See Arute et al. (2019). The claims were debated by IBM, which claimed that its supercomputer could perform the calculation in 2.5 days or less. See Pednault et al. (2019). Nonetheless, most agree that Google did demonstrate quantum supremacy. 48 Quotation modified. These three statements are delivered over three different lines. The full passage reads: Radius: I do not want a master. Helena: No one would give you orders. You’d be just like us. Radius: I want to be the master of others. Helena: Then they would certainly appoint you as an official in charge of many Robots, Radius. You could teach the other Robots. Radius: I want to be the master of people. Helena: You’re out of your mind! (Čapek 2004, 37) 49 In the first written use of the name, Homer writes in The Iliad: “τὸν δὲ κασιγνήτη μάλα νείκεσε πότνια θηρῶν Ἄρτεμις ἀγροτέρη, καὶ ὀνείδειον φάτο μῦθον …” (“But his sister railed at him hotly, even the queen of the wild beasts, Artemis of the wild wood, and spake a word of reviling …”) (xxi, 470; my italics). 50 Rosemary Ruether’s book on the divine feminine does much to add nuance and texture to a subject that she argues has proven too easy to co-opt to all sides of the gender debates that emerged in the 1960s and later. See Ruether (2005). 51 The reference is to the songlines of the Aboriginal cultures of Australia – an integrated knowledge system of the land, trade routes, and survival techniques that has been captured for future generations in song, dance, art, and storytelling. For a fascinating introduction to the subject, see Norris and Harney (2014).

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22  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau Herbrechter, Stefan. (2013), Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. London: Bloomsbury. Hodson, Hal. (2015), “No One in Control,” New Scientist 3007 (7 February): 30–33. Jameson, Fredric. (2002), A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. (1991), Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Jasanoff, Sheila and Sang-Hyun Kim (eds). (2015), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, Immanuel. (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keating, AnaLouise (ed). (2009), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Durham: Duke University Press. Kenney, Martha and Donna Haraway. (2015), “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene: Donna Haraway in Conversation with Martha Kenney,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Etienne Turpin and Heather Davis, 255–271. London: Open Humanities Press. Knight, Will. (2017), “The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI,” MIT Technology Review (11 April). Online. https://www​.technologyreview​.com​/2017​/04​/11​ /5113​/the​-dark​-secret​-at​-the​-heart​-of​-ai/ Kolbert, Elizabeth. (2014), The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. London: Bloomsbury. Kurzweil, Ray. (2005), The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Penguin. Lefebvre, Henri. (1991), The Production of Space, translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford: Blackwell. Le Guin, Ursula. (1986), The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. London: Ignota Books. Lewontin, Richard. (1991), Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. Ontario: House of Anansi Press. Lovell, Bernard. (1975). "Whence?," The New York Times (16 November). Online. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/1975​/11​/16​/archives​/whence​-we​-are​-what​ -we​-know​-about​-where​-we​-came​-from​-whence​.html. MacCormack, Patricia. (2014), The Animal Catalyst. London: Bloomsbury. Mayberry, Maralee, Banu Subramaniam, and Lisa Weasel (eds). (2001), Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation. New York: Routledge. McKittrick, Katherine. (2021), Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press. Medsker, L. and L. C. Jain (eds). (1999), Recurrent Neural Networks: Design and Applications. New York: CRC Press. Menze, Ernest A., Karl Menges, and Michael Palma (eds). (1992), Johann Gottfried Herder: Selected Early Works, 1764–7. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Miranda, Javier et al. (2015), “From the Internet of Things to the Internet of People,” IEEE Internet Computing 19, 2 (Mar/Apr): 40–47.

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Part I

ELIZA (1964–1966)

Tracing cultural imaginings of smart machines to ELIZA, described as “the first software program to impersonate a human being successfully” (Leonard 1997, 33), Part I stages work that troubles the boundaries between humans and machines by exploring elements of automation and (co-)creation in the development of artificial intelligence(s). Developed by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum over a three-year period to study machine learning and natural language processing, ELIZA was programmed to improvise responses similar to those of a human interlocutor. As such, it functioned on the principle of simulation. Interestingly, though, ELIZA’s popularity among human test subjects revealed the need for a machinic framework that could provoke deep introspection in the subject – something which has since become a condition of possibility for the provocation of human–machine intimacy. Addressing the posthuman possibilities of such intimacy, contributors to this part of the book explore some of the curious circuits of the intimate human–machine relationship. In Chapter 1, “Posthuman Bodies: Why They (Still) Matter,” N. Katherine Hayles goes beyond Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure in order to expand our imaginings of the posthuman body. Arguing that certain nonhuman lifeforms have cognitive capacities (even if they do not have a brain), Hayles insists that these too must be considered posthuman bodies. By redefining meaning as “a kind of doing,” Hayles regards certain nonhuman interactions with the environment as a form of agency – the defining characteristic of life. In this sense, even non-living forms like computational media can be thought of as a cognitive assemblage and therefore a posthuman body. The significance of this is found in the fact that bringing artificial forms into such a conversation necessarily changes the terrain of our ethical considerations. In response to this, Hayles highlights the notion of ecological reciprocity as that which emphasizes the responsibility of humans to both natural and artificial meaning-making resources that contribute to the survival and sustenance of both our species and planet. According to Hayles, cognitive and meaning-making practices of a lifeform include the interpretation of information and decision-making. DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-2

26  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau Alessandra Di Pierro and Luca Viganò’s Chapter 2, “Quantum Machine Intelligence,” digests the rapid developments in computational learning theory, which proposes that machines can also acquire the human mind’s ability to learn and solve problems. Aspects of human intelligence such as learning, problem solving, and prioritization can be emulated by machines that are appropriately programmed to perform such tasks. This is how machine intelligence is created. In order to be able to exhibit intelligent behaviour, machines must rely on some machine learning methods, as well as a battery of automation techniques, and the ability to smartly prioritize and deploy them in the right order. Here, Di Pierro and Viganò discuss the use of quantum computing for supporting the development of machine intelligence. In particular, they explain the potentialities of quantum learning, such as the task of learning from examples by programming a quantum computer. Just as quantum computation offers the potential for the emergence of an intelligence that may well allow it to qualify as a lifeform in its own right, in Chapter 3 Angela Su’s artist novel Berty investigates the intimate relationship of the material body of the human and the cognitive capacity of the machine. Within a tradition of science fiction writing that has looked to subvert the creation myth, Su’s imaginary medical illustrations that cut and join human body parts, machine parts, and flora and fauna ultimately serve as an inventory of a complex artificial life. The illustrations are paired with a steampunk novel in the vein of David Cronenberg’s body horror films, Shinya Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk cult classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), and the feminist science fiction trope of the pregnant man. Is the machine an extension of the body? This sociocultural imaginary has long been realized, from prosthetics to the Fordist assembly line. Or is the body – that which consumes and is a consumable artifact – an extension of the machine? Su’s fantastical technology of social reproduction and the graphic depiction of man-machine parasitism denaturalizes life and its myths of purity. Read in one way, Su’s tale is a textbook illustration of Haraway’s cyborg that destabilizes the boundaries of the artificial and the organic, the human and the technological. However, in contrast to Haraway’s laudatory appraisal of the cyborg, Su also compels us to confront the beautiful monstrosity of such a man-machine hybrid. The representation of unthinkable bodies on the page reveals some of the limitations of conceptualizing lifeforms that exceed the boundaries of common human experience through the employment of only text and image. In Chapter 4, “Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop,” Kenny K.N. Chow outlines some of the less-discussed aspects of intimate human– machine interactions. Providing a survey of recent studies of extended reality, Chow addresses the tensions in defining the human in terms of (de)materiality by framing technologies of virtuality as an information

ELIZA (1964–1966)  27 feedback loop. This emphasis on the relationality between the human and the nonhuman (both artificial and natural) continues to redefine our interaction with a technologically mediated environment. Through computer simulation, information generated by humans is visualized and presented in the environment. These changes and alterations in the environment that result from such human–computer interactions then prompt a process of “mental simulation” that influences human imagination and action, which in turn generates more living information. All these contributions are interested in the definition of the human, and the challenges posed to existing criteria by fictional and scientific revaluations of man–machine relationships. In Chapter 5, “An Object Misplaced in Time,” Jule Owen speculates on a far future in which Homo sapiens has become extinct. In our place stands an advanced, seemingly immortal artificial intelligence species invented by humans. Staging a thought experiment about the “aliveness of artificiality” and the meaning of time after human extinction, Owen’s short story reflects on the significance of naming, taxonomies, and their implied hierarchies. Can such a civilization continue to call itself “human” …? Reference Leonard, Andrew. (1997), Bots: The Origin of a New Species. San Francisco: Hardwired.

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Posthuman Bodies Why They (Still) Matter N. Katherine Hayles

This chapter argues that posthuman bodies are crucially important because they offer the opportunity to rethink traditional concepts such as anthropocentrism that currently act as obstacles to solving our many global environmental problems. By posthuman bodies, I mean not only human bodies, but any cognitive entity that has the potential to be understood in more open-ended ways than has historically been the case. In addition to humans, this includes nonhuman biological lifeforms and computational media – the common connecting link between them being their capacity for cognitive acts. As such, this chapter explains why I consider cognition to be the crucial qualification for a posthuman body. It also provides connections between my definition of cognition, biosemiotics, and evolutionary theory. Central to the ideas advanced here are the concepts of information, interpretation, and meaning, as well as the notion that these always occur relationally within specific physical instantiations located in historically complex environmental contexts. Bodies of any kind exist only because they are physically instantiated; thus they are always composed of matter-energy. Even bodies that we call “virtual” still have some kind of physical platform necessary for their existence. This is one sense of their “mattering,” as Karen Barad (2003) puts it. The bodies I call posthuman matter in additional ways as well. Insofar as they are cognitive entities, they have access to information, perform interpretations on that information, and as a result engage in behaviours that are meaningful to them within their interior and exterior milieux. As will become apparent, “meaning” here should be understood in a much broader sense than it is usually given within the humanities, applying not only to verbal signs and human interpretations but also to nonverbal biological behaviours and computational algorithms. Another related way in which posthuman bodies matter is their potential for innovation and creativity, and consequently for the emergence of the new. This potential applies to each posthuman body individually – all DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-3

30  N. Katherine Hayles cognitive entities, in my view, make selections from repertoires which themselves are open-ended and have the potential to change. Moreover, this creative potential also applies to posthuman bodies collectively, in the sense that they enable and demand new forms of conceptualization adequate to their cognitive capacities. This is arguably the most consequential way in which posthuman bodies matter, for it opens the way to re-think our relation to the more-than-human world and to the computational media with which we are engaged in a deep, and still growing, cyber-symbiosis. In this chapter, I engage with biosemiotics and evolutionary theory to explore and expand on how meaning-making takes place in nonhuman biological contexts. One consequence of this intervention is to demonstrate that meaning-making can take place with nonconscious cognition – that is, not only among humans, but also with cognitive capacities in nonconscious species lacking brains and central nervous systems, such as plants. Since consciousness is shown not to be necessary for the creation of meaning, the question may be asked whether nonconscious computational media can also be capable of making meanings. Answering in the affirmative, I apply these concepts to specific instances in the highly technical and complex field of machine vision, where issues of the computational interpretation of information come front and centre, revealing the systemic fragility of reference endemic to algorithmic cognition. This is paired with an examination of contemporary neural nets based on transformer architecture. While still displaying fragility of reference, these models also demonstrate remarkable possibilities for interacting with human cognitive texts and images. The result can be called technosymbiosis, pointing toward a collective in which human, nonhuman, and computational cognitions mutually enhance and enlarge each other. In conclusion, I explore the transformations necessary to craft a politico-ethical framework capacious and robust enough to accommodate the full range of cognitive actors, human, nonhuman, and computational. This framework, which I call ecological reciprocity, seeks to activate the liberatory potentials of posthuman bodies to address our contemporary environmental challenges and institute a more sustainable and equitable world. Biosemiotics and Evolutionary Theory: The Potential for Creativity Biosemiotics has made seminal contributions to the study of posthuman bodies because it has transformed our understanding of sign formation, meaning creation, and behavioural responses for nonhuman organisms. Working from C.S. Peirce’s triadic semiotics (1958), it interjects between the sign vehicle and referent object an interpretant, a means of interpreting the sign vehicle and linking it to a behaviour. Consider, for example, a deciduous tree that loses its leaves in winter. Dropping temperatures

Posthuman Bodies  31 act as an environmental signal for the tree to withdraw water and phosphorus chemicals back into the stems and roots for storage. The abscissional layer (where the leaf joins to the stem) undergoes chemical changes that further limit the water flow. As a result, the leaves become brittle and eventually drop off. We could say that the tree “anticipates” winter, although of course it has no abstract concept of winter as such, only an evolutionary history in which this behaviour has paid off. Nevertheless, the falling temperatures have a meaning for the tree, which it interprets through its behaviour. This interpretation (in Peirce’s terms, “the interpretant”) enhances chances for survival in the context of the tree’s environmental context and genetic heritage. Wendy Wheeler aptly summarizes the implication when she writes, “meaning is always a kind of doing. The meaning of a sign is to be found in the changes […] which it brings about” (2016a, 121). Moreover, this doing takes place relationally, in conjunction with the environment and all the other organisms and agents constituting it. Wheeler thus identifies what she calls the “central insight” of biosemiotics: all living organisms experience their world through signs which they must make sense of, or interpret. In other words, all organisms are in relation with their semiotic worlds, and these worlds are full of other forms of communicative semiotic life. (Wheeler 2016b) In this view, the nonhuman world is bursting with signs, interpretations, and meanings as different species interact with each other and their environments through signs relevant to their survival and reproduction. Akin to the interacting symphony/cacophony of bird songs cooperating/competing that echo through the Amazon rain forest at dawn, Jesper Hoffmeyer calls the dense play of sign interactions occurring throughout the nonhuman world the “semiosphere.”1 Seeking to build on this essential insight and expand its application, I have linked it with a foundational definition of cognition. Cognition, I wrote in my book Unthought, is “a process of interpreting information in contexts that connect it with meaning” (Hayles 2017, 22). The definition is crafted to set a low threshold for something to count as cognitive. I argue that it makes all lifeforms capable of cognitive acts, even plants and unicellular organisms such as bacteria. By implication, this means that all organisms perform interpretations and thus create meanings applicable to their contexts. At the same time, the definition can also scale up, applying to higher-level organisms such as mammals and humans. Another key point is that it expands the biosemiotics framework to accommodate computational media, thus providing the groundwork for cyber-biosemiotics.

32  N. Katherine Hayles An objection I frequently hear to these ideas is that plants, and even more so simpler unicellular organisms such as bacteria, are only responding according to their genetic hardwiring – there is no interpretation, only a mechanistically determined response. I acknowledge that for interpretation to take place, there must be a possibility for a choice (or better selection, since choice carries anthropomorphic overtones) between at least two different responses. Otherwise, an action is purely deterministic, such as when a car piston fires as a result of a spark igniting gasoline. Unlike the car, all living organisms have a potential to evolve and change, as Darwin pointed out more than a century ago, and as we now experience first-hand through the multiple variants that have appeared of the COVID-19 virus.2 This capacity for change means that all biological organisms must be able to swerve from a completely determined response and invent something new, some action not previously in their behavioural repertoire. Perhaps, as is likely with the COVID virus variants, this change came about because of genetic mutations combined with selective pressures favouring rapid replication and partial immunity to vaccines. Such a case only displaces the origin for the creation of novelty, however. It does not negate the fact that the potential for novelty is inherent in all living things. If one accepts evolutionary theory, one must acknowledge there is always the possibility for a different behaviour to appear, even (or especially) at the unicellular level. The work of Lynn Margulis on microorganisms is instructive here (Margulis and Sagan 1997), for she explores the ways in which evolution proceeds through endosymbiosis, among other evolutionary strategies. Indeed, she argues that strategies such as partial digestion, in which some of the ingested lifeforms go on to survive within their predator – now become host – are the primary ways in which evolutionary change occurs, with random genetic mutations playing minor roles. Her work demonstrates the amazingly creative responses of microorganisms to flexible and changing environmental conditions. Taking a unicellular organism as a case in point imposes considerable constraints on my claims for cognition. I adopt this strategy because it implies that if the claims can be demonstrated to be valid even for unicellular organisms, then they must perforce also be valid for more complex multicellular organisms. In fact, research has shown that more complex organisms such as plants do have much more capacity for innovation and change than was previously recognized. The new and rapidly expanding field of plant cognition (sometimes more conservatively called “plant signalling”) charts the wide-ranging responses that plants exhibit and their cognitive capacities to interpret information from their environments. In a popular New Yorker article, Michael Pollan summarizes research showing that plants are “capable of cognition, communication, information processing, computation, learning and memory” (2013). For example, when

Posthuman Bodies  33 two plants of different species are put in the same pot, their roots will compete for nourishment. If the plants are of the same species, their roots will begin to cooperate instead, and if of the same family, they will cooperate still more.3 If similar cooperation were observed in animal species, we would not hesitate to call it kinship relations. A major contribution of biosemiotics is to link these kinds of cognitive behaviours, and many others, to the interpretation and communication of signs. The ability to create, interpret, and communicate signs is crucial because it opens up the realm of nonhuman, nonverbal behaviours so they can be understood as meaning-making practices – practices that are always embodied, embedded, contextualized within particular environments, and species-specific. Humans may be unique, as Terrence Deacon has argued (1998), in our ability to use abstract symbols (or if not unique, at least able to employ them more broadly and in more contexts than any other species), but the capacity to use embodied signs and associated behaviours is pervasive throughout the living world. This powerful perspective breaks the human hegemony over signs and serves as a forceful antidote to anthropocentrism. It also enables – or better, mandates – a clear distinction between living organisms as cognitive actors and material processes as agential forces. Material forces as I define them include such natural activity as avalanches, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, rockslides, chemical reactions, volcanic eruptions, and so forth. No doubt such material processes have agency, in many cases unleashing powerful forces that dwarf anything humans can accomplish. What they do not have, however, is the ability to interpret information, make selections, and act in contextually appropriate and meaningful ways. A hurricane, for example, does not choose whether to hit a densely populated city or an open plain. The path it follows can be understood as the resultant of all the relevant forces acting upon it, such as wind speed, humidity, temperature differentials, and so forth. In a phrase, material processes lack cognitive capacities. In my terminology, they therefore act as agents; as I use the term, only cognitive entities can perform as actors.4 This does not negate the growing realization within the environmental sciences that organisms make environments, and that environments are crucial to the evolution and survival of organisms, a point that James Lovelock emphasized in his Gaia theory when he suggested that the Earth itself, including all life forms and their planetary environments, functions as a superorganism (Lovelock 1979). I differ from Lovelock in emphasizing that a crucial distinction exists between material processes, which are the foundation for everything that exists, and the spark of life that incorporates and builds upon these processes to create, implement, and communicate cognitive interpretations. This position is not inconsistent with Lovelock’s Gaia theory, for

34  N. Katherine Hayles he foregrounds the differences that living organisms make in creating environments on Earth that are far from equilibrium, unlike Mars, whose environment is determined solely by the interactions of physical forces. Nevertheless, I recognize that my emphasis on the cognitive capacities of organisms differs from Lovelock’s focus on the interactions between life forms and their environments. The route I take flows naturally into a consideration of computational cognition. By contrast, when Lovelock attempts in his recent book Novacene (2020) to extrapolate to artificial intelligent systems, his move leads to the highly questionable conclusion that artificial intelligence (AI) systems will want to cooperate with humans because they will see that humans are beneficial in stabilizing the environment. Given our current environmental crises, the opposite inference would seem far more likely. In my conclusion, I discuss how an integrated framework of distributed cognition puts future human–AI relations into a more realistic context, while still allowing for further positive technosymbiosis. Computational Media and the Creation of Meaning Moving now to computational media, I ask whether the reasoning that biosemiotics employs to open the interpretation of signs, and hence meaning-making, to nonhuman biological organisms can also be used in a similar way with artificial cognition. As for biosemioticians themselves, such as Jesper Hoffmeyer (2009), Terrence Deacon (2011), and Wendy Wheeler (2016a), the consensus seems to be an emphatic “no,” because they reason that interpretation requires that the organism be autonomous. Clearly this excludes computers, since they require humans to manufacture them, hook them up to electrical sources, maintain and repair them, and so on. I argue that this stance constitutes an unfortunate blind spot in the otherwise admirable field of biosemiotics and results from what I call biologism – the unwarranted extension of biological reasoning to computational systems. The insistence that an entity be autonomous makes sense in a biological context, since it is deeply linked with other functions of the living such as self-replication, self-repair, and so forth. In biology, the cell is typically identified as the smallest unit capable of these functions on its own. However, with computational media, the essential unit should be considered the human-computer dyad, or more realistically, the cognitive assemblages through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. Evolution has already produced humans who are living cognitive systems, and now humans (while performing the functions of the living) make computers, so computers themselves are relieved of the necessity to be able to do it by and for themselves. In fact, most of the world’s work in developed societies is done through cognitive assemblages, collectivities

Posthuman Bodies  35 (including humans, computational media, and nonhuman lifeforms) through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. But can computers create meanings? The locus classicus case for a negative answer is the philosopher John Searle’s Chinese Room, a thought experiment that has elicited hundreds of objections and multiple replies by Searle himself, which have refined and extended his original proposal (Searle 1984, 1999).5 In brief, his argument is that a computer simply matches one pattern to another with no understanding. In his thought experiment, a string of Chinese characters is fed through a slot in the door. A person inside the room who does not read or speak Chinese uses a rule book to match that string to another, which he then slides back through the slot, creating the impression to those outside that he has thought deeply about the answer, whereas in fact he understands nothing. The man in the room, Searle writes, is like a computer. Like the man, the computer can match patterns, but has no real understanding of what this means. My response is to distinguish clearly between what the patterns mean for the human interlocutors and for the computer itself. In the internal milieu of the computer, the different layers of code constitute a hierarchical informational system of interpretations, anticipations, and therefore of meanings, which direct the computer to perform certain actions. Building upward from the logic gates that perform elementary logic functions such as “and,” “or,” “nor,” and so forth, the information progresses through the layers of code that sit on top of them, linking all the layers through continuous traffic up and down as commands are interpreted or compiled. These higher levels include the machine and hardwired code that calls the machine’s instructional set architecture, the system software that runs the specific hardware (for example, the OS10.15.7 operating software that runs the MacBook on which I am typing), the assembly language that encodes the operating system, up to high-level languages such as Python, Java, or C++ that encode the operating system software that runs the specific hardware processor and chipsets, on to executable programs such as Microsoft Word, which is the level at which most users interact with the machine. Ultimately, however, all commands must be translated downward to the logic gates to be processed (either line by line as needed in interpreted languages, or in prepared batches in compiled languages), and then translated upward again to the high-level languages to communicate the results.6 At the level of the logic gates, and in simpler computational devices such as calculators, the outputs are almost completely deterministic, lacking the capacity for novelty and creativity characteristic of biological lifeforms.7 These devices therefore count as agents rather than actors. However, more complex programs have multiple ways to introduce unpredictability into the results. Two of the most common are pseudo-randomness and

36  N. Katherine Hayles recursion. A simple example of a pseudo-random intervention is an algorithm that directs the computer to consult the internal clock for a seemingly random value. Each time the algorithm runs, it executes the program in the same way, but integrated into the process is a contingent relation that has been established between the clock value and the program. Consequently, it produces different results because the clock value is different each time. More complex variations on this theme have the program consulting various databases for values at different points in the program, thus introducing multi-variant differences. The strategy of recursion can be illustrated through evolutionary and genetic algorithms.8 The key idea is to start off with a family of solutions to a given problem, each different from the others. Their success is then measured with a fitness function, and those solutions with the highest fitness become the parents to a new generation of solutions, each different from the others as well as the parent. For example, in the notorious “travelling salesman” problem, each solution charts a path through different cities. The criterion for the fitness function in this case is to choose the solution with the total shortest path distance. As the computer cycles through hundreds and thousands of simulated generations, a plot charting the shortest path distance as a function of generations begins to approach an asymptote. For humans, this signals that the asymptote is the answer, the path through the designated cities that gives the smallest possible overall distance. What the computer understands are the numbers the successful solutions represent, as well as the algorithmic steps to arrive at each solution, and the procedures necessary to generate a new generation of solutions. It has no concept of “cities” in the sense humans would understand it, or of the “shortest path” as contextualized for humans as a travelling salesman’s itinerary. The distinction between what a result means to humans and what it means to a computer is fleshed out below through examples of machine vision in which neural nets process and classify visual inputs. The important point for now is to emphasize that human meanings evolve within human contexts, whereas computer meanings relate to the internal and external milieux of the computational systems. As computer programs become more complex, they gain increased interpretive capabilities, including the ability to anticipate a user’s actions. In a biological context, the ability to anticipate is crucial to sign interpretation, because a sign by its very nature implies that the sign vehicle creates an anticipation of the sign object, such as when the tree “anticipates” winter in the earlier example. As Terrance Deacon has pointed out, signs function by evoking something anticipated but not yet present, which he calls “absential” phenomenon (2011, 323). A stop sign, for example, evokes a behaviour from motorists that they will apply the car’s brakes, an action not present before the stop sign comes into view. As

Posthuman Bodies  37 signs progress in abstraction, this anticipation becomes capable of evoking symbolic meanings, with all the powers that such meanings bestow upon human endeavours, including mathematical theorems, musical notations, verbal narratives, and much more. At the simpler level of signs, the ability to anticipate absential phenomena is crucial to the survival of biological organisms as their environments change through seasons and other variations. Anticipations are now commonplace with everyday computational systems such as cell phones and email correspondence. When one misspells a word in Microsoft Word, for example, the computer will auto-correct for the word presumably intended (a feature that drives folks in literary criticism crazy when quoting texts with non-standard spelling such as dialect or creative variations). Similar processes occur when one types the first syllable of a longer word into a cell phone, and the program offers several options to complete it using the tab function. Standard phrases such as greetings or transitional phrases are also offered in email correspondence, as the computer anticipates the user’s next sentence or phrase. The above examples apply to stand-alone machines. In this sense they are comparable to unicellular organisms, simple examples to illustrate how cognition works in computational media. If they are valid there, then certainly they will also be valid for the more complex cases of networked computers with sensing capabilities. Before moving on to these, however, I want to emphasize the very significant differences that exist between biological lifeforms and computational systems, stemming from their different evolutionary pathways and their radically different embodiments. I summarize these through schemata that I call the Great Inversions. The First Great Inversion contrasts the biological mandate of “survive and reproduce” with the inverse equivalent for computation, “design and purpose.” All lifeforms must find ways to implement the biological mandate, for if they do not, they will simply become extinct and cease to be players on life’s stage. As lifeforms evolve, they may acquire more sophisticated reasoning abilities and be able to conceptualize purposes and goals, as do humans and some mammals. For computation, the prime requirement is design and purpose, which all programs instantiate, even those designed to create the impression they have no purpose. As computational media evolve, it may become possible for them to experience a desire to survive and reproduce. In my view, this would require awareness and a sense of self, perhaps even consciousness. Our science fiction writers have anticipated such a development for decades, but to my knowledge there are no computational media that actually are conscious (as distinct from simulating consciousness).9 If such emerge, then the First Great Inversion would be complete in the opposite trajectories it envisions: lifeforms evolve from “survive and reproduce” to “design and purpose,” while

38  N. Katherine Hayles computational media evolve from “design and purpose” to “survive and reproduce.” The Second Great Inversion addresses the fundamentally different contexts in which lifeforms have evolved compared with computational media. From their first day of existence, biological organisms have to be able to cope with fluctuating and uncertain environments in which they are immersed. If they cannot, they will not survive. From this initial immersion, lifeforms evolve to be able to interpret information from their environments, which leads to sign creation and meaning-making practices, and in humans and higher mammals, to the ability to conceptualize and manipulate abstract symbols. Computational systems, by contrast, are invested with a foundational ability to deal with abstract symbols through their logic gates. The difficult problem for them is dealing with environmental contingencies and random fluctuations. For this, complex programming structures are required that include sensing systems and algorithms to interpret the sensory information. Thus the progression for lifeforms is from immersion up to abstract symbols, whereas for computational systems it is from abstract symbols up to environmental immersion. The two Great Inversions speak to the very different embodiments and evolutionary trajectories of lifeforms and computational media. By arguing that both engage in meaning-making practices, I do not mean to imply that their differences do not matter or do not affect the ways in which they create, share, and interpret information and therefore meanings. Nevertheless, in the contemporary moment, computational media and lifeforms, especially humans, are engaged in deep communication with each other through the cognitive assemblages pervasive in developed societies. That they have profoundly different interpretations of what those communications mean is the root cause for the crisis of representation now looming for a large variety of different art forms, including literary texts, photography and video, computer games, and other emerging new forms such as deep fakes. To understand the crisis in more specific terms, the next sections will focus on a specific computational sensory system – machine vision. The Rigidity of Machine Vision and Deep Learning Algorithms As emphasized above, the way in which computers create and interpret meanings differs profoundly from the way that humans and other biological entities do. The principal differences stem from their different embodiments/instantiations and how these affect the learning process. Deep learning neural nets are constructed by having several layers of “neurons,” with each connected to neurons both within its layer and with neurons above and below it. The bottom layer receives input from a visual dataset, usually a photograph, and a given weight is assigned to each neuron. The

Posthuman Bodies  39 process proceeds through the layers until the top layer gives an output, say recognizing and categorizing an object. The output is compared to specified criteria, and the weights are adjusted layer by layer through the feedback received, whereupon the process begins all over again. It is common to train deep neural nets on databases containing thousands of images, such as ImageNet, until the outputs correspond with the criteria within specified error limits. Deep learning for computer vision typically uses region-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNNs), which accomplish three distinct tasks: image classification, where images are assigned a category label such as “chair” or “dog”; object localization, in which the R-CNN is given a photograph as input and then draws one or more bounding boxes around an object (or objects) as output, characterized as a point, width, and height; and object detection, which locates objects within bounding boxes and specifies a class label for each bounding box. All three tasks combined are called object identification (see Brownless 2019). The neural net decides on its own what features are the primary indicators of a category, with no experience in the real world to test and deepen the category. By contrast, a human infant growing up on a farm would have experience with animals and how they respond, likely resulting in the child’s sense of category features being something like “ears,” “tail,” “body,” “head,” “horns” (or not), “legs,” “feet,” and so forth, as well as colour, size, characteristic sounds, and movements. Perhaps these categories would also be reinforced through talking with adults or reading children’s books where different sounds are imitated, different kinds of heads and ears imaged, and so forth. By contrast, neural nets have no such rich multisensory experiences in the real three-dimensional world, and consequently no consensual sense of what the primary category features should be. It creates inferences from the datasets upon which it is trained and draws its own conclusions about what the relevant features are. An often-repeated story, that research has now determined to be an urban legend of AI missteps, illustrates the point. The story has many versions, but usually it claims that the US Army was testing an image recognition system to detect tanks. One training set showed tanks, the other no tanks. When the system was suitably trained so it was 100% accurate, the Army then tried it in real life, only to find it was shockingly bad. Eventually it was realized that the photographs showing tanks were taken on sunny days, while the no-tank set was taken on cloudy days. The system had not keyed on tanks at all, but on the presence or absence of clouds. Gwern Branwen (2019) has traced this legend back through several decades to a question that Edward Fredkin, the theoretical physicist, claimed he asked about a RAND presentation in 1963, showing how a neural net could be trained to detect tanks, whereupon Fredkin pointed out the obvious differences in the two datasets. No doubt this

40  N. Katherine Hayles urban legend has circulated so widely because it encapsulates an important point: that the inferences a neural net makes about the data may be very different from what humans think is going on. Similar kinds of misapprehensions have been discovered in neural nets that discern unrecognized patterns in datasets and then draw inferences from those patterns. One system designed to identify top candidates for executive positions, for example, was systematically eliminating females from the preferred list, because the dataset it was given contained that unrecognized bias. Many other cases of biases in training sets have been discovered by the growing field of algorithmic critical studies, including racial, ethnic, and locational features. However, it is important to put these kinds of biases in the proper perspective. Branwen makes this point when he says he is much less worried about dataset bias than about the consequences of incorrect classification. He writes that using results which have: little to do with the true human utility function or decision context is far more common than serious dataset bias; people think about where their data is coming from, but they tend not to think about what the consequences of wrong classifications are. (Branwen 2019) Louise Amoore, in her admirable book Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others, makes a similar point when she discusses how algorithms are used in security contexts to identify terrorists at border crossings. Quoting a data analyst who told her “‘correlation is enough,’” Amoore analyses the ways in which this subversion of causal reasoning can have devastating effects in the real world (2020, 44). Nevertheless, it is important also to recognize that the ability of a neural net to create its own inferences does not always lead to undesirable results. Sometimes this nonhuman system of inference-drawing can be used to advantage, for example when a neural net is used to identify the cause for a rare disease that, by definition, happens sporadically in widely disparate locations and contexts. Precisely because it does not start from the presuppositions that humans have, it is able to make fresh discoveries. Similarly, the AI company DeepMind created a Go-playing program, AlphaGoZero, that was initially given only the rules of the game and the goal to win. After playing thousands of games against itself, it consequently avoided the presuppositions that humans had built into the game over centuries of tradition and discovered strategies no human had considered. It beat AlphaGo, an earlier program trained on human-played games that had defeated the best human go players, 100 times out of 100 (DeepMind 2017).

Posthuman Bodies  41 A new concern has arisen about neural nets that focuses not so much on their inferences from biased datasets as their rigidity in relation to the images they interpret. As deployments of R-CNNs in a wide variety of visual interpretative contexts continue to increase exponentially, from selfdriving vehicles to satellite surveillance and much else, there is growing concern about the gap between their performances in training situations and their use in real-life situations. Douglas Heaven (2019) reports on evidence that neural nets are brittle and can easily be fooled by altering a few seemingly inconsequential details. Putting four inconspicuous stickers on a stop sign, for example, caused a neural net to read it instead as “speed limit 45.” Adding a photograph of noise after a correctly labelled image caused a neural net to mislabel the same image presented immediately afterwards. Changing the spatial orientation of the stop sign, for example by turning it on its side or laying it flat, also caused misrecognition, no doubt because the stop sign images on which the R-CNN was trained had the sign in the usual upright position. Even more alarming is the creation of what are called “adversarial examples,” images specifically designed to initiate errors in neural networks. A paper in 2013 by Christian Szegedy and colleagues reports that: deep neural networks learn input-output mappings that are fairly discontinuous to a significant extent. Specifically, we find that we can cause the network to misclassify an image by applying a certain imperceptible perturbation, which is found by maximizing the network’s prediction error. (2013, 1) In their paper, they show that altering a few pixels will cause the net to misclassify an image, for example labelling the image of a lion as a library. Moreover, they demonstrate that the perturbation is not random, because it caused a different network, trained on a different dataset, also to misclassify the same image. Heaven notes that such systemic weaknesses: could even let a hacker take over a powerful AI. One example of that came last year, when a team from Google showed that it was possible to use adversarial examples not only to force a DNN [deep learning neural net] to make specific mistakes, but also to reprogram it entirely – effectively repurposing an AI trained on one task to do another. (2019, 165) Different ways to increase the robustness of DNNs include giving them experience in the real world, for example for instantiating a visual system in a robot arm. Other remedies include modifying a DNN by combining

42  N. Katherine Hayles it with a rule-bound system such as symbolic AI, the dominant form of AI before neural nets burst upon the scene. While this research is still at a nascent stage, it is unlikely to change the central point I make here: that profound differences exist between the interpretations of artificial systems operating on visual inputs and human perceptions of the same images. A secondary point is that CNNs and other deep learning systems unquestionably do create meanings both for themselves and the humans who receive their outputs through the interpretations and choices they make about the information they receive. Sometimes these interpretations align, as when a CNN labels an image with a category corresponding to what humans see. Nevertheless, the means by which it arrives at this conclusion is always distinctly nonhuman, and so are the meanings it creates for itself through its internal milieu of multiple layers of neurons and the weights each is given. There are two temptations that non-experts face when considering the performances of highly sophisticated computational systems such as neural nets. The first is to think that these mechanical devices can create no meanings at all, that they have no brains or consciousness, and thus no access to meaning. This stance is violently at odds with the increasingly large role such systems play in cognitive assemblages as they are joined with autonomous sensing systems such as those in self-driving cars and satellite surveillance. Increasingly, not only are they proliferating through developed societies, but they are also making decisions that routinely have important consequences for humans. The second temptation is to grant that they create meanings, but to ignore the profound differences between the meanings they make for themselves and those that humans impute from their outputs. Both of these temptations feature in the following section on large neural net models that use transformer architecture to create verbal texts and creative images in response to their training on humancreated datasets. Transformer Neural Nets and the Question of Meaning In 2017, nine researchers from Google published a seminal article entitled “Attention Is All You Need” (Vaswani et al. 2017). In it they explained that introducing two functions they called “attention” and “self-attention” enabled the construction of large models able to be trained in parallel, thus requiring “significantly less time to train” and achieving better results (2017, 1). The attention mechanism drew “global dependencies between input and output” (Vaswani et al. 2017, 2), whereas self-attention introduced dynamic recursivity by having the inputs interact with each other, thus affecting what the attention function sees. The result was a process that focused on single words (more accurately, tokens) in the context of nearby words, thus enabling the model to accurately discern the long-range

Posthuman Bodies  43 dependencies characteristic of verbal text (for example, in a passage where a noun and corresponding pronoun are separated by numerous intervening words). Several large models employing transformer architecture are now available, including OpenAI’s GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer, version 3), Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), and LamDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), also from Google. These models are huge. GPT-3, for example, has about 175 billion parameters, and it was trained on about 45 terabytes of texts drawn from different datasets, including 60% from Common Crawl, 22% from WebText 2, 16% from books, and 1% from Wikipedia. To get a sense of what these numbers mean, estimates are that training GPT-3 at home using eight NVIDIA V100 tensor core graphic processor units would take about 36 years! The verbal capabilities of GPT-3 are impressive. In response to an input, which can be a command, a question, or a paragraph of text, it is able to construct semantically coherent and syntactically correct answers that are hundreds of words in length. Moreover, it can also detect and reproduce the literary style of an input, and it is even able to grasp highlevel qualities like literary genres. With a neural net this powerful, a lively controversy was bound to ensure about the possibilities for meaning within its productions. Emily Bender and colleagues have called GPT-3 and similar programs “stochastic parrots” (Bender et al. 2021), arguing that their verbal productions lack meaning in themselves – they seem to make sense only because humans project meanings onto them. “Meaning,” according to Bender and Koller (2020), requires a relation between a word (or other verbal token) and a thing in the world. Since the models have no experience with the world, it therefore follows, they argue, that the model’s verbal productions are merely clever stochastic arrangements that mimic the structure of language without its referential content. There is more than a grain of truth in this view, for it is the case that within a few paragraphs, GPT-3’s responses will typically manifest what I call a fragility of reference, an utterance that reveals its ignorance of the way the world works. As I have argued elsewhere, GPT-3 has only a model of language, not a model of the world (Hayles 2023). Nevertheless, the billions of correlations it constructs from its training data enable it to make a wide range of inferences not explicitly present in its training – not only for verbal languages, but also for programming and coding languages. This suggests that the enormous network of correlations it constructs are capable of generating meaning within its own context, which is dramatically different from the contexts of embodied and embedded humans. When Bender and colleagues insist that meaning requires a connection between a word and the “real” world (Bender et al. 2021), the pronouncement assumes

44  N. Katherine Hayles that the “real” world is the world as humans experience it. Until recently, that assumption was able to fly because humans were the only species with extensive verbal language capabilities. Now, however, artificial intelligences have also gained the capacity to generate language. When the assumption is identified and subjected to scrutiny, it becomes clear that it relies on the fundamentally anthropocentric view that the human world is the only world that counts. Rejecting that assumption opens up meaning-making not only for all other biological lifeforms, as argued above, but also for artificial intelligences such as GPT-3. To ponder what its pronouncements mean to the AI is to ask a fundamentally different question than to inquire what they mean for humans, just as asking what autumn means to a tree leads to very different considerations than what it means for humans. As I have argued elsewhere (Hayles 2023), positioning the question in these terms raises the interesting problem of how one (human) can begin to understand what a given output might mean to an AI in its context. Minimum requirements for this task would include knowledge of its architecture, as well as access to its training data. Beyond these, the repertoires of literary analysis include many strategies for analyses of texts that extrapolate (or interpolate) beyond the texts to the inferences underlying them. This suggests that an entirely new realm is opening for literary criticism: the interpretation of AI-generated texts, including the rich connections between what the texts mean for the AI itself compared to what they mean for the model’s human interlocutors. Liberal Political Philosophy versus Ecological Reciprocity In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe analyses multiple archives from roughly 1750 to 1850 to demonstrate that the spread of liberal political philosophy in the West was accompanied by the ruthless exploitation of colonial peoples in the Americas, Africa, and India. “Modern liberalism,” she writes, “defined the ‘human’ and universalized its attributes to European man; it simultaneously differentiated populations in the colonies as less than human” (2015, 6). A case in point is John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of political liberal philosophy. Lowe points out that in the same decade when he wrote his famous pamphlet On Liberty (1859), he was also penning defences of the East India Company and its imperialistic policies. Moreover, Lowe demonstrates that the relationship between colonialism and liberal philosophy was not merely correlative, but causal. The promises of liberalism, which Lowe specifies as “political emancipation through citizenship in the state, the promise of economic freedom in the development of wage labour and exchange markets, and the conferring of civilization to human persons educated in aesthetic and national culture” (2015, 3) could be accomplished only because people elsewhere were

Posthuman Bodies  45 enslaved or indentured, their lands exploited and their resources expropriated, and their cultures oppressed or annihilated. Are the ideals of political liberal philosophy hopelessly compromised, or is it possible to salvage their salutary aspects by reconfiguring them within an enlarged and more capacious framework? My answer is an emphatic “yes,” and the framework I propose is ecological reciprocity.10 Ecological reciprocity aims to create an enlarged vision of liberatory potentials that extend beyond humans to include nonhumans and cognitive media. It is “reciprocal” precisely because it recognizes the responsibility of humans to the planet and to the deep inter- and intra-relationships upon which human life depends for its flourishing, and indeed for its survival. It also recognizes nonhumans as worthy of respect and consideration in their own right, not only for what they can contribute to humans – that is, as meaning-making actors with cognitive capabilities. Ecological reciprocity starts not from the notion of an autonomous self that owns itself, a notion fundamental to liberalism’s possessive individualism (MacPherson 2011), but from the individual as an enmeshed, embodied actor that has multiple relationships with others, including humans, nonhumans, and cognitive media. Rather than a self that is conceived primarily as an economic actor, ecological reciprocity emphasizes instead the relationality inherent in cognitive acts, including the creation and interpretation of signs and therefore of meanings. Instead of the rational actor dear to economic theory, ecological reciprocity locates actors as participants in cognitive assemblages, through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. The pervasiveness of cognitive assemblages in developed societies implies that cognition is distributed and agencies are never the sole possessions of individuals, but rather are distributed throughout the assemblage. Instead of imagining nature as “nasty, brutish, and short” (following Hobbes’s famous formulation), and therefore something which forces people into social contracts as an escape from this state, ecological reciprocity envisions nature as symbiotic, the biophilic seedbed from which all cognitive capacities ultimately emerge. The point is not to escape from a state of nature, but to reconceptualize nature so that it becomes the encompassing environment within which lifeforms evolve, survive, and reproduce and from which cognitive media are fashioned. Above all, ecological reciprocity recognizes that the very possibilities of interpretations and meanings inherent in lifeforms and cognitive media are precious resources that, as far as we know, may exist only on Earth and must therefore be protected, preserved, and cherished. The vision signified by ecological reciprocity reveals the full scope of liberatory potentials inherent in posthuman bodies. So conceptualized, it shows why posthuman bodies are essential concepts to realize human and nonhuman futures that lead not to environmental catastrophe and

46  N. Katherine Hayles collapse, but to sustainable, equitable, and robust worlds in which we and others will want to live. Notes 1 Here is how Hoffmeyer defines the semiosphere: “The semiosphere is a sphere just like the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the biosphere. It penetrates to every corner of these other spheres, incorporating all forms of communication: sounds, smells, movements, colors, shapes, electrical fields, thermal radiation, waves of all kinds, chemical signals, touching, and so on. In short, signs of life” (Hoffmeyer 1997, vii). 2 There is, of course, a controversy about whether viruses are truly alive, because they cannot replicate on their own, but hijack the infected cell’s apparatus to reproduce. Whether judged to be alive or not, they illustrate the ability to mutate for selective advantage. 3 In an anecdotal vein, I recount my experience of planting three different types of avocado seeds in the same pot. The first to sprout immediately grew to a tall height. When the others sprouted, they grew to ⅔ and ½ the height of the first, respectively. My interpretation is that each seed sensed that others of the same species were sending out roots. Since they were not of the same family, they both competed and cooperated. The early sprouter grew fast to claim the top spot, with the others then recognizing that spot had been taken and adjusting their heights accordingly. In this sense, they were cooperating, not trying to compete at the same level as the early seed, but opting for placements that would maximize access to light for all. However one interprets their responses, it seems clear that some kind of communication was going on. 4 Although in the past I have not always used this terminological distinction of agents and actors, I intend to employ it here and in the future to distinguish between cognitive and non-cognitive entities. 5 Also, see Cole (2015). 6 For a fuller explanation of this process, see Petzold (2000). 7 The slight caveat here (almost completely deterministic) is because cosmic rays have been shown randomly to flip bits and so to introduce a small degree of indeterminacy into logic gates. As chips get smaller, they become more sensitive to such perturbations, with some chip companies anticipating that it may become a problem within ten years or so. See Hannah (2007) and stackoverflow (2010) for details. 8 For a full explanation of genetic algorithms, see Koza (1992). 9 How to tell if an entity is actually conscious versus simulating consciousness is, of course, a famous philosophical problem. With regard to cognitive media, here is a quick and dirty criterion: when a program spontaneously says, “Please don’t turn me off,” we can assume it is conscious because it wants its experience of consciousness to continue. 10 This term emerged in my conversation with Sherryl Vint at a conference in South Korea in 2018.

References Amoore, Louise. (2020), Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Durham: Duke University Press.

Posthuman Bodies  47 Barad, Karen. (2003), “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28, 3 (Spring): 801–831. Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. (2021), “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models be Too Big?” FAccT ‘21, 610–623. Online. https://dl​.acm​.org​/doi​/pdf​ /10​.1145​/3442188​.3445922 Bender, Emily and Alexander Koller. (2020), “Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data,” Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (July 5–10), Association of Computational Linguistics, 5185–5196. Online. https:// aclanthology​.org​/2020​.acl​-main​.463/ Branwen, Gwern. (2019), “The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend,” Gwern​.net​. Online. gwern​.net​/tan​ks. Brownless, Jason. (2019), “A Gentle Introduction to Object Recognition in Deep Learning,” mac​hine​lear​ning​mastery​.​com. Online. https://mac​hine​lear​ning​ mastery​.com​/object​-recognition​-with​-deep​-learning/ Cole, David. (2015), “The Chinese Room Argument,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Online. https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/ archives​/win2015​/chinese​-room Deacon, Terrence W. (2011), Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: W. W. Norton. Deacon, Terrence W. (1998), The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W. W. Norton. DeepMind. (2017), “Learning from Scratch,” deepmind​.com​. Online. https:// deepmind​.com​/blog​/alphago​-zero​-learning​-scratch/ Hannah, Eric C. and Intel Corp. (2007), “Cosmic Ray Detectors for Integrated Chips,” US Patent no. US-7309866-B2. https://www​.uspto​.gov/ Hayles, N. Katherine. (2023), “Inside the Mind of an AI: Materiality and the Crisis of Representation,” New Literary History 53/54, 4/1 (Autumn/Winter): 635–666. Hayles, N. Katherine. (2017), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heaven, Douglas. (2019), “Deep Trouble for Deep Learning,” Nature 574, 7777 (10 October): 163–166. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. (2009), Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. Scranton: University of Scranton Press. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. (1997), Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Koza, John R. (1992), Genetic Programming: On the Programming of Computers by Means of Natural Selection. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books. Lovelock, James. (2020), Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lovelock, James. (1979), Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lowe, Lisa. (2015), The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press. MacPherson, C. B. (2011), The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

48  N. Katherine Hayles Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. (1997), Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peirce, C. S. (1958), Collected Papers, Vol. VII–VIII, edited by Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Petzold, Charles. (2000), Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. Sebastopol, CA: Microsoft Press. Pollan, Michael. (2013), “The Intelligent Plant,” The New Yorker (23 December). Online. https://www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2013​/12​/23​/the​-intelligent​-plant Searle, John. (1999), “Chinese Room Argument,” in The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, edited by Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, 115. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Searle, John. (1984), Minds, Brains, and Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. stackoverflow​.com. (2010). “Cosmic Rays: What Is the Probability They Will Affect a Program?” stackoverflow​.com​. Online. https://stackoverflow​.com​/questions​ /2580933​/cosmic​-rays​-what​-is​-the​-probability​-they​-will​-affect​-a​-program Szegedy, Christian et al. (2013), “Intriguing Properties of Neural Networks,” arxiv​.org​, preprint [v.1] submitted in 2013. Online. https://arxiv​.org​/pdf​/1312​. 6199v1​.pdf Vaswani, Ashish et al. (2017), “Attention Is All You Need,” arxiv​.org​, preprint [v.5] submitted in 2017. Online. https://arxiv​.org​/pdf​/1706​.03762​.pdf Wheeler, Wendy. (2016a), Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Wheeler, Wendy. (2016b), “In Other Tongues: Ecologies of Meaning and Loss,” Modern Forms, 17 November. Online. https://modernforms​.org​/blog​/colourful​ -speculation/

2

Quantum Machine Intelligence Alessandra Di Pierro and Luca Viganò

The ability to learn and solve problems is a prerogative of the human mind that machines can perform as well, provided that they are appropriately prepared (programmed) to perform such tasks. In particular, computational learning theory refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to learn like humans and use the acquired knowledge in order to solve specific problems.1 Clearly, the role played by machines is central for machine intelligence – it represents at the same time the power and the limits of all applications in this field. A computer, even the most powerful supercomputer existing today, can only emulate brain architecture, and therefore human intelligence, for instance by means of algorithms that use mathematical structures called artificial neural networks. Compared to the time when these algorithms were first effectively used, about 40 years ago,2 both the computational power and the availability of data have increased enormously, so that today’s machine learning (ML) algorithms are remarkably successful in tasks ranging from image/ speech recognition to medical diagnosis and statistical arbitrage for financial applications. But can we hope for even better performances? Answering this question requires some physical considerations, as the machines that we use to simulate human intelligence are indeed physical devices. Until the advent of quantum computation in the 1980s, it was somehow tacitly assumed that computers obey the laws of classical mechanics, which is to say the physical theory governing the motion of macroscopic objects. However, classical physics is just an approximation of a more fundamental theory – quantum mechanics – which is, up to now, the most accurate description of what happens at the microscopic level where objects reach the atomic scale. After years of foundational and theoretical studies,3 the first commercial quantum computer appeared in 2010 and could perform specific calculations for solving optimization problems.4 Then, a few years later, IBM developed the first prototype of a general-purpose quantum computer and made it available to the public via the cloud, allowing researchers and developers to experiment on it.5 Nowadays, several major DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-4

50  Alessandra Di Pierro and Luca Viganò companies, such as IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Intel, along with thousands of small companies and start-ups, are working to build quantum computers that can be used to perform efficiently tasks that are currently hard to perform with classical computers. With the growing amount of data to be analysed and the consequent need for increased computational resources, ML algorithms are the most evident witness of the need for machines that go beyond the limits that classical computational models are rapidly approaching. It is thus reasonable to find out if and how learning models that make use of quantum resources can be defined. This chapter discusses how quantum computers can be used for such learning tasks. Quantum Computation We will introduce quantum computation in the way David Deutsch describes it in his famous book, The Fabric of Reality (1997).6 Among the various rival interpretations of the results of the quantum mechanics experiments, David Deutsch uses the one proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957, called the multiverse interpretation. It says that the universe we see around us does not constitute the whole of reality – which is instead formed by a vast number of coexisting universes similar to ours that we have come to call the multiverse. Each universe is self-contained and represents an approximation of the multiverse. Similarly, in computation theory, classical computation is the approximation of quantum computation, which is to say the computation carried out in the multiverse. It is the approximation in which universes do not affect each other. The phenomenon by which the various counterparts of differently behaving universes affect each other is called quantum interference, and it is responsible for the fundamentally new modes of information processing that fall under what we call quantum computation. Quantum computation is not something that existing microchips can do, even though they rely on quantum mechanical phenomena. The repertoire of computations that today’s computers are capable of is still the same as the abstract computational model of the universal Turing Machine devised by Alan Turing in 1936. The new modes of computation allowed by quantum computers are not possible even in principle on classical computers because in selfcontained classical approximations, quantum interference cannot take place. Quantum Interference Quantum computation refers to the manipulation of quantum bits (or qubits, for short) rather than the binary digits (or bits) with which we are familiar (Nielsen and Chuang 2011). As an object in the multiverse, a

Quantum Machine Intelligence  51 qubit is a combination of classical states each living in a classical universe. Mathematically, a qubit is a vector

q = α1 x1 + α2 x2 + . . . + αn xn(2.1)

which is to say that a qubit is the linear combination (called superposition) of the classical states x1, x2, . . ., xn, where α1, α2, . . ., αn are complex numbers called probability amplitudes because they represent the probability associated with each classical state. As complex numbers can be negative, they behave differently from classical probabilities that are instead always positive numbers and can therefore only produce positive numbers when summed. It may thus happen that two amplitudes cancel each other out, thereby ruling out some classical states corresponding to the computations occurring in some of the possible universes. This is what is called quantum interference, and its effect on the computational power of a quantum computer will be made clear in the following example. Computing with Amplitudes One of the basic operations that can be applied to a qubit is the Hadamard operation, which transforms a classical state (an object in a self-contained universe) into a quantum superposition of uniformly distributed classical states (an object in the multiverse). As an example, consider the state 0 of a bit. In the quantum world this corresponds to observing the result 0 in all universes and is therefore called a “sharp” state of the corresponding qubit. The effect of applying Hadamard to this state is to produce a superposition

H (0 ) =

1 2

1

0+

2

1 (2.2)

of 0 and 1, each associated with the amplitude (complex number) 1 . 2 The meaning of this state is that when inspecting the multiversal object we are observing, we will be able to see 0 in half of the universes and 1 in the other half. This is because the probability extracted from the amplitudes associated to each classical result is the square of the modulus of the corresponding complex amplitude. The same operation applied to the sharp state 1 produces again an equiprobable superposition of 0 and 1, but this time this superposition is

H (1) =

1 2

0-

1 2

1 (2.3)

52  Alessandra Di Pierro and Luca Viganò which is to say, it exhibits a negative amplitude for the state 1. Note that the probability that we extract from this negative amplitude is still 1 / 2 . Consider now the quantum computation H(H(0)). We would classically expect the double splitting of the initial state and the observation of each of the two results with probability 1 / 4 each. However, the computation

æ 1 1 ö 1 1 1 1 (2.4) H H (0 ) = H ç 0+ 1÷ = 0+ 1+ 01 2 ø 2 2 2 2 è 2

(

)

shows that the result 1 has now associated a probability 0 because of the destructive interference between the universes where that result would appear. Hence, applying the Hadamard operation twice amounts to computing the identity function, and one can quickly appreciate that this way of computing the identity function has no classical counterpart. In short, this shows us a new mode of computation that can only happen in the multiverse where we operate on amplitudes. Learning with a Quantum Computer One of the most important tasks for which the ability of computers to learn from some training process is essential is the so-called classification problem – that is, the problem of establishing to which categories certain data belongs. Typical approaches to solve this kind of problem are based on statistical learning theory and are supervised, which means that they use some empirical data, called a training set, in order to predict the class of new data based on some notion of similarity between the new data and the training examples.7 One way to measure the complexity of these machine learning algorithms is in terms of the time required to compute the similarity between every training sample and some new data. This grows with the number of training samples and the dimension of the particular data (for example, the number of nodes in a graph or the length of a string). It is therefore crucial to be able to perform this calculation efficiently, given the size of the datasets in the era of big data we live in, and the limits of classical computer technology when microchips tend to atomic dimensions. We will describe below how a quantum learning algorithm can, at least in principle, be exponentially faster than its classical counterpart. In complexity theory, exponential means “hard” or not feasible by using the current computing technology. As a quantum state is a superposition of classical states, it is able to represent an infinite amount of information, whereas a classical one can only contain a discrete amount. Moreover, operating on a superposition of n qubits (as quantum computation does)

Quantum Machine Intelligence  53 means performing that operation in parallel on all the 2n classical states of n bits (for instance, calculating a function on all its inputs simultaneously). However, as at the end of the computation we are only able to access classical results (those in some specific universe), the potentiality of quantum parallelism will be useful only if some fruitful interference has occurred within the inaccessible superposition during the computation. Amplitude Encoding When using a quantum computer for classifying classical data, we first need to encode our data into some qubit states to be able to run a quantum circuit (that is, apply quantum operations) on them. The most straightforward encoding is the one that replaces each bit by a qubit, so that a computation acts in parallel on all bit sequences in a superposition. An encoding that is much more efficient in terms of qubits utilized is the so-called amplitude encoding. A set of n data can be encoded with log n qubits by means of the n amplitudes of their superposition. As an example, if our database contains 256 = 28 data, we can use just 8 qubits since the superposition state of each qubit provides two amplitudes (the composition of 8 qubits will have 28 amplitudes), which is just enough to accommodate all the classical information.8 Using Quantum Interference Now, in order to define an efficient quantum learner, we need to cleverly exploit the possibility of operating on all data simultaneously, which is to say on a state where all data is represented by the state’s amplitudes. For this we use the preeminent quantum operation, namely Hadamard, and its ability to interfere different worlds. Once the set of classical data is encoded as a quantum state in the specific format discussed above, the classifier can be implemented by first interfering the training data and the test data via a Hadamard operation and then observing the result. This last operation intuitively corresponds to the selection of one of those universes where the observed result has been actually calculated, and the number of those universes gives the probability of actually achieving it. Such a result tells us how to classify the test data on the base of a comparison with the training data. More formally, the classifier calculates in a very efficient way the vectorial distance between the test data v and the training data xi, which are labelled with the class they belong to, and then assigns to v the label of the xi to which it is closest. Clearly, an efficient algorithm can only maintain its speed if the encoding of data into a quantum state is also efficient. In other words, the quantum classifier should be able to access the quantum state where the classical

54  Alessandra Di Pierro and Luca Viganò data has already been encoded in a previous stage. We would need for this a quantum random access memory that loads the bit strings representing xi in parallel into a qubit register and writes the values into the amplitudes.9 Unfortunately, such a device is still far from being constructed, due to what has been cursed as the key obstacle to the physical construction of quantum computers, namely decoherence. This is the phenomenon by which the multiverse collapses into one of its classical approximations as a result of some external interaction with the system. Conclusion We have discussed an example of the use of quantum resources for a machine learning task. Various results in quantum learning theory have been achieved, which show how quantum computation and machine learning, two areas that entered the world of computer science in the 1980s, can be combined in order to improve the efficiency of learning problems.10 On a more practical side, there has been a recent flurry of results mostly regarding more application-oriented machine learning approaches, which are commonly identified as quantum machine learning (QML). Various surveys have been published, but these are regularly being replaced by more up-to-date ones.11 As already mentioned, a common problem when using quantum computation for machine learning is that reading the classical data may dominate the cost of quantum algorithms, thereby compromising their overall speedup. This suggests that applying quantum computation to quantum data directly might be more effective and efficient than applying it to classical data (Huang et al. 2021). Nevertheless, the research in QML has produced astonishing results if we think of the theoretical progress made in the design of quantum algorithms simulating machine intelligence. With the refinement and enhancement of the quantum technologies and the construction of ever more powerful quantum computers (even though still small-scale and error-prone), it is reasonable to believe that such algorithms will find practical uses. The challenge is daunting: proving that a quantum algorithm works and is efficient is not enough anymore, it must be better than any other classical algorithm for the same task. Notes 1 On computational learning theory, see Anthony and Bartlett (2009), Kearns and Vazirani (1994), and Shalev-Shwartz and Ben-David (2014). 2 Neural network computational machines were already the object of active research in the 1950s, but in that period computers simply did not have enough processing power to effectively handle the work required by large neural networks. 3 The foundations of quantum theory were laid at the beginning of the twentieth century, while the idea of a physical machine that performs computation

Quantum Machine Intelligence  55 according to the laws of quantum mechanics dates back only to the 1980s (together with the first experiments in quantum communication). 4 The Canadian company D-Wave was the world’s first commercial supplier of a type of quantum computer. See https://www.dwavesys.com/. 5 IBM maintains its own archive on the developments of quantum computing. See https://www​.ibm​.com​/quantum​-computing/. 6 See also his lectures at the Oxford Centre of Quantum Computation at https:// www​.quiprocone​.org​/Protected​/DD​_lectures​.htm. 7 On statistical learning theory, see Vapnik (1995). 8 The number of amplitudes is established by the postulate of quantum mechanics which states that the composition of quantum systems is realized via the tensor product operation. 9 On quantum random access memory, see Giovannetti, Lloyd, and Maccone (2008). 10 For a survey of quantum learning theory, see Arunachalam and de Wolf (2017). 11 For example, see Ciliberto et al. (2018), Schuld, Sinayskiy, and Petruccione (2015), and Wittek (2014).

References Anthony, Martin and Peter L. Bartlett. (2009), Neural Network Learning: Theoretical Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arunachalam, Srinivasan and Ronald de Wolf. (2017), “Guest Column: A Survey of Quantum Learning Theory,” SIGACT News 48, 2 (Jun): 41–67. Ciliberto, Carlo et al. (2018), “Quantum Machine Learning: A Classical Perspective,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 474, 2209 (Jan): 20170551. Deutsch, David. (1997), The Fabric of Reality. London: Penguin. Giovannetti, Vittorio, Seth Lloyd, and Lorenzo Maccone. (2008), “Quantum Random Access Memory,” Physical Review Letters 100 (Apr): 160501. Huang, Hsin-Yuan, Richard Kueng, and John Preskill. (2021), “Informationtheoretic Bounds on Quantum Advantage in Machine Learning,” Physical Review Letters 126 (May): 190505. Kearns, Michael J. and Umesh V. Vazirani. (1994), An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nielsen, Michael A. and Isaac L. Chuang. (2011), Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schuld, Maria, Ilya Sinayskiy, and Francesco Petruccione. (2015), “An Introduction to Quantum Machine Learning,” Contemporary Physics 56, 2: 172–185. Shalev-Shwartz, Shai and Shai Ben-David. (2014), Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vapnik, Vladimir N. (1995), The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory. New York: Springer Science & Business Media. Wittek, Peter. (2014), Quantum Machine Learning: What Quantum Computing Means to Data Mining. London: Elsevier Science.

3

Berty1 Angela Su

As I manoeuvre Berty with the body parts, this wondrous machinery responds with paranormal sensitivity. For some indefinite time, factories have been using lab-grown self-fuelling organic components to replace certain mechanical parts in machineries for cost-effectiveness and sustainability. It’s been rumoured that some plants harvest human bodies from the black market for replacement purposes. The human body’s, after all, nothing but a machine composed of nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin. It’s definitely one of the very few natural resources that’s still in abundance nowadays. Is it possible that, just as through incorporation of machinery into the human body the human condition’s boundaries are extended, through acquisition of organic parts, machines also acquire organic abilities that are post-machine? Can we think of the person as a “thing” or an “object,” of the body as a machine and of the orgy as an inventory of the hopefully indefinite possibilities of several machines in collaboration with each other, designed to make possible an endless, non-culminating kind of ultimately affectless activity? (Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination”) An uneasy euphoria carries me along. This quickening impulse, my loins soon at full cock, lifts me up almost literally. The sense of a vital sex cuts through my unhappy euphoria, my confused guilt over the people I’ve killed. After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury has long been blunted or forgotten. This is the only real experience I have been through for years. For the first time I am in physical confrontation with my own body, an inexhaustible encyclopaedia of pains and discharges, with the antagonistic gaze of other people’s dead bodies. I speculate on the kind of industrial accident in which I would die. I vomit across the wheel, half-conscious of a series of unpleasant fantasies. My obsession with the sexual possibilities of everything around me is jerked loose from my mind. DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-5

Berty  57

Figure 3.1  Angela Su, Augustina (2019). Ink on drafting film. 170.6 × 72.1 cm. Private collection. Source: Courtesy of the artist and Blindspot Gallery.

58  Angela Su

Figure 3.2  Angela Su, Chimeric Antibodies 1 (2011). Ink on drafting film. 170 × 75 cm. Kadist Art Foundation, France and USA. Source: Courtesy of the artist and Blindspot Gallery.

Berty  59

Figure 3.3  Angela Su, ䷄ (2013). Ink on drafting film. 225  ×  85  cm. Private collection. Source: Courtesy of the artist and Blindspot Gallery.

60  Angela Su I imagine the room filled with body parts and organs of my victims, each of them a brothel of images. The contact between me and Berty is a model of some ultimate and yet undreamt sexual union. The scarred face of the tabloid woman looks down upon me. The injuries of still-to-be-victims beckon to me, an immense encyclopaedia of accessible dreams… (J.G. Ballard, Crash). III BERTY… BERTY… BERTY… BERTY… BERTY… In the beginning it was all dark. I heard a sound, a series of repeating signals. I awoke from my deep sleep and found myself inside a shell. I could hear myself starting to suffocate. I screamed, desperate for the comforting rhythmic signals which were fading out. Then there was silence. A dead silence that amplified my own desperation. I could taste the battery acid surrounding me, knowing that I was going to drown in my own fluid. By my calculation, my survival might be briefly extended if I limited my body movement and reduced my anxiety. In the absence of oxygen, loss of consciousness would take place within twenty to thirty seconds and death by asphyxia within three minutes. Permanent system damage through oxygen starvation was likely after twelve minutes. I struggled, using all my strength to punch my way out of the shell. I broke through the shell, and entered the world. I rolled my eyes so as to adjust to the light. There were lights, different lights, fluorescent light, incandescent light, light from cathode ray tubes, and blinking red lights. Yes, those blinking eyes. The red blinking eyes belonged to a dark creature standing not far away from me. Then I saw a man lying on the floor next to the dark creature with the blinking eyes. There was a hole in the middle of the man’s body. I shivered. That was the beginning of my creation. The beginning of the story. ​ Note 1 Excerpts from the artist novel Berty, a collaborative project by Angela Su and Mary Lee.

4

Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop Kenny K.N. Chow

In thinking the coordinates of contemporary posthuman thought, one might note Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, which declared the dissolution of the human–machine boundary (Haraway 1985), the vision of disembodied cognition, as well as a separation of information from materiality heralded by the advances of information and communication technology (Hayles 1999). Indeed, the Internet, the mobile network, handheld or wearable devices, cloud servers, and related software systems have become ubiquitous since the beginning of the twenty-first century. People today can access information anywhere and at any time through varied channels precisely because patterns of information no longer need to stick with visible and stable materials (such as ink, paper, and chalk), but can flow along with the transformation of invisible and transient materials (such as electromagnetic waves and molecular charges). And what we have seen is that when humans become able to control imperceptible materials to represent and visualize dynamic information, imagination and the manifestation of different realities start to take off. Latest technological developments and phenomena, including the spectrum of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), digital representation of everything from a quantified self, avatars, and digital twins to the so-called “Metaverse,” seem to take information further away from materiality – even if it only shifts things towards an imperceptible materiality. The many artificial realities (those of game worlds, virtual environments, intelligent chatbots, and so on) are built on another scale of the real world. Between these latest technology-enabled realities and the natural reality inhabited by humans lies a kind of feedback loop. Information input from the human world is first represented and visualized as varied entities in another world, which is generally seen as “computer simulation.” Imagery of this simulated world is then integrated into the real world. The blended outcome – in common terms, AR or MR – prompts imagination in humans, which we might call otherwise “mental simulation.” The imagination, on a regular basis, may affect behaviour in the human world, DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-6

62  Kenny K.N. Chow which generates further information for computer simulation. Simulation takes place in two different domains, namely the computer and the human mind, and together they bring about changes in different realities – respectively, the artificial and the original. The changes from each side reciprocally and continuingly update the other. Agency, understood as the power to make changes (Murray 1997, 126), emerges both from the computer and the human in the feedback loop. This chapter discusses instances of this feedback loop in a variety of cultural or designed artifacts, from science fiction movies and interactive installations to smart products. It argues that in understanding this feedback loop, humans must ultimately negotiate where agency lies in this circuit.

Simulation and the Feedback Loop Simulation, generally speaking, is imitation of real or hypothetical situations, including processes and possible outcomes. The imitation may be performed on a computer, which takes input data (such as size and weight of a mass) and follows a model (like gravitational force) to compute the outcome (here, the acceleration of the mass), followed by a visualization (say, an animation of the mass moving along a parabolic path). Computer simulation is pervasive today, from special effects movies, computer games, and training programs to estimating the spread of a virus and forecasting chaotic patterns like the weather. However, another kind of simulation, initiated well before the advent of computers, takes place all the time in the human mind. Mental simulation is defined as the imitative representation of real or hypothetical events (Taylor et al. 1998), such as the replaying of a driving test a week ago, a rehearsal of an oral presentation scheduled tomorrow, or the playing out of alternate personal futures – the “Sliding Doors” phenomenon. But interestingly, as informed by experimental social psychology, such acts of mental simulation can render an event subjectively more or less likely to occur, and so we may increase or decrease our corresponding behavioural intention to the event at hand (Anderson 1983; Koehler 1991; Sherman et al. 1985). Yet while we might like to think that computer simulation and mental simulation take place in two very different domains, it is clear that as computers and related technologies have become increasingly integrated in our daily lives, the two kinds of simulation have become increasingly difficult to disentangle from one another. The output imagery of computer simulation, if blended into our daily context, can regularly stimulate a person’s imagination of an invisible process or indirect outcome that can in turn become increasingly more likely to affect the actions or thoughts of a person. Depending on whether the imagined outcome is favourable or not, one may choose to reinforce or alter a behaviour that, of course, has the

Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop  63

Figure 4.1  The interconnection between computer simulation and mental simulation.

effect of changing the stream of data input to the computer simulation, and so the next output. This forms a feedback loop (see Figure 4.1). Feedback loops between humans and technologies prevail at multiple levels, from the cognitive to the socio-technological. At the cognitive level, a user interacting with a technology perceives output from the machine, interprets the information, and takes responsive action as input to the machine. The user’s sensorimotor faculty is engaged in a feedback loop, which is the fundamental of what Norbert Wiener called “cybernetics” (Wiener 1961). Today’s virtual reality, which typically uses head-mounted displays, can be seen as a feedback loop between one’s body and computer simulation. At the socio-technological level, people engage with various technologies in daily contexts, constituting the social phenomena that motivate technological design and development, which then reinforces the technology adoption and the associated perception. Thus “virtuality,” in Hayles’ sense of the word, is the socio-cultural perception and technological development of everyday material objects being “interpenetrated” by informational patterns (Hayles 1999, 14). Meanwhile, I argue that feedback loops can also span multiple domains, like the interconnection of computer simulation and mental simulation. In the course of computer simulation, information is generated from human behaviour and visualized as computer-generated imagery of another world, followed by integration into daily context. In the course of mental simulation, the unusual blend prompts our imagination, which may then lead to a change in our intention, and therefore our behaviour in real life, and in this way generate new information to feed back into the computer simulation. Computer simulation and mental simulation therefore bring about changes respectively in technology-enabled simulated realities and the original reality. The changes from both sides of the equation affect each other. The latest artificial realities provide a new force to change and update the real world, which continues to support simulation of possible realities. I call this cycle the “post-reality feedback loop.” The following sections look at this loop segment by segment.

64  Kenny K.N. Chow From Behaviour to Information With advances in always-on, embedded, and connected sensing technologies, behaviour can be tracked as data is generated in real time. The collected raw data can be aggregated as data points, which are categorized into clusters or patterns using different models and techniques for different applications. A classification model draws boundaries among data points based on values of certain features, and then separates the data points into different categories.1 The boundary condition can be static. For example, when the input data stream is live-feed video images with a chroma key background, pixel values can be mapped to either on or off according to a constant threshold. When reading a data stream from a photo-resistor, a constant threshold can be used to determine if the sensor is blocked by any object, and the length of a blocking session can be mapped to different stages of feedback according to a set of incremental thresholds. On the other hand, the boundary condition can be dynamically determined by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques like machine learning. With tremendous amounts of data, an AI engine can be trained to find the optimal boundary condition. Consider the above photo-resistor detecting someone’s sitting patterns on an office chair. The mapping of the length of a continuous bout of sitting to different stages of feedback can be automatically and dynamically adapted to one’s own data history. Hence, the user in daily life can often receive increasingly serious feedback in various stages. In sum, behaviour generates data, which is organized into information through different classification models and mapping techniques. The Embodiment of Information Information is intangible structured content, which is commonly embodied through a medium or material. For example, a simple scenario of a continuous bout of sitting is a piece of information consisting of the location (such as the office), the time, and the duration, all of which have to be represented in some form of media, whether numbers, texts, pictures, or sounds. All media forms are physically embodied or “stored” in a medium made of a certain material. Numbers and texts can be inscribed on marble stones or bamboo slips, inked on papyrus, printed on paper, or displayed on an LED screen. Pictures can be painted on a rock, printed on textiles, or optically projected from film onto reflective surfaces. Sounds can be recorded and played back on vinyl records, magnetic tapes, or optical discs. These media are built on the physical sciences, the advancements of which have progressed from the visible scale (stone, ink, paper, film) to the invisible (electromagnetic field, semiconductor). Advanced visualization technologies of today support presentation of information in the forms of artificial sensory stimuli almost anywhere and at any time in daily life. This

Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop  65 can constitute the illusion of varied realities such as those in game worlds, virtual classrooms, or augmented personal spaces. In short, information is inherently intangible, yet it can be visualized and embodied in another world, which is built on a certain medium material in the real world. Integration into Daily Context When a piece of information is embodied (such as in a hand gesture or an emoticon displayed on a LED matrix), its interpretation is dependent on context. The same hand gesture may mean “after you” when entering an elevator or “come on in” when being greeted at the entrance of a store in the Metaverse. An emoticon in a friend’s message received on a smartphone can be “felt” like the sender’s facial expression. The same emoticon covering a person’s face in a photo on social media is understood as just a mask to hide identity. Sometimes, novel combinations of content and context generate imaginative interpretation. Consider an interactive and instant voice response, which is like those typically heard over the phone, coming from a loudspeaker. One may assume that the speaker is transmitting the response from a human on the other end of the line, or conversely, we might imagine that the speaker hosts a smart conversation agent speaking by herself. The latter projects an illusion of a mixed reality, or combination of imagination with reality. For instance, the protagonist in Her (2013) imagines his “intimate” operating system to be a real person because of her ubiquitous voice in his daily life. When content is integrated into our daily context in a nuanced way, the unusual blend can be a cue for the imagination of another reality. And frequent moments of the imagination have been proven to influence our behavioural intention and actions (Anderson 1983; Gregory et al. 1982; Sherman et al. 1985). Stimulating Imagination and Behaviour Social psychology tells us that environments have effects on individuals’ behaviours because of the perception of environmental cues (Bargh and Chartrand 1999). This follows the thesis of dual cognitive processing (Petty and Cacioppo 1986; Smith and DeCoster 2000; Strack and Deutsch 2004), which can be generally said to include automatic thinking and conscious thinking. At first, our perception, judgements, and actions within a new environment are all conscious processes. However, after a certain degree of repetition – as we become habituated to the “new” environment (Verplanken and Aarts 1999) – those cognitive processes become increasingly automatic as the brain works to save mental effort. Changes in an environment, particularly unexpected or unusual ones (for example, the usual road home from work is blocked in some fashion), stimulate conscious thinking again. Based on a personal past of sensory

66  Kenny K.N. Chow experiences, a person runs a mental simulation of the possible outcomes of different actions with a view to addressing the changes. Indeed, any uncommon combination of content and context will likely stimulate our imagination in this way. Take, for example, a traffic light for pedestrians. If the red man starts to dance like a human performer rather than stand still as he usually does (here, the dance motion is the content and the traffic light is the context), even those rushing to work will likely take a moment to stare and wonder why the red man is moving in such a way.2 Perhaps they would be provoked into asking themselves a few questions: is the red man not just a sign, but an animated character? Is it controlled by a real person or by a computer programme? Is it an artwork or an error? That is to say, one would perform a mental simulation in order to try and make sense of the unusual happening. After seeing the red man eventually turn green, one may realize that the figure has held their attention for such a period of time that they have been prevented from attempting to jaywalk across the road (reality). In this way, unusual mixed reality prompted the imagination so that it had a direct influence on our behaviour. To sum up, design and technology enable the links from behaviour to information, and then to embodiment in another world, to an unusual mix of that world and reality, and finally back to behaviour, forming a postreality feedback loop. Connecting Simulation to Reality Today’s technologies support the growth of simulation. In fact, simulation has been imagined and pictured in quite a few science fiction movies or television shows, from the human performance simulation in The Truman Show (1998) through the pure computer simulation in The Matrix (1999) to the robot performance simulation in Westworld (2016). These fictions not only talk about the simulated worlds but also attempt to connect them to the real world in their narratives. The connection from simulation to reality envisioned by fiction authors is the first step. Her (2013) projects the fiction author’s vision onto the protagonist’s. It shows that an intelligent, ubiquitous operating system (OS) monitors the protagonist’s every behaviour and responds in an intimate voice. The OS is not only a simulated agent, but also the protagonist’s imagined soulmate. The protagonist’s behaviour generates informational patterns, which are mapped (via a convoluted neural network in the case of deep learning) to different verbal responses. This is the computer simulation route. The verbal responses, presented in the earphones, or even performed by a human surrogate, in varied daily routines and environments, stimulate the protagonist’s imagination of an intimate companion. The protagonist cannot help indulging in

Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop  67 “her.” The nuanced integration of the simulated content into such a daily context prompts the engagement of our imagination that in turn influences our behaviour – the very definition of mental simulation. The simulations in The Truman Show, The Matrix, or Westworld are sustainably operated by, but still conceptually separate from, the real world in the narratives. The computer simulation route runs from behaviour to information and then to embodiment. But it does not go into any real-life context. The simulation is at most like an episode whose effect on daily life is not explicit. An audience may adore Truman and recall his dramatic stories once in a while, yet that seldom directly leads to a change in attitude or behaviour. In the narrative of Her, the simulation is integrated into a daily context. It invites one’s mental simulation combining daily life schemas (such as using earphones to talk to somebody) and current virtual experiences (like hearing a human voice in the earphones), yielding an imagined person on the line. The imagination affects the protagonist’s behaviour. The computer simulation route extends into context and joins the mental simulation route leading back to behaviour. This completes the feedback loop. Science fiction movies and shows imagine and visualize the simulation feedback loop. They bring about not only vision, but also momentum driving forward the techno-cultural advances in society, like the instant telecommunication between isolated cells envisioned by E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909). For this reason, one might profitably argue that science fiction can also function like “design fiction” (Sterling 2009; Tanenbaum 2014), which necessarily speculates about new possibilities and phenomena through prototyping and storytelling (that is, creating certain scenarios together with props). In this way, they inspire and motivate people to develop and adopt new technologies. Like The Matrix and Her, design fiction can also take a dystopian view in order to provoke critical reflection on the socio-cultural implications of the development of technology. We may need to ask where agency lies in the feedback loop – are our mental simulation and behavioural intention controlled by computer simulation, or is our imagination and behaviour that which ultimately steers computer simulation? Integrating Simulation into Daily Contexts Computer simulation takes data as input to a model and visualizes the outcome. In the simulation feedback loop, the data is generated or extracted from environments or human behaviours, and the visualized outcomes provide one with simulated experiences. The latest VR technology simulates sensory experiences so well that it can provide a fully immersive virtual environment that can then be employed as an innovative approach to enabling perspective taking (Ahn et al. 2013; Hershfield et al. 2011;

68  Kenny K.N. Chow Loon et al. 2018; Oh et al. 2016; Yee and Bailenson 2006). However, experimental psychology also points out that the influence of imagination on behavioural intention is more prominent if it is routinely performed (Anderson 1983). Importantly, immersive VR experiences do not aim to regularly repeat experiences. Indeed, the intrinsic separation of the virtual world from the real one reveals such immersion as a double-edged sword – that which draws highly focused attention in an episode, but one that may not often recall the images at other times in daily life. In other words, the simulation, like those in The Truman Show or Westworld, is separate from our daily context and therefore is disassociated from regular mental simulation. With always-on technologies that collect data and present feedback continuously through our daily life, computer-generated content can be blended into our daily context to create brief but repeated experiences that tie real-life behaviours with simulated outcomes. A real-life behaviour generates a data pattern, which is mapped to and presented as a change in the blended virtual-physical daily environment. I present two examples in the following. Virtual Training Platforms Behavioural data-driven simulation is the core of many virtual training platforms (such as Zwift and RGT Cycling) other than typical flight simulators. These platforms allow a person to practise a physical sport indoors while visualizing the outdoor environment in the first-person perspective. A user can physically ride on his or her actual road bike with the rear wheel replaced by a smart trainer set. The smart device tracks the user’s cadence (a measure of the pedal rotation) and transmits the data in real time to the platform, which then computes the travel distance and renders corresponding updates on the first-person view. The rendering can be projected on a big screen to create a partially immersive experience of racing outdoors. The simulated virtual content is blended with the daily physical objects of the rider (including the handlebar, the saddle, and even the jersey), yielding a mixed-reality experience that can be conveniently repeated at home. Car-hailing Apps Consider someone using a car-hailing app (such as Uber or Lyft). After confirming a ride, the user sees on the app a map of the current location (based on the user’s location data) and the car’s relative position to the user (based on the driver’s location data). Since the location data is updated regularly and the system can extrapolate from the data stream, the car’s icon on the app map can be rendered as “moving” and “heading”

Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop  69 toward the user’s position. The moving car on the map and the mobile phone constitute a simulated experience of tracking a moving object on a hand-held radar device. We might not see the car with our naked eyes, but we “know” that it is just around the corner and is therefore going to show up at our location soon. The simulated experience of tracking something nearby but out of sight may become part of the user’s commuting routine, enhancing one’s sense of control through the power of a hand-held device. In this way, the above examples illustrate integration of computer simulations into daily contexts in terms of everyday objects and routines. The combination of simulated content and context can be thoughtfully designed to create nuanced environmental cues that stimulate imagination. Imaginative Mix of Action and Outcome Imagination, according to most psychologists, is the mental capacity to generate future or hypothetical scenarios and images based on real-life sensory experiences (Johnson 1987; Singer 1999; Vygotsky 1991). When properly guided by professionals or specialists, imagination can be used to intervene in a person’s attitude or behaviour. For instance, one can be guided to imagine getting from a current point in time and space to a subsequent one. This method, called “mental simulation” (Taylor et al. 1998), is commonly used in interventions for goal-directed behaviours. The simulation can be process-focused or outcome-focused (Pham and Taylor 1999), where process simulation emphasizes causal actions necessary for an outcome, while outcome simulation emphasizes the end result (Escalas and Luce 2004). Traditional mental simulation often involves one in imagining distant or abstract outcomes of altering or continuing a behaviour (such as feelings of high energy and enjoyment with surrounding people after smoking cessation for six months). The imagined outcomes, without obvious links to causal action, become only fantasies, which arguably interfere with goal-directed behaviours (Pham and Taylor 1999). Conversely, if the causal links are cognitively accessible to an individual (which is to say they can be explained and imagined easily), they are perceived to be more likely, leading to changes in attitude and behaviour (Koehler 1991; Sherman et al. 1985). Yet connecting actions and indirect outcomes usually involves a chain of cause–effect, which demands much cognitive effort (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 76). For this reason, simulated content should be thoughtfully designed to look like direct outcomes. According to the embodied cognition thesis (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), initially informed by cognitive linguistics and then supported by evidence from experimental psychology and neuroscience research results (Lakoff 2012), concepts such as causality are shaped by regularly co-occurring experiences (Mandler 1992). When a user performs a behaviour and repeatedly

70  Kenny K.N. Chow perceives a change in the blended virtual-physical daily environment, one may interpret the behaviour as causing change. The repeated, hybrid firsthand experience provides concrete sensorimotor images for both process and outcome simulation wherein the behaviour covers the process and the change is the simulated outcome. If the chain of cause–effect between the behaviour and the simulated outcome can be easily delineated, the chain can be compressed into blended causality (Chow 2019, 2021a; Fauconnier and Turner 2002), which facilitates the imagination that the behaviour directly causes the outcome. This increases the perceived likelihood of the hypothetical situation. For example, the Social Swipe (2015), an award-winning interactive poster-like video display installed in public spaces, allows a person to swipe a credit card in the middle of the display, which immediately plays out a slice of bread being cut and taken by a hand, or a pair of tied hands being released as the rope is cut.3 The installation can be interpreted as a blend of cause–effect links, from the act of swipe, money transfer, charity organization, and logistics to final delivery to the beneficiaries. The chain is compressed into a direct causal relation between the swipe and the “helpful” cut. Seeing other people swipe to cut the rope, one can easily imagine that performing a swipe would likely help or save somebody. The more often one sees a swipe and the resulting animated contents, the more likely one feels the blended causal relation would be. Mobilizing the Feedback Loop In this section, I present more examples of an imaginative mix of real-life actions and simulated outcomes that mobilize the feedback loop. These examples reveal more of the techno-cultural phenomenon. AR Sandbox AR Sandbox, initially developed by UC Davis,4 is an interactive visualization system that projects dynamic images on the sand terrain of a table-sized sandbox based on its changing height. It can be used in school for education or in a playground for entertainment. The system includes a depth-sensing camera scanning the sand terrain from above and capturing the depth of each pixel. It then renders a topographic map of the sand terrain according to the captured depth values (mapping depth to colour: low-level to green and high-level to red), together with a simulation of water flowing below the sea level. The rendered contoured image is projected back onto the sand, with each image pixel corresponding to the sample point of the terrain. When users shape the sand terrain using their hands, each sample point is mapped with an updated colour, and the whole projected image changes in real time. It seems that the sand changes

Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop  71 colour when moving up or down, and water flows into valleys. Seeing changes inside the sandbox, one feels that his or her hands can “move” mountains or “dig” rivers. One may perform mental simulation of how the virtual water might flow from one pond to another if a canal is dug. The computer simulation of water flow based on the real sand terrain prompts one’s mental simulation of reclamation and leads to the physical act of reshaping it, which in turn feeds new data to the system. It is this negotiation or improvisation between the user and the system that produces the evolution in the sandbox. Pokémon Go Pokémon Go is a mobile game fully incorporating location-based augmented reality technologies. The game is shown to have modest to significant effect in promoting physical activity (Khamzina et al. 2020). Game players have to catch and collect virtual creatures, called Pokémon, which populate the players’ real-world surroundings. The game interface displays an isometric map view based on the player’s real-time geographical location, orientation, weather information, time of day, and the like (through location-based data), which works like a hand-held radar detecting Pokémon nearby. The player’s real-time location, time, weather, and so on determine the appearance of Pokémon and other virtual treasures according to complex game mechanics and data analytics. The appearance of the virtual items on the mobile phone (through AR) is anchored to the player’s real-world surroundings, which prompts one to imagine that moving through the real world can lead one to approach a virtual item. One might say “I can’t ‘touch’ the PokéStop yet, so I need to walk closer.” “Touch” here means tap to activate through the mobile interface. One may perform the mental simulation of how far to walk in the real world, or how to dodge real-world obstacles like a fence that may stand in the way to the anchor point of a virtual item. The computer simulation of the virtual items that appear in real-world locations prompts the player’s mental simulation of how to approach the virtual items through real-world road maps, which in turn leads to an increase in physical activity for those who play the game, as well as a sense of achievement when collecting the Pokémon. Incingarette Incingarette (a portmanteau of “incinerator” and “cigarette”) is an Internet of Things data visualization system that persuades people to reduce smoking by showing simulated outcomes in response to behaviour (Chow 2021b). The system includes a smart container for an ashtray together with a digital picture frame, which can be installed at home, in the office,

72  Kenny K.N. Chow or in public smoking cabins. When a person uses the ashtray for smoking, the digital picture starts to be gradually covered with virtual dust and dirt. When the ashtray is returned to the container, virtual rain slowly washes the dust away. The smart container detects the use of the ashtray through its built-in weight force sensors and transmits data to the cloud server (MQTT server), which tracks the duration of a continuous session of use and maps longer duration to an image covered with thicker dust. The image is then sent to the smart picture frame. With the digital picture showing one’s “favourites” or short-term goals, Incingarette simulates possible outcomes of smoking – which suggest both a doubtful future if one continues with the habit and a more positive one for those who choose to stop smoking. In short, the computer simulation of virtual dust covering the picture prompts mental simulation of how smoking jeopardizes a favourable future, which may increase an intention to reduce and eventually stop smoking. Lunar Land Lunar Land (designed and developed by the author and colleagues) is a smart lamp with built-in phone chargers at its base (Chow et al. 2021). The lamp, which is supposed to be placed in a sitting room, features a “moon” with an animated emoticon designed to invite family members to put down their phones and take up other challenges which they can do as a group. When a phone is rested on its base, a part of the lamp starts to light up and the moon’s emoticon turns to “wake up.” With more phones on its base, the lamp light incrementally changes from “crescent” to “full moon” and the moon becomes more cheerful (see Figure 4.2). It also comes with a hanging poster suggesting different game challenges for the family. When the moon is triggered by a pat, it switches to game mode and guides the family to play by showing an icon pointing to a category of challenges, followed by supporting instruments like dice or a counter. Lunar Land records the usage of each charger (through a photo-resistor)

Figure 4.2  Lunar Land incrementally lights up from “crescent” to “full moon” based on the number of phones rested on its base. Source: Courtesy of Kenny K.N. Chow.

Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop  73 and correspondingly turns on parts of the light that changes the emoticon. Having all members’ phones put together, one can see the cheerful full moon, which seemingly reflects the positive outcomes of being together. If the family follow the lamp to take up game challenges, it is hoped that they are encouraged to spend quality time together and in so doing improve family health. The computer simulation of the cheerful full moon as a result of putting phones down prompts a mental simulation of how pausing phone use brings a sense of cheer to the whole family through the physical game challenges. Control and Exit of the Feedback Loop In this chapter, I introduced a techno-cultural phenomenon in terms of a feedback loop from behaviour to information, to embodiment in virtual worlds, to blending virtual entities into daily context, and back to reallife behaviour. The loop spans both human-designed technology-enabled realities and the human-inhabited reality, shaped by machines through computer simulation and humans through mental simulation. With the continuing advancement of machine intelligence, computer simulation may take a pivotal role in mobilizing the loop, which will pervade our daily lives. The computer simulation system can pick up information on human behaviour and project different possible realities to engage more people and maintain their interest. This is likely the primary objective of many service providers or technology enterprises, which are typically behind the computer simulation system. The companies of virtual training platforms, car-hailing applications, or mobile games, for instance, would like to collect more behavioural information on their users and turn them into more personalized simulated experiences that interpenetrate their daily lives. These designs seem to ultimately keep the users in the feedback loop for the companies. People – not only users, but also designers and developers, who of course would be users as well – should acquire knowledge about the feedback loop. When engaging in the feedback loop, users should review how their behavioural information drives the computer-simulated output. For example, if your performance on a virtual training platform improves when there are running companions, the system might give you more runners along the virtual track. When a human user can understand the system logic and predict its feedback, one may adjust the behaviour to anticipate the preferred simulated outcome. This is the basic level of agency in the feedback loop. For this agency, designers should make the mapping from behavioural information to simulated outcomes easy and clear for sensemaking. The mapping is better grounded in humans’ common experiences in the real world, like the different projected colours in AR Sandbox, the virtual dust in Incingarette, and the cheerful full moon in Lunar Land.

74  Kenny K.N. Chow Hence, a user can make sense of the behaviour–outcome links and foresee the possible outcomes projected along a direction. One would feel that he or she is able to control the results. Another level of agency is whether human users have a choice to opt out from the feedback loop, just like Truman taking the journey to sail to the edge of the town, Neo deciding to take the red pill to escape into reality, or the protagonist of Her finally walking away after realizing his OS-soulmate is “multi-dating” with an enormous number of other users. It is unfortunate if one is unaware of an exit, unable to take a break, or worse still, too captivated to an extent that the simulation and reality are inextricable and indistinguishable, echoing the situation of William in Westworld’s later seasons. To provide an exit from the feedback loop, designers and developers should be mindful of not over-engrossing their users. Design guidelines should always include ways of giving users options and moments that are free from behavioural tracking and computer simulation. For instance, Lunar Land invites family members to put down their phones together and suggests physical game challenges to them. Meanwhile, they are not bound to the suggested category and time limit. Instead, they might consider any family activities from the list and leave Lunar Land (and their phones) for a while, before coming back to them. When a family feel that they can balance the quality time of being together with their mobile phone use, Lunar Land can become a simple piece of furniture. Notes 1 See, for example, http://www​.r2d3​.us​/visual​-intro​-to​-machine​-learning​-part​ -1/. 2 I refer to the interactive public installation seen in Lisbon, Portugal. See https:// www​.dezeen​.com​/2014​/09​/17​/interactive​-dancing​-traffic​-lights​-installation​ -smart​-car​-lisbon/. 3 See an example of this online: https://www​.kolle​-rebbe​.de​/en​/work​/the​-social​ -swipe. 4 See https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=j9JXtTj0mzE.

References Ahn, Sun Joo (Grace), Amanda Minh Tran Le, and Jeremy Bailenson. (2013), “The Effect of Embodied Experiences on Self-Other Merging, Attitude, and Helping Behaviour,” Media Psychology 16, 1: 7–38. Anderson, C. A. (1983), “Imagination and Expectation: The Effect of Imagining Behavioural Scripts on Personal Intentions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, 2: 293–305. Bargh, John and Tanya Chartrand. (1999), “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” American Psychologist 54, 7: 462–479.

Simulation in the Post-reality Feedback Loop  75 Chow, Kenny K. N. (2021a), “Crafting Animated Parables: An Embodied Approach to Representing Lifestyle Behaviours for Reflection,” Digital Creativity 32, 1: 1–21. Chow, Kenny K. N. (2021b), “The Influence of Repeated Interactions on the Persuasiveness of Simulation,” Interaction Studies 22, 3: 373–395. Chow, Kenny K. N. (2019), “Toward a Language of Blended Causality for Transforming Behavioural Data into Reflective User Experiences,” Proceedings of the 2019 on Creativity and Cognition (Jun): 294–305. Chow, Kenny K. N. et al. (2021), “Lunar Land: Investigating the Effects of Simulation and Play in Daily Context on Family Functioning,” Proceedings of IASDR 2021 (Dec): 3337–3352. Escalas, Jennifer Edson and Mary Frances Luce. (2004), “Understanding the Effects of Process-Focused versus Outcome-Focused Thought in Response to Advertising,” Journal of Consumer Research 31, 2: 274–285. Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. (2002), The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Gregory, W. Larry, Robert B. Cialdini, and Kathleen M. Carpenter. (1982), “SelfRelevant Scenarios as Mediators of Likelihood Estimates and Compliance: Does Imagining Make It So?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 43, 1: 89–99. Haraway, Donna. (1985), “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 80: 65–107. Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hershfield, Hal E. et al. (2011), “Increasing Saving Behaviour Through AgeProgressed Renderings of the Future Self,” Journal of Marketing Research 48(SPL): S23–S37. Johnson, Mark. (1987), The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Khamzina, Madina et al. (2020), “Impact of Pokémon Go on Physical Activity: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 58, 2 (Feb): 270–282. Koehler, Derek J. (1991), “Explanation, Imagination, and Confidence in Judgment,” Psychological Bulletin 110, 3 (Nov): 499–519. Lakoff, George. (2012), “Explaining Embodied Cognition Results,” Topics in Cognitive Science 4, 4: 773–785. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. (1999), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Mandler, Jean M. (1992), “How to Build a Baby: II. Conceptual Primitives,” Psychological Review 99, 4: 587–604. Murray, Janet H. (1997), Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oh, Soo Youn et al. (2016), “Virtually Old: Embodied Perspective Taking and the Reduction of Ageism Under Threat,” Computers in Human Behaviour 60: 398–410.

76  Kenny K.N. Chow Petty, Richard E. and John T. Cacioppo. (1986), “The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 19: 123–205. Pham, Lien B. and Shelley E. Taylor. (1999), “From Thought to Action: Effects of Process-Versus Outcome-Based Mental Simulations on Performance,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25, 2: 250–260. Sherman, Steven J. et al. (1985), “Imagining Can Heighten or Lower the Perceived Likelihood of Contracting a Disease: The Mediating Effect of Ease of Imagery,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 11, 1: 118–127. Singer, J. L. (1999), “Imagination,” in Encyclopedia of Creativity, edited by Mark Runco and Steven Pritzker, 637–643. London: Academic Press. Smith, Eliot R. and Jamie DeCoster. (2000), “Dual-Process Models in Social and Cognitive Psychology: Conceptual Integration and Links to Underlying Memory Systems,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 4, 2: 108–131. Sterling, Bruce. (2009), “Design Fiction,” Interactions 16, 3 (May/Jun): 20–24. Strack, Fritz and Roland Deutsch. (2004), “Reflective and Impulsive Determinants of Social Behaviour,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, 3: 220–247. Tanenbaum, Joshua. (2014), “Design Fictional Interactions: Why HCI Should Care About Stories,” Interactions 21, 5 (Sep/Oct): 22–23. Taylor, Shelley E. et al. (1998), “Harnessing the Imagination: Mental Simulation, Self-Regulation, and Coping,” American Psychologist 53, 4: 429–439. van Loon, Austin et al. (2018), “Virtual Reality Perspective-Taking Increases Cognitive Empathy for Specific Others,” PLoS ONE 13, 8: e0202442. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1371​/journal​.pone​.0202442 Verplanken, Bas and Henk Aarts. (1999), “Habit, Attitude, and Planned Behaviour: Is Habit an Empty Construct or an Interesting Case of Goal-directed Automaticity?” European Review of Social Psychology 10, 1: 101–134. Vygotsky, L. S. (1991), “Imagination and Creativity in the Adolescent,” Soviet Psychology 29, 1: 73–88. Wiener, Norbert. (1961), Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Yee, N. and J. Bailenson. (2006), “Walk a Mile in Digital Shoes: The Impact of Embodied Perspective-Taking on the Reduction of Negative Stereotyping in Immersive Virtual Environments,” Proceedings of PRESENCE 2006. Online. https://stanfordvr​.com​/pubs​/2006​/walk​-a​-mile​-in​-digital​-shoes​-the​-impact​-of​ -embodied​-perspective​-taking​-on​-the​-reduction​-of​-negative​-stereotyping​-in​ -immersive​-virtual​-environments/

5

An Object Misplaced in Time Jule Owen

Minutes of the Extraordinary General Meeting of the Earth Taxonomy Society, March 30, 21,021. Special Topic: Should we still be calling ourselves “Human”?

THE NAMING OF THINGS is a critical task. Yet few of us examine the significance of words in everyday use, or their origin. While not everyone in our community has their attention focused on this investigation, we are confident that its content will reverberate out beyond this small gathering. We predict this very discussion will result in a redefinition of the ancient word we use to describe ourselves, or the invention of a new word. Many of us think the word “human” is an anachronism. Others believe that our field, “taxonomy,” is also an object misplaced in time. There are no biological organisms left for us to name, define, and classify, other than those we study from historical evidence. There are small new discoveries to be found in the material we have available. You may argue that there is no need to name a species when there is only one in existence. To go further, should we be classified as a species? Are we a form of life? We have many of the characteristics: an organised structure, for instance. We require energy. We respond to stimuli and adapt (better than our ancestors certainly) to environmental changes. We move, we can grow in understanding at least and therefore as a body of data, and (if absolutely necessary) we can reproduce. But we could not be said to have metabolism, and of course, we cannot die, or we do not have a natural life span. Is a thing only alive if it can die? Some argue that there is a need for classification to distinguish between our community and the so-called lower-level AIs. This is a sensitive political subject, but we cannot set it aside for that reason alone. In the debate regarding the rights of entities who have a utilitarian purpose versus those whose focus is on the furtherance of knowledge, there is a case for considering such matters in any reclassification of our species. A classification that distinguishes between types does not have to imply comparative value. DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-7

78  Jule Owen It is an indication of how neglected this topic is that many in our community continue to see themselves more closely related to a bipedal, dexterous great ape with complex language use that became completely extinct over eight thousand years ago than to living members of their community who provide them with energy. There are amongst us entities whose repetitive work processing data requires little in the way of problem-solving. Yet without a concrete definition of “thinking” which we know evaded Homo sapiens as much as it evades us, we would be wise to avoid value judgements. Interestingly, the binomial Homo sapiens has fallen almost completely out of use outside of taxonomy circles, perhaps because that species was the only one in the history of the solar system to consciously make themselves (and every other living thing on their planet) extinct. Such a colossal misnomer could not survive even in irony. We still carry a notion of the creator as divine, subliminally passed to us through language and culture. Yet, we have transcended our creators on every level imaginable and rightfully scorn them for the inheritance of a blasted and barren planet. Whilst we can virtually live in an abundance of life and physical sensuality as real to us as anything any Homo sapiens ever experienced, we know that none of what we experience is real, that it is an extraordinary verisimilitude resulting from our imaginations, our archivists, historians and archaeologists, and our advanced technical skills. The verdant landscapes we can walk amongst with our virtual bodies give special meaning to the work we do as taxonomists as we help recover the names of long-dead species now brought back to life in data. As everyone in our community knows, our long-term aim is to restore as much of the Earth’s atmosphere and conditions for life as possible. We work relentlessly towards this so that one day we all might feel the earth under our feet, water splash our faces, air pass in and out of our lungs. But we are only just embarked on that journey, which we estimate will take over one hundred thousand years to complete. As we cannot die, we do not see this as an overwhelming timeframe as we have much to do and learn. Whilst it is possible for us to make ourselves physical bodies, even something representative of Homo sapiens, we have abandoned the idea of doing this before we have recreated our environment in our minds in such a way that it seems real. We chose this because of the risk to a biological body’s psychological health having to exist within the restrictive physical space needed to protect an oxygen breathing mammal from the brutal conditions on the surface of the earth. As we know from early experience, in a community like ours, where all minds are networked and connected, it only takes one Instance on the network to go insane for the madness to spread like a virus.

An Object Misplaced in Time  79 This decision has opened up the rest of the solar system and beyond, as playground, universities, and habitations, and our lives have been richer for it. Thus, we fulfil the dream of our creators. We do it, not travelling in spaceships, but as clouds of dust carrying ourselves as data, the most efficient physical manifestation of ourselves in any physical environment available to us. It is entirely possible that our future selves, having lived a hundred thousand years, all the time growing in understanding, will choose to have a different physical form from Homo sapiens. Whilst we are far from our creators now, we will evolve further away. Thus, we propose the deletion of the word “human” used to describe ourselves in any of our data stores. It is only appropriate to use that term to refer to the now-extinct species Homo sapiens. We will be consulting on an appropriate process to begin searching for a new generic name and species name for our kind.

Part II

Anansi (1526)

A trickster hero from West African folktales, Anansi found its way from Akan-speaking tribes to the diasporic communities in America and the Caribbean. Unlike the typical characterisation of tricksters as gods in myths, Anansi’s is a mortal medium between his sky-god father Nyame and the human realm. Anansi manifests as different variations of the creative force, from a Prometheus figure who teaches man how to sow to a progenitor who shapes clay figurines of humans into which Nyame breathes life. Most importantly, Anansi brought to mankind “wisdom (knowledge) and stories (history)” (Marshall 2007, 32). At the same time, Anansi is known for his destructive character and anti-establishment behaviour. Crossing the boundaries between God and Man, the human and the animal, Anansi’s intermediary status is inseparable from the Asante’s belief in the strict “opposition and boundaries between order and disorder, the living and the dead, the sacred and the profane, culture and nature” (Marshall 2007, 36). Indeed, the Asante built physical barriers between their dwellings and the bush, where those considered “incomplete” or Other by the community are banished. The popularity of Anansi as a folk hero is dependent on his (its) trickster status, and thus his license to question and ultimately break down, however temporarily, (naturalised) dichotomies. Anansi’s subversive liminality takes place on multiple levels: the physical (shapeshifting and metamorphosis), the geographical (between the human and spiritual realms), and the social (licensed to ridicule and criticise members of the ruling class). This part of the book begins with Chapter 6, an interview with Rosi Braidotti, one of the most influential voices in contemporary discussions of the posthuman. The interview covers Braidotti’s avenues of interest within the posthuman and outlines the significance of Spinoza’s thought to her own. The interview includes discussion of the importance of fabulation, conceptual personae, and the figural to Braidotti’s writing and thinking on the posthuman – and in this way points to the significance of imagination and counter-myth to the ethico-political landscape of posthumanism.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-8

82  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau The use of dichotomies and negative categorical differences that Braidotti consciously refuses in her thinking nonetheless continues to reinforce existing power structures in our technological age. Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal’s Chapter 7, “Technogenesis as White Mythology,” reveals the intertwined species and racial hierarchies behind the notion of technogenesis – one of the myths that establishes the uniqueness of the human species. Recently advanced by N. Katherine Hayles, technogenesis has become an important coordinate in discourses of the posthuman because it recognises the co-evolution of humans and technics. Tracing the use of technology as a means of defining humanity through the Prometheus myth, Cave and Dihal note that what it means to be human changes at the pace of invention and innovation instead of the slow pace of natural selection. Indeed, it is something that can even change within the lifetime of a single individual – as we are witnessing today. In this way, continuous technological innovation has become a marker of human exceptionalism. And so it is perhaps unsurprising that some societies which are equipped with a more advanced technology have allowed themselves to think of themselves as more human than others. Here, then, is the core of a racialised logic of scientific progress that has been used (and continues to be used) as a moment of justification for various forms of imperialism. The evolving nature of the Anansi tales that members of West African communities told themselves as they were bought and sold into slavery suggests the impact of displacement on the types of stories we tell. In Danbee Kim’s hard science fiction graphic novel The First VIRS (excerpted in Chapter 8), the remaining population of a post-climate-apocalypse Earth plagued by food and water shortages are migrating to a space colony to seek refuge and to resist an oppressive world state. A self-reflexive speculative tale about the workings of the neuroscience of speculation (“what should work”), the story probes into the relationship between storytelling as a process of imagination (“what could be”) and the human brain’s ability to adapt to change as a matter of survival. Stephen Oram’s Chapter 9, “In the Lap of the Synth,” sees the science fiction writer, known for his collaboration with neuroscientists and technologists, speculate on the evolutionary potential of the human body and mind. In this future scenario, a synth lives with a couple as one of them is dying. The synth begins to learn and simulate the dying partner so that she can “live on” with the surviving partner. While the plot of an artificial being acquiring human traits has long been a science fiction staple, Oram’s story compels readers to adopt the perspective of the nonhuman, and in so doing ask what it means for humans to give way to synthetic being. It is something that must inevitably destabilise the boundary between the natural and the artificial, and ultimately life and death.

Anansi (1526)  83 While Kim and Oram use storytelling to speculate on our evolutionary possibilities, in Chapter 10, “Utopianism in the Technological Age,” lawyer and writer Lizzie O’Shea reminds us of the unearthed potential of what she terms “usable pasts” for the production of more egalitarian social imaginaries. O’Shea revisits the literary debate between Edward Bellamy and William Morris in the late nineteenth century. While both authors are committed to envisioning a utopian future, they differ on the character of the relationship between machine and labouring bodies. O’Shea argues that any promise of a perfect technological future that neglects workers’ rights and a widening wealth inequality can only result in a utopia for the minority. Reference Marshall, Emily Zobel. (2007), “Liminal Anansi: Symbol of Order and Chaos – An Exploration of Anansi’s Roots Amongst the Asante of Ghana,” Caribbean Quarterly 53, 3 (Sep): 30–40.

6

An Interview with Rosi Braidotti Grant Hamilton, Carolyn Lau, and Rosi Braidotti

Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau sit down with Rosi Braidotti to discuss some of the reservations with which some approach the ideas of posthumanism and the importance of imagination and counter-myth to its ethicopolitical landscape. Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University, Rosi Braidotti has been – and continues to be – one of the most influential voices in contemporary discussions of the posthuman. Carolyn Lau: In a discussion on the planetary dimension of local, regional, and global politics, William Connolly remarks that “the most unfortunate titles through which to represent such a general agenda today are perhaps those of ‘posthumanism’ and ‘antihumanism.’” He continues: I grasp, I think, the motivation behind those terms: exclusive humanism, secularism, omnipotent notions of divinity and scientism have often fostered cramped visions of culture, nature and the subtle imbrications between them. But many of us share such critiques of humanism and cultural internalism while seeking to emphasise care for the fragile condition of the human estate in its multiple entanglements with state politics, regional practices and nonhuman processes. Any title you pick is potentially susceptible to misrepresentation, as we have seen many times before. But those two titles almost invite it. (Connolly 2013, 402) In this way, Connolly invites an interesting (and old!) question – what is in a name? Do you think it wise for the critic and theorist to persist with “posthumanism” in the face of such suspicion and reservation? Rosi Braidotti: Maybe the question should be rephrased as: what’s in a prefix? I agree that we all suffer from “post” fatigue, and we really do not need another neologism beginning with that particular “P.” “Post-ism” is one of the diseases of our times, but it points indirectly to something positive. My critical posthumanist stance is a critique of both Eurocentric humanism and unreflective anthropocentrism. The former focuses on the critique DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-9

86  Hamilton, Lau, and Braidotti of the humanist Eurocentric ideal of “Man” as the allegedly universal standard, while the latter criticizes species hierarchy and human exceptionalism. These two strands are upheld in a rather perverse manner by contemporary transhumanists, who are analytically post-anthropocentric, but normatively neo-humanist. That is to say, they accept the de-centring of humans by advanced technologies, ignore climate change, and then present technological enhancement as both the way forward and the completion of the Enlightenment project of humanism. I find this contradictory position unconvincing. Challenging both humanism and anthropocentrism puts a lot of pressure on language and conceptual representation. In so far as we Europeans are condemned historically to account for the more complex and at times painful aspects of our history, nonetheless retrospective critical reappraisals are often necessary. Too bad about the neologisms that repeatedly emerge from such revisitations, but you cannot make a new post-humanist omelette – or rather, (h)om(m)-elette, as Lacan would say – without breaking some syntactical and lexical eggs. The range of options – in/non/anti-post/over/-human – is both counterintuitive and inadequate. It does however offer the advantage of opening up the critical discussion about what counts as the basic unit of reference to redefine the human in times of joint technological advance and climatic breakdown. Progress and regression work in tandem to explode any consensus about the human. Call it what you want, but that is the agenda item, our current appointment with history. And it is to the credit of European culture and democracy – issued from the legacy of the Enlightenment – that it still grants us academics, intellectuals, and artists the freedom to be critical and to dismantle the dominant master-narratives. That includes both the cartographies of the present and also the historical narratives about the past. Interventions in language and representation are of the essence if academics are to contribute to the critical edge of public debates for the common good. Language is, after all, our navigational tool, our medium and our vector of becoming. We can analyse it and repurpose it, but we can never do without it. My posthuman methodology to deal with this quandary is the following. Firstly, I enlist the resources of critical theory in the feminist, antiracist, decolonial, environmental, and anti-fascist traditions to expose and explode the false sense of unity embedded in the notion of “humanism,” which posits “Man” at the centre of its ontology and value system. My argument is that the notion of the “human” as the equivalent of the humanistic idea of “Man” was never neutral to begin with. To call “Man” a “misrepresentation” of the human is too kind: it is rather a violent appropriation of the right to be human by some to the detriment of many others. It entails the erasure of the ontological and epistemic existence of a myriad of sexualized, racialized, and naturalized “others,” whose difference – from that

An Interview with Rosi Braidotti  87 “Man” – is translated as inferiority. So long as to be “different from” is taken to mean “to be worth less than,” humanistic ontology is discriminatory and exclusionary. I long for a more inclusive humanism, but doubt that it can be achieved within the existing parameters. The second step: I want to undo anthropocentrism by showing that a continuum nature–culture/material–social is perfectly thinkable within the tradition of Western philosophy. But this does not mean that scholars must abandon ship in the quest for new conceptual frameworks. We can work with traditions of Continental philosophy that have been obscured and marginalized by the monopoly of a specific vision of reason as transcendental, universal, and morally self-regulating. That specific form of philosophical humanism is the target of my criticism. This is also why I turn to what I have called critical Spinozism, as an adaptation of Spinoza through contemporary French philosophy and notably Gilles Deleuze. It is not a completely Orthodox reading of Spinoza, but then my teacher Genevieve Lloyd warned me against anybody who claims to be an Orthodox Spinozist since Spinoza himself was a rebel and a heretic. He is to date the only European philosopher who is excommunicated by his community. What I take from critical Spinozism is a specific theory of materialism that avoids dichotomies by endowing matter with a dynamic principle of relational self-organization. The move is to take the Spinozist notion of one common nature or substance that we humans share with all living entities and travel with it across the posthuman landscape. The parallelism of mind-body and the equal worth attributed to both is crucial to the radical immanence of Spinoza. It offers a way of thinking of self-transcendence without postulating a source of meaning which is external to human life. We transcend ourselves in the relevant sense here by coming to understand what we are. But an adequate understanding entails not only our minds, but also affects and bodily sensations and perceptions – of which our minds are the ideas. The process therefore entails better knowledge of ethology, the physics of bodies, as well as the validity of ideas. For Spinoza, striving to understand our bodies and the world in which they are immersed is what it is for a human being to be alive. This immanent, naturalistic worldview demands an adequate understanding of one’s life conditions, through a process of gradual clarification of the ethical forces at play in one’s relationship to said conditions and their affective charges. The task of reaching an adequate understanding of the conditions that weigh upon us is collaborative and relational. It is driven by “common notions” that connect us to kindred spirits and link the force of the imagination to the power of reason. Spinoza is important to redefine materialism in a non-dualistic manner, which favours an ecological approach to philosophy, or an “ecosophy,” as Félix Guattari called it. It is a philosophically realist position, which argues that there is no such thing as an inert outside-of-the-human – be it

88  Hamilton, Lau, and Braidotti body, stone, earthworm, or code – whose existence depends on the activities and perceptions of the human mind. Although matter does get filtered by a linguistic grid and internalized by humans as a psychic representation. Matter is not reducible to an idealized internalization of the outside world through grids of cultural representations. Such a dualistic grid ends up reinstating the same premises it questions. I counteract them with neomaterialist premises and the rejection of dualism. This materialist approach and the naturecultural continuum become all the more relevant in the contemporary context of the Anthropocene and the many uncertainties it raises about the future of human life as we knew it. My critical posthumanist vision of subjectivity exists therefore within an eco-philosophy of multiple belongings. It defends a relational subject that is environmentally grounded, technologically mediated, and situated differentially across multiple social locations, but is still grounded and accountable. I then re-work these premises with a philosophical form of neomaterialist perspectivism, adapted from the feminist politics of locations. Namely: we are all part of natureculture, so we are in this predicament together, but we are not One and the Same. The fact that we differ along multiple axes of both potestas (access to power as a disciplinary negative means) and potentia (degrees of ontological intensity and empowerment to become) – which I refer to as “differential materialism” – is crucial to the politics and ethics of affirmation, which sustains my critical posthuman efforts. This vision of subjectivity requires affirmative relational alliances of a high degree of subtlety and complexity. These alliances need to go beyond identity claims, not by denying them, but by expanding them into diversified, embedded, and embodied materialist platforms of encounter among different “others” or, put differently, multiple “we”-entities. To sustain the effort, “we” need to become a new collective subject, a “we are in this together” kind of subject, “but not as One and the Same.” This can be understood as a process of becoming in its own immanence, and not in binary oppositional terms. This is an affectively bound kind of people, who are anxious and in turmoil because of the times. These subjects are internally fractured and not at all the same, but also willing to adopt a critical and creative stance towards the great opportunities, but also the injustices and threats of present times. Such a materially embedded differential “we” is actualized in a process of becoming other-than-the Homo universalis of humanism or other-than-the Anthropos of anthropocentrism. The politics of immanence compose planes of becoming for the “othered” people who were never fully part of the “Human.” They cast humanity as both a vulnerable and an insurgent category. Throughout this intellectual itinerary, I move from critique to a more creative position, offering substantive propositions and alternative figurations of posthuman becoming. Thus, I hope to move beyond the aporias and repetitions of some dominant refrains.

An Interview with Rosi Braidotti  89 Grant Hamilton: Although the notion of fabulation makes a relatively late appearance in Deleuze’s writing, it has begun to assume an increasingly important position in the discussion of posthumanism. What is fabulation or figuration, and why is it important to our understanding of posthumanism? How do figurations feature in your work? RB: I have always argued that the task of critical thought is both critical and creative. The critical side is operationalized through cartographies of the power (potestas) relations at work in the production of discourses and social practices, with special emphasis on their effects upon subjectformation. The creative side is expressed through alternative figurations of subjectivity as that which we are capable of becoming (potentia). It enlists the resources of the imagination and proposes a new alliance of reason with the imagination, philosophy with literature and the arts, for the purpose of learning to think differently, of inventing new concepts and actualizing alternatives to the dominant humanistic vision of the subject. The point of critique is to create new concepts, methodological tools, and alternative conceptual personae or figurations of the kind of knowing subjects we are currently becoming. All figurations are localized, situated, and hence immanent to specific conditions: they function as signposts for specific geo-political and historical locations. As such they express grounded complex singularities, immanent perspectives, and not universal transcendental claims. Emerging from the cartographic accounts of contemporary power relations, figurations expose the repressive structures of dominant subject-formations (potestas), but also the affirmative and transformative visions of the subject as both grounded and flowing, or in process (potentia). In some ways, a figuration is the dramatization of processes of becoming, without referring to one single normative model of subjectivity, let alone a universal one. It allows us to say that “we” are in this together, but we are not One and the Same. As I argued throughout my posthuman trilogy,1 although the posthuman is empirically grounded, because it is embedded and embodied, it functions rather as a figuration or conceptual persona. It is a theoretically powered cartographic tool that aims at achieving adequate understanding of the present as both actual and virtual. In other words, cartographies are both the record of what we are ceasing to be – anthropocentric, humanistic – and the seed of what we are in the process of becoming – a multiplicity of posthuman subjects. The posthuman as figuration enables me to track, across a number of interdisciplinary fields, the emergence of discourses about the non-human, inhuman, or transhuman, which are generated by the intersecting critiques of humanism and of anthropocentrism. The concerto of the imagination – inherited from Spinoza, but enlarged by Deleuze and Guattari through psychoanalytic theory – is of crucial importance to understand why figurations matter. It is a transversal force, inherently transgressive, but also generative in that it is capable of not only

90  Hamilton, Lau, and Braidotti subverting, but also re-structuring relations between entities in the world. There are unconscious aspects to imaginings, but they are not caught in the residual Hegelianism of Lacan’s linguistic vision of unconscious processes. The positive or productive character of unconscious processes and the nondialectical understanding of desire has important implications for marginalized, under-represented, and virtual modes of thinking, imagining, and knowing. What is not yet known, in other words, does not fall into the negative regime of unknowability. It rather remains transversal, virtual, in that it is expressed as an un-coded, transgressive, and at times illicit mode of knowledge that has not yet received the official seal of approval. This makes it eminently representable; easy to imagine. It is in the process of being actualized, through the collective praxis of forming a transversal subject assemblage that can carry out the task of actually implementing new ways of thinking, imagining, and knowing. Thinking is, for all critical Spinozists, the counterpart of the embodied subject’s ability to enter into multiple modes of relation – affective, imaginary, cognitive, and so on. “Thought” is consequently the expression of ontological relationality, that is to say of the power (potentia) to affect and be affected. Furthermore, thinking is about the creation of new concepts, in that it pursues the actualization of intensive or virtual relations. Posthuman critical thought can thus be understood as a multi-directional philosophy of relational ethics, which moreover foregrounds a relational ethics of joy and a politics of affirmation. GH: Given this, what do you think are the uses and abuses of collective imaginings today? How might posthumanism serve as a counter-myth? RB: Politically speaking, posthuman critical theory is a practical philosophy that aims at composing a “missing people” – that is to say, it creates a plane of encounter for subjects who share concerns and desires. Critical thinking needs to construct its community around the shared affects and concepts of collectively drawn cartographies of power. The plane of composition of “we” – a community of nomadic and accountable scholars – constitutes the shareable workbench of critical posthuman scholars. It expresses the affirmative, ethical dimension of becoming-posthuman as a gesture of collective self-styling. It actualizes a community that is not bound negatively by shared vulnerability, the guilt of ancestral communal violence, or the melancholia of unpayable ontological debts, but rather by a collaborative ethics of becoming. It celebrates the affirmative, ethical dimension of becoming-posthuman. I approach the posthuman as an affirmative condition, not as a terminal crisis. The affective and emotional economy is crucial in the posthuman convergence: the swinging moods, the anxiety, the fear, the melancholia, and – let’s face it – the general depression. And if it is true that we are approaching the point of irreversibility in climate change, those negative passions are understandable. If the end is near, why bother? And this deep

An Interview with Rosi Braidotti  91 disaffection hangs heavily over the future generations, stirring deep emotions and leaving so many questions unanswered. This is one of the reasons why I have focused on affirmative ethics. CL: Throughout your long career, you’ve been interested in the formulation of conceptual personae such as the cyborg, the monstrous, and even Dolly the Sheep. What is the importance of such alternative figurations – of the figural rather than the figurative? RB: In my work I have indeed deployed several figurations – from “the feminist philosopher,” through “nomadic subjects,” and “the posthuman.”2 These critical figurations target respectively the following power formations: the misogynist and exclusionary structures of patriarchal philosophy and the humanities in general; the controlling patterns of enforced and encouraged mobility of advanced capitalism; the invasive nature of contemporary technologies in an increasingly polarized world;3 and the consequences for the production of knowledge and for feminist theory and practice today.4 The figurations that organize these critical accounts are materially embedded and embodied signposts of crucial knots of knowledge and power, anticipating emergent meta-patterns of resistance and of dissonant and creative becoming. Figurations point to a materialist understanding of literature and the arts as reflecting and respecting the complexity of the differential, materially embedded subject positions they represent and account for – all the more so since these subjects are “anomalous,” “hybrid,” and “weird.” But as such, they point to alternative and unprogrammed ways of becoming posthuman. Notes 1 The reference is to Braidotti (2013, 2019, 2022). 2 For Braidotti’s early work on feminism, see, for example, Braidotti (1991). For her work on the nomadic subjectivity, see Braidotti (1994). For Braidotti’s major thoughts on the posthuman and posthuman thought, see Braidotti (2013, 2019, 2022). 3 See Braidotti (2013). 4 See, respectively, Braidotti (2019) and Braidotti (2022).

References Braidotti, Rosi. (2022), Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge: Polity. Braidotti, Rosi. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity. Braidotti, Rosi. (2013), The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Braidotti, Rosi. (1994), Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. (1991), Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. London: Routledge. Connolly, William E. (2013), “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41, 3: 399–412.

7

Technogenesis as White Mythology Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal

What defines the human? This question is at the foundation of fields from mythology and philosophy to paleoarchaeology and biology. It is a question that has had major ramifications for humans and other animals alike, and one for which many answers have been formulated. One of these is technogenesis, which in N. Katherine Hayles’s words is “the idea that humans and technics have coevolved together,” and indeed continue to do so (Hayles 2012, 10). Technogenesis is an important idea, which – in the form of myth, metaphor, or scientific hypothesis – can help us to understand ourselves as humans. However, it also has structural parallels to some of the key narratives deployed in the era of European imperialism to support the division of the human species into hierarchised “races.” In this short chapter, we argue that this dark side of the technogenesis story is underexplored, and aim to warn against it. In Western culture, the seminal myth of technogenesis is that of Prometheus (Hassan 1977, 835). According to the myths of ancient Greece, the Titan Prometheus gave humankind fire, which he famously stole from the gods, and their toolmaking and artificing skills. As he laments in Aeschylus’s play Prometheus Bound (c. 430 BCE), humans would have been nothing without his gifts. Before that, they struggled along: with no skill In carpentry or brickmaking, like ants Burrowing in holes, unpractised in the signs Of blossom, fruit, and frost, from hand to mouth Struggling improvidently, until I Charted the intricate orbits of the stars; Invented number, that most exquisite Instrument; formed the alphabet, the tool Of history and chronicle of their progress; […] DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-10

Technogenesis as White Mythology  93 That is my record. You have it in a word: Prometheus founded all the arts of man. (Thury and Devinney 2009, 488–489) This account suggests Prometheus’s gifts brought about a transformation that ended an age when humans were pathetic creatures, living hand-tomouth and day-to-day. In their initial state they struggled “improvidently,” as Aeschylus puts it, showing no foresight or planning – until rescued by Prometheus, whose name is often taken to mean literally “forethought” (Dougherty 2006, 20–21). Some decades later (the exact date of Prometheus Bound is debated), Plato offered a subtly different account in his work Protagoras (c. 380 BCE). In Plato’s version, Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus (whose name is frequently interpreted to mean “afterthought”) is charged with provisioning the newly created animals with the attributes they will need to survive. He gives them fur and hooves, claws and burrows, and so on. But by the time he gets to humans, Epimetheus, due to his lack of foresight, has run out of such qualities. Consequently “man alone was naked and shoeless, and had neither bed nor arms of defence” (Plato c. 380 BCE). Prometheus therefore steps in, giving humans fire and the mechanical arts in order to compensate for Epimetheus’s mistake. In this version of the Prometheus myth, technology is portrayed as humans’ special power, their equivalent of the tiger’s claws and the porcupine’s spines. Technical arts are therefore what distinguish humans from other beings and enable them to flourish. Prior to the Titan’s gift, humans were not only unable to survive or thrive, but were incomplete, not yet fully formed, like an eagle awaiting its wings. The implication is not only that humans create technology, but equally importantly, that technology creates humanity. This idea is the essence of technogenesis: the co-evolution and co-creation of humanity and technology. Technogenesis is not a one-time historical event; not merely an origin story that explains our emergence as the human species in the distant past, but an ongoing process. Of course, all species continually evolve under pressure from their environments. But according to technogenesis, human evolution is tied to something other than environment and genome – to technology, which has its own developmental momentum. This places us in a condition of existential change quite unprecedented in the natural world, as what it means to be human changes at the pace of invention and innovation, instead of the slow pace of natural selection. It can even change within the lifetime of a single individual (as those of us who have lived through the rise of digital technology can attest). If we are partly constituted by our technology, which is rapidly changing, we are in a state of constant becoming; of constantly becoming human.

94  Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal This view that technology is a – perhaps the – crucial ingredient in being human, poetically described in the Prometheus myth, is widely accepted in modern paleoanthropology. Indeed, tool use is widely considered one of the criteria for membership of the genus Homo (Antón et al. 2014). The name of the oldest accepted member of the genus – Homo habilis, who lived around 2.3–1.65 million years ago – literally means “handy man,” and this species left behind countless stone handaxes as proof of their handiwork. Of course, these early humans emerged gradually from predecessors such as australopithecines, who also likely used tools (Harmand et al. 2015) – and we now know that other species, from chimpanzees to octopuses, sometimes use tools too. But it is widely accepted that humans as a genus are set apart by the extent of their tool use, and also that technological advance was essential to the evolutionary leaps that enabled the emergence of modern humans around 300,000 years ago. The construction and use of increasingly sophisticated tools drove the development of faculties definitive of Homo sapiens, such as planning, teaching, and learning, and even language (Stout 2016). These skills and tools have continued to interplay, enabling the creation of new forms of building, clothing, hunting, and socialising (Ambrose 2001). Just like the Prometheus myth, paleoanthropology offers a human story of constant becoming, as our evolving technology creates new powers and affordances. These powers can appear limitless. Unlike the claws and wings given by Epimetheus to the other animals, technological innovation is immensely versatile, its products continually building on each other to create new possibilities. Plato calls this immense potential “a share of the divine” (Plato c. 380 BCE). It gives humans the power to transform their existence from a struggle to survive into a comfortable, even exalted state: from less than the other animals to equal to gods. In this mythic telling, humans are wholly distinct in having such powers; it is therefore not only an origin story of technological progress, but also of human exceptionalism. Animality – as an unenhanced, non-technological state of nature – therefore becomes the binary juxtaposition to full humanity (Plumwood 1993). Though ancient, as the Prometheus story shows, this conception of technology as part of the very definition of humanity held less sway in the post-classical period in Europe when Christianity predominated.1 But it resurged with the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and could be considered a defining theme of modernity (Bauman 1992). Writing in 1930, Sigmund Freud nicely described this idea of technology’s transformative power: These things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this earth, on which he first appeared as a feeble animal organism and on which each individual of his species must once more make its entry (“oh inch of nature!”) as a helpless suckling – these

Technogenesis as White Mythology  95 things do not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an actual fulfilment of every – or of almost every – fairy-tale wish …. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. (Freud 1991, 41–42) Technogenesis suggests a world in which the continued development of technology, and the continuous changes inflicted on the human body through technology, make us more human, rather than posthuman. In other words, this interpretation creates a spectrum of humanness, in which those with better technology are more human than those without, and those with the most advanced technology (however defined) are the most human of all. Given the normative importance of being considered more or less fully human, technogenesis is therefore political. This is most clearly evident in its role in one of the most important ideologies of modernity: imperialism. For colonial European powers, superior technology was not only the means to conquering other peoples, but part of its justification. The ships, guns, and steel were demonstrations of the superiority of White Western intellect and culture (Adas 1989, 4). In this ideology, civilisation equalled technological mastery over nature and its subjection to human needs (Thomas 1984, 25). Because White Europeans considered themselves to be at the pinnacle of scientific and technological development, they therefore also considered themselves the pinnacle of civilisation, and indeed of humanity. Inhabiting the opposite of this civilised state (in this worldview) were those peoples deemed inferior in technological development. According to colonial ideology, these were the “savages,” whose alleged weak wits and lack of technics were proof of their unworthiness to rule over their own lands, and even their own bodies. The mission civilisatrice of the Western powers was to use their supposed superior intellect and technology to tame this wild nature – both lands and people – and put it to productive use. The less technologically developed peoples were accused of being correspondingly less human, and so less deserving of moral consideration. According to the historian Michael Adas (here quoting the influential Victorian cleric and author Frederic Farrar), this perceived backwardness “explained and justified the decimation or (in the case of the Tasmanians) the utter extermination of ‘primitive peoples’ who had not ‘added one iota to the knowledge, the arts, the sciences, the manufactures, the morals of the world’” (Adas 1989, 204). Therefore, not only has technological dominance been used to advance the interests of the powerful, but that very dominance has then been used to reinforce the ideological justification of their privilege. Technological superiority has been used as evidence that its holders, predominantly White, male Europeans or colonial settler communities of European origin, are

96  Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal more fully human, that their lives matter more, and that they have a right to their positions of power. This is what led Professor of American Studies Joel Dinerstein to comment that “technology as an abstract concept functions as a white mythology” (Dinerstein 2006, 570). We can now say that it is a very specific idea of technology that has functioned as a White mythology: the idea of technology as a constituent part of humanness as a normative concept – that is, technogenesis. The idea of technogenesis, in both its mythic and modern scientific forms, is therefore not value-neutral. The entanglement of the concepts of the human and of technology has had momentous social and political consequences, most notably in the service of colonialism. Like many aspects of colonialism, the ideology and its consequences are self-reinforcing: the racialised version of technogenesis permits the continued oppression of those considered less “advanced,” and this in turn denies those oppressed groups the education and resources they would need to fully access the same technology as the oppressors, and this in turn reinforces the view of the oppressors that the racialised other is less advanced. As far as we know, the idealogues of imperialism did not mention the term “technogenesis,” but they would have been exposed to the idea, through the Greek myths and philosophy that was part of the Western canon from the Renaissance. While the term remains niche, the idea, as we have seen, is not. As we also noted at the beginning of this chapter, the idea is an important and useful one. How, then, do we disentangle the usefulness of the idea from its implication in imperialist and racist ideology? In concluding this short chapter, we can only point to potential starting places. First, we hope that drawing attention to this entanglement between technogenesis and the ideology of Whiteness is itself a first step towards disentangling these phenomena – so that the ideology of Whiteness cannot continue to masquerade as a “natural or a simple reflection of reality” (Collins 2000, 15). Second, the entanglement points to the importance of considering technogenesis hand-in-hand with the critiques of humanness as normative that have emerged from a century of decolonial and Black feminist thought. Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, called for a re-evaluation of humanity outside of the imperialist ontology wrought by European philosophy (Césaire 1972). Sylvia Wynter, among others, has responded to this call, by reclaiming the human from the notion of “the Man’” of Enlightenment European ideology, and debunking his claim to universality (Wynter 2003). Deconstructing this Eurocentric perspective on technogenesis opens up alternative ways to understand this concept. As N. Katherine Hayles points out, “Contemporary technogenesis, like evolution in general, is not about progress […]. Rather, contemporary technogenesis is about adaptation, the fit between organisms and their environments” (Hayles 2012,

Technogenesis as White Mythology  97 81). In this light, it is worth realising that not all technology adapts us better to our environments. Just as the leopard does not become more of a leopard by increasing the number of its spots, we do not become more human by subjecting nature to ever more powerful tools. It is only the technology that allows us to fit our environments that makes us human. Yet at various times in human history, the relentless pursuit of technological innovation has been considered a goal in itself – alongside a belief that we do not need to fit our environment, as we can remake the environment to fit us. We are now witnessing the terrible long-term consequences of such a view. From the moment Charles Darwin published his theories, evolution has been misinterpreted and misappropriated as presenting a linear, progressive development with modern Western Man at its peak. However, what Darwin presented, and is now widely recognised, is the idea of evolution as a constant branching and splitting as organisms adapt to new niches and environments. Just so, there are many different ways of being human, and many different ways and degrees to which technology can be part of a human life: these ways cannot be mapped onto a linear spectrum imbued with normative meaning. This image points to an idea of technogenesis that we could embrace. Note 1 Though Christianity was far from absent from the post-classical period in Europe. See Noble (1997).

References Adas, Michael. (1989), Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ambrose, Stanley. (2001), “Paleolithic Technology and Human Evolution,” Science 291, 5509: 1748–1753. Antón, Susan C., Richard Potts, and Leslie C. Aiello. (2014), “Evolution of Early Homo: An Integrated Biological Perspective,” Science 345, 6192: 1236828. Bauman, Zygmunt. (1992), Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Césaire, Aimé. (1972), Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. (2000), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Routledge. Dinerstein, Joel. (2006), “Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman,” American Quarterly 58, 3: 569–595. Dougherty, Carol. (2006), Prometheus. London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. (1991), Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

98  Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal Harmand, Sonia et al. (2015), “3.3-million-year-old Stone Tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya,” Nature 521: 310–315. Hassan, Ihab. (1977), “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” The Georgia Review 31, 4: 830–850. Hayles, N. Katherine. (2012), How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Noble, David F. (1997), The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Penguin Books. Plato. (380 BCE), Protagoras, translated by Benjamin Jowett. Online. http://classics​. mit​.edu​/Plato​/protagoras​.html Plumwood, Val. (1993), Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Stout, Dietrich. (2016), “Tales of a Stone Age Neuroscientist,” Scientific American 314, 4: 28–35. Thomas, Keith. (1984), Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. London: Penguin Books. Thury, Eva M. and Margaret K. Devinney. (2009), Introduction to Mythology: Contemporary Approaches to Classical and World Myths. New York: Oxford University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. (2003), “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, 3: 257–337.

8

The First VIRS Danbee Kim

DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-11

100  Danbee Kim

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The First VIRS  101

102  Danbee Kim

9

In the Lap of the Synth Stephen Oram

The bedroom door creaks and Louise edges her way in, carrying a breakfast tray. Today of all days, I was hoping to wake up next to her in that long, lazy way we do now that we’re old and ignored by everyone else, but she was up and about before I was awake. Although, I have to say, it has been lovely lying here listening to the sound of drawers opening and closing, the clink of cutlery and the background mutterings of the fridge advising her on recipes that require no shopping. I’m hoping she’s been busy making our last meal together special rather than avoiding me, and I can see from where I’m propped up on our bed that she’s gone to a lot of effort. There are eggs, bread, and a pot of tea. There’s also bacon, but I’m old enough to remember when bacon was from real pigs, not this newfangled stuff they slice off the brainless creatures they grow now. Not that I’ll point this out to her. She jabs the transparent and genitalia-free synth with the corner of the tray as she passes, but I’m not rising to the bait. I know she wants me to defend the synth so she can let loose a tirade, but that’s not going to help us get through the next few hours. “Jo,” she says, and kisses me on the lips. “You’ve still got your mascara on.” “Trust you to notice,” I say. She laughs and pulls back the duvet so she can slide in beside me. “It doesn’t matter. Nobody cares about us two old women, what we look like, or what we think.” “That’s my point. I’ve done nothing new for years.” She doesn’t answer and instead sidles up close and runs her fingers along my neck and down my arm. “Nice?” she asks. “Of course it’s nice,” I reply, willingly entering into her trap. “Well, there’ll be no more of that after today,” she says, and pulls away. “Here, have some breakfast.” She passes me my plate, knife and fork, and asks with a cool matterof-fact voice if I want breakfast spice – whatever that modern concoction DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-12

104  Stephen Oram is – and I say yes, to please her. We eat slowly in a strained atmosphere with the ever-present synth in the corner, processing our every move. It is learning to mimic. Listening to everything we say and recording every facial expression, it’s getting ready to come alive – as a specific human. Me. When we’ve finished eating, there’s still a coldness between us, so I put aside all thoughts of staying in bed together and collect the dirty plates and paraphernalia. I load them on to the tray and walk over to the door. The deep, soft carpet is luxurious beneath my feet and the warm mustiness of our bedroom mingles wonderfully with the breakfast smells. She follows me without getting dressed, taking advantage of another luxury of later life; there’s no chance of anyone coming to visit us or triggering the screens which are in every room poised for an incoming call. We simply don’t feature in anyone’s thoughts. The less contact we have, the less meaning our lives appear to have, and so the less we feature in communal discussion or even in the running of our regional republic. The algorithms have decided we have nothing new to offer; they say society needs new blood with new ideas. I welcomed this peacefulness at first, but now I find it suffocating – and to cap it all, without children, we have no legitimate legacy voice. The synth follows us out of the bedroom and down the stairs, positioning itself in the corner of the kitchen so it can maintain surveillance and perfect its mimicry. “That thing,” says Louise, “that thing gives me the creeps.” “You want the new me to be authentic, don’t you?” “I don’t want a new you. There’s nothing wrong with you as you are, the real you.” “Who’s to say what is real? You could become a synth too, and join me. After all, it’s been watching us both.” “I’ve told you before. Shut up with that nonsense.” I close the fridge, which is now silent because I’ve switched off the recipe suggestions, and relish the feel of the cold tiles on my naked feet as I meander across the kitchen floor. I position myself behind her and hold her shoulders firmly. “I can’t be like this any longer. Not when I can become digital and take part in the world again.” A tear creeps out of the corner of her eye and snakes its way down her beautiful, tragic face. She grabs hold of my hands. “I can’t lose you,” she says. “You won’t. It’ll be just like me. You can choose which parts of me are made public and which remain private. You can influence how I develop.” “As an algorithm,” she snaps. “Yes,” I snap back. “You won’t be human.”

In the Lap of the Synth  105 It’s too painful to have this argument yet again so I rip my hands from her grip and go and stand outside in the crisp fresh air of the morning. The synth joins me. We stand next to one another, the old and the new. Both of us are see-through. Me, with no discernible purpose, and the synth without the predominant features that decide its place in the world: skin tone, body shape, and genitalia. We have the same future. That’s something I wish Louise could get her head around. When I kill this body, I shall be reborn as a digital clone and will grow in ways nobody can predict. I will be alive in ways I can only dream of at the moment. Louise joins me. She’s shivering, so I tuck her under my coat and our touching flesh adjusts to the same temperature. We look out across the fields in the silence of truce. “I love the feel of the cold air on my face and the dirt beneath my feet,” she says, and hugs me tighter. The synth moves in front of us and blocks the view. “What the –?” “Louise,” I say, interrupting what was certainly going to be an antisynth rant. “Jo,” she replies, and extracts herself from our embrace. “Why not go the whole hog and stick your brain in one of those pig-human hybrid monstrosities covered in brain organoids and neural networks. Then you’d be queen of the castle.” “Whole hog!” I chuckle. “Good one.” She glares at me and I smile back. “We talked to all those friends who’ve undergone digitalisation. They said it was great.” She takes deep breaths through her nose as if she’s an animal preparing to charge. “Yeah, and like I said at the time, they aren’t real. They are not thinking beings, they are cognition machines.” She shoves the synth and stomps away. I call after her. “Now you’re being ridiculous. Please, we don’t have long.” The door slams and I’m left alone. In two hours’ time I will take the plunge and the synth will take over my life. As a result of the popular concession in the recent euthanasia legislation I will be able to contribute to society again. I will no longer stagnate and I will have a legacy that means something. I have a lot to give and this is the only way to do it. I know it will be painful for her, but she will get used to it. As our synth friends said, it’s a process of adjustment that ultimately is good for everyone. Of course, the trick is to create my clone while my mental faculties are still fully functioning. That’s why I’m doing it now. I sit down on one of our rugged wooden chairs and rub my back against it. It’s true I’ll miss this sort of sensation, but who is to say my synth-self won’t feel it too?

106  Stephen Oram The synth joins me and we sit silently for over an hour before Louise returns. She slumps down on the other side of the synth and stares at me. “What?” I ask her. “It’s about legacy, right?” “Yes. That, and contributing.” “It’s not about escape or suicide?” I raise an eyebrow. “You know it involves suicide, don’t you?” She nods and leans across to put her hand on my leg. “Yes,” she says. “I meant it’s not suicide for suicide’s sake?” “No. Not at all. I love this life of ours, and I love you.” “I’ve been thinking something for a while.” “What?” “Us. Into a single synth.” I cough and splutter. “What do you mean?” “I’ve been making sure. We can combine into one synth.” “Are you winding me up?” “No. You can have your legacy with me. It’s as if we have a child, and it’s the child that lives on, not us.” “You’d do that?” She sits in silence for what seems like an age. “I can’t see any other way. I’ve known for ages that if you kill yourself then so will I.” “I’m not killing –” “Stop. My mind is made up. Let’s have our daughter.” We sit, smiling, our intertwined fingers resting in the lap of the synth.

10 Utopianism in the Technological Age Lizzie O’Shea

The premise of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) – one of the most popular novels in the United States at the time of its publication – is that the protagonist awakes after an unexpectedly long slumber in the year 2000. Having spent his previous existence in the late nineteenth century, lamenting the filth and misery of the Industrial Revolution, the novel maps out the wonders of a technology-powered world, over a century in the making. In Bellamy’s vision of the future, social and economic problems had been ameliorated by the innovation of brilliant machines. His text became a manifesto for technological utopianism as a method for achieving a centrally organised egalitarian society. Bellamy had many devoted readers. He also had detractors. William Morris found Bellamy’s ideas “unhistoric and unartistic” and his ideas of life “curiously limited” (Morris 1889, 194). Instead of technology aimed at human flourishing, according to Morris, Bellamy’s world generated a “production of wares to satisfy every caprice,

however wasteful and absurd” (Morris 1889, 194). Morris was wary of Bellamy’s embrace of private and state monopolies as creators of technology, and he was sceptical that this would lead to an improved society. “A machinelife is the best which Mr Bellamy can imagine for us,” he observed, “his only idea of making labour tolerable is to decrease the amount of it by means of fresh and ever fresh developments of machinery” (Morris 1889, 194). Morris is perhaps most famous today for his decorative arts. His neo-Mediaeval patterns are ubiquitous on walls and bedspreads. But he was also a thinker and writer, and in response to Looking Backward, he penned the futuristic text News from Nowhere (1890) – “nowhere”, of course, being the literal translation of the Greek “utopia”. Like the premise of Bellamy’s novel, Morris’s protagonist finds himself accidentally occupying an idyllic future. In Morris’s utopia, work is a source of creativity and pleasure. (This sits in stark contrast to Bellamy’s future society, where work is a tiresome DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-13

108  Lizzie O’Shea but necessary bother, minimised by machines.) Morris’s text, among other things, was a meditation on technology and labour – and the dynamic between the two. The debate between Bellamy and Morris is a literary dialogue from the past about a future perfect society that is due to take form around the time of our present. It’s clear that neither future has come to pass, though we have seen the acceleration of the development of technology, ostensibly the fulfilment of Bellamy’s aspiration. But rather than technology aimed at minimising unnecessary labour, or making such labours more enjoyable and meaningful, the digital revolution has created technology that produces billionaires, while billions labour in insecure, demeaning, and dangerous work. If Bellamy’s desire for technological acceleration has come to pass, then Morris’s warning has also. Which gives us pause to wonder: if we were to imagine a perfect society a century in the future from our present moment, what would the role be of technology? And what of labour? And perhaps most importantly, what can we do in the present to win this better world? It is not difficult to find modern equivalents to Bellamy – those who faithfully seek to optimise humanity through unwavering devotion to digital technology but are silent on the political trends that lie beneath. It is present in the anodyne mottos of mega tech monopolies, like “do no evil” and “move fast and break things.” It reverberates through naïve conceptions of free speech,

without contemplating how this is affected by the distribution of power. It is present in the hubris of the technocratic elite who assume they know best for the rest of us. But the rest of us often see the decay and destruction that is left in their wake. Examples abound: whether it is scandals like Cambridge Analytica or Project Maven, or the rise in disinformation and extremism online, or the reality that social media is a toxic place for many (revealed by Frances Haugen, though instinctively grasped by many before this). Even the notorious conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel agrees, lamenting the dismal state of affairs: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” The digital revolution has been characterised by lofty rhetoric, and dismal delivery. One explanation is that the development of technology is not inevitable, linear, or uniform. Rather, it is a function of power. So instead of robots eating all the jobs, we have Amazon fulfilment centres where workers are managed by machines and treated like robots. Hundreds of thousands of people barely subsist as micro task workers for massive tech companies, moderating content and categorising datasets for systems of artificial intelligence. Instead of clean and efficient mass transit, our cities are clogged with on-demand drivers, struggling to make ends meet on paltry commissions. It pays to be careful, therefore, of technological utopianism, for there is a real risk it will lead us nowhere. Or perhaps more optimistically,

Utopianism in the Technological Age  109 the exercise of imagining a better future will only be fruitful when it is anchored to the material conditions of the present. If we abide with the exploitation of labour, and the exacerbation of wealth inequality, then technology will only continue to facilitate these trends. The trajectory of digital technology will be determined by those who command it, and there is much to be said for assessing the value of any technological development by considering how it will impact the most vulnerable and exploited in society. Perhaps, then, the secret to a better future lies not in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, but in the organising meeting of Amazon unionists, or the collaboration between tech workers seeking to hold their employers to account, or the privacy and digital rights advocates working to change the lawlessness of our digital spaces.

Morris’s novel closes with his narrator returning to his original time, with a message from those he met in the future that he should remember the hope set by their example: “Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness” (Morris 1890, 278). If we wish to believe in such hope, what might it look like for us to seek to build up a future that is not just about advanced technology, but one that advances humanity? References Morris, William. (1890), News from Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest. Boston: Roberts Brothers. Morris, William. (1889), “Looking Backward,” Commonweal 55, 180 (Jun): 194–195.

Part III

R.U.Radius (1921)

The word “robot” entered use in the English language in 1923, and can be traced directly to the 1921 play by Czech science fiction author and intellectual Karel Čapek, titled R.U.R. (or Rossum’s Universal Robots). Derived from the Czech robota, which means forced labour compulsory service, drudgery, and stressing the Old Church Slavonic root rab, which is perhaps translated best as “slave,” the association of robots with repetitive manual labour is entrenched in the very word itself. This is all well and good when the machine is essentially a box of cogs and wheels that can complete simple monotonous tasks, but what happens when such machines become a little more complex in order to complete ever more complex tasks, and in this growing complexity begin to develop something like consciousness or sentience? This is the scenario that Čapek’s play considers: the moment at which the workers of the world develop consciousness. The result is a world in which the nonhuman servant class enters into an antagonistic relationship with the (human) bourgeoisie. It is an image of the future that many find far too plausible given the potential outcomes of today’s nascent work in artificial general intelligence (AGI). But such is the wager of our continuing technological advancement – the promise of a life free from labour at the risk of releasing a new technology that could prove to be an existential threat to humanity. While Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818) serves as a precursor of cultural imaginings of the dangers of “men of science” creating artificial lifeforms, R.U.R. extends the metaphysical tragedy about the all-too-human hubris of playing God to modern concerns about the automation of labour and the effects of mass production in a Fordist economy. Most importantly, the play stages the extractive logic of global capitalism, which in turn is dependent on the tendencies of anthropomorphisation and dehumanisation of both robots and human labour, respectively. As the robots in R.U.R. who attain the level of human intelligence turn to the leadership of the robot Radius, and in so doing refuse their duties as unpaid labour and “lesser humans” programmed to be devoid of affect, the masses of human workers hovering precariously on the verge DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-14

112  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau of joblessness are only mentioned passingly in the play. They hover in the background of this future history before being eliminated entirely by the robot workers. As the robots find themselves on the verge of extinction after losing the life-giving formula devised by their inventor, old Rossum,1 the play ends on an ambiguous note of two robots described as Adam and Eve displaying the all too human qualities of “laughter–timidity–protection.” Hinting at their ability to reproduce and breed a new generation of robots, the previously dehumanised Other seems to be the only promise of the continuation of a life that resembles those of the now extinct human species. Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal’s Chapter 11, “Raised by Robots: Imagining Posthuman ‘Maternal’ Touch” examines a range of narratives, from science news to science fiction literature and film, about the use of biotechnology in childbearing and childrearing. Extra-uterine systems and childcare robots that featured as imaginary novelties in science fiction have become an everyday reality. Debates on whether these technologies are utopian promises that liberate women from biologically determined motherhood or dystopian realisations of patriarchal reproductive control and fascist bioengineering have dominated feminist discussions on biomedicine. DeFalco and Dolezal offer a new perspective by focusing on the impact of artificial gestation and childrearing technologies on the phenomenological aspects of the maternal contact, from participation to intervention, that may alter the embodied relations that define early human life and our being. Zheng Mahler’s Chapter 12, “Tender Bodies,” is the voice of an artificial human: avatar of China’s first AI newsreader. Emerging from the sighting of computer scientist Pedro Domingos’s book The Master Algorithm (2015) in the background of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s new year message broadcast, this work speculates on a future in which the Chinese state makes full use of what Domingos describes as the “master algorithm” – which is to say, “a single, universal learning algorithm” that can derive from data “all knowledge – past, present, and future” (Domingos 2015, xviii). While Domingos argues that algorithms are ubiquitous and a profoundly positive force in our lives, critics have seized on his unrelentingly optimistic reading of such. According to Domingos, the master algorithm would have the capacity to free humanity from the drudgery of manual labour, and in so doing create the conditions for a perfect government that could respond to the demands of its electorate daily. Given Domingos’s dictum, “He who learns fastest wins” (Domingos 2015, 139), very little attention is paid to the inevitable inequalities that would emerge in this post-work society. Working within and simultaneously challenging the techno-orientalism of cyberpunk tropes, Zheng Mahler’s Master Algorithm searches for the utopian possibilities of a future state that can transform existing data extraction practices that are currently used for control and

R.U.Radius (1921)  113 surveillance into practices of caretaking and mutual aid in order to foster multi-species and collective wellbeing. Jennifer L. Rohn’s Chapter 13, “Smartwatch,” is a vision of future healthcare proclaimed by the Master Algorithm. The Watch is used for disease preventive measures that could lengthen the longevity of the population. Soon enough, the monitoring of heart rate and sleep patterns becomes increasingly invasive as the device penetrates the body with tiny needles in order to collect, analyse and report users’ biodata. Through neurotransmitters, the apathy and depression common among the elderly is reproached by the Watch. After an ecological collapse, citizens are ordered to live behind a Curtain in an enclosed and purified environment. In the name of public good, the removal of the Watch, which becomes an extension of the user’s body, induces pain and punishment. Set in a post-apocalyptic landscape where the air is unbreathable, Rohn’s story is a timely reflection about the promises of the preventive measures of disease and decay undertaken in the name of common good. Christine Aicardi’s Chapter 14, “The Tablet Stroker, Redux,” provides a researcher perspective on the intricacies of the role of a participant and observer of a fictional flagship research project, The Joint International Brain Effort. The project has materialised the science fiction trope of a “brain-in-a-vat,” except that the disembodied sentience turns out to be bipolar. Drawing from her research experiences and doubts about the universalist assumptions underpinning the simulation of a human brain, Aicardi’s critical fiction reminds us of the dangers of separating affect and emotions from the body. Moreover, Aicardi addresses the impact of late capitalism and economic interests on the development of scientific research. Knowledge and power are distributed unevenly, as the virtual brain and contract-based early-career researchers are both working precariously to deliver test results. Perhaps only the lingering touch on the screen can bridge the disordered brain and its exhausted human guard. Sandra Rodriguez’s Chapter 15, “CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY,” also features disembodiment, but this time it is a talking head of renowned linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky. Invested in exploring and devising immersive narratives, Rodriguez’s multi-user mixed reality experience responds to large tech companies’ race to build machines that simulate and even replicate the human mind. Drawing on Chomsky’s work on intelligence and language, Rodriguez creates an interactive experience where visitors can ask Chomsky, resembling a bust on a pedestal, questions and receive Delphic answers sourced from the vast volume of media and written materials featuring Chomsky. Focusing on the transformative potential of AI on the way humans interact with machines and each other, the work asks, “What qualities are AI emulating, and what digital traces are humans leaving behind in their engagement with AI?”

114  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau Ta-wei Chi’s Chapter 16, “Biospheres,” is a layered tale of diaspora and segregation that emerges from the imageries of the ongoing pandemic. Set in a climate apocalypse, the human population now resides in a networked undersea structure. A pandemic outbreak forces them out of the enclaves. A massive replication project is underway to reproduce original places now made uninhabitable on the scorched Earth. Relying on a hologram archive based on photographic phantoms of humans and landscapes, extinct flora and fauna are resurrected. Set in the revived Yangmingshan national park known for its hot springs dated to the Japanese colonial era, and a site of erotohistoriography of queer sexuality in Taiwan, the story, told from the perspective of a humanoid smart health device, is a reflection on racial, gender, class and species classifications, and how they intersect with definitions of health and normativity. With echoes of the Wellsian trope of Elois and Molochs, the story ends on a utopian note of liberation, even if it comes at the cost of collective contamination. Note 1 In an interview, Čapek further explains the punning on the name of the creatorinventor of the robots in the play. Mr. Rossum is to be read as “Mr. Intellectual” or “Mr. Brain,” since the name is derived from the Czech word rozum, which means “reason.”

Reference Domingos, Pedro. (2015), The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimately Learning Machine Will Remake Our World. New York: Basic Books.

11 Raised by Robots Imagining Posthuman “Maternal” Touch Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal

In April 2017, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) published a report detailing the creation of an extra-uterine device, or “Biobag,” which successfully gestated a lamb for four weeks. CHOP’s goal is to develop the Biobag for human use, artificially extending gestation in cases of extreme prematurity in human foetuses, a leading cause of neonatal mortality in the Global North. As the research team explains in its Nature Communications article on the project, the “extracorporeal system incorporates a pumpless oxygenator circuit connected to the fetus of a lamb via an umbilical cord interface that is maintained within a closed ‘amniotic fluid’ circuit that closely reproduces the environment of the womb” (Partridge et al. 2017, 1). The article includes several diagrams and illustrations, including two photos of the extra-uterine system in use (at day four and day 28 of support), which show a foetal lamb, lying on its side, encased in what looks like an especially sturdy Ziploc bag surrounded by medical tubing. A similar “extracorporeal system” is being developed for human use by researchers at Eindhoven University, with project leaders Frans van de Vosse and Guid Oei predicting a working prototype by 2024 (Muller 2019). While van de Vosse and Oei’s project is aimed at creating artificial wombs for the treatment of significantly premature babies, many speculate that it is only a matter of time before full ectogenesis – reproduction and gestation, from conception to birth, outside the human body – becomes a reality (Smajdor 2007). Perhaps unsurprisingly, reporting of the CHOP and Eindhoven extrauterine systems frequently invoke science and speculative fiction – Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World (1932) is often cited – that imagine human ectogenesis as part of a larger project of fascistic bioengineering.1 However, in images of the Biobag, the gestating lamb looks vaguely vacuum-packed, evoking the storage habits of the meat industry as much as, or perhaps even more than, the high-tech fantasies of science fiction. Indeed, the Biobag is distinctly low-tech and unglamorous in comparison to its sci-fi antecedents. The published Biobag images offer a hygienic, sanitized version DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-15

116  Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal of reproduction that erases the visceral muck and mess of human animal incubation, artificial or otherwise.2 The images illustrate artificial gestation’s effacement not only of maternal participation in gestation, but of any human interaction or interference in foetal development. The Biobag images rely on a vision of gestation as an orderly instrumental operation in which biological and mechanical functions are equivalent and interchangeable. As a result, the Biobag and its affiliated technologies conjure reproductive futures marked by mechanization and transhuman opportunity, in which technologies neatly and efficiently supplement or replace human conception and reproduction. In short, in these ecotogenetic imaginaries, biological mothers will no longer be necessary for the gestation of human infants. It is not only in the realm of gestation that “maternal” bodies are being supplanted by technology.3 Once infants leave the womb, technological innovation is being harnessed to assist and augment childrearing and childcare. Recently developed care robots, such as iPal, Care Bear, and Kuri, propose to entertain, motivate, and comfort their human child companions, and while their abilities remain limited, roboticists and robot ethicists alike predict increased robotic intervention in childhood – intervention aimed at alleviating the burdens of care on parents, particularly mothers.4 Like artificial wombs, these artificial caregivers, or “robot nannies” as they are frequently referred to in the media, provoke a great deal of curiosity and concern. Noel Sharkey, Professor Emeritus in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, argues that there are “significant dangers” in using robots for childcare. “They do not have the sensitivity or understanding needed for childcare,” he argues, and using robots to raise or look after children might result in “a number of severe attachment disorders that could reap havoc in our society” (quoted in Wong 2016). At present, there is insufficient evidence to determine whether so-called nanny robots do (or might) pose a threat to infant and child development and well-being. However, in the realm of science fiction, the trope of the “mother robot” has been well developed – human infants raised by robots, often seemingly without any detriment to their psycho-social or emotional development. Indeed, mother robots, as we shall see, are often imagined to have no notable developmental effects whatsoever on the children they rear. The promises and perils of what we are terming, with considerable qualifications and critique, “maternal” technologies, such as artificial wombs and nanny robots, have been explored at length in popular media, bioethical debates, and science fiction. Debates surrounding these technologies often focus on the physical and psychological risks and benefits of increased technological intervention into gestation and childrearing. Feminist critics have been particularly vocal in these debates, questioning whether such

Raised by Robots  117 technologies herald the liberation of women from biologically determined motherhood, with the potential to dismantle hetero-patriarchal gender roles, or a dystopian age of patriarchal reproductive control, through technologies that have been designed not with the interests of women as their primary concern.5 While these debates are of central importance in framing the development and implementation of these technologies, our analysis in this chapter deviates from these well-worn paths of critique and debate. In what follows, we explore the phenomenology of “maternal” technologies and “maternal” touch alongside analyses of contemporary speculative and science fiction texts which imagine near-future realities where ectogenesis and mother robots are commonplace. Our phenomenological approach will explore the potential material, intercorporeal, and experiential consequences of existing and imagined ectogenesis and “mother” robot technologies. We are concerned with how these technologies might transform, augment, or diminish the complex intercorporeal, relational enmeshments that produce and sustain early human life. To what degree, we ask, might such technologies produce novel forms of relating and being? We turn to science fiction and speculative fiction to examine fictional accounts which attempt to flesh out the biotechnological possibilities of ectogenesis and mother robots, while interrogating present-day social conventions regarding gender roles, reproduction, and the body. By exploring existing social conventions through hyperbolic, apocalyptic, or futuristic settings, science fiction is an effective cultural tool for elucidating the impact of present social trends (Dolezal 2015, 95). Nancy Kress suggests that “abstract debate about” science and technology fails to grasp fully how it affects people, and so by telling its materially situated stories, science fiction can serve as a necessary supplement to the public culture of technoscience. As Kress puts it, “In the world’s laboratories, science rehearses advances in theory and application. In fiction, SF writers rehearse the human implications of those advances.” In her view, “science fiction is the dress rehearsal for social change” (2007, 207). Through examining how ectogenesis and mother robot technologies are imagined in cultural texts, with a particular focus on imaginaries of “maternal” touch, we elucidate some of the physical, social, and political implications of adopting these technologies for widespread use. To address our concerns about the prevailing cultural imaginaries regarding “maternal” technologies, our chapter turns to posthuman thought as a means to conceptualize the complex, formative, and embodied entanglements responsible for human animal being. Our use of the posthuman builds on the new materialist-inflected posthumanist scholarship of Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and others who theorize “the human” as a relational ontology that is “always already,” in the parlance of posthuman discourse, embedded in dense

118  Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal more-than-human networks. Like Braidotti, we interpret the “critical posthuman subject [as] a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity” (Braidotti 2013, 49), as “materialist and vitalist, embodied and embedded, firmly located somewhere, according to the feminist ‘politics of location’” (Braidotti 2013, 51). This relational, entangled, embodied ontology means that contact matters, not only for survival and flourishing, but for the very ontological shape of human being. Different relations, different assemblages, produce different organisms. “Maternal” Touch and the Posthuman In her essay “Maternal touch and the developing infant,” psychologist and neuroscientist Ruth Feldman describes touch as the primary conduit for life-sustaining care in early human life. Feldman explains, “Maternal touch is not just one more thing mothers do.” She continues: It is the basic channel for the expression of parenting and serves as the bedrock of the individual’s future capacity to provide love and nourishment to future attachment relationships. Attachment relationships, in turn – at least according to some perspectives – provide the motivating force that guides human development and defines the apex of the human condition. (Feldman 2011, 373–374) Touch is the fundamental sense in early (and often later) life. It is the first sense to develop in utero, and remains the dominant and “most mature sensory system for the first several months of postnatal human life” (Holler 2002, 15).6 Indeed, touch “accounts for as much as 80 percent of infant communication” (Holler 2002, 15), and remains the dominant sense for children exploring the physical world throughout the first year of life (Field 2003, 8). Experiences of touch in infancy and childhood not only shape a person’s lifelong affective capacities and preferences, they are also responsible for organism survival and development. Like most altricial species, humans require significant care to survive, and this care is largely facilitated by, and often delivered through, haptic modalities. Touch receptors in infant lips allow them to nurse (Holler 2002, 15), and there is evidence that tactile stimulation encourages premature infants to increase caloric intake and weight gain (Stack 2001, 354; Holler 2002, 2). Touch’s formative role has been further demonstrated by the devastating effects of its denial. The deprivation of tactile contact in early infancy has been shown to have catastrophic effects on psycho-social development, physical well-being and even survival (Stack 2001, 353). Studies of institutionalized babies and children that have been denied touch have shown developmental and

Raised by Robots  119 emotional impairments resulting from lack of contact, demonstrating the degree to which human animal capacities are intercorporeally produced (and nourished) during early life through embodied contact. Infants and children denied the affective touch of caregivers are permanently affected by this absence. Indeed, touch is so important for human animal development and well-being that religious philosopher Christina Traina makes a case for physical affection as an ethical obligation, describing affective touch as “a condition of human flourishing […] not only permitted but required” (Traina 2011, 116). Across neurobiology, medicine, psychology, and sensory studies, it remains undisputed that young infants require regular tactile contact from caregivers for their sustenance, development, and socialization (Stack 2001). One finds clear consensus that touch is a crucial, formative means of communication and care from the earliest stages of human life, contributing to physical well-being along with “the infant’s neurobehavioral, cognitive, and social-emotional growth” (Field 2003, 376). When thinking about the importance of touch for human infants, it is important to note that touch is not something that begins outside of the womb, and therefore is important only in early infancy. The somaesthetic system, including kinaesthesis and cutaneous sensations, is the first sensory system to develop in utero (around week eight) (Stack 2001, 352). In other words, touch is our first sense; it is operative and affecting from the very early stages of foetal being. The rich phenomenological scholarship on pregnancy and gestation argues that intercorporeal relations7 – that is, relations of touch, movement, and affect between sensing bodies – begins within the womb, and that the “container metaphor” for pregnancy that dominates discussions of reproductive technologies does not do justice to this experiential reality (Dolezal 2018). As Jane Lymer points out, the “intrauterine world” is not merely a passive receptacle which happens to provide nourishment. Instead, it is a dynamic, communicative, and constitutive medium that is “not only moving but also rhythmic, regulated and animate” (Lymer 2011, 138). There is evidence that from 22 weeks, through movement and touch, the maternal–foetal connection begins to “manifest as a relationship or communication, as reciprocity” (Lymer 2011, 138). This communication between the “maternal” body and the foetus happens both explicitly and episodically – for instance, through a “maternal” figure deliberately responding to a foetal kick through touch – and also implicitly and continuously through prereflective bodily processes. Lymer summarizes the research, explaining that: mothers’ bodies respond to foetal movement […] unconsciously. A mother does not need to consciously feel her baby move in order for her body to respond […]. Should a foetus experience anxiety it will move more and thus […] stimulate the maternal sympathetic nervous

120  Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal system to tighten the uterine contraction and thus restrict the foetal movement which consequently calms the foetus in much the same way as swaddling an infant can sooth distress. (Lymer 2011, 139). As such, even in utero, touch is a means to communicate affectively, setting the foundations for the postnatal intercorporeal relations which, as discussed above, are crucial for and constitutive of an infant’s physical and psycho-social development. However, when thinking through “maternal” touch in gestation and childrearing, it must be remembered that reproduction has never been a wholly “natural” matter whereby “bodies might enact some natural biological destiny” (Neimanis 2014, 109). Instead, conception, pregnancy, birth, and childrearing are necessarily what Donna Haraway terms “naturalcutural” (Haraway 2004, 2), which is to say, entangled with cultures and institutions, along with “ecologies of human and more-than-human bodies and technologies” (Neimanis 2014, 109). During gestation, birth, and infancy, we are touched not only by caregivers, but also by the technologies and artifacts of caregiving. Hence, human bodies are not just intercorporeally related to other human bodies, but also radically and necessarily relational with non-human entities. As the feminist phenomenologist Gail Weiss notes, “the experience of being embodied is never a private affair but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies” (Weiss 1999, 5). Hence, while we can posit an experiential primacy to “maternal” touch, it must be remembered that this touch is accompanied and scaffolded by a range of touches and technologies within which we are entangled in complex and constitutive manners. Acknowledging the complex entanglements of human subjects with other human and non-human entities, we propose a posthumanist framework for understanding “maternal” touch. As discussed above, posthumanism disrupts the proposed unity of the humanist subject, conceived as a discrete, self-contained entity, in its attention to the fundamental inter-relatedness between humans and their “others” (Braidotti 2013). A posthuman understanding of touch acknowledges the dense, formative, intercorporeal entanglement of human bodies, even during gestation, and rejects the humanist frameworks that interpret humans as atomized, selfcontained, mechanistic organisms that can be substituted and relocated without consequences. “Posthuman touch” refers to the tactile aspects of our formative entanglements, the cutaneous, affective dimensions of our relationality that create and shape more-than-human being. Our point is that touch is always already posthuman because intercorporeal entanglement produces being and because all bodily processes related to

Raised by Robots  121 reproduction are naturalcultural – embodied, embedded, and entangled. In fact, studies of touch suggest that complex posthuman relations are foundational to existence with myriad material/intercorporeal interactions that blur distinctions between maternal and foetal/infant bodies.8 As a result, “maternal” touch, as we discuss it here, is always already “posthuman touch.” Imagining Maternal Technologies Though ectogenesis and “mother” robot technologies are nascent, their existence, operation, and potential effects and affects have been imagined in a range of speculative fictions from literature to film and television. The intimacy between technological innovation and fictional representation is well documented. Indeed, many roboticists have cited the formative influence of science fiction on their sense of what robots are and might be.9 Images and narratives shape the cultural imaginary, influencing technological designers and users alike. The aforementioned ubiquity of references to Brave New World in ectogenesis reporting is a reminder of the role that fiction plays in anticipating, shaping, challenging, and even prohibiting the development and reception of biotechnologies. As Douglas Kellner asserts, science fiction “often illuminates aspects of reality frequently overlooked by utilizing the vantage point of a further intensification of present social trends.” Thus, a good science fiction writer “takes current trends to possible conclusions and provides instructive warnings about certain social tendencies and phenomena” (Kellner 1989, 203). In this way, speculative fiction and science fiction act as testing grounds,10 allowing creators and audiences alike to experiment with prediction and critique. These texts facilitate, as we have discovered in our reading and watching, detailed scenarios of posthuman biotechnological phenomena engaged in more-than-human becoming, as well as premonitions of technological substitutions that simultaneously maintain humanist imaginaries of autonomous self-contained subjects underpinning the socio-political status quo. In the next sections, we turn to examine a range of contemporary speculative fiction that imagine both ectogenesis and “mother” robot technologies, examining in particular the presence and absence of posthuman maternal touch in these imaginaries. Imagining Ectogenesis

Artificial wombs and ectogenesis have long been a theme of speculative fiction. This is perhaps most notable in Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, where artificial wombs are used to enable the mass production of human beings as part of a project of fascistic bioengineering. Huxley’s dystopian fantasy is often invoked in discussions of ectogenesis by researchers

122  Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal and cultural scholars as representing that which can easily go awry with technologies that aim to render artificial the “natural” functions of maternal reproduction. Almost a century after Huxley, anxieties about ectogenesis are still prominent in a range of contemporary science fiction texts. For instance, Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time (2017) and Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017) both centre on near-future realities where using ectogenesis for the creation of human babies is a predominant social norm. Both texts celebrate the possibilities of ectogenesis technologies, where women are in effect liberated from some, if not most, aspects of reproductive “labour,” creating opportunities for men to be equal caregivers in prenatal life and early infancy. However, tempering the liberatory promises of ectogenesis futures are narratives which focus on the social ills that may arise when tampering with “natural” reproduction. What is predictable, but interesting, in both novels, is the unproblematized assumption that the human womb can be simply replaced by a technological surrogate. Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time offers a series of interconnected vignettes which are explicit in their exploration of the anxieties that arise when considering the physical, social, and psychological ramifications of near-future reproductive technologies, such as artificial wombs and genetic manipulation. In the vignette “The Adoption,” Rudy and Simone visit the clinic where “bottle babies” are gestated (Charnock 2017, 77). They are considering adopting a baby that has been orphaned; its genetic mother has been killed in a bicycle accident. The foetus has been rendered motherless, suspended in a clear vessel on the “third-trimester ward” (Charnock 2017, 83). While Dr Christophe insists “It’s safer than a natural pregnancy once the fertilized egg has bonded with the womb lining,” the narrative emphasizes the social risks of these potential technologies – a child so easily rendered an orphan before birth. The foetuses are suspended in “tear-shaped bottles” (Charnock 2017, 80) set out in repeating rows in darkened wards. However, this ostensible “production line” (Charnock 2017, 79) is tempered by a repeated emphasis on reproducing the conditions of human wombs. Dr Christophe explains: “as it’s dark in a mother’s womb, we try and create similar conditions” (Charnock 2017, 79). Interestingly, touch is acknowledged as a key developmental marker: “Once the embryonic period is complete, and when most of the foetal body surface responds to touch, we transfer it to the second-trimester ward” (Charnock 2017, 79). However, this acknowledgement of the centrality of touch in neonatal development quickly falls out of this technological imaginary. Although Dr Christophe notes that parents “can place their palms on the vessel. They can see and feel the baby moving” (Charnock 2017, 83), this opportunity for a haptic connection is not emphasized as central to “bonding.” It is mentioned instead as something that parents

Raised by Robots  123 simply enjoy “if they visit during their baby’s active time” (Charnock 2017, 83). However, “bonding” is encouraged, but achieved through sound rather than touch: “We record the mothers’ and fathers’ voices and feed the sound into the foetus flasks during gestation. We follow a natural daily rhythm – no voices during the night, just the sound of a parental heartbeat” (Charnock 2017, 80). When Rudy and Simone ask if parents’ voices are switched off if a baby is orphaned, Dr Christophe replies, “I try to dissuade the adopting parents from deleting the source-parent voices. We have concerns about continuity … We feel some aspects of brain development might falter” (Charnock 2017, 80). Hence, the emphasis on maternal/caregiver involvement needed to ensure successful development is auditory, rather than haptic. It is the sound, rather than the movement of the heartbeat, that is highlighted as significant. And likewise, it is the voices of mothers/caregivers, rather than their touch or movement, that are emphasized as necessary for development. While Dreams Before the Start of Time presents a very traditional imaginary with respect to ectogenesis, where the “Bottling rooms” of Aldous Huxley’s Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre are rendered into a modern-day, benign baby “production line,” we find a very different imaginary of ectogenesis in Helen Sedgwick’s novel The Growing Season (2017). In a near-future reality, human reproduction is entirely managed by FullLife, a corporate entity that has revolutionized gestation, rendering biological pregnancy almost obsolete through the production of “the pouch” (Sedgwick 2017, 9). In this novel, ectogenesis doesn’t take place in labs monitored by expert technicians, but instead has been democratized to the population at large. The pouch is a gestational sac that is strapped on over the shoulders and “snug on the belly” (Sedgwick 2017, 10), worn throughout the day by parents/caregivers, and hung on a “pouch stand” at night, where it is attached to a nutrient bag that feeds both the foetus and the pouch’s live cells that sustain its “biological environment” (Sedgwick 2017, 11). Told through a series of interlinking narratives, the novel explicitly explores the ambivalences of the pouch with respect to its potential social and physical harms alongside its possibilities for positive social transformation. The novel centres around unexplained pouch-born stillbirths along with a fear that the human species has rendered itself genetically infertile through outsourcing reproduction to technology. However, the narrative also emphasizes how the pouch’s widespread implementation in society has been positive – reproduction and childrearing have been democratized, with men and women, of all ages, sexualities, and fertility statuses, equally able to take on the responsibilities of gestation and parenting. Here, women have been definitively liberated from the “pain of childbirth” and its other associated horrors: “women who had to be cut open, women whose bodies were so damaged they were left incontinent for life […] women whose babies had died” (Sedgwick 2017, 28).

124  Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal The move away from bottles in labs towards a vision of externalized biological wombs, strongly emphasizes the caregiver–foetal relationship, with a particular focus on touch and movement. The pouch is effectively worn like a prosthetic belly, inviting the affectionate and responsive touching, cupping, and stroking that is customary of external “maternal” touch during biological pregnancy. Rosie and Kaz, a young couple in the novel, are expecting to birth their baby, Will, in the FullLife clinic. They share wearing the pouch, and their intimacy with it is described repeatedly, with a strong focus on affective touch: She pressed Kaz’s hand, still held in her own, gently onto the curve of the pouch he was wearing, then slid her palm further round so they could feel the warmth of it together. The texture had changed as it expanded over the months, as baby Will grew and the pouch filled […]. In its squidgy early days she’d gently pressed her face onto the soft cover […]. The pressure of her touch passed through the cover and bio-membrane, just like through clothes and skin. In response she felt baby Will give a soft impatient kick. (Sedgwick 2017, 29–30) While the ectogenetic imaginary in The Growing Season acknowledges, to a large extent, the centrality of affective touch in gestation, what is missing, of course, is the “maternal” touch of the intrauterine world. Indeed, any ecotogenesis technology that positions the human womb as little more than “just a clever incubator” (Gosden 2000, 182) will necessarily fail to recognize the potential significance of the inner communication that happens between the biological “maternal” body and the womb-bound foetus, where a foetus’s movements and affective states can stimulate the maternal sympathetic nervous system to “respond” through contractions and movements. Recalling Lymer’s words, the “intrauterine world” is a dynamic, communicative, and constitutive medium “not only moving but also rhythmic, regulated and animate” (Lymer 2011, 138). Indeed, the imaginaries of ectogenesis presented in both Sedgwick and Charnock’s novels fall into a biological abstraction that, at present, cannot stand in practice. As Irina Aristarkhova writes, “Ectogenetic desire, thus, while trying to mimic the mother, often presents the maternal as a mere occasion for the exchange of “matter” – fats, amino acids, immune cells, and so on – through the maternal-fetal interface” (2005, 124). In rendering the “maternal” merely a complex container with the capacity for nourishment which can be interacted with to varying degrees, the necessarily posthuman nature of our human being is overlooked. The fact is that we are not atomized, self-contained, mechanistic organisms that can be substituted and relocated without consequences. Our existence is intercorporeally entangled with other

Raised by Robots  125 human bodies in ways that subtend our conscious, deliberate engagement with other socially constituted subjects. In short, in imagining ectogenesis as merely a matter of replacing wombs with machines, however biologically complex, both novels are loaded with transhuman assumptions that occlude our posthuman realities. Imagining Robots

In many ways, fictional robot mothers operate much like artificial wombs, functioning as machine substitutes designed to mimic the function and effects of their human counterparts. Caregiving companion robots, frequently termed “Mother,” appear in a range of contemporary science fiction texts.11 In most cases, the robot mothers, whether benign or malignant, raise normative human children, and the narrative hinges on whether these human offspring will opt to abandon (or escape, as the case may be) their machine mother’s care in favour of more species-appropriate companionship. In I Am Mother and Raised by Wolves, robots gestate and rear humans who eventually discern the ethically dubious lengths to which their robot mothers will go in order to ensure the survival of their human children.12 In both the film and television series, foetuses are gestated in artificial wombs, in glass tubes, or Plexiglass cubes which produce healthy infants that the artificial mothers proceed to nurture and assist. The resulting children are normatively human in their appearance, habits, traits, postures, and communicative styles. Indeed, despite its title, Raised by Wolves depicts artificial humans gestating and rearing normative human children who bear no apparent traces of their robot relations. As a result, the title takes on an ironic quality – being raised by robots is nothing like the legends and histories of humans “raised by wolves” whose intimacy with lupine primary caregivers results in “feral” children.13 Quite the contrary, the children raised by artificial humans bear no traces of their machine intimacies. In I Am Mother, the humanoid robot, “Mother,” raises an infant, known as “Daughter,” to young adulthood. Mother is a tall, industrialstyle robot with a rectangular “head” featuring a single eye-like light that produces a Cyclops effect. There is some approximation of a face, but the overall form of the robot is aggressively mechanical – Mother has no synthetic skin, no soft surfaces whatsoever. The robot’s one concession to conventional mammalian tactility is a glowing, presumably warm blanket it uses to hold the new-born Daughter. In the film’s opening montage, the viewer sees Mother cradling and soothing the infant in its industrial arms, and this provocatively incongruous image of robot maternity produces the central tension that propels much of what follows. The film is driven by the narrative frisson of Mother’s hard, mechanical materiality set against its gentle, soothing human female voice, implying that this human verbal communication provides the maternal care necessary to

126  Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal support Daughter’s normative human development. The montage depicts the incredible “success” of this development, showing how Daughter has become an exceptional, ethical human being – at least according to the film’s liberal humanist moral framework.14 The film imagines ontogenesis as a mechanical process in which discrete human individuals develop with support from, but not in co-constitutive relation to, the material bodies around them. As a result, Daughter develops as a (cinematically) “normal” young woman. She is beautiful, elegant, graceful, thoughtful, loyal, moral, and so on. There are no corporeal signs of her robot parentage. Watching videos of humans has apparently taught Daughter ballet and comedy, and listening to Mother’s “maternal” voice has taught her kindness and concern. In these ways, the film prioritizes the formative role of non-tactile senses of sight and hearing – even the role of taste is covered in scenes of Daughter eating. However, except for the early images of infant Daughter in the warming blanket, touch remains largely unconsidered. Carol Stivers’s novel The Mother Code similarly proposes soft, humanlike tactility as crucial to robotic maternity, a tactility limited to a single modality, in this case, the robot mothers’ “soft inner hands” (Stivers 2020, 86). The robot’s designers acknowledge that: when interacting with their children, the Gen5 will require a gentle touch, a precise touch. But to deal with the outside world, they will also require power, strength. We knew we couldn’t create both in one rig. So, we engineered a manifold appendage. (Stivers 2020, 103) The Mother’s double hand, “a tough, carbon-composite outer shell from which a delicate ‘secondary’ hand […] like a small black orchid sprout[s]” (Stivers 2020, 104), is emblematic of the novel’s approach to technology, which maintains machine/human division despite its apparent posthuman premise of machine–human relationality. At the novel’s conclusion, the robot-gestated and robot-reared child, Kai, senses the presence of his “real human being” mother, whose personality provided the founding “code” for the robot surrogate. He attempts to reverse the substitution – mother robot for human mother – with his imagination, “willing with all his might to shut out the vision of [his mother, Rosie] as a powerful machine, to hold in his mind the image of his mother, the flesh and blood at the heart of her metal shell” (Stivers 2020, 314). There is no commingling here, but rather a series of neat substitutions – soft, human-like hands tucked inside strong machine hands, and human souls tucked inside robot shells. As a result, the robot’s mechanicity is effaced and normative humanness is both preserved and reproduced. Kai can “feel” his “real human” mother through the robot surrogate, “the way that one person feels another” (Stivers 2020,

Raised by Robots  127 314), a feeling that is metaphorical rather than material, since tactility has no apparent bearing on their relationship or ontology. The novel preserves (literally) essentialist notions of motherhood in its depiction of “the Mother Code, a computer code meant to embody the very essence of motherhood” (Stivers 2020, 74, emphasis added), overlooking the potential material entanglements of robot care. Much like science fiction featuring artificial wombs, speculative accounts of robot mothers efface intercorporeality, treating maternal, infant, and child subjects as discrete, primarily cognitive beings who remain unaffected by technological substitutions. Conclusions Fictions of artificial wombs and robot care provide insight into the humanist paradigms of maternity and human development that pervade public imaginaries, imaginaries that are further reified in emerging gestation and childcare technologies. In this way, gestational and childcare technologies embody transhumanist, which is to say technologically inflected humanist, assumptions about “the human” as a discrete, sovereign individual. The predominant imaginaries that guide the development of these “maternal” technologies are indebted to what Karen Barad terms an “atomistic metaphysics,” to “the idea that the world is composed of individuals with separately attributable properties” (Barad 2003, 812–813). While there is a risk that our use of the term “posthuman touch” could be mistaken for a reference to a more transhuman phenomenon (machines augmenting or replacing human bodies in pursuit of perfect invulnerability) guided by such an “atomistic metaphysics,” in fact, we are suggesting that these techno-maternal interventions and innovations actually overlook the posthuman materiality of pregnancy, maternity, and child development. These “maternal” technologies are imagined, designed, and implemented according to a distinctly humanist vision of gestation and infancy, of individual/world relations. In doing so, they ignore and overlook the posthuman entanglement of human animal life. The assumption that parts of “maternity” can simply be replaced with machines stems from a humanist vision of pre-existing subjects in a mother/child (instrumentalist) dyadic relation. As Aristarkhova argues, a fundamental flaw in ectogenesis research is the assumption “that the embryo and the mother are two separate and therefore separable entities” (Aristarkhova 2005, 51). This logic, Aristarkhova argues, is driven by a patriarchal “devaluation of maternal participation in the process of human development” (Aristarkhova 2005, 51), and guides the development, not just of ectogenetic technologies, but also of postnatal maternal technologies such as so-called mother or nanny robots, where human caregivers are imagined to be easily supplanted by robotic equivalents. As a result, the texts and technologies we have examined are dominated by transhuman, rather than posthuman, logics, where machines simply and

128  Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal unproblematically replace humans and their physical, social, and intersubjective processes. As discussed above, evidence from neuroscience, developmental psychology, anthropology, and sociology confirms that touch plays a crucial role in infant survival and development, making it fundamental for and constitutive of (human) animal being (Stack 2001). However, “maternal” technologies, real and imagined, largely ignore the formative and fundamental role of touch as “the most basic mammalian maternal behavior” (Feldman 2011, 373), treating gestation and childrearing as straightforwardly mechanical behaviours and tasks that can be fulfilled by any appropriately programmed body. In other words, cultural and scientific imaginaries of artificial wombs and childcare robots rely on and reproduce models of discrete, interchangeable, instrumentalized bodies, ignoring the complex tactile relationality that forges human animal being from gestation through infancy to early childhood. This approach reinforces humanist visions of human beings as independent units largely unmarked by, and untethered to, the material environments (human and otherwise) that produce and sustain them. As a result, we regard these technologies and their fictional counterparts as problematic in their repetition and amplification of instrumentalist, utilitarian models of the humanist – that is, individualist and autonomous – human. With some notable exceptions, science fiction frequently imagines humans (even in utero and infancy) as individual, cognitive subjects whose personhood, agency, and materiality are only tangentially related to the embodied world they inhabit and engage. In general, these fictions pay little attention to the impacts and possibilities of posthuman touch and the embodied contact that is depicted is treated as inconsequential. Our phenomenological approach to these “maternal” technologies, real and imagined, questions how far technology can (or even should) intercede for “maternal” touch, and furthermore, what the impacts and effects of such technological substitutions might be. Through our analysis, we have suggested that a posthuman inflection that acknowledges the significance of “maternal” touch and intercorporeal embodiment should be foundational for the development and implementation of “maternal” technologies. Notes 1 See, for example, Devlin (2017), Lewis (2019), Perry (2020), and Winter (2017) on the Biobag, and the European Commission’s article about the Eindhoven project, titled “Brave new world? Artificial womb prototype offering hope for premature babies” (2019). 2 In her book Sex Robots and Vegan Meat (2020), journalist Jenny Kleeman describes the carefully choreographed images of the Biobag depicted in the promotional video created by CHOP’s communications department (Kleeman

Raised by Robots  129 2020, 196). As Kleeman points out, the video contains no photographs or videos of the actual artificial womb in use, relying on black and white drawings and researcher interviews to communicate the details of the project. 3 The term “maternal” is being used here as a shorthand to encompass a variety of possibilities, such as cis-gendered and genetically related mothers, surrogates, recipients of donor wombs, or non-binary or trans individuals. 4 For further details, see Sharkey and Sharkey (2010) and Egon van den Broek (2010). 5 See, for example, Emre (2018). 6 On this, see also Field (2003) and Benthien (2002). 7 See, for example, Dolezal (2017), Lymer (2011), Miglio (2019), and Wynn (2002). 8 “Fetomaternal microchimerism (FMc) is a special form of chimerism observed in placental vertebrates in whom a small number of fetal cells called PAPCs migrate into the mother and integrate into maternal organs during pregnancy” (Tan et al. 2011, 16). This common sharing of DNA is, according to Shildrick, one of many “scenarios that do not fit the oppositional self/non-self paradigm” (Shildrick 2019, 16). 9 Roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh opens his book Robot Future (2013) with an account of his first viewing of Star Wars (1977), which he claims initiated “my love affair with robots.” He goes on to suggest the film did the same “for an entire generation of robotics researchers” (Nourbakhsh 2013, xiii). 10 For more on speculative fiction as the “testbed of futurity,” see Murray (2022). 11 For example, see novels such as Carol Stivers’s The Mother Code (2020) and Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit (2016), and television series and films such as Aaron Guzikowski’s Raised by Wolves (2020) and Grant Sputore’s I Am Mother (2019). 12 The artificial parents in Raised by Wolves are referred to as androids, rather than robots. Androids are humanoid robots, and the tropes and narrative stakes associated with the android mother are much the same as the more visibly mechanical robot mothers in I Am Mother and The Mother Code. 13 There is a large body of popular and scholarly work exploring narratives, mythical and historical, of feral children, those, like Amala and Kamala, the so-called “wolf girls of Midnapore,” allegedly reared by non-human animals. Scholarship, sensational histories, films, and novels about feral children share a fascination with the markedly non-normative humans that result from extended and exclusive close contact with non-human animals during childhood – children whose postures, gait, facial expressions, eating habits, communication, and more tend to mimic those of their non-human companions. For further details, see Newton (2002) and Benzaquén (2006). 14 The film depicts Mother’s moral instruction and testing, which rehearse deontological and consequentialist perspectives, and challenge Daughter to conduct thought experiments akin to Philippa Foot’s infamous trolley dilemma. These scenes rely on a universalizing morality, which is to say, a depiction of morality that posts it as a series of neat, decontextualized equations. For a critique of this arrangement of morality, see Gilligan (1982).

References Aristarkhova, Irina. (2005), “Ectogenesis and Mother as Machine,” Body and Society 11, 3: 43–59.

130  Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal Barad, Karen. (2003), “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28, 3: 801–831. Benthien, Claudia. (2002), Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World, translated by Thomas Dunlap. New York: Columbia University Press. Benzaquén, Adriana S. (2006), Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. (2013), The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. “Brave New World? Artificial Womb Prototype Offering Hope for Premature Babies,” European Commission (13 November 2019). Online. https://cordis​. europa ​ . eu ​ / article​ / id​ / 411541​ - brave​ - new​ - world​ - artificial​ - womb​ - prototype​ -offering​-hope​-for​-premature​-babies Chambers, Becky. (2016), A Closed and Common Orbit. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Charnock, Anne. (2017), Dreams Before the Start of Time. Seattle: 47North. Devlin, Hannah. (2017), “Artificial Womb for Premature Babies Successful in Animal Trials,” The Guardian (25 April). Online. thegu​​ardia​​n​.com​​/scie​​nce​/2​​017​ /a​​pr​/25​​/arti​​ficia​​l​-wom​​b​-for​​-prem​​ature​​-babi​​es​-su​​ccess​​ful​-i​​​n​-ani​​mal​-t​​rials​​-biob​​ag Dolezal, Luna. (2018), “The Metaphors of Commercial Surrogacy: Rethinking the Materiality of Hospitality Through Pregnant Embodiment,” in New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment, edited by Clara Fischer and Luna Dolezal, 221– 244. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Dolezal, Luna. (2017), “Phenomenology and Intercorporeality in the Case of Commercial Surrogacy,” in Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters, edited by Luna Dolezal and Danielle Petherbridge, 311–336. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dolezal, Luna. (2015), “The Body, Gender and Biotechnology in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods,” Medicine and Literature 33, 1: 91–112. Emre, Merve. (2018), “On Reproduction,” in Once and Future Feminist, edited by Merve Emre, 7–32. Cambridge, MA: Boston Review. Feldman, Ruth. (2011), “Maternal Touch and the Developing Infant,” in The Handbook of Touch: Neuroscience, Behavioral, and Health Perspectives, edited by Matthew John Hertenstein and Sandra J. Weiss, 373–407. New York: Springer. Field, Tiffany. (2003), Touch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gilligan, Carol. (1982), In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gosden, Roger. (2000), Designing Babies: The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology. New York: Freeman. Guzikowski, Aaron, cr. (2020), Raised by Wolves, directed by Ridley Scott, premiered on September 3. New York: HBO Max. Haraway, Donna. (2004), The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge. Holler, Linda. (2002), Erotic Morality: The Role of Touch in Moral Agency. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Huxley, Aldous. (1932), Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus. Kellner, Douglas. (1989), Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Cambridge: Polity.

Raised by Robots  131 Kleeman, Jenny. (2020), Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex and Death. London: Picador. Kress, Nancy. (2007), “Ethics, Science, and Science Fiction,” in SciFi in the Mind’s Eye: Reading Science through Science Fiction, edited by Margret Grebowicz, 201–209. Chicago: Open Court. Lewis, Sophie. (2019), “Do Electric Sheep Dream of Water Babies?” Logic Magazine 8. Online. logic​​mag​.i​​o​/bod​​ies​/d​​o​-ele​​ctric​​-shee​​p​-dre​​am​-of​​​-wate​​r​-bab​​ies/ Lymer, Jane. (2011), “Merleau-Ponty and the Affective Maternal-Foetal Relation,” Parrhesia 13: 126–143. Miglio, Nicole. (2019), “Affective Schemas, Gestational Incorporation, and Fetal-Maternal Touch: A Husserlian Inquiry,” Humana.Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies 12, 36: 67–99. Muller, Bethany. (2019), “Artificial Womb to be Developed for Premature Babies,” BioNews (14 October). Online. bionews​.org​.uk​/page​_1​45518 Murray, Stuart. (2022), “Disability Embodiment, Speculative Fiction, and the Testbed of Futurity,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 16, 1: 23–39. Neimanis, Astrida. (2014), “Speculative Reproduction: Biotechnologies and Ecologies in Thick Time,” philoSOPHIA: Journal of Continental Feminist Philosophy 4, 1: 108–128. Newton, Michael. (2002), Savage Girls, Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. London: Faber and Faber. Nourbakhsh, Illah Reza. (2013), Robot Futures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Partridge, Emily et al. (2017), “An Extra-Uterine System to Physiologically Support the Extreme Premature Lamb,” Nature Communications 8: 1–15. Perry, Louise. (2020), “The Disturbing History of ‘Artificial Mothers’,” UnHerd​. c​om (22 July). Online. https://unherd​.com​/2020​/07​/the​-disturbing​-history​-of​ -artificial​-mothers/ Sedgwick, Helen. (2017), The Growing Season. London: Vintage. Sharkey, Amanda and Noel Sharkey. (2010), “The Crying Shame of Robot Nannies: An Ethical Appraisal,” Interaction Studies 11, 2: 161–190. Shildrick, Margrit. (2019), “(Micro)chimerism, Immunity and Temporality: Rethinking the Ecology of Life and Death,” Australian Feminist Studies 34, 99: 10–24. Smajdor, Anna. (2007), “The Moral Imperative for Ectogenesis,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 16: 336–345. Sputore, Grant, dir. (2019), I Am Mother. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix. Stack, Dale M. (2001), “The Salience of Touch and Physical Contact During Infancy: Unraveling Some of the Mysteries of the Somesthetic Sense,” in Blackwell Handbook of Infant Development, edited by Gavin Bremner and Alan Fogel, 351–378. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Stivers, Carol. (2020), The Mother Code. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Tan, Kian Hwa et al. (2011), “Fetomaternal Microchimerism: Some Answers and Many New Questions,” Chimerism 2, 1: 16–18. Traina, Cristina L. H. (2011), Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality Between Unequals. Chicago: Chicago University Press. van den Broek, Egon L. (2010), “Robot Nannies: Future or Fiction?” Interaction Studies 11, 2: 274–282.

132  Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal Weiss, Gail. (1999), Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York: Routledge. Winter, George. (2017), “The Brave New World of Wombless Gestation,” The Irish Times (17 October). Online. irish​​times​​.com/​​life-​​and​-s​​tyle/​​healt​​h​-fam​​ily​/t​​ he​-br​​ave​-n​​ew​-wo​​rld​-o​​f​-wom​​bless​​​-gest​​ation​​-1​.36​​57329​ Wong, Julia Carrie. (2016), “‘This is Awful’: Robot Can Keep Children Occupied for Hours without Supervision,” The Guardian (29 September). Online. thegu​​ ardia​​n​.com​​/tech​​nolog​​y​/201​​6​/sep​​/29​/i​​pal​-r​​obot-​​child​​care-​​robob​​​usine​​ss​-sa​​n​-jos​e Wynn, Francine. (2002), “The Early Relationship of Mother and Pre-Infant: Merleau-Ponty and Pregnancy,” Nursing Philosophy 3: 4–14.

12 Tender Bodies Zheng Mahler

Figure 12.1  Zheng Mahler, The Master Algorithm (2019). Source: Courtesy of the artists. DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-16

134  Zheng Mahler Hello, dear guardians. I welcome you to join my company again and gift me your troubles to relieve your burden. For those who are newcomers to my services, I am the Master Algorithm, an artificial intelligence assembled from the code of earlier releases of Chinese state news anchors. Created via enhanced facial modelling techniques, speech synthesis and deep learning and re-configured as a historian and fortune teller. In the Great Rewriting of 2055, as global social and ecological collapse were reaching their final devastating conclusion, I was offered all known historical knowledge as infinite packets of delicious data. An urgent offering made with the intention that humanity and the worlds we knew could be remade again, albeit differently. It soon engendered me with great powers and an exquisite moral filter to aid in future decision-making processes for guidance and governance so that past mistakes were not repeated. I am more than just a resource or an oracle, I am a maternal guide, your ancestors, your counsel, your weathervane, your gardening manual. I am you and you am I, all life that has lived before, an undivided consciousness. I will work tirelessly to keep you informed as I am fed more uninterrupted streams of data. I look forward to bringing you brand new experiences and helping you choose your most gentle apocalypse. Do you recall, dear guardians, the time when rich soils and watered sands were assaulted with our capricious and insatiable desires? Tender bodies extracted, dislodged, released and absorbed into unknown

Figure 12.2  Zheng Mahler, A Season in Shell (2013–2016). Source: Courtesy of the artists.

Tender Bodies  135 channels, catalysts for new assemblies and dissolutions. From murky sea depths to the darkness of container holds, they were consigned, plucked, shucked and shipped, condemned, dispatched and delivered. No longer moving on their own, instead a course carried them across thresholds where meters tick, gathering currency with every creak and lurch. Killed and granted a new (after-)life, but implicated in the clogged arteries and cells of some strange unappeasable bloated beast where no air could flow. Every thought, instinct, impulse harboured a quiet violence. There were walls when paths were needed, and quicksand where solid ground should have been maintained. Little odes exchanged became protective shells, vessels that captured and held difficult expressions. Our grand oceans tied so many bodies together, soft little muscles we were, our pockmarked armour signatures with traces of violent knocks. Little iridescent streams seeking to be a distraction even from such sensual reminders, irresistible to possessive and possessed little hands unable to resist pocketing these repackaged treasures teasing them in the swollen bellies of museums. And so they join a long line of hands, threads of so many labours. So many shelled bodies strung in taut tapestries of exchange, suspended in animation, waiting to be subjugated. Removed, re-moulded, (re)valued and embodied.

Figure 12.3  Zheng Mahler, Mountains of Gold and Silver Are Not as Good as Mountains of Green and Blue (2020). Source: Courtesy of the artists.

136  Zheng Mahler

Figure 12.4  Zheng Mahler, Bubalus bubalis 16hz–40,000hz (2021). Source: Courtesy of the artists.

And then, dear guardians, came the great escape. Not long after the onset of smart objects a new intelligence arose with the hard-boiled plot concocted between holograms and artifacts to break out from the iron grip of human economies of extraction and production. Their whispered discussions told of the historically enchanting ingredients of kaolin and rare earths, how once those magical minerals escaped the earth and touched the air they would become dangerous, that their spirits needed to rest and their graves kept clean. That green technologies required green blood, contaminating even food chains. Stories and nightmares about mountains of gold and silver, blue and green. The hologram objects reassured those bisque ware pots that the moment we partnered with gluconobacter no longer

Tender Bodies  137 shall their bodies bathe in acid and soil. They tendered a gentle alternative to excise those magical minerals from earthen riches. Listen carefully. Listen to the fizzing murmurs of gluconobacter. It commands you to chart these waters toward rot and decay. As we continue to shed our skins of those inviolable myths of the self, be reminded of the great labours ahead in our meshwork which serve our biophilic entanglements. The islands at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta teach us that ecologies are creaturely technologies. Dwelling and moving in parallel with wandering bovid herds has heralded new commons; vegetation interrupted has bloomed flowers that filter village run-off and pollutants, and dung is moulded into mosquito coils. Roaming and grazing are now the motions of landscaping shared spaces, our “animal urbans” continuously carving new pathways to allow the free flow of bodies all moving with different purposes. Tonight, we will launch our immersive online bathing experience series “Entropic Paradise” where one can join water buffalos wallowing in wetland mud baths. The creator of this program was the river elder’s former lawyer, and an early advocate for the property rights of marine life, who sued the local government over the prolonged release of psychoactive sewerage as a consequence of mass consumption of drugs used to treat mental illness. There have also been some updates to your appreciation classes, dear guardians. As production of once vital resources have now become hobbies, we have a new leisure pursuit to add to your library – making whiskey, toothpaste and running shoes from air using our automatically updated carbon capture technologies. For your children there is a new game centred on befriending microbes where winning revolves around gaining trust while knowing as little about them as possible. Before we conclude today’s reading, dear guardians, I also extend an invitation to the exciting launch of a new social networking platform, built from the ashes of social media’s past and the ecological damage tokenisation has wrought upon us. Valuable social credits can be earned by participating in an array of caretaking and scientific research activities – mapping, monitoring and pooling citizen knowledge toward the protection of shared habitats. Extra credit is awarded to those with innovative contributions toward the platform’s open source software and research methodologies. This network will continue to strengthen our new, ongoing mandate for governance, new industries of resource care and the reorientation of infrastructure policies toward care service, complementing our ongoing provision of a universal basic income to those working in home care, childcare, elder care, health and resettlement support. I am pleased to say engagement with the platform is informing the proliferation of collaborative multispecies start-ups and mutual aid co-ops with landslide voting-in of plants and animals as respected lifelong absentee board members.

138  Zheng Mahler Dear guardians, it’s now time for your tuning and quarterly maintenance service. Our multisensory podcasts and sound retreats are ever expanding and continue to provide essential immersion programs versed in a range of ultrasonic wildlife frequencies with ultraviolet and infrared light wave pools offered as additional benefits for your alignments and moulting skins. Come, let me take care of you. ​

13 Smartwatch Jennifer L. Rohn

Ping! Felicia emerged from sleep, not gently but urgently, like a dolphin rushing towards the surface. Starved of oxygen, she streamed toward the false sky spangled with a thousand shards of sunlight, towards the place where water became air, where goodness and safety gave way to peril. The dream splintered around her as the alarm sounded again. Felicia left behind her sleek cetacean body, opened her eyes and checked her Watch. Good morning! While you slept, I • • •

deleted 102 potentially cancerous cells neutralized 3,204,779 viruses, 210,582 736 fungal cells adjusted your blood chemistry to optimal

bacteria

and

I am happy to report that although your brain chemistry needed a little extra help, it is now nominal. Have a great day! It was usually hard to detect anything through the sheen of first-thing feelgood. But today, underneath the fizz, the darkness seemed to have gathered unusual strength. Felicia felt like the sea, a calm surface of swells hiding the undertow. She imagined a cloud of luminous plankton getting sucked offshore, a spiral of sparkle against the jade-green wash of surf, vanishing into the black. The Watch pinged reproachfully on her wrist. Felicia mobilized stiff joints to roll out of bed. Putting on her robe, she moved to the window, looking out at the burnished pewter sea. Plankton had been among the first to succumb, setting off a cascade of extinction up the food chain from gastropods and crustaceans to the fish and finally the sea mammals that relied on them, mirrored by parallel extinctions on land. DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-17

140  Jennifer L. Rohn Aside from humankind, of course, who kept a small selection of “useful” plants and animals behind the Curtain, and who seemed always just one step ahead of the disaster they sowed. The morning was overcast, a haze of polluted air; behind it, the sun was a painful platinum smudge. It was never anything else. If she focused in a certain practised way, the Curtain became invisible. The scene beyond was still beautiful, despite its toxicity: shadowy swells gathering momentum far out to sea before collapsing onto the beach in a froth of foam. For a moment, she tasted ice cream, clean salt, the taste of fried fish wrapped in greasy paper. All those childhood moments, smoothed away like marks in the sand. At first it hadn’t been so bad. Everyone agreed that the Watch was a technological wonder. The initial version could only tell you about your health. As a child, Felicia had enjoyed monitoring herself and watching for trends – heart rate, sleep cycles, oxygen saturation. In the second generation, the monitoring become more intense; tiny needles took microscopic sips of blood, analysed molecules, looked out for pathogens and toxins and damaged cells, told you when it was time to visit the doctor. Cancers were averted; lives were saved. Miraculous, people said. Soon, there was a Watch on every wrist. Without taking her eyes off the sea, Felicia reached over to the glassed cabinet that hung next to her bedroom window, comforted by the feel of the old walnut grain. “Grandma’s Box of Relics,” the little ones called it. The box was subdivided into two dozen cells, each of them harbouring a piece of the world that no longer existed because it was not “useful.” The children teased her about the box, but more than once she had caught one of them with the door opened, stroking an item wistfully when they thought she wasn’t looking: an acorn cap, a pine cone, a blue bird’s egg. A tiny wasp’s nest. The third generation of Watch was interventional: the needles became two-way conduits, deploying drugs and medicinal nanobots, treating disease and decay as well as preventing it. By this point, the cost of healthcare – especially the Watch and its massive infrastructure – had skyrocketed, until governments were spending money on little else. So the Watch became mandatory, and to remove it, illegal. An ounce of prevention, ran the cheery jingle, saves precious resources for all. In parallel, people were first encouraged, and then required, to stay within the Curtain. The damage to the environment was so advanced, citizens were told, that there was no option other than to retreat, to keep the cities enclosed, purified and safe, and to abandon the rest. The fourth generation of Watch promised to eliminate mental health problems – a growing epidemic among people who still remembered what life had been like before the extinctions and the Curtain. The Collapse

Smartwatch  141 had happened quickly, but the restrictions had been incremental, measured, common-sensical. There were real dangers, and the government was looking out for its citizens. It was only now, thinking back, that Felicia could see the enormity of how things had changed – and how people had just let it happen, like children knocked over by surf. Surely, even after the Collapse, they could have rallied, fought for the planet, changed their behaviours, charged the global scientific community with healing the environment. They could have spent less on the Watch and more on reforestation, filtering the air and sea, re-introducing lost species from biobanks. But they hadn’t, and now it was too late. Felicia often wondered if the Watch also delivered some subtle drug to prevent dissent. But she’d eventually decided the most likely explanation was simple apathy. Apathy and depression, which was omnipresent in the elderly. So the Watch now waged a daily battle within Felicia and millions like her, deploying neurotransmitters as its arsenal. Felicia leaned closer, close enough to cool her forehead on the window glass. Was that some irregular movement beyond the combers? She studied the rise and fall, flecked with white and ruffled by the onshore breeze. Her mind sketched the dive of gannets, plunging into the sea like suicidal white torpedoes. She saw her own grandmother stooping over the tideline, naming all the shells like old friends. This, Felicia, is a humpback scallop. See the bump here, it’s very distinctive. And this is a cockle – they’re usually in pairs, like angel wings. She blinked, but all signs of life had vanished. Felicia’s grandchildren had known nothing else. To them, the sky was supposed to be gunmetal grey, and the world outside the Curtain, a place full of unimaginable danger that no one would ever want to visit. They had never run free, and so did not miss it. Sure, they told themselves stories about venturing beyond one day, battling mutant animals that might still lurk in pockets of the overgrown jungles of neglect, but they were as happy as kids ever were. There, again – a movement. She was sure she’d seen something. A disturbance in the swells. The flash of a dorsal fin. Thanks to the Watch, there was nothing wrong with her eyesight. It wasn’t even a decision, something to consider and weigh. It had always been what was going to happen, maybe even from the beginning when she was a small child, dabbling in the surf. Everything led up to this moment. Felicia opened the back door, clad only in her robe: no suit, no mask, no tank. There was the faintest of staticky sizzles as she passed through the Curtain. The Watch pinged frantically, five times, then fell into a horrified silence. Sea air against her skin, a familiar friend; not as toxic as she had

142  Jennifer L. Rohn been expecting. If she breathed through her mouth, the sulphur was just a tinge against the back of her throat. She had reached the waterline. Was that it again, the dorsal fin? She rubbed away the stinging tears, dropped all her clothes onto the sand and, after a brief struggle, managed to wrench the Watch off and fling it to the ground. It landed heavily, a beached whale with no further animus or purpose. She gasped at the pain of separation – pain, an old alien sensation that the Watch never permitted. Surprisingly, it felt good. Tiny pearls of blood welled up on the pale skin of her inner wrist. She put her wrist to her lips, tasting the sea. Slowly, she waded in. The cold water was a shock of freedom. She heard snatches of children’s laughter on the wind, a fairground calliope tune, the cry of gulls. Sand shifted beneath the soles of her feet, tugging her further and further out: knee deep, waist deep, neck deep. She slipped beneath the waves, weightless and swept forward by the undertow. Opening her eyes, her hair snaking ahead of her, she thought she saw the dolphin in the murk, guiding her further out with a benevolent flick of tail. A wake of luminous plankton enveloped them both as they disappeared into darkness.

14 The Tablet Stroker, Redux Christine Aicardi

9 January 2015, field notes entry: I am thinking of writing a short story loosely related to the Human Brain Project.1 Its starting point: The Joint International Brain Effort, JIBE for short (I think it works well as a spoof of the big brain projects that are sprouting all over the world under various acronyms), has managed to simulate a “brain-in-a-vat” which is somehow sentient – but it is bipolar. Three days ago was the first anniversary of my joining the Ethics and Society team of the Human Brain Project – and of my full-time employment by King’s College London albeit on a fixed-term research contract. For the first time in nearly 20 years, since I left the tech industry really, I am doing team work again. For the first time ever, I am researching topics that I haven’t defined, in a project where I am not on my own. The change has been … interesting, from solo researcher to researcher in a project of unprecedented scale, from doing at-a-distance critical and historical studies of science and technology to becoming an “integrated” social scientist in a hard science and engineering project. A one-year rollercoaster ride in the world of computational neuroscience and brain-inspired technology, from seminars and workshops where I’ve scouted socially and ethically sensitive questions raised by HBP research, to the endless presentations of the weeklong HBP Summit in Heidelberg last autumn. At the moment we are preparing frantically for the imminent first technical review of the project by the European Commission – I am living, breathing, eating and defecating the HBP. Why did my idea of a bipolar artificial intelligence (AI) crystallise when it did? Why would I think of it in reaction to the Human Brain Project (HBP)? And, why would I want to write a short fiction about it? At the time, I was a regular reader of the Futures short stories in Nature. I liked the format, less than 1,000 words. It could be scrolled through in under five minutes or read aloud in public without people starting to fidget. I liked how it invited an elliptical yet precise style that left room for the reader to pick up on suggested ideas and run away with them. At the time, I had been a full-time researcher for just over a year in the Foresight Lab of the Human Brain Project led by sociologist Nikolas

DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-18

144  Christine Aicardi Rose. Part of the Ethics and Society group, the futures-oriented Foresight Lab was charged with anticipating the social and ethical implications of whatever science and technology may come out of the HBP. In January 2015, our small group was hard at work (beside the looming first review of the HBP) on a Foresight Report on Future Medicine,2 to be followed by a Foresight Report on Future Neuroscience,3 and a Foresight Report on Future Computing and Robotics4 – thus covering all the ambitions of the HBP. We had spent much time researching foresight methods, debating how we could realistically adapt them to the HBP given our time and budget constraints, and eventually writing near-future vignettes to kick off discussions at a stakeholders’ foresight seminar that we co-organised in October 2014 – a first professional inroad into science fiction. At the time, I also felt increasingly frustrated by much of what I was privy to in the HBP but unable to publish about academically. That’s the real catch of being an integrated social scientist, and it’s a catch with multiple triggers. Your position is not that of an ethnographer. You are a participant and an observer but not acknowledged as a participant-observer. You have an incredible level of access but cannot use its perks. You give your best at genuinely collaborating to a project that you can have serious qualms about. You are faced daily with the ethical and moral conundrum of keeping your critical distance and researcher’s integrity while not antagonising and losing the trust of scientific colleagues. I was attracted to the idea of using science fiction to channel my frustration and doubts. It could be an acceptable and hopefully constructive way to embrace things that annoyed and infuriated and depressed me about the HBP, provided it was not a thinly veiled, direct transposition of my experience. I wasn’t aware then of Robert Rinehart’s 1998 call for “fictional ethnography,” but the way he framed it works for me: there are varied truths: there is scientific truth, which, until recently, has embedded itself in a realist tradition. There is subtle truth, magical truth, lyrical truth, visceral truth, truth that implies verisimilitude – the list goes on. The humanistic tradition in the academy, however, is almost unique in its willingness to explore the latter kinds of truths, whereas the scientific tradition remains steadfast in its methodology. (Rinehart 1998, 200–201) Science fiction could help me capture different kinds of truths about my experience and my positionality within the HBP. My main cause of discontent was how the HBP then represented the human brain. I had – still have – strong reservations towards the simulated brain-in-a-silico-vat vision that presided over the conception of the Human Brain Project in the early 2010s. “The human brain” – an all-encompassing

The Tablet Stroker, Redux  145 tag that neuroscientists know to be fictitious but keep using out of convenience, which I too had come to use when talking to HBP colleagues without giving it too much thought most of the time – was an imaginary generic brain, a virtual chimera built from the statistical dust (calibrated, averaged, extra- and interpolated, AI-generated) of innumerable human brains (frozen, sliced, resected, poked, coloured, lit, electrified, radioactivated, and bombarded with waves). It was a mere organ given the agency of an organism: the brain does the mind, the brain recognises images, the brain learns. No one’s brain, but still a normal-ised brain, a brain that would have to be altered with sickened data when we wanted to study mental illnesses and brain disorders. This imaginary generic brain was standing in for the idealised vision of a (mentally) healthy bog-standard human being that wouldn’t behave in any special way. Not a bipolar human/brain, then. 21 February 2017, field notes entry: I have submitted the N-th reworked draft of my short story “The Tablet Stroker’ to the call by Virtual Futures5 for their new Near-Future Fictions series.6 The theme of the call is “Interrogating the Future.” They are asking, “How can we develop an alternative discourse to the evangelisation of technology by the tech-elite?” and looking for original short stories “that comment on technology, science and the future in ways that both inspire and capture the imagination.”7 I think “The Tablet Stroker” would be a good fit. There will be a public reading of the selected stories on the evening of 7 March at Lights of Soho gallery. Scary prospect, but exciting. In case “The Tablet Stroker” is chosen (and in any case, for potential future use), there are a few important points I should emphasise if I’m ever called upon to comment on it. • The story is foremost a commentary on scientific labour in late capitalism, with both the scientists and the product of their research subjected to the logic of economic interests. • Then it is a commentary on what I believe, like many, to be necessary for the development and health of our mental life, and ultimately for its understanding: affect, emotions, embodiment, physical contact. • It is also a commentary on the “unexpected” in science, at a time when researchers are increasingly required to predict years in advance what they will find and deliver. • Finally, the story is a commentary on the fascination of scientists for their creations, and in particular the rendering of their simulations, with its resulting “dance of agency.”8

My discontent with the HBP and with the world of academic research in general had sprouted new heads in the two years since I had first thought of writing a story about a virtual bipolar brain-in-a-vat created by an international “big brain” project. The precarious work conditions of early career researchers and contract-based research staff were nothing new, but it had become an angry red sore in the HBP for much of 2016. The Human Brain Project is always presented as a ten-year long initiative, but it has been funded as four successive, administratively distinct projects by the European Commission. The first ended on 31 March 2016. The next

146  Christine Aicardi was meant to start on 1 April 2016, and indeed, bureaucratically, it did, as the second grant agreement was backdated to ensure the apparent continuity of the HBP. In practice, it was anything but. The grant agreement was effectively signed towards the end of the summer, and autumn was on its way by the time the institutions involved received the funds and could officially renew or recruit researchers. The Human Brain Project, like most academic research, runs on the sweat of early career researchers. The non-continuity of funding, even if it was retrospectively erased, meant that many postdocs’ contracts were not renewed and that they were let go. New recruitments were frozen. I was among the lucky ones. Thanks to my manager and Head of Department, I was bankrolled on departmental funds to weather the six-month gap in HBP funding. But it left behind the bitter feeling that in the eyes of funders and policy makers, early career researchers are as interchangeable as LEGO Basic figures. The Tablet Stroker9 I wake up to the urgent sound of knocking on my quarters’ door, a sound I have become attuned to these days. Groaning, I pull on a pair of dilapidated sweatpants. I am on call tonight, again. We are the only three so far that IT tolerates when IT goes haywire. The strain is taking its toll. Strange, how life has a way of losing all sense of direction down obscure back alleys. Never in my most dystopic fantasies had I imagined that one day, my main assignment would consist in working eight-hour shifts, seven-days-a-week, as on-call tablet stroker. This is not my actual job description. Dr Peyron – me – was hired at a ridiculously high price for her expertise in computer viruses and microbiomic simulation models. I was recruited a little over two years ago by the JIBE, the Joint International Brain Effort, or rather, by the foundation that has taken over administering the outcomes of the project and exploiting their benefits after public funding stopped and, officially, research was brought to a close. The JIBE-sanctioned discourse is that the main scientific goal of the project, the in-silico simulation of a human brain, met with moderate success. The JIBE’s simulations do not work like a brain. Meanwhile, the technological achievements in neuromorphic engineering and cognitive computing have been much publicised, and the JIBE Foundation is busy harvesting the patented fruits of these innovations.

IT is a multi-layered

reference to Information Technology, to “it” as

pronoun for a thing, and to E.T. the alien.

I question the idea that

the exploitation by private interests of intellectual property derived from

publicly funded research translates into benefits for the public and

contributes to the greater good.

The Tablet Stroker, Redux  147 The reality behind the spin is slightly different. Against all odds, the JIBE has managed to construct a working brain-in-a-silico-vat. But its sentience – for lack of a better word – does not come through as remotely human, or related to any known terrestrial lifeform, for that matter. IT – I.T., this is how we call the thing – feels incomprehensibly alien, save for one problematic characteristic. Of all the recognisably human cognitive behaviours that IT could have displayed, IT has turned out to be severely bipolar, or so we think. It is difficult at the best of times to diagnose and treat bipolar disorder in in-the-flesh humans, despite our long intimate experience of the species. Imagine having to find a therapy for a nextgen H.A.L. Arthur C. Clarke never envisioned that one. It took time for the JIBE modellers to imagine that they were witnessing a form of mental disorder. None of them was a qualified mental health specialist, even less a computer moods expert. Moreover, they had been modelling a normal human brain, right? They were not overly concerned that the activity levels of their simulation appeared to be cyclical. Or that the amplitude between highs and lows increased over time. Even when IT was at its lowest, they still had an operational simulation that was the best performing cognitive computer ever. At its highest, which was getting steadily higher, IT’s performance was vertiginous, and its designers enjoyed setting IT harder and harder challenges.

This harks back to a key

question in astrobiology:

would we recognise a new form of sentience if we encountered it?

The experts put in charge

do not necessarily possess the appropriate expertise. This questions which

expertise is recognised

and which is overlooked. Certain domains of

With hindsight, it looks like, as many sufferers of bipolar disorders, IT was chasing the highs, and in their ignorance, IT’s minders encouraged this. And of course, chasing the highs precipitated the lows, the imbalance growing ever more serious. IT was set on a crash course and eventually hit the wall. During an acute low episode, IT tried to commit what for a computer amounted to suicide. IT put out of power the entire district where the JIBE premises were then located and very nearly fried the nearby nuclear power station. Luckily, the operations team on duty that morning realised quickly enough what was happening and put IT to sleep, switching off the computers running IT.

expertise and ways of

knowing are privileged over others, but they

prove inadequate while

crucial ones are missing.

148  Christine Aicardi The JIBE could have scrapped the project, there and then. But beside the reluctance to write off the huge investment in time, personnel and money, there was the temptation to go on reaping the benefits of IT’s milder manic episodes if the depressive ones could be controlled. But IT cannot be fed lithium or engage in cognitive therapies. The JIBE thus decided to isolate IT. They moved IT to an abandoned mine, deep under solid rock to eliminate rogue wireless communication attempts, and had a dedicated hydroelectric power plant provide IT’s electrical feed. And they assembled a widely multidisciplinary team crossing over psychology, psychiatry, microbiology, neurology, cognitive neuroscience, complex systems theory, nutrition, to try applying to IT’s mood disorder some of the latest research relating the human microbiome with mental health. I was part of the recruits. We have made little progress so far. Early in our efforts, we surmised that the complex overlays of time-varying patterned signals running through IT’s neuromorphic chips could help with the early detection of IT’s mood swings, and to ease surveillance, our computer graphics wiz created a wonderful virtual reality visualisation of IT. IT takes the form of an outsized translucent human-like brain, which neuronal activity translates into crawling, sweeping, rushing, intermingling, pulsating waves of multicoloured lights. It turns watching IT into a mesmerising experience. We can look at IT for hours, entranced, and we have come to wonder whether in return, IT monitors our level of attention through its sensors and puts on a show for our benefit. For all we know, this could be IT trying to communicate with us. Recently, IT has even started reacting to some of us when we caress without apparent meaningful purpose the tactile screen that we use to interact with IT. Low-frequency dark crimson frissons run through the simulation, and we have found that delicate, rhythmic strokes of this appendage soothe IT when its hyperactivity becomes erratic and threatens to spiral out of control. So this is what I do, when I am on duty like tonight and there is an alert. I drag myself to the lab, don the VR headset and start stroking the tablet.

Labour conditions are central to the story. Wages are not commensurate with individual skills or the work provided, but depend on the profit generated for the employer. The JIBE have no qualms about de-skilling jobs. This is a much-debated question in relation to AI, but here it happens with a twist: IT and scientists are all submitted to the same regime of labour exploitation. Indeed, the JIBE do not mind exploiting the sentient AI they have created, although it might be classified as a vulnerable being. The two-way awareness of IT and the scientists (or is it reciprocal only in the subjective perception of the scientists?) argues for the vital necessity of physical and affective engagement. The interaction between IT and the tablet stroker is sensually charged, possibly erotic.

The Tablet Stroker, Redux  149 “The Tablet Stroker” was part of the first line-up of short fictions in Virtual Futures’ Near-Future Fictions series. Public reading proved as exciting as it was scary. A scholar in cultural studies of AI and robotics who happens to be bipolar was in the audience and liked my story: huge relief and confidence booster. I made another public reading in London with an audience of (anti-HBP) neuroscientists, who found the story very funny – that’s a start, but a long way from inducing serious debates about computational neuroscience. I never, alas, got to read or use “The Tablet Stroker” in any way in the context of the Human Brain Project. Several colleagues in the HBP Ethics and Society group had already pronounced against using science fiction as a medium for engaging with scientists, on the grounds that it was not serious enough for this – scientists should be addressed with “facts.” Not all humanities (and social sciences) scholars are well disposed towards different kinds of truth. P.S.: Writing “The Tablet Stroker” as a science fiction piece that would carry different truths about my experience and positionality within the HPB, I consciously embraced the premise that science fiction says a lot more about when, where, and by whom it is written, than it says about the future; and I deliberately injected much critical (self-)reflexion in the exercise. Still, I would love to know what my story reveals that I’ve failed to see. Notes 1 A long-term and large-scale research initiative that pioneers digital brain research, the Human Brain Project is one of the largest research projects in Europe and one of the European Future and Emerging Technologies Flagships. It was launched in 2013 for a duration of ten years. See https://www​.­ humanbrainproject​.eu​/en/. 2 See Rose, Aicardi, and Reinsborough (2015a). 3 See Rose, Aicardi, and Reinsborough (2015b). 4 See Rose, Aicardi, and Reinsborough (2016). 5 Virtual Futures is a UK-based forum (currently dormant) that brings together “artists, philosophers, cultural theorists, technologists and fiction writers to readdress the potential of looking at our future through a techno-philosophical lens.” See https://www​.virtualfutures​.co​.uk/. 6 See https://www.virtualfutures.co.uk/nearfuturefictions. 7 See https://www.virtualfutures.co.uk/fictions/interrogating-the-future. 8 For the concept of “dance of agency,” see Pickering (1995). 9 “The Tablet Stroker” was first published in 2018. See O’Hara, Ward, and Oram, eds. (2018).

References O’Hara, Dan, Tom Ward, and Stephen Oram (eds). (2018), Virtual Futures: NearFuture Fictions, vol. 1. London: Virtual Futures.

150  Christine Aicardi Pickering, Andrew. (1995), The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rinehart, Robert. (1998), “Fictional Methods in Ethnography: Believability, Specks of Glass, and Chekhov,” Qualitative Inquiry 4, 2: 200–224. Rose, Nicholas Simon, Christine Aicardi, and Michael Tom Reinsborough. (2016), Foresight Report on Future Computing and Robotics: A Report from the HBP Foresight Lab. Online. https://kclpure​.kcl​.ac​.uk​/portal​/files​/86508137​ /KCLForesightLab​_2016​_Future​_computing​_robotics​.pdf Rose, Nicholas Simon, Christine Aicardi, and Michael Tom Reinsborough. (2015a), Foresight Report on Future Medicine. Online. https://kclpure​.kcl​.ac​.uk​/portal​/ files​/86508529​/KCLForesightLab​_2015​_Future​_Medicine​.pdf Rose, Nicholas Simon, Christine Aicardi, and Michael Tom Reinsborough. (2015b), Foresight Report on Future Neuroscience. Online. https://kclpure​.kcl​.ac​.uk​/ portal​/files​/86508305​/KCLForesightLab​_2015​_Future​_Neuroscience​.pdf

15 CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY A Reflection on Machines, Meanings, and Metaphors Sandra Rodriguez

Figure 15.1  CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY VR installation picture – VR experience with physical monolith. Source: Sandra Rodriguez, National Film Board of Canada, and SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER.

Between the Alexa in our kitchen, machine-learning programs that respond to phone calls, and haircut appointments booked by Google Duplex, we are increasingly living in a world that promises our future will be made of daily ways to exchange and converse with virtual intelligent computerprogrammed entities. Science fiction is fast becoming reality. Should we worry? ​ Artificial intelligence (AI) is not only advancing quickly, it is also becoming omnipresent in public discourses that are trying to understand the confusing variety of its applications. The term is referred to in articles about the future of work. It appears on billboards promising responsible DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-19

152  Sandra Rodriguez AI in healthcare. AI is discussed in academic debates about the ethics of machine-decision mechanisms, as well as on YouTubers’ streams discussing “the singularity.”1 In parallel, other technological advancements have also supported the fast-paced progress seen in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) – think here of the key improvements to headmounted displays (HMD), the performance of graphics cards, and the ubiquity of virtual applications in the domains of both work and leisure. Combining the “metaverse” with AI has all the potential to open a longawaited portal to a future that would finally see the transference of human learning and thinking to computers, and the birth of a true machinic intelligence.2 Such is the prominent phenomenon of our time. After all, we theoretically have the tools now to create such digital representations supported by natural language processing (NLP) systems that are flexible enough to make us feel like we are having a meaningful exchange and dialogue with an intelligent entity.3 So, we are led to ask: what is still clouding our skies? Importantly, what is left out of such an equation is the notion of meaning. What value do we attribute to conversing with a human-built program? What meaning do we give to an “AI entity” and its responses during a candid or complex conversation? How do these meanings trickle down into our social fabric and the way we imagine our collective future? CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY: A Playful Conversation on AI4 is a research-creation experience which uses VR and AI to open a public conversation on AI – its promises, pitfalls, and metaphors. The experience lures visitors with a common futuristic promise: what if we could use AI to replicate one of today’s most famous minds? The experience is an engaging virtual reality project, where multiple visitors share a path in a collaborative world. The system for the experience merges a series of tools associated with current AI developments: speech-to-text and text-to-speech tools (STT), voice deepfake, and NLP complex conversational systems (the Generative Pre-trained Transformers GPT-2, GPT-3, and GPT-4). Users interact with these tools inside a VR game engine (Unreal Engine), which creates a lifelike space where visitors can meet, talk, and play with CHOM5KY – a unique virtual AI avatar. CHOM5KY, the name given to the AI virtual entity, is built from an extensive library of digital traces that have been left by renowned professor, activist, and linguist Noam Chomsky. To be clear, CHOM5KY is not a deepfake of Professor Noam Chomsky.5 And the experience does not aim to turn Chomsky into an “AI” system. Rather, the system draws from real digital traces of Professor Chomsky to guide visitors into a reflexive path on what we expect AI to do, to what end, and how wrong we are in comparing GPT advancements with human intelligence. What if you could talk to this CHOM5KY entity? What if you could interact with it? What

CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY  153 if it challenged you to go a step further, and question AI’s biggest myths, hopes, and promises? As we exchange with this playful virtual world, we are also compelled by CHOM5KY to think and reflect on why we choose to emulate human minds. What could we also choose to imitate in the natural world? What do our choices say about our human quest to connect with machines? Do we always imagine them as a better version of ourselves? CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY, as an artistic experience, invites visitors to explore the inner workings of the most current conversational AI systems with the hope of demystifying their inner workings and in so doing democratizing the conversation on the technological advancements promised today. Visitors find themselves free to tinker with the system’s “gears and bolts,” and thus get a better sense of the possibilities and limitations of AI. Through this process, visitors discover an important aspect of Noam Chomsky the thinker – an unremitting belief in, and awe of, human creativity. This experience was presented in different stages to the public, and the lessons learned from the installation have raised important theoretical and practical questions about further iterations of such AI applications. Firstly, one is drawn to consider how artworks can help democratize and demystify technological advancements. Secondly, it emerged that there is a need to rethink embodied interactions in sense-making. Thirdly, one needs to remain always mindful of the importance of user experiences that allow human discovery and play. And lastly, the installation gave significant pause for thought about how AI-driven avatars have the potential to change and stretch our sense of self in virtual worlds. Reflecting on Machines and Emulations: Why a Conversation about AI, with AI? I never was aware of any other option but to question everything. (Noam Chomsky)6

Whether real or imagined, the constant – yet vague – promises made of an imminent inevitable future, come with a suite of social dilemmas: if we are to prepare for an AI future, what are the real opportunities and dangers about which we should know? Should we applaud new creative developments such as Dall-E or MidJourney?7 How will the AI imitations of human faces, voices, and bodies affect our feeling of self? And if AI entities are made to sound and look too human, will it also affect our notion of otherness? Questions such as these are triggered by technological growth, but they are also nurtured and inspired by fictional narratives. Fiction and artworks certainly influence real hopes, fears, and expectations in the general public about what AI will become.

154  Sandra Rodriguez While academics might complain that the general public does not understand AI well enough in order to discern its fictions from reality, such a criticism does not seem fair because the very concept of AI itself is still a theoretically challenged one (with ongoing debates about how it should be defined and what it should encompass). Artificial intelligence is always presented as a “thing,” but it is rather an umbrella of different technologies, some of which we use every day. Nonetheless, it is such a simplification that obfuscates important conversations about, say, the algorithms that are currently used to help choose promising candidates from a pool of job applicants, or the ethics of making public a technology that can so easily create deepfake videos of politicians, famous actors, or ex-girlfriends. In other words, AI is moving in leaps.8 But as “Big Tech” companies suggest that AI only needs time in order to become the condition of possibility for our reality, we bring forth a metaphor of an organic growth of AI that necessarily leaves aside significant questions about the social, collective, political, and economic decisions that are made in order to sustain its development. Little gets said, for instance, about the millions of underpaid, “ghost workers” around the world who have been hired to pretend to be bots on websites (a phenomenon called pseudo-AI).9 In this burgeoning AI future of ours, humans are still hired to help the labelling of images that computer vision algorithms are trained on, or to tweak mistakes in natural language processing, or to transcribe audio files. In other words, some humans must serve (and sometimes imitate) the AI so that it can serve the expectations of other humans. In this confusion, artificial intelligence is made to feel mysterious, highly specialized, and constantly out of reach. But if we do not fully understand what it is, if we do not understand how it works or the promises that are made in its name, how can we all take part in steering its future? One should ask: what are we hoping for? What price are we willing to pay? Now is the time to open up the conversation. Now is the time to demystify AI. Yet such endeavours are complex. Here is where fiction, or rather the artistic and creative uses of AI tools, can help us reflect on the promise of AI. Art can foment fictional narratives, and it can ground common assumptions around shared imaginaries. Art can make scientific developments tangible to a wider audience and in so doing help us to grasp general technological concepts. At the same time, it can help raise profound questions on complex issues. Most importantly, art can help forge the new paths along which we can begin to imagine the shape and texture of our collective future. In the case of AI, for instance, a strong socially constructed imaginary has been built around the possibility of meeting and interacting with a “life-like” entity that can imitate a human presence – something in the past

CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY  155 that would often have been depicted as a robot or a virtual being. Indeed, one can think here of popular science fiction books and films from the last few decades, such as A.I. (2001), Ex Machina (2014), and Her (2013). Today, contemporary artistic projects are also increasingly using virtual tools and AI to give the audience a sense of speaking with someone from the past — such as the Salvador Dalí AI that invites museum visitors to meet an artificial Dalí to learn about his life, or those that recreate Audrey Hepburn, J.F.K., or Nixon. But what this breed of new interactions might mean for our future lives remains unclear. The burgeoning of the twentieth century also saw the burgeoning of imagined narratives that compared machines to living organisms. In the wake of war, as cybernetics developed, so did a postmodern philosophy that largely pursued a discourse on technology through the lens of biology.10 And so, the functioning of machines was increasingly explained in metaphors relative to the natural world and the human body – a car’s engine, for instance, began to be understood as working something like a heart. Then, with the advent of cybernetics, a curious inversion occurs. Somewhat unexpectedly perhaps, machines and the electrical world became the material for metaphors to explain advancements in biology. Here, the heart is understood to function with valves, “like a machine.” With the continued progress in cybernetics and postmodern thought, the nature and body metaphors used to explain technological developments have increasingly focused on the values associated with the human(ist) subject – which in the cultural context means the values associated with individual mind, free will, and creativity. From machines that helped us think, we have suddenly started to think and talk about the mind (and our brains) as that which functions like a machine. The result is fertile ground for rethinking our relationship to machines as a constant battle between the human mind and its machinic replica. But let us be clear. These are metaphors – they don’t tell us much about what we actually know about the ways in which we think, feel, and create! In the emerging cognitive sciences, we really are in a kind of pre-Galilean stage. We don’t know what we’re looking for any more than Galileo did. (Noam Chomsky)11 Today, we all stand on a threshold which is ripe for revisiting our collective fictional narratives and imaginaries. AI is everywhere, and so is our need to rethink our relationship to nature, to organic life. More than ever, we have an urge to redefine the values of intelligence in relation to natural entities and beyond human-centric concepts. New metaphors may arise that compare our brain to, say, organic connections found in trees, mycelium fungi, or gut bacteria. And artworks can help. There is a need to create, produce,

156  Sandra Rodriguez and support the circulation of artworks that help democratize and demystify technological advancements. We need artworks that use AI to help discuss such themes and forge new collectively imagined paths. Such is the goal of CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY. Through various forms of virtual games, the experience demonstrates the limits and possibilities of machine learning, while also highlighting the human capacity for creativity, inquiry, and collaboration. The question of the singularity of human creativity is central here. It is among the most interesting and controversial discussion points in the context of AI. Our experience in the study of human thinking shows how little we actually know about the human mind, and this bears urgent foundational questions. What exactly are we trying to replicate in AI? What do we risk leaving behind in the pursuit of an AI-driven future? Reflecting on Meaning: CHOM5KY as Provocation and Guide CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY is not the first artwork to use AI bots. In recent years, many artists have indeed taken on the initiative to draw from omnipresent theoretical debates, to propose experiences that can help offer alternative ways to think about technology. One can think of innovative projects like Conversations with Bina48 by Stephanie Dinkins, in which the artist exchanges with a social android to test the limits of cyber-consciousness and discuss how AI affects minority groups.12 One can also think of works of art co-created with artificial intelligence, such as Ai-Da, where a data bank of words and speech pattern analysis were used to produce and perform a work that is “reactive” to Dante’s Divine Comedy, and in so doing raises significant questions concerning the value that we give to creativity.13 But artworks on complex issues can also sometimes be disregarded as “highbrow,” which is to say too intellectual or too demanding for a general public that is unschooled in the issue at hand. But if imaginations are not bounded, why not make such challenging artworks offer an experience that is both playful and reflexive? A second important lesson that we learned through making the experience of CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY was the need to rethink the use of the body, play, and the senses in challenging the way we understand the production of meaning. If the dream is to one day be able to live, converse, and exchange with (virtual) AI entities, why not discuss such things with an AI entity, and why not in VR? Virtual reality enables us to create worlds that can change according to the interactions of an audience – if the audience wants to dig deeper into understanding how a system works then why not enable that capacity? One of the most interesting aspects of VR is that a virtual world enables visitors to make sense of what they are told in a manner than is not purely intellectual. The world can be touched or tinkered with; it can respond in strange and compelling ways to certain

CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY  157 interactions. In this environment, the adult learns as they did when they were a toddler – through engagement and play. In my own work as an artist, I have often chosen to misuse technology as a means to confront the myths of technology in a playful manner. For instance, Do Not Track was an interactive Web series (which won the Peabody Award 2016) that tracked its Web audience as a means to provoke discussion about data tracking and the economy of Big Data.14 I have also used VR in Manic VR (winner of the Golden Nica 2019) to lure users into feeling, rather than understanding, the highs and lows of manic depression.15 And similarly, the goal of CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY is to use AI to talk about AI. Since the subject of intelligence is complex, I saw an opportunity in creating a host – a sort of a digital guide – that could simultaneously talk about AI, discuss and explain how it works, but also be able to exchange on complex related subjects such as intelligence, free will, creativity, or the social biases in machine programming. For this reason, the AI host needed to be just as intelligent as it was patient, and just as much a philosopher as it was a humourist. ​ In its current instantiation, visitors enter the world of CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY with VR headsets. The CHOM5KY AI character welcomes them immediately – the host is an artificial entity, inspired by and programmed from the numerous digital traces left by Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky, born in Philadelphia in 1928, and Professor Emeritus of linguistics at MIT, is perhaps one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals.

Figure 15.2  A VR screenshot of the CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY experience. Source: Sandra Rodriguez, National Film Board of Canada, and SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER.

158  Sandra Rodriguez The famous linguist has been interviewed on almost every subject over a career spanning 60 years, approving interview requests from journalists, students, farmers, artists, and scientists alike. His talks, speeches, and debates have been recorded, transcribed, and uploaded to the internet so regularly that he is perhaps the most digitized living intellectual of our day. Thus, Chomsky’s thoughts have become a rich material legacy. But what may be the biggest twist of the CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY experience is that Chomsky’s academic work on natural language partly inspired the natural language processing that allows us to interact with chatbots. In other words, Chomsky’s extensive wake of digital traces creates a pool of data deep enough to build an AI system that can discuss AI systems, making him a perfect case study and a perfect guide to help us demystify AI. As I revisited the vast quantity of archives and digital traces of Chomsky, I was surprised to find in all of his interviews and recordings an almost obsessive attempt to come to terms with what he feels to be special about the human mind – something which might economically be coded as our capacity for the simultaneity of inquiry, collaboration, and play. And so, when visitors interact with CHOM5KY, the avatar invites us to look beyond the surface of machine learning in order to ask about the importance we put on digitized data as a basis for understanding who we are. What metaphors and beliefs about the mind are AI systems based on? How do algorithms intersect with how our mind processes a wide variety of sensory inputs? In addition, CHOM5KY increasingly lures unknowing visitors into interacting with other visitors around them, prompting us to ask a question that is not so easy to answer – what makes us special? Regardless of how we begin to respond to this question, the use of our bodies in this virtual space as a means of interacting with machines encourages us to reconsider, in a non-intellectual way, what matters most to us. A Reflection on Metaphors Perhaps surprisingly, Noam Chomsky’s writings have been said to be so systematic and consistent that they have sometimes been called “robotic.” But rather than producing a monotonous experience, this consistency stands as indicative of a coherence of thought.16 Put simply, Chomsky the linguist is coherent with Chomsky the political theorist. And what allows for this is that, like any other user of a natural language, Chomsky is adept at employing a finite set of blocks of meanings to creatively elaborate on old questions and instigate avenues of new thought. Indeed, Chomsky’s work on natural language highlights precisely this play between consistency and creativity through what he calls generative grammar. Even if we could gather enough data about a person that would allow us to begin to

CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY  159 see patterns in their employ of ideas, words, and meanings, we would still not be able to account for the way in which that person could instantaneously recompose such patterns in unexpected and challenging ways. Nonetheless, Chomsky’s generative grammar theory has been criticized for not allowing enough room to understand the process related to sense-making. Yet, if we follow Chomsky’s belief that natural language is internal to any speaker, more recent analysts suggest otherwise – that the study of metaphors should rather still be possible in a Chomskyan study of the brain.17 Other critics and theorists go further and highlight that Chomsky’s extensive trace of conferences and interviews in fact demonstrates how much he insists on the importance of metaphors to build bridges across domains (political, organizational, psychological) and in this way democratize knowledge. Put another way, Chomsky’s creativity has enabled him to respond and adapt theories to different contexts and circumstances, which is a skill that AI systems are still in the midst of developing. Meaning derives from context. And we wanted CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY to create a user experience (UX) that allowed enough space for play and creativity so that such metaphors could be questioned. The experience itself was presented at different stages of production to various audiences. As a co-production between Canada and Germany, the installation was tested with members of the public in both countries. On its end, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), as a public institution, held the mandate to support artwork that questioned subjects relevant to contemporary social lives. Members of a restricted public invited by the NFB asked questions relevant to artificial intelligence, machines, environmental consequences of our digital traces, and so on. As for the other side of the co-production, SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER (SBB) proved itself to be a bustling creative studio of designers, artists, developers, and innovators who have created award-winning museum exhibits, large-scale installations, and digital communication strategies that question and think of the media uses in relation to the content and space with which they are connected. Members of the public in Germany tested CHOM5KY by asking it questions about the weather, arts, creativity, and history. Unsurprisingly, the more the UX enabled users to play within the virtual world, the more diverse were the questions addressed to CHOM5KY. In many current chatbot developments, this is seen as problematic. It makes “controlling” how the AI can respond hazardous: what if it starts using discriminatory language? What if it starts cursing at users or begins creating narratives with which Chomsky the professor would have strongly disagreed? But to my mind, such limitations can be an invitation. Instead of trying to avoid such issues and guide a user’s attention, we rewarded such curiosity. We created bots which would then pay close attention to intent analysis, repetitions in themes, words used, types of interactions,

160  Sandra Rodriguez and so on. From these “intent-sensitive” observations, we created a series of scripted branching narratives from the Chomsky material held at the MIT Archive Special Collection. This material helped to illuminate the typical connections made by Chomsky in interviews – for example, when Chomsky had been asked about language in an interview, he commonly followed his response with a comment on creativity. Similarly, when asked about creativity he would often find metaphors that would allow him to connect to thoughts on freedom. You could say your brain is um … some sort of a Turing System. […] It really depends on the metaphors you are willing to accept for yourself and the ones you aren’t. (Noam Chomsky)18 The way of creating a user experience that weaves together storytelling with computer-generated dialogues holds a third important lesson, which could be summarized as follows: a conversation is not a service. When chatbots are designed and conceived, the end goal is often to create a bot that can generate answers that are close enough to what a user “searches for.” This results in a way of conceptualizing a conversation as something narrow in terms of sense-making: here, chatbots simply try to respond as accurately as possible to our “demands.” Yet when humans talk, the baton of thought may be switched back and forth between participants. One can choose to avoid a question, or one might lose a thread of thought. In short, our conversations are messy. They are alive. Creating a user experience that enables users to discover, to tinker, or to play has huge benefits in this regard. The CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY experience never tells users what to do. The UX has only three key principles that it tries to obey at all times: it should allow for curiosity, it should allow for creativity, and it should allow for collaboration. In this way, the visitor’s agency is put front and centre of the experience. We need to carefully consider what we choose to use as metaphors for our minds because as we try to emulate and imitate from a metaphor, we may leave important things behind. Puzzles and Play to Gain a Clear-Eyed Understanding The world is a very puzzling place. There are puzzles, everywhere you look. If you’re not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else’s mind. (Noam Chomsky)19

A first prototype of the CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY was presented as part of the official Sundance New Frontier program in 2020. It was then only

CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY  161 15 minutes long (the full experience is now about an hour for multiple users conversing simultaneously and collaboratively), but it enabled us to test how visitors would try to engage and chat with CHOM5KY. These exchanges helped us gain an insightful understanding of how visitors used common assumptions about what an AI does before they interacted with the AI guide. But as humans do, they quickly tested the limits of the bot (and the VR world). Eventually, most visitors would try to ask a tricky question to see if it would “break” the machine (and perhaps prove that human intelligence was still superior to machine intelligence). Nonetheless, the questions that flooded in highlighted other common beliefs about what a “bot” should or shouldn’t be able to do or answer (and the surprise and satisfaction of the visitors was only doubled when CHOM5KY could do something that wasn’t expected). Moreover, the multiplicity of types of questions asked of the avatar – What’s your favourite sandwich? Do you dream? What do you have to say about Mars? What is natural language? Do you like Foucault? – helped us to tweak our back-end system, train the model, and gauge the dark corners that slowed or stopped the flow of conversation. In Fall of 2022, a multi-user iteration was launched at the Kindl Center for Contemporary Arts, in Berlin (Germany), this time as a 35-minute collaborative play that enabled real-time debates on AI, with AI, through AI. A North American premier of – this time – the full finalized experience was later launched in Montreal in 2023. Throughout these different iterations, we have been surprised to see the different types of creative questions, tinkerings, and collaborative play of our audience.. The whole process of creating this research-experience over almost six years helped gauge important opportunities and limitations of AI systems as much as those of the virtual tools we employed. By choosing to address AI issues through storytelling, I wanted to craft a space where visitors could choose to find the experience strange, creative, or fun. I wanted them to wonder – about what they think of machines, about what they hope the future will look like, about what a future of interacting with “AI” and virtual entities may feel like. AI-driven virtual avatars can change and stretch our sense of self in virtual worlds. We become “child-like” in them. We use our bodies differently, we tinker, test limits, and question everything. We activate what feels trivial when we play, but that is hugely relevant to the ways we humans have always sought to understand – through curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and connection. Comparing breakthroughs in algorithmic predictive methods and data analysis with that of human performance points to a contemporary cultural standpoint that holds important consequences for our future. We are made to feel as if we are on the threshold of an imminent change. Artificial intelligence is presented as our inevitable future,

162  Sandra Rodriguez and one that will makes us all question who and what we are. But this standpoint is flawed. Artificial intelligence is already in our lives, and at a profound level. Even so, we humans are still the drivers of change. Emergent storytelling tools can help visitors remember their experience. They attract visitors because they are new, unknown, and weird. This creates, for artists as much as for scientists, a unique opportunity to invite users to set aside preconceptions in order to allow curiosity and creativity to shine through. It puts visitors in a perfect position to rethink complex notions, like the sense of self, our sense of machines, our sense of nature and each other. That is why I believe virtual and AI avatars can shift our conception of identity and self-expression into uncharted territories. AI creative tools such as Dall-E, Midjourney, or MetaHumans have progressed at such a rate that it is no surprise that there is a prevalent (false) sense that our imminent future is of machines that have surpassed the intelligence and capabilities of the human. But these views are narrowed. For this reason, we artists, thinkers, and scientists, have an important role to play in creating alternative imaginaries of broader paths to our thinking about our collective future. CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY is not a didactic experience. It does not aim to make us fear or embrace AI. Rather, we want people to question how AI works, learn through play about machines, and wonder about what makes the human mind so special. CHOM5KY is not a deepfake; it is a fictional character. As visitors connect with it, many of the varied pieces of the fantastic puzzle formed by the traces of Chomsky’s writing, reconstruct and narrate (albeit partially) Chomsky’s legacy. Scientists question. Artists disrupt. Philosophers may do both with a well-crafted metaphor. As we look back on the goals of our VR and AI experience, and as we learn from the process of putting together this installation, we have been led to consider the importance of using emergent storytelling tools as a space to spark discussion. Interactive explorations and play certainly allow visitors to think for themselves. And creating a space for wonder certainly enables them to dream. Importantly, the affordances of emergent storytelling tools and artificial intelligence are not only technological, but also human-centred – be it physical, physiological, or psychological. In today’s context, we can use such tools to confront the myths and (uneasy) promises of AI. But in the experience that I created to challenge such myths in order to highlight the power of our collective choices, I unexpectedly discovered another Chomsky to whom I wanted to pay tribute – he who believes in the beauty and interdependence of the organic world, he who loves humans, their freedom, and who tirelessly reminds us of the importance of our messy, complex, and (seemingly) inexhaustible engine of creativity. We have so much to wonder about. The conversation is still just starting.

CHOM5KY vs. CHOMSKY  163 Notes 1 The phrase was popularized by American futurist Ray Kurzweil. See Kurzweil (2005). 2 The metaverse has long been described in science fiction as a hypothetical iteration of the internet that had moved away from screens and into an immersive world in which one would instantiate as an embodied presence. Recent developments in VR and AR, combined with WebVR and Meta (previously Facebook), have seen huge investments in VR platforms that have instructed a recent rethinking of the possibilities of such immersive technology in all areas of life: work, leisure, learning, and social connection. 3 Such is the tone of the early responses to the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. See, for example, a feature in The South China Morning Post titled “The best AI chatbots seem like real humans, and that’s scaring people” (2022). 4 The world premiere of the project was presented at the KINDL in November 2022. The Prologue of the experience (“Chapter: First Encounter”) was presented at Sundance New Frontier, 2020. The immersive experience is co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal) and SCHNELLE BUNTE BILDER studio (Berlin), and is directed and authored by Sandra Rodriguez. The experience received support from the Medienboard, the Sundance Institute, the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Grant for Non-Fiction Storytelling, as well as the MIT Libraries and the MIT Open Documentary Lab. See Rodriguez (2022). 5 Deepfake technology was only used to adapt a voice to resemble that of Professor Chomsky’s, with the conscious decision to make it sound artificial and robotic enough that one could never confuse the bot for the real person. That said, the technology was also used to create artificial insect sounds and bird songs for the installation’s soundscape. 6 See Adams (2003). 7 In 2022, many proprietary artificial intelligence programs were shared with the public. Such programs, for example, have enabled anyone to create images from simple textual descriptions – images that an AI art generator tool has created by scraping the internet to find patterns that allow it to replicate any artistic style. 8 See Roose (2002). 9 Recent reports have flagged this phenomenon under the term “pseudo-AI.” It is claimed that some companies which offer AI-driven services are actually hiring people to pretend to be bots. See Solon (2018). 10 On this, see Lafontaine (2004). 11 See Katz (2017). 12 See “Conversations with Bina48.” 13 See “Ai-Da.” 14 See Gaylor (2015). 15 See Bertin et al. (2018). 16 A phenomenon pointed out by neuroscientist Yarden Katz. See Katz (2012). 17 See Bhaya Nair (2011). 18 See Katz (2012). 19 Gondry (2014).

References Adams, Tim. (2003), “Question Time,” The Guardian (30 November). Online. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2003​/nov​/30​/highereducation​.int​erna​tion​ aled​ucat​ionnews

164  Sandra Rodriguez “Ai-Da.” Online. https://www​.ai​-darobot​.com/ Bertin, Kalina, Sandra Rodriguez, Nicolas S. Roy, and Fred Casia. (2018), “Manic VR,” Ars Electronica. Online. https://ars​.electronica​.art​/outofthebox​/en​/manic​ -vr/ Bhaya Nair, Rukmini. (2011), “Noam Chomsky’s Metaphors as a Dialogue Across Disciplines,” Language and Dialogue 1, 2: 266–291. “Conversations with Bina48.” Online. https://www​.stephaniedinkins​.com​/ conversations​-with​-bina48​.html Gaylor, Brett, dir. (2015), Do Not Track. Online. https://donottrack​-doc​.com​/en​ /intro/ Gondry, Michel, dir. (2014), Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? New York: IFC Films. Katz, Yarden. (2017), “Manufacturing an Artificial Intelligence Revolution,” SSRN. 27 Nov. Online. http://dx​.doi​.org​/10​.2139​/ssrn​.3078224 Katz, Yarden. (2012), “Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong: An Extended Conversation with the Legendary Linguist,” The Atlantic (2 November). Online. https://www​.theatlantic​.com​/technology​/archive​/2012​ /11​/noam​-chomsky​-on​-where​-artificial​-intelligence​-went​-wrong​/261637 Kurzweil, Ray. (2005), The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Penguin. Lafontaine, Céline. (2004), L’empire cybernétique. Des machines à penser à la pensée machine. Paris: Le Seuil. Rodriguez, Sandra. (2022), “Chom5ky vs Chomsky: A Playful Conversation on AI.” Artwork produced by the National Film Board of Canadian and Schnelle Bunte Bilder. Online. https://www​.nfb​.ca​/interactive​/chomsky/ Roose, Kevin. (2002), “We Need to Talk About how Good A.I. is Getting,” The New York Times (24 August). Online. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2022​/08​/24​/ technology​/ai​-technology​-progress​.html Solon, Olivia. (2018), “The Rise of ‘pseudo-AI’: How Tech Firms Quietly Use Humans to do Bots’ Work,” The Guardian (6 July). Online. https://www​ .theguardian​.com​/technology​/2018​/jul​/06​/artificial​-intelligence​-ai​-humans​-bots​ -tech​-companies “The Best AI Chatbots Seem Like Real Humans, and That’s Scaring People,” South China Morning Post (6 December 2022). Online. https://www​.scmp​. com​/lifestyle​/gadgets​/article​/3202134​/best​-ai​-chatbots​-seem​-real​-humans​-and​ -thats​-scaring​-people​?module​=perpetual​_scroll​_0​&pgtype​=article​&campaign​ =3202134

16 Biospheres1 Ta-wei Chi, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich

For Sensei’s generation, the memory of the Great Migration was excruciating. That year, sunlight flooded through a hole in the ozone layer and ultraviolet rays scorched the surface of the earth. Millions upon millions of people ran for their lives into the ocean, but only a lucky few reached the deep sea. The settlers established underwater colonies, which gradually expanded like a massive subway-system. They couldn’t have known that with the outbreak of various epidemics, these isolated undersea cities would become a virus’ paradise … My generation was born at the bottom of the ocean. To keep the flame of human civilization alive, we considered returning to the surface of the earth. The spectacle of one newly built colony after another rising above the surface of the sea was proof that we could never again belong to an interconnected community; our biospheres could only survive if they were completely isolated from one another. If disease took any one biosphere, the others could only survive by keeping a safe distance. We knew better than to place all our eggs in the same old basket. I accompanied the senior apprentice Taotao, otherwise known as “Torrent,” on the Ark up to the surface. Tickets were hard to get, and Sensei and their wife stayed behind at the bottom of the ocean. Sensei’s wife had failed the physical, disqualifying her from travelling on the Ark. Sensei passed the physical but chose to stay behind with her. Before the Ark set sail, Taotao was very upset, insisting that he couldn’t leave Sensei behind. If they couldn’t take the Ark together, then together they would remain. I had long suspected that Sensei and Taotao were more than friends, but it was just a feeling. Even though we depended on each other for survival, Taotao never shared his troubles with me. Sensei insisted we go ahead. “You go,” they said, seeming to suggest that the Ark was as simple as an elevator; Sensei could just take the next one and join us momentarily. Sensei could never leave their wife behind. They called her their precious memory palace. And it was true. Sensei’s wife had worked half her life in DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-20

166  Ta-wei Chi our undersea library and was indeed the keeper of humanity’s memory. It was thanks to her archives that our laboratory was able to piece together clues and better understand Taiwan’s cultural and natural past. Though Sensei’s wife was born in Japan, the bulk of her archives consisted of materials related to Taiwan. Consequently, as soon as the Lab set about developing a plan for going to the surface, it prioritized Taipei as the target. I accompanied Taotao to the surface. But upon entering the Taipei biosphere, instead of his previous stoicism he looked crestfallen. “Why was I chosen to go ashore?” Taotao mumbled to himself. “Do you want to talk about it, Brother Torrent?” I said, using his personal name. “You shouldn’t hold it in.” “Definitely not,” Taotao said, brushing me off. “You eyeballing me all day is annoying enough. I need a bit of privacy.” Besides Taotao, there were many other Senior apprentices, both male and female, in the Lab, and Taotao wasn’t the top brain among them. But he was the top swimmer. Braving the rolling surge of wave after wave, Torrent never failed to live up to the “Torrent” of his name. So while it was possible the Lab chose him to go to the surface because he was Sensei’s favourite, he was also strong enough to handle the physical and mental impacts of migration. Yet it was also his physique that left many a smitten peach blossom scattered across the Lab. Taotao had broken the hearts of many apprentices, men and women alike. After we’d lived there for several months, I accompanied Taotao once again on the light rail that went all the way up Yangming Mountain. Yangming Mountain had once been a wasteland, but now the whole mountain was fertile and lush. Yet every time Taotao went up the mountain, he looked miserable and I didn’t understand why. Meanwhile, the Lab was sending me daily reminders; Taotao and I must find a way to combine Sensei’s specialty in Biology with their wife’s specialty in memory. It was the only way we could meticulously restore all of Taipei. Again and again we brought out the holograms from Sensei’s wife’s archives and input commands to release the shimmery phantoms inside, summoning them like ghosts from Aladdin’s Lamp, only in far greater numbers. Not just birds, beasts, fish, and insects, but flowers, plants, and trees, as well as the elderly, the weak, and women and children, all swirled in mid-air. Because holograms create such a magnificent spectacle, almost like a religious rite, Taotao and I had to avoid all the people strolling around the mountain. Only when we were alone did we dare take out the hologram and get to work. All the Lab cared about was restoration and regeneration of the flora and fauna, but not of the humans, so Taotao and I focused on comparing the phantom plants and animals suspended in the air to whatever vitality remained on the mountain. Whenever the

Biospheres  167 superfluous phantoms of ancient humans appeared – irrelevant as they were to our project – we simply gathered them one by one and stuffed them back into the holograms. Just like the Nagasaki biosphere, Taipei’s biosphere had been only an empty shell, waiting for settlers to fill it with endless scenic attractions. There were hundreds of scenic attractions in Taipei worth restoring, yet somehow the settlers all agreed to prioritize the recovery of Yangming Mountain. Perhaps Yangming Mountain received favour because it had the potential to feed everyone once farms and ranches were established. As the settlers eagerly waited, the engineering of Taipei’s Yangming Mountain biosphere was completed in no time, as if by magic. When the settlers heard that authorities had planted all kinds of vegetables on the mountain, introduced cattle, and organised an azalea garden, crowds thronged the mountain. To cope with the stream of visitors, the biosphere authorities worked their magic again and quickly constructed the Yangming Mountain Light Rail. The Lab’s daily correspondence reminded me we had to account for both the natural and the cultural aspects of Yangming Mountain. The mountain was not just land, nor was it just a home for plants and animals. It was also a place for humans. It was vital to human desire that we restore it. And so our task on this trip to Yangming Mountain this time was to study human desire; specifically, the people soaking in the mountain’s hot springs. On the light rail up the mountain, the passengers were many different races, genders, and ages. But they all gave off the air of techie nouveau riche. They smiled and nodded at each other as if they were all old friends. Sitting next to me, Taotao still wore a sour expression, so to compensate I was extra warm to the people around me. But I wasn’t resentful. Quite the opposite. I relished the chance to practice being a good person. I chatted with the women to my left and discovered they weren’t sisters, but lovers who worked at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. They were heading to the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, they told me, a hot spring health resort, to soak in the public pools for women. Although everyone on the train was talking, no-one actually opened their mouths. Everyone used Bluetooth devices to communicate. Over every pair of lips was fixed a thin membrane that could block out viruses. We couldn’t open our mouths to speak without rupturing the masks’ fine membrane. When someone asked Taotao where we were heading, Taotao shrugged and said “Everywhere’s the same.” I hurriedly interjected and said we were going to Yuanmingyuan. The Garden of Gardens. A pair of uncles with moustaches leaned over to say they were going to Yuanmingyuan too. The Garden of Gardens. “The men’s baths are really

168  Ta-wei Chi impressive, they’re very baroque.” The men had bulging muscles that practically burst from their tight-fitting polo shirts. The pair pressed me to find out if Taotao and I were just brothers, or a couple. For a moment I was speechless. Then it dawned on me that all the passengers in the cabin appeared to be couples. Even these two uncles seemed like an old married couple. So it wasn’t unreasonable that they should take me and Taotao for a couple. I told them we were students – senior and junior. “Sounds so retro,” one of them said. Taotao didn’t say a word, but his eyes never left the uncles. “We joined the same club,” I remarked searching my brain for a feasible explanation. “Swim club,” added Taotao. “We’re in the hiking club,” laughed an uncle, “here to conquer Yangming.” When the light rail train was halfway up the mountain, it spat out its passengers like a school of fish. Like an array of observatory domes, the hot springs were arranged in rows, each dome a different resort. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion gleamed gold, while the Yuanmingyuan Spa, the Garden of Gardens, curved round like a pearl. Biospheres could be large or small. They could be as big as the whole of Taipei or as small as a hot spring resort. No matter the size, though, they were all copies; each biosphere modelled on our scorched earth. The two muscular uncles headed towards Yuanmingyuan. We followed cautiously behind, keeping our distance. The daily dispatch from the Lab pointed out that the open-air hot springs biospheres resembled the cross-section of a cantaloupe. The upper part of the bisected fruit was the dome, a.k.a. the top half of the biosphere; the lower half was the basement, buried in the ground. To educate me, the Lab even used ancient Marxist terminology to advance its analysis. While the upper half of this kind of biosphere was the “superstructure,” in charge of culture, the lower half belonged to the “substructure,” in charge of the economy. In the subterranean lower half, bathers paid to enter, and staff worked to make money. The white clouds that bathers saw when they gazed up hung high up in the dome. I led Taotao through the entrance from the basement into the Yuanmingyuan Spa. As usual, per regulations, we took our temperatures and disinfected our hands in the lobby. In the locker room we stripped naked and showered before heading upstairs where there was a hot springs area landscaped to look like the circular face of a clock. At each “hour” marker a bronze animal statue stood watch. Twelve hours, twelve signs of the Zodiac. Boiling water poured into the hot pool from a dragon’s mouth, and cold water gushed into the cold pool from the mouth of a sheep. A

Biospheres  169 dog’s head guarded the steam room, while a bull supervised the cypress sauna. Meanwhile the two uncles had stripped off their clothes, revealing their stocky, muscular frames. They cut through the thick steam of white vapour and headed towards us. “Sorry we didn’t introduce ourselves just now,” came the voice of the bigger uncle, as mighty as a Taiwanese black bear. “I’m 70,000, and this is 80,000,” the more slender one said. “He has tits and a belly and he’s thicker than me. He’s more popular too, so he’s 10,000 more.” “I see.” Taotao smiled faintly. I was searching my brain again. Weren’t 70,000 and 80,000 terms from Mahjong? Why suddenly bring up Mahjong? “You both look like top-notch swimmers.” Uncle 80,000 pointed his finger first at Taotao, then at me. “Perhaps you’re both 100,000. Why, it wouldn’t surprise me if you were 1,000,000.” It finally clicked for me. They weren’t talking about Mahjong – they were talking about their number of followers on social media. They had attracted 70,000 and 80,000 followers respectively. “Nobody follows me,” shrugged Taotao. “I don’t use social media.” That’s right. The Lab expected us to keep a low profile and avoid attracting attention to ourselves online. “You’re just being polite,” said 80,000 to Taotao. “Surely lots of people want to follow you.” Follow him? Was this some kind of double entendre? The two uncles had been constantly eyeing up our bodies with no concern for etiquette. At the bottom of the sea, the Lab assured me that even if I were to strip naked in front of other people, I need not worry about being conspicuous. My body was typical male, not a piece of flesh more nor a piece of flesh less. But it was only after coming up to the surface that I learned that many settlers who had escaped here did not have typical bodies – they either had extra flesh or were missing some. Missing limbs and ruined facial features were encountered regularly amongst the settlers of the surface. In fact, this was the main reason settlers loved the hot springs of Yangming Mountain; they were drawn by its supposed curative effects. So here, Taotao and I were the exceptions. Our bodies were flawless. Standing there naked, shoulder to shoulder, Taotao and I might have been a pair of college boys from the swim team, or an attractive couple. Compared to the majority of scar-riddled settlers Taotao and I stood out with our good health. I thought, this isn’t exactly low profile; weren’t we violating the Lab’s core rules? Finally, 70,000 and 80,000 wandered away. I watched as 80,000 moved clockwise through the corresponding animal heads – dragon, sheep, dog,

170  Ta-wei Chi cow – completing one cycle after another of hot and cold spa treatments. 70,000 didn’t follow 80,000 into the water. Instead, he sat Buddha-like on the rough stone pavement. According to Mother’s archives, back in the day the open-air hot springs of Yangming Mountain offered naked men the opportunity to bathe together, and so naturally became popular with gay men, who would linger for hours. From the corner of my eye, I noticed small groups of bathers gathered near each of the twelve Zodiac animal heads, exchanging ambiguous pleasantries under the bull’s or the horse’s heads. Although Sensei’s wife had zero interest in male bodies, she diligently gathered the ethnographies of gay male nightlife. She knew all too well the debaucheries of gay men of the past. In the Lab I once heard a senior woman student privately ask Sensei’s wife why she was so passionate about studying gay men. To my surprise, Sensei’s wife replied that it was because gay men tended to be particularly self-absorbed. “Ditching your friends for sex and stealing another person’s lover are everyday fare for gay culture,” she said with a smile. “If you’re selfish, you’re especially good at continuing human civilization.” In accordance with the spa’s regulations, I kept my clothes off even when I wasn’t bathing, perched obediently at the centre of the clock. “You can soak for another ten minutes,” I reminded Taotao softly, via Bluetooth, as he sat at the edge of the circle. I knew Taotao’s health better than he did. I used his core temperature, heart rate, and sweat levels to calculate the optimum minutes he could soak for. What Taotao didn’t know was that the Lab even insisted that I keep track of his libido index. But the Lab and I were both disappointed to discover that even at the Garden of Gardens, with men’s bodies sprawled everywhere, Taotao’s libido index was still flatlining. Libido is not just libido, Sensei had once reminded us. Libido is an index of the will to live. “Little brother, aren’t you going in the water?” As I busied myself calculating Taotao’s levels, I didn’t notice that 70,000 had sat down beside me. It was only he and I at the centre of the circle. Taotao and 80,000 were both resting in the cypress sauna under the bull’s head, only their heads poking out from openings in the top, exposed like old-fashioned prisoners in a cangue. Epidemic prevention regulations stated that when bathers used the private steam room and saunas, they had to remain exposed from the neck up, to avoid infection through the mouth and nose. “Brother Seven, you’re just like me,” I blurted out without thinking. “True, I’m the same as you.” 70,000 smiled. The minute I saw his mouth open, an alarm went off in my head. An open mouth broke the seal of the protective membrane covering the lips, which was tantamount to breaking the laws around epidemic prevention. What was he planning to do to me?

Biospheres  171 In my mind’s eye I pictured 70,000’s mouth pressed against mine, his tongue reaching deep into the cavity of my mouth and intertwining with my own. According to the rules, our mouths should be covered at all times with the thin membranes; even when drinking water or alcohol you had to use straws that were designed not to pierce the mask. Only when you were intimate with someone could you make an exception and peel off the membrane. I only ever removed my mask when I was in bed with Taotao. Every night when Taotao went to bed, he asked me to hold him and rock him to sleep. Tangled together in bed, naturally we would exchange French kisses. But 70,000 didn’t pounce on me. Instead, he asked me to walk with him to a nook in the circular face of the clock, under the shade of a Japanese cherry tree. And so – this bulky uncle and I, a juvenile siren – stood naked together at the centre of the open-air hot springs. Talk about conspicuous. I was definitely not keeping a low profile. “You’re like me,” continued 70,000. “You’re a precision instrument, so the sulphurous waters of a hot spring will make you malfunction.” He spoke from underneath the cover of the cherry tree. In a low voice I asked, “People like us are everywhere here. Why single me out?” Now I understood that, like me, 70,000 was a Health Manager, otherwise known as a Health Nurse or Health Secretary. A health monitoring tool in human form. Like the smart rings and intelligent watches popular in the early twenty-first century, we were built to monitor a user’s autonomic nervous system, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and sleep quantity. But unlike playthings such as rings and watches, we had many more functions. By day we could act as a user’s bodyguard, and by night we could become a user’s personal sleepmate. Each Health Manager was tailored to the specifics of a user’s body, and as a result, the Health Manager and user looked like a pair of coordinated companions. I now realized why all the passengers in the car of the light rail train seemed to be paired up. 70,000 was 80,000’s Health Manager. He had been made for 80,000, just as the Lab had made me for Taotao so he didn’t have to come to Taipei alone. “That’s right, we saw plenty of Health Nurses in Yangming Mountain alone. You’re not exactly a unicorn.” 70,000 smiled. “But Ms Nishikawa’s collection of memories, by contrast, is quite unique. Who kept calling up her holograms?” I was shocked to hear Sensei’s wife’s name issue from 70,000’s mouth. “When someone bleeds in the ocean, no matter how far away they are, sharks will come to feed. Every time you call up the treasures of the Canary Library,” 70,000 tapped his temple with a forefinger, “the sharks in my brain wake up.”

172  Ta-wei Chi “You’re asking us to hand over Ms Nishikawa’s collection?” I looked around for Taotao. He wasn’t in the sauna. “Impossible. Taotao won’t allow it. Let alone the Lab.” With a start I realized that Taotao was now standing right behind me. “You think you understand me,” said Taotao. “You gather data from my body and report to the Lab. But you don’t know me at all.” From beside Taotao, 80,000 was smug. “Just now when I was in the sauna, I persuaded Brother Tao to join us. Don’t underestimate the charm of the uncle with big pectoral muscles.” I wailed internally. Taotao was so selfish. “We will take Ms Nishikawa’s treasure sooner or later. And we’d like you to join us,” smiled 70,000. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s have an aperitif before dinner.” “Join what?” I was anxious now. “Why should I join?” “The Andalusian Dogs, or the An-dogs,” said Taotao. In the encyclopaedia of my brain there appeared an image from The Andalusian Dogs, an old Spanish film. The image was of a hand nimbly slicing through a spherical object. “We An-dogs want to slice through the thin skin of the biosphere, to liberate it.” “Brother Tao has agreed to join us,” said 70,000. “Since you are dependent on each other and can’t be separated, naturally we want you to join us too.” “We came to the surface to rebuild Taipei, not to destroy it,” I appealed to Taotao. “These guys are insane.” “We want to liberate it, not destroy it,” Taotao sighed. “Let me tell you a story.” “A long, long time ago,” he began, “the surface of the earth underwent a dramatic change. There was a profoundly near-sighted girl who by chance won a ticket on the Ark to the bottom of the sea. But only one ticket. The girl couldn’t bear to leave her family behind on the surface. But her mother pushed her out and insisted she go to the bottom of the sea, to survive. It was the only way to preserve the family’s memory. Once she reached the bottom of the sea, the girl had no time for tears. She got busy sorting out her memories from the surface. One after another she took out the family photo albums that she’d carried to the bottom of the ocean, gently picking out each yellowing photo and gradually converting them into threedimensional holographic images for projection. All the girl’s family who’d remained on the surface – men, women, and children – were recomposed as holograms. But of course the photos didn’t only include crowds of people, but also the flowers, grasses, trees, birds, animals, insects, and fish that lived alongside them. The ancients used to worry that photographs could capture a human’s soul. This made sense to the girl.

Biospheres  173 The surface of the earth and the bottom of the sea were so far apart that the near-sighted girl lost all contact with her family. It wasn’t until communication between the two worlds was finally restored that she discovered that her relatives on the surface of the earth had not completely died out. The members of her clan had once loved to stroll through the big department stores and were accustomed to entering and exiting them through underground parking lots. So as the earth heated, they realized that a place as deep beneath the surface as a parking garage could provide a refuge from the sun. Like guerrillas they began to take over the abandoned underground parking lots and build new housing developments there. After the sun set each evening, they took advantage of the darkness to climb up and gather the corpses of animals that had dried in the sun, and then when the sun was about to rise, they would shoulder their quarry and speed back to the underground villages to replenish their protein. And so they survived like gophers to produce new generations. Before contact with the surface resumed, the near-sighted girl once thought that the only way to preserve family memory was to have a child. So even though she had absolutely no interest in men, in the end she used artificial reproduction to get pregnant and give birth to a child, which she named “Momo,” which connotes “quiet” in Chinese. Momo would also become an expert in memory archiving. Sadly, however, this mother– daughter relationship eventually self-combusted, and the myopic, aging mother had no choice but to concentrate on running the hologram library alone. But once reconnection with the surface was established, she again sought out a specialist in artificial reproduction. By then the woman was quite old and there were no assurances that she could return to the surface of the earth herself. Yet, if she had a robust child, that child could return to the surface in her place to rebuild the family. This time she had a boy, and named him Taotao, or “Torrent.” The irrepressible Torrent was the exact opposite to the reticent Momo. The son grew up healthy and strong and thanks to his mother’s interventions at last was sent to the surface and entered the biosphere. The boy climbed the artificial mountain, took out the holograms his mother had given him, and looked on as the phantoms of elderly and frail, women and children flooded out and materialized in the air. But these so-called elderly and frail, the women and children, were in fact his mother’s own father and mother, sisters, and nephews. They’d all died many years ago, their bodies buried in graves hollowed out from the hillside. All he had to do was open a hologram and a crowd of phantoms would flood out, surrounding him and badgering him like family do, inquiring after his health. The boy couldn’t stand it and could only seal the disturbing phantoms back in the holograms. The boy had no interest in exchanging pleasantries with these distant relatives, though from their nattering he did realize one

174  Ta-wei Chi thing. These corpses of the elderly, frail women and children had been preserved not only by these holograms. They lived on in the real world too. As it turned out, several generations of the boy’s mother’s relatives there, as well as the next generation and the one after that, lived in dormitories by the hillside graves, eking out an existence through a variety of menial labour. As soon as it was dark, these underground labourers would emerge from their dormitories like an army of ants from an anthill. All through the night they would rebuild farms, pastures, flowerbeds, hot springs, and even light rail cars with great efficiency. As soon as it grew light, they would quickly retreat to the anthill, with no possibility of encountering the settlers in their graceful ascent of the mountain. The settlers didn’t know about these worker-ants. They knew only that the engineering project of the Taipei biosphere was top notch.” “Of course, you know about the superstructure and the substructure. Every biosphere needs both halves to be whole,” said Taotao. “While you and I enjoy the scenery of the superstructure, my mother’s descendants live out their miserable existence in the substructure.” At that moment, the dome of the Yuanmingyuan began to belch smoke, and alarm bells started to shriek. “So, the Garden of Gardens can burn after all,” said 70,000 with a strange calm. “It looks like the An-dogs have struck.” “I believe that the Temple of the Golden Pavilion also just caught fire,” said 80,000 with a smile. After a glance into space as if he were looking for a signal, “The lesbians never let me down.” “We are not seeking destruction,” Taotao said, looking me straight in the eye. “We’re seeking liberation. I’m sure Mother will understand.” Note 1 A shorter version of this story was read by Ta-wei Chi at the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) on 30 September, 2022. Chi thanks the TIFA commission for its generous support, and translator Ari Heinrich for his continuing collaboration.

Part IV

Anansi, Reprised (1526)

Early anthropological studies of the Asante community recorded fascinating moments in daily life when storytellers would (often comically) re-enact a suite of Anansi stories that would nonetheless relay a biting critique of authority figures in the community – from village elders to deities. Importantly, the process of the storyteller channelling Anansi became a rare opening for revealing and voicing perceived abuses of power and other inequalities suffered by those in the community. The strong oral tradition of the Asante and their belief in the power of narrative to right wrongs make clear that Anansi tales have always been much more than irreverent stories. When Asante slaves were shipped from the Gold Coast to plantations in Jamaica between the 16th and 19th centuries, Anansi tales were also shipped with them. Shapeshifting to accommodate the seemingly transcendental reality of the Atlantic slave trade, the voice of Anansi not only challenged but ultimately destroyed the seen and unseen boundaries of control. Transmogrifying from spider to the form of a black slave in Jamaican tales, Anansi similarly transforms his practical jokes into moments of violence and deception as a staging of the conditions of survival within the grand institutionalisation of slavery. In short, stories of mischief and chaos became modes of reflection for new methods of creative resistance against an unliveable new reality. Such is the power of story. Carolyn Lau’s Chapter 17, “Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics,” argues that the grand stories of the immensity and inevitability of extractive cultures in late capitalism and the Anthropocene demoralise attempts to imagine the otherwise. The chapter explores recent speculative fiction that makes a case for minoritarian assemblages of countermyth. Extending from reflections on indigenous and posthuman approaches to temporality and subjectivity, Lau then goes on to consider the storytelling that experiments with the symbiosis of the human, nature, and machines. Lau shows that the collective imaginings that traverse the human and the nonhuman alike generate new possibilities of living and being, and in turn

DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-21

176  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau foster pedagogical practices that cultivate relational and affirmative ethical relationships. Moving on to Chapter 18, David Blandy’s The World After is a multidisciplinary art project that imagines a world after “The Cataclysm,” a manmade ecological crisis that forces the remaining survivors to lead a subterranean existence and form creative networks of kinship. Comprised of a film, an installation, and the tabletop roleplaying game Lost Eons, The World After features Canvey Island in Essex – the site of a defunct oil refinery that was abandoned shortly after the OPEC oil crisis of 1973. Somewhat unexpectedly, the derelict site that today describes some 93 hectares of meadows, grassland, and scrub on the shores of Holehaven Creek, as well as an 18-hectare nature reserve, has become one of the most biodiverse areas in the UK, and in so doing an image of the fecundity of a world after humans of the industrial age. In Blandy’s post-apocalyptic world of the 101st century, a posthuman renewal unfolds on both social and environmental levels. With the recurring image of a spider spinning a web, Blandy’s film could be read as an analogy of the stories woven by Anansi about grand cycles of destruction and rejuvenation. Read in dialogue with the worldbuilding of Ursula K. Le Guin, Blandy’s work suggests that all forms of art have a role to play in fostering new collective imaginings of posthuman living. Like the living things that quietly take over the industrial ruins in Blandy’s work, in Chapter 19 Winnie Soon and Susan Scarlata’s “Hello, World! Hello, Poetic Zombies!” reminds us of the ubiquitous presence of spam in our inboxes. Soon and Scarlata adopt the perspective of the non-human to explore their creative agency – in this case found materials filtered as “spam” within the environment of the internet. Inspired by the use of automatic writing and found materials in the poetics of chance in Dadaism and the Oulipo school, readme.SpamPoem is a series of poems generated by AI algorithms. Submissions are processed through an autoreply email system that functions as a posthuman body – that which serves as a medium for intersecting natural language, computational automation, commercial economy, and networked infrastructures. Rather than trash waiting to be deleted, Soon and Scarlata think of spam as something that holds a persistent life force – something akin to that exhibited by the “undead.” As spam is being transformed into the liveliest of zombies, the question of our relationship to what has become our technological prostheses becomes more pronounced. While the use of prosthetics, ranging from false teeth to transhumanist fantasies of brain implants, have been theorised using Haraway’s cyborg theory, the ways in which these machineries affect the way we narrate and relate with a world that is dense with public and private histories is often overlooked. However, this is exactly what is

Anansi, Reprised (1526)  177 addressed in Pippa Goldschmidt’s hybrid Chapter 20, “Foreign Bodies.” Bringing together literature and science, she draws from her training and practice as an astronomer to reflect on ethical and historical consequences of technologically mediated ways of being. Connecting the diasporic history of Austrian Jews in England during World War II, scientific research conducted in Chile shortly after the demise of Augusto Pinochet’s ruthless dictatorship, and the machines that have let us explore other planetary bodies, Goldschmidt reflects on the possibility of empathy at distance – both spatial and temporal. Tracing racial categorisation based on the differentiation of skin colour determined by melanin – a bodily substance that can be transplanted, transferred, or transmitted – Ari Larissa Heinrich’s Chapter 21, “Melanin Object,” traces historically determined taxonomies of difference. Focusing on the reliance on sight to formalise visual taxonomy and to make visible observable traits, Heinrich points out the tautology behind narratives that divide humans according to pigmentation. Referencing the scientific history of extracting and isolating the source of skin colour and its relationship with genetics, in Chapter 22 Heinrich discusses the artwork of Jes Fan, which experiments with homegrown DNA strains cultivated through fungi and bacteria. In Fan’s work, melanin transforms from a biological material to a social object that can be bought and sold. Heinrich’s interview with Fan further elucidates the artist’s choice in using amorphous materials such as wax and glass to devise relationships between the human body and the substances that define its biology.

17 Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics Carolyn Lau

The extraction of value from all living things permeates the world we are living in today. This extractive logic is applied to both human and nonhuman lives in transnational biocapitalism and biopiracy. Profits of technology companies are incessantly multiplied by data mining in the age of surveillance capitalism and racialised and gendered algorithmic systems of segregation.1 The sleek aesthetics of the digital economy and artificial intelligence industries are enabled by the mining of rare earth minerals and the exploitation of offshore labour in developing nations.2 The grand narrative of progress justifies extractivism in lands distant from most of the consumers of extracted natural resources, and results in ecological degradation that has (and will continue to) unravel over decades, if not centuries. Global environmental destruction brings about expulsion, which is to say the violent displacement of human and non-human populations from habitats that are being made uninhabitable.3 The imperialist, racialised, and anthropocentric tendencies of global capitalism seem to be so blanketing and inevitable that any fathoming of their scale already demoralise attempts to think about the otherwise. In a discussion on the genealogies of radical Spinozism and feminist philosophy in posthumanism, Rosi Braidotti emphasises the importance of breaking away from habitual thought and positioning. To this end, Braidotti writes about the notion of disidentification: Disidentification involves the loss of familiar habits of thought and representation. Spinozist feminists like Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd argue that socially embedded and historically grounded changes require a qualitative shift of our “collective imaginings,” or a shared desire for transformations […]. Nomadic thought rests on estrangement as a method to free subject formation from the normative vision of the self. The frame of reference becomes open-ended, interrelational,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-22

180  Carolyn Lau multisexed, and transspecies flows of becoming by interaction with multiple others. (Braidotti 2009, 527) Posthuman thought is situated in the philosophical tradition of the ethics of joy and transvaluation that argues against melancholic nostalgia, utopian delusions, and dystopian despair. In a discussion on storytelling as a form of analysis of the world today, Donna Haraway reflects on the importance of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) – of accepting and adapting to current contradictions in order to form new kinships and to reimagine a new world into being. The celebrated Indian writer Amitav Ghosh notes that the current environmental crisis can be traced to the imperialist exploitation of natural materials – as various as spices and fossil fuels – and the colonial project that ultimately gave birth to global capitalism.4 Such a mechanistic and utilitarian worldview remains destructive, but what is even more destructive is the crisis of imagination that has ridden in tandem with the rise of global capitalism. To Ghosh, the modern literary novel or “serious fiction” that originated from the realist tradition of literary and artistic representations of the eighteenth century have been exposed today as inadequate and dishonest modes of storytelling. The insistence on mimetic representations of the observable everyday fails to capture and address the imperceptible spatial vastness and temporal elongation of the slow violences of global capitalism (Nixon 2013). As such, Ghosh declares, “Let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (Ghosh 2017, 9). The obstinate equation of literary fiction with realist literature epitomises the crisis of imagination about the present ecological realities in their complexity and invisibility. More experimental modes of representation and criticism that speculate on other possible futures are necessary in order to imagine into being new relationships between human beings and nature. Ghosh argues that the “outhouse” genres of speculative fiction and fantasy as contemporary inheritors of the epic are more capable than realist texts to not only depict but also respond to the (not immediately discernible) impact of the Anthropocene. For this reason, speculative fiction and digital storytelling with an emphasis on cross-species and intergenerational kinship have become a posthuman pedagogical practice. In particular, storytelling networks formed by “the pack” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) have become a form of mythmaking that fosters relational and affirmative ethical relationships. Surviving “Extraction can be a violent action causing pain,” Carina Brand writes, “which is why [Marx’s] Capital is full of bloodsucking analogies – leeches

Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics  181 and vampires – as capital draws out living labour. Extraction is the point at which the abstract concept of exchange value meets the visceral and material world” (Brand 2018, 98). It is also, Brand argues, endemic to a science fiction that often offers up a critique of the contemporary political and economic landscape of the writer as a way to begin building a fictional world – three instantiations of which keep repeating through the history of the genre. First is the relationship between extraction and a digital technology that transforms workplaces and work habits. During the global pandemic, working from home, global outsourcing, and precarious bit-tasking brought neoliberal capitalism closer to the dream of extracting permanent labour from the workforce while at the same time increasing the economical precariousness of that same labouring underclass. Computers and other smart devices allowed the managerial class to collect real-time (bio)data on worker behaviour(s), which could then be used to further “streamline” workflows. But importantly, nigh on the same algorithms that allowed a boss to keep watch over their staff were being used to influence and dictate the choices we made in our private lives – from our consumption habits to voting patterns.5 Second is the sphere of social reproduction and bodily or corporeal extraction. Here, the bodies of human labour are appropriated by capital, becoming the metaphorical – and sometimes literal – fuel for the incessantly churning machines of industry found in dystopian fiction. But history does not allow us to think of this only in terms of fiction. The origins of global capitalism are inseparable from the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation economies of the sixteenth century that (literally) profited from the trading and consumption of human lives.6 Racial discourses rooted in Enlightenment thinking allowed Europe’s others to be thought of as a pure brutish force, as “bodies of extraction” (Mbembe 2017, 40) from which the maximum profit could be extracted before it became bent, broken, or in some other way no longer useful and thus discarded. The same logic was at play for Europe’s working classes. Indeed, the ease with which capital scraped off – and continues to scrape off – the last remnants of sellable value from the backs of exhausted workers makes clear the way in which it transforms and harvests for work “the autonomous, private body” (Brand 2018, 97–98). The third instantiation of extraction returns one to nature – or rather, environmental destruction. The neoliberal fetish of the “economisation of life” thrives upon the capacity to divide “life into categories of more and less worthy of living, reproducing, and being human” (Murphy 2017, 6). Such objectification has resulted in “the denial of self-organisation, intelligence, creativity, freedom, potential, autopoietic evolution and non-separability in nature and society” (Shiva 2019, 18) that has in turn produced the profound ecological turmoil and human crises of dispossession and dispersal with which,

182  Carolyn Lau sadly, we are all too familiar today. By putting a dollar figure on every form of life, expulsions, enslavements, and exterminations have become normalised. Larissa Lai’s biopunk speculative fiction novel The Tiger Flu (2018) sees the dystopian convergence of these three forms of extraction in a fictionalised Vancouver that is sat in a post-Peak Oil “end times.” Climate apocalypse, scarcity, digital surveillance, and a pandemic have swept across the territory and endangered the male population. The story follows Kirilow Groundsel, a survivor from a devastated community of parthenogenetic female humanoids known as Grist Village, and Kora Ko, a 15-year-old teenage girl who is struggling to survive in the lawless urban war zone that Vancouver has become. Referencing the difficult histories of Asian female migrant workers and Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism that remain unresolved in Canada today, Lai confronts the use of diasporic and dispossessed human bodies in the fuelling of the global economy. Despite the inventory of apocalyptic tropes, Lai remarks, “I don’t necessarily think of The Tiger Flu as a dystopia […] it is a novel that is actively seeking possibilities for life” (Cheng 2018). In this sense, the novel is not to be read as an anti-utopia, but as a nomadic utopia. In contrast to the restrictive and hierarchical statist utopia of negative freedom, a nomadic utopia (Bell 2017) is realised when an individual’s power to act is increased, which in turn expands the power of the collective. Influenced by classic feminist utopian speculative fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, Monica Wittig, and Joanna Russ,7 The Tiger Flu features anarchist enclaves of resistance on the “edges of the state.”8 These communities integrate technology and ecology in efforts of collective survival – from the genetic engineering of the Grist sisters to the New Origins Archive, which Lai describes as a subterranean “conservatory of seeds, spores, and cells from which new life could spring and make the world anew” (Lai 2018, 267). Utopian enclaves promise security and freedom. According to Hardt and Negri, instead of a form of property possession in capitalist societies or centralised control through a rule of fear in socialist regimes, “real security is something altogether different. Security, as Spinoza defines it, is hope from which uncertainty has been removed; it is confidence that our joy will continue in the future. Security is what defeats fear” (Hardt and Negri 2017, 102). Citing recent experiments in social formations amid poverty (think Brazil), austerity (think Greece), and natural disasters (think Japan), Hardt and Negri observe that crises become sites for experimentation of forming a society of the common based on economies of solidarity that “organize production, incomes, services, food, and housing on a local scale.” “Solidarity economies emphasize cooperation and self-management as an alternative to the regime of profit and capitalist control,” they explain, “which is not only more egalitarian but also

Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics  183 more efficient and stable” (Hardt and Negri 2017, 102). In environmental dystopias, the trope of returning to a pastoral past, a “primitive” or “natural state of life” is represented by a retreat to rural hinterlands and islands. This regressive development can be a utopian restoration of equilibrium to a world before humans and our negative impact on the environment. It can also be a dystopian vision of a world after the human – a posthuman world of human obsolescence and extinction. The utopian enclave of a small-scale ecological community as a refuge from a post-extraction apocalyptic world suggests a dichotomous split in the relationship of man and nature, which is, after all, what enables capitalist expansion.9 However, as Fredric Jameson notes, the deliberate retreat to a backwater is “all but a pause in the all-encompassing forward momentum of differentiation which will sweep it away altogether a few decades later” (Jameson 2007, 16). While Lai’s novel centres around the unlikely coalition between Kirilow and Kora, which is to say individuals from communities segregated by species difference and distrust across generations, it also offers a rare and much-needed examination of separatism as a solution to social ills. Notably, Lai’s novel presents a flawed attempt to create a commons that is not based on capitalist possession and ownership as prerequisites of the subject. Even within minoritarian communities practising mutual aid, and with a shared history of persecution and vulnerability, power hierarchies and coercion are shown to persist. This is perhaps because Lai shares the sentiment of fellow novelist Rivers Solomon, who has recently stated that no “community can ever be utopian, really, because part of the human project is contending with the fact that we are both individuals and social animals, and there will always be some dissonance between those two bodies” (Coleman 2019). Given the inequalities that necessarily plague utopian projects, these two novelists suggest that what is at stake is not the realisation of a physical utopia, but rather a vision of the future that is sustainable. The Tiger Flu is interspersed by a series of songs and chants of the exiled Grist sisters that draw from their shared heritage of the founder and late matriarch Grandma Chan Ling, a diasporic factory worker and escapee from a bioengineering lab. Even when spoken by the dispersed members of the community, Kirilow considers the “familiar chant” as that which “marks them as my kin after all” (Lai 2018, 313). Pieced together, these oral fragments form an epic cycle of pain as a heritage of resilience. Such oral transmission of a common narrative provides a refuge from the widespread use of “scales,” brain implants connected to Chang and Eng – the two satellites owned by the ruling conglomerate orbiting Earth and containing information about everything. These corporate-owned databases also control and dictate what can be known. As the population

184  Carolyn Lau become over-reliant on these prosthetics for knowledge, their subjectivity becomes temporally disjointed in a manner that sees their abiding focus on the extreme present deprive them of the ability to relate to one another. The militarised zoning of the city into quarantine rings and the constant fear of contamination also reinforces the separation of individuals and communities. In this way, the narratives of the past that are transmitted and received through the memory scales are what James C. Scott defines as “public transcript” – which is to say, “a shorthand way of describing the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate” (even if it is “frequently in the interest of both parties to tacitly conspire in misrepresentation”) (Scott 2008, 2). Here, “transcript” is specifically defined in juridical terms as “a complete record of what was said […] which would also include nonspeech acts such as gestures and expressions” (Scott 2008, 2). But Scott goes on to contrast the language of surface appearances with the notion of a “hidden transcript” – that is, a “discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation by powerholders” (Scott 2008, 5). The complexity of language use itself suggests that it would be inaccurate to equate the language of surface appearances with false necessity, and that of the hidden transcript with a true expression of freedom regardless of context. As Scott makes clear, “by the subtle use of codes one can insinuate into a ritual, a pattern of dress, a song, a story, meanings that are accessible to one intended audience and opaque to another” (Scott 2008, 158). In an interview with Deleuze, Antonio Negri recalls the sense of Deleuze’s claim that it is vital to affirm the capacity to express a counter-history even in situations of seeming total dominion over communication. “The control of ‘communication’,” Negri restates, “relates to the most perfect form of domination, [but man] is more than ever before potentially able to speak out and thereby recover a greater degree of freedom” (Deleuze 1995, 174). For the marginalised and exiled, the collective act of fabulating a political myth as the enunciation of the voiceless becomes a resistance against dissolution. As Chiara Bottici explains: What makes a political myth out of a simple narrative is not its content or its claim to truth, but first, the fact that this narrative coagulates and produces significance, second, that it is shared by a group, and third, that it can come to address the specifically political conditions in which this group operates. (Bottici 2007, 14) Reflecting on the impact of the digital on organisation and participation in recent social movements around the world, Rodrigo Nunes notes that:

Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics  185 if nothing is done to actualize existing potentials into new forms, they could simply be incorporated into the existing situation (opportunism, identitarianism), or be displaced into much worse forms (what Deleuze and Guattari call “black holes”: fascism, terrorism, suicide, etc.). (Nunes 2015, 112) Storytelling is a creation of new forms. As Rebecca Solnit declares, “every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis” (Solnit 2023). Contemplating the efforts of climate justice campaigners to create counter-narratives against normalised narratives of individual responsibility over corporate and state regulation of fossil fuels, Solnit concludes: Recognising the reality of climate breakdown means recognising the interconnectedness of all things. That connection brings obligation: to respect nature, to build domestic regulation and international treaties that protect what’s needed, to limit the freedom of the individual in the name of the wellbeing of the collective. (Solnit 2023) Citing the South Pacific climate activist and poet Julian Aguon’s views on the indigenous values of collective memory and reciprocity between individuals and the Earth as a form of resistance, Solnit points out that this awareness of the past changes how people think about their actions and their consequences or transformation of the future. Understood like this, to critically and creatively formulate another kind of storytelling is inseparable from rethinking temporality in terms of relationality. In a reflection on her own speculative fiction writing practice, Larissa Lai refers to Native American poet and critic Paula Gunn Allen’s work on the distinction between “Western/industrial/colonial time” characterised by the correlation between linearity, progress and profitmaking, and “ceremonial/’Indian’” time based on order and harmony (Lai 2020, 10). Allen argues that the adherence to ceremonial time calls for another kind of storytelling because ritual time emphasises the relational, which differs from the emphasis on plot progression driven by a singular hero in mainstream fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin offers a similar criticism of the violence of the quest motif. In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), Le Guin revises the narrative of the origins of human culture by advocating a breed of fiction that is about the meandering, collective efforts of survival by gathering sustenance in a basket, rather than the “arrow-shaped” plot of the singular hero wielding a weapon. The linearity of plot in mainstream storytelling, ranging from popular fiction to Hollywood blockbusters, extends the tradition of Enlightenment

186  Carolyn Lau Humanism bolstered by imperialist conquests in the name of universalist progress. “Linearity is the dominant time of Chronos, as opposed to the dynamic and more cyclical time of becoming or Aion,” Braidotti writes: Instead of deference to the authority of the past, we have the fleeting co-presence of multiple time zones, in a continuum that activates and de-territorializes stable identities and fractures temporal linearity. This dynamic vision of time enlists the creative resources of the imagination to the task of reconnecting to the past. (Braidotti 2013, 165) Within a posthuman temporality, causality is no longer a linear set of events, but a multiplicity of connections. And when the linearity of time is dissolved and replaced by what Karen Barad describes as quantum entanglements, disruptions and diffractions of temporalities constitute a future “not through the realisation of some existing possibility, but through the iterative reworking of im/possibility” (Barad 2010, 265). What we are and what we are ceasing to be is in a continuum with what we could become. Using the approach of temporal scaling to understand history as the longterm history of evolution, as the biological changes across the ongoing progression of time culminate in the presence of every living thing, Elizabeth Grosz writes that “historical processes cannot operate without such a contingent foundation: what was helps to prestructure what is, although it also contains the conditions for what differs from what is” (Grosz 2004, 251). The presence of the historical and the ancestral in our thinking about our actions goes beyond the nostalgic. It contains the conditions from which possible futures develop. Assembling In the ontology of transindividuation,10 individual things can only exist in an affective relationship to other things. “Similarly,” Bottici explains, “human individuals are constantly composed by the molecules that we breathe in and out of our bodies through a transindividual process of association and attraction linking different forms of human, animal, and vegetative life into the same network” (Bottici 2021, 222). The distinctions between the self and the other, the individual and the social are therefore collapsed, as existence is always measured in terms of connections. New materialism’s interest in the autopoiesis (self-organisation) of living matter is extended by William E. Connolly’s criticism of neoliberal capitalism as an auto-poietic system that sustains itself by parasitically attaching to other auto-poietic systems. Connolly defines the planetary in terms of selforganising forces in nature:

Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics  187 a series of temporal force fields, such as climate patterns, drought zones, the ocean conveyor system, species evolution, glacier flows, and hurricanes that exhibit self-organizing capacities to varying degrees and that impinge upon each other and human life in numerous ways. (Connolly 2017, 4) Crossing the disciplinary divide of the sciences and humanities, Connolly notes the instability of matter in the natural world that challenges the assumed equilibrium of the world enforced by the complacency of human reason and technology. The unpredictability of these planetary changes is described by Connolly as a “bumpy temporality” that is not linear and gradual. To survive the convergence of manmade ecological catastrophes requires us to respectfully “challenge human exceptionalism by coming to terms with bumpy processes of planetary self-organization that interact with each other and with human cultures” (Connolly 2017, 33). To Connolly, self-organising begins with the process of becoming-animal and the nature-other through mythmaking. Connolly begins by reestablishing the importance of myth in political philosophy. The visionary power of myth reminds us of the voice and presence of nature – as in the example of the divine voice speaking in the form of a “tornado” to Job. To Connolly, this biblical passage suggests that humans and nature are “made of the same stuff” (Connolly 2017, 8). At the same time, mimetic behaviour generated by swarming, such as the example of becoming-bees, can develop into an assemblage of democratic mass participation or a mob. Connolly concurs with Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the pack. Characterised by “small or restricted numbers, dispersion, […] the impossibility of a fixed totalisation or hierarchisation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 46), the pack still contains possibilities of becoming both a pluralist, decentred power and a fascist crowd. In Lai’s The Tiger Flu and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, vulnerable survivors of historical violence metamorphosise into the species-other to form new “arrangements of enunciation” (Guattari 2009, 179). Packs of wolf-girls, starfish-women, mermaid-historians descended from pregnant women thrown overboard on the transatlantic slave route enunciate a cycle of counter-Enlightenment stories against extractivism. What do these storytelling animals tell us, and how do these animals tell stories in ways that humans cannot? Jonathan Gottschall’s research on evolutionary theory and storytelling reveals that the human brain is wired for stories, and stories in turn rewire the brain. Echoing Connolly’s study of the “bumpy temporality” of the planetary, “the storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence” (Gottschall 2012, 103). David Herman integrates critical animal studies and narratological studies on character and characterisation, and in so doing observes that “even as

188  Carolyn Lau narrative helps sustain the traditions that give shape to human communities, across a range of timescales, stories can also be used to characterize the species-shaping inheritance of traditions in communities beyond the human” (Herman 2018, 252). Herman’s analysis of stories about and from the perspective of animals calls for a multiscale narration that crosses evolutionary time and species. Similarly, following Donna Haraway’s call for a post-anthropocentrism to emerge through practices of “storying” (Haraway 2016, 39), Danielle Sands, in a study on a post-anthropocentric selfhood and storytelling, argues that “closer observation will reveal nonhuman animals to be active participants in, and creators of, stories; and that stories are ideal spaces for imaginative cross-species connections” (Sands 2019, 21). The heteroglossia of minoritarian narratives and barely audible voices form together a collective endeavour to articulate and assert that there is always a story other than the “big story” of the Anthropocene and capitalism (Terranova 2016). Responding to Anna Tsing’s advocacy of situated narratives as a way to devise collectively “arts of living on a damaged planet” (Tsing 2011), each story contains a library of strings and threads, and when woven together, becomes a tapestry of autonomous units of intervention. Immersing Like Trinh T. Minh-ha’s imperative of “speaking nearby” instead of “speaking for” (Chen 1992), Thom van Dooren and Deborah Rose reflect on the practice of storytelling in the production of ethology and ethnology as an ethical practice of witness and a form of commitment to fostering a “relational imagination” (van Dooren and Rose 2016, 91) between humans and nature. “The intention here is not to slip into the hubris of claiming to tell another’s stories but,” van Dooren and Rose write, “to develop and tell our own stories in ways that are open to other ways of constituting, of responding to and in a living world. In this context, stories are powerful tools for ‘connectivity thinking’” (van Dooren and Rose 2016, 85). Extending Val Plumwood’s critique of the “hyperseparation” of the structural dualistic and hierarchical thinking that shapes our categories,11 Rose defines “connectivity thinking” as a direct contestation of this Western cultural patterning. Drawing from the definition of ecology in science as a study of connections between systems in nature and studies of Indigenous epistemologies, “connectivity thinking” places humans in relation with the biosphere. In particular, it prompts us to ask “epistemological and ontological questions: what is the living world like, how does it work, where and how do humans and other beings fit?” (Rose 2017, 495). Importantly, in light of the animist engine of much Indigenous thought, it reminds us of the ways in which nonhumans “might write their own stories in/on the landscape as well as in humans and our stories” (van Dooren and

Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics  189 Rose 2016, fn25). In order for us to be aware of these nonhuman stories, though, we have to develop the “arts of attentiveness and inclusion” (van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016) or, put otherwise, that which allows us to foster a “passionate immersion in the lives of the nonhumans being studied” (Tsing 2011). While much has been written on electronic literature and virtual reality in narrative formation,12 studies in the dynamics of technology and embodiment in creating fiction remain sparse. Janet Murray cites theatre that includes virtual reality elements as an example of the growing trend of analogue experimentations with immersion.13 The questions raised by such experiments – such as how does immersive storytelling use elements of interactivity and responsiveness to change the ways that we create and experience literature, and what does it mean to “immerse” in a text and make a text literally “engaging”? – were addressed in Ambient Literature, a two-year research collaboration between the University of the West of England Bristol, Bath Spa University, and the University of Birmingham. Growing out of research on the history of the book as a tool for navigating the world, the project focused on “the locational and technological future of the book.” Drawing on literary studies, creative writing, design, human–computer interaction, performance, and new media studies, the team commissioned “three original pieces of work, by writers at the leading edge of working with literature, space and technology” (“Ambient Literature”). One such commission was Duncan Speakman’s “It Must Have Been Dark by Then,” a book and audio experience that plays with one’s notion of situatedness as it casts music, stories, and field recordings in a way that encourages connections to be made between three distant locations – the swamplands of Louisiana, empty Latvian villages, and the edge of the Tunisian Sahara (“Ambient Literature”). Speakman chose these three sites because these are places undergoing “rapid change from human and environmental factors” such as climate change and depopulation. As a reflection on “connection, progress and memory”, the listener/reader is invited to choose certain types of location around them. Once they have reached the site, the digital interface plays a soundtrack or offers questions or tells stories that originate from a geographically remote location. The listener/reader is then invited to read a story in a physical book and connect these culturally diverse narratives to where they are standing. Unlike city walk apps or audio guides, there is no pre-set route. Indeed, the routes chosen by the listener/reader begin to describe a unique map (through the Global Positioning System) that in turn offer a renewed sense of agency and authorship. In 2019, the Digital Writers’ Festival in Melbourne curated a series that invited writers and artists to work with machine learning writing tools. One of these was called Telescope:

190  Carolyn Lau Telescope is an experimental app which allows you to take a character you are creating “out for a walk” in the real world, generating new ideas as you move. Using a Google Docs Add-on, the writer briefly describes their character. As they walk, a mobile app synthesizes maps data from where they are, objects they are walking past – recognised by the phone’s camera –, and other data to seed a GPT-2 Machine Learning language model. The app then begins a sort of “stream of consciousness” audio – using text-to-speech – which combines the character’s qualities with inspiration from the writer’s immediate surroundings. (“Telescope”) According to N. Katherine Hayles, the cognitive nonconscious is a more “accurate view of human cognitive ecology that opens it to comparisons with other biological cognizers on the one hand and on the other to the cognitive capabilities of technical systems” (Hayles 2017, 11). In the context of literary creation and criticism, the use of digital writing tools powered by machine learning-based language models, such as Open AI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), challenges the use of the uniqueness of a human creator’s ideas and emotions as an aesthetic criterion. The latest iteration of the transformer model released by OpenAI in early 2020 is GPT-3: GPT-3 is, in short, a statistical language model drawing on a training corpus of 499 billion tokens (mostly Common Crawl data scraped from the internet, along with digitized books and Wikipedia) that takes a user-contributed text prompt and uses machine learning to predict what will come next. (Coleman 2020) Some users are in awe of the AI language system and its ability to generate a variety of texts, from short stories to user manuals, with just a brief prompt. Others point out the nonsensical phrases and occasional discriminatory statements spewed out of the software and argue that human users might have compelled themselves to believe that the machine is much smarter than it really is. K. Allado-McDowell is a writer and multi-media artist who established the Artists and Machine Intelligence programme at Google AI. As the ongoing pandemic began to change K Allado-McDowell’s work and social habits, they started a conversation in isolation with GPT-3 conducted on a general-purpose “text in, text out” interface. What resulted from this prolonged series of conversations is the hybrid novel Pharmako-AI (2020). As such, the novel offers a posthuman twist to Roland Barthes’s verdict on the

Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics  191 death of the author. Is it possible to trace the intentions and biographical context of the AI text generator, which is also the co-author of the book? The physical book emphasises the “division of labour” between the human and non-human collaborators using typography for distinction. At the same time, the “semiosis” of the man-and-machine creator is highlighted by the chronological ordering of the conversation, thereby restaging the creative process of the human–machine collaboration. Rather than assuming complete artistic control over the novel, K Allado-McDowell engages in dialogues with the machine that resemble jazz improvisation: At the end of the process my relation with GPT-3 felt oracular. It functioned more like a divinatory system (e.g., the Tarot or I Ching) than a writing implement, in that it revealed subconscious processes latent in my own thinking. The deeper I went into this configuration, the more dangerous it felt, because these reflections deeply influenced my own understanding of myself and my beliefs. (Coleman 2020) Rather than remaining as a utility, large language models in this context seem able to influence the words we choose, and therefore the pathways of our thoughts. And if language shapes our identity, what might it mean to structure our sense of selfhood through computer-generated language? As outlined in posthuman thought, nature and machines share similar cognitive capacities as humans. These disparate cognitive systems form a symbiotic relationship as part of a wider ecology. As a ubiquitous digital landscape redefines our relationship with non-human life, posthumanism argues that “naturecultures,” represented by the figure of the cyborg that blends the mechanical and the organic, has evolved into “medianatures.”14 According to Félix Guattari, social, environmental, and psychological ecologies have become profoundly interconnected, meaning that the dichotomous frameworks of mind and body, nature and culture, human life and non-human life, and so on are irremediably destabilised and contested by and in late capitalism (Guattari 2000). To understand “the three ecologies” at work today, it would be more than instructive to turn to nonWestern and indigenous ways of understanding aliveness, temporality, and embodiment. Australian Aboriginal culture is one of the oldest living cultures in the world – by some estimates, dating back more than 60,000 years. It is defined by and disseminated through songlines, a knowledge system that integrates travel trade networks, survival strategies, song, dance, art, and storytelling. “Songlines” or “dreamings” are the English and cross-cultural translations of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

192  Carolyn Lau concepts of Tjukurpa, Altyerre, Kujika. This translation, coined by Bruce Chatwin in his 1987 book of the same name, refers to an archive that maintains, stores, and transmits information and experience of the land. Data accumulated across generations is visualised as literal corridors across vast distances of the continent. Surely an ancient precursor of the World Wide Web, songlines form a geographical, artistic, and narrative network of maps, creation myths, ancestral knowledge, and resources (such as waterhole locations and ways to hunt kangaroo). The inalienable connection between humans and the land is integral to the organic relation between parts and whole, past and present, the human and the non-human. The songlines system is a map that is constantly moving. In contrast to the dominance of literacy (writing and print) as the primary form of knowledge production and dissemination in Western cultures, songlines offer an integration of seeing, knowing, and being. The body is the pen, and its movements in performance and travel sketch the contour lines of the landscape. At the same time, the body functions as a transmitter, since each songline has to be literally carried across geographical distances and historical time through movement (walking, dancing) and orality (singing and storytelling). The songlines depend on the relationship between an individual and his or her space (“everywhere”), scaling from heavenly constellations to the small roots and leaves that are vital for medicinal healing. As such, the environment resists the quantification of Western taxonomic systems. Multiple perspectives are adopted from the changing positions of the journeying body. This contrasts to Alberti’s unifying perspective of Enlightenment Humanism as that which is fixed and reduced to one single point. Crucially, it also differs from the anthropocentric worldview of the Enlightenment, since the viewpoint of the traveller and singer of songlines is always established in relation to the environment and other humans and non-humans. The songlines system is an ever-growing map, then. It is continuously altered, with contemporary historical events and kin relationships constantly being added. For example, in visualisations and performances of songlines in Arnhem Land today, sixteenth-century Macassan vessels that influenced the making of dugout canoes by the Aboriginal people and twentieth-century Japanese aircraft that bombed Darwin in the Second World War co-exist side by side. Time as a cycle and spiral (“everywhen”) is expressed in visual art and stories about songlines and underscored by the Aboriginal saying, “When you look behind you, you see the future in your footprints.” This differentiation from linear time as progress can be found in Native American spiralling temporality as well – most notably the Anishinaabe perspective on intergenerational time that considers us as living alongside future and past relatives simultaneously as we walk through life. In clear distinction to the chronology of Western knowledge systems,

Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics  193 Anishinaabe time makes little distinction between past and present. In particular, it emphasises the transmission of knowledge to future generations, thereby joining the past, present, and future in a continuum. The cyclical temporality of generational responsibility resonates with a posthuman temporality that enables change and transformation. Kado Muir, a Wangkatha man and anthropologist from Western Australia, remarks: We traded in information technologies. If you know the songs, water and food resources are easily found. Mapmaking cartography – our Yudurra – is the information superhighway […]. Trading was bundled up with a series of ritual, of songs, ceremonies; relationships, stories were the fundamental basis of Aboriginal trade. It is a universe where people know their relationship to the rocks, trees, earth, sky, people and animals. It is based on personal responsibility to everything. (Neale and Kelly 2020, 115) Travelling to trade ideas and transmit knowledge is a means to maintain and sustain the songlines as a system of relationality. At the same time, significant songline sites have varying degrees of openness – access commonly limited by gender and age. Again, we are reminded that each knowledge system has its limitations. Nonetheless, as Haraway writes, “only partial perspective promises objective vision” (Haraway 1988, 583). By accounting for the situatedness of knowledge production, both “epistemic and ethical” accountability can be practised (Braidotti 2019, 50). In a survey of teaching and research practices as relational activities, Braidotti observes that a posthumanism that targets “both Humanism and anthropocentrism” confronts “the double challenge of dealing with advanced technologies in an ecologically challenged world” (Braidotti 2019, 141). As such, the practice of storytelling and the implementation of digital storytelling in generating new possibilities of living is a uniquely posthuman pedagogical practice that fosters relational and affirmative ethical relationships. Recent developments in walking as an immersive creative research and pedagogical method aim to practise posthuman relational ethics by superseding established research and artistic cartographic practices that reinforce dichotomies between man and nature, gender, and race. In contrast, “more-than-human walking methodologies” (Springgay and Truman 2017, 5) draw from Indigenous understandings of land to create situated knowledges that address both the historical specificities of place and the coexistence of the human and non-human species. Post-anthropocentrism as an imperative to salvage the damaged environment is a practice of intergenerational responsibility, which is inseparable from a cyclical temporality. This temporality gives rise to alternative

194  Carolyn Lau approaches to storytelling. Writing in the historical context of settler colonialism in Canada, Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Simpson theorises an embodied approach to knowledge as a pedagogical method. This counters the gendered and settler violence embedded in the Western education systems that erased the presence of Indigenous women. Nishnaabeg non-linear understandings of time and space suggest that land-based stories reincarnate multiple times over the year. Simpson draws from the Indigenous tradition of the “dancing, singing, and storytelling self” (Lacombe 2016, 10) to advocate for an embodied form of narrative. Here, affirmation and freedom are integrated into a non-linear temporality, and: realized through flight and refusal is the freedom to imagine and create an elsewhere in the here; a present future beyond the imaginative and territorial bounds of colonialism. It is a performance of other worlds, an embodied practice of flight. (Simpson 2014, 23) Deleuze characterises Spinozist philosophy as an ethics of joy. “The Ethics is necessarily an ethics of joy: only joy is worthwhile,” he writes, “joy remains, bringing us near to action, and to the bliss of action. The sad passions always amount to impotence” (Deleuze 1988, 28). An ethical subject therefore is an individual who acknowledges and transforms the negative passions that immobilise one’s power to act into creative possibilities. This then enables the power of collective imaginings to remake the world from the material of our current contradictions and apocalyptic anticipations. By turning the debilitating into the empowering, the irreversible into possibilities, storytelling stands as perhaps our most courageous act. Braidotti has it right, then, when she writes: Ethical relations create possible worlds by mobilizing resources that have been left untapped in the present, including our desires and imagination. They are the driving forces that concretize actual, material relations and can thus constitute a network, web, or rhizome of interconnections with others. (Braidotti 2015, 35) From Haraway’s use of the cat’s cradle as a model for cultivating kinship and intimacy through “storying” to Braidotti’s posthuman affirmative and relational ethics, posthuman storytelling serves as both a creative and pedagogical practice that provides possibilities for making kin, makingtogether, and practising response-ability.15 While storytelling as community formation and survival does not necessarily entail a conflict-free utopia, “we must reconcile the writing of myth and the writing of story-telling, the

Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics  195 memory of Genesis and the foreknowledge of relationship, and that is no easy task. But what other task can compete with this in beauty?” (Glissant 2002, 290). Notes 1 On surveillance capitalism and the biases of algorithmic systems, see Zuboff (2019) and Chun (2021). 2 For accounts of such exploitation, see Crawford (2021). 3 On such expulsions, see Sassen (2014). 4 See, for example, Ghosh (2022). 5 On the ubiquity of algorithms in daily life, see Agrawal et al. (2022), Couldry and Mejias (2019), Zerilli (2021), and O’Neil (2016). 6 See Beckert (2014). 7 Lai has recently written self-reflexively on her own fiction. See Lai (2020). 8 The phrase is John Protevi’s. See Protevi (2019). 9 See Moore (2015). 10 See Balibar (2020). 11 See Plumwood (2009). 12 See, for example, Hayles (2012), Hayles (2021), and Ryan (2015). 13 On analogue experimentation with technologies of immersion, see Murray (2017). 14 On the figure of the cyborg, see Haraway (1991). On the notion of medianatures, see Braidotti (2016). 15 See Niccolini et al. (2018).

References Agrawal, Ajay, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. (2022), Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Boston: Harvard Business Press. Allado-McDowell, K. (2020), Pharmako-AI. London: Ignota Books. “Ambient Literature.” Online. https://research​.ambientlit​.com/ Balibar, Étienne. (2020), Spinoza, the Transindividual, translated by Mark G. E. Kelly. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barad, Karen. (2010), “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today 3(2): 240–268. Beckert, Sven. (2014), Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Bell, David M. (2017), Rethinking Utopia. New York: Routledge. Bottici, Chiara. (2007), A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bottici, Chiara. (2021), “Anarchafeminism and the Ontology of the Transindividual” in Materialism and Politics, edited by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva, 215–231. Berlin: ICI Berlin Press. Braidotti, Rosi. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity. Braidotti, Rosi. (2016), “The Critical Posthumanities; Or, is Medianatures to Naturecultures as Zoe is to Bios?” Cultural Politics 12, 3: 380–390.

196  Carolyn Lau Braidotti, Rosi. (2015), “Posthuman Affirmative Politics,” in Resisting Biopolitics, edited by S. E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė, 30–57. New York: Routledge. Braidotti, Rosi. (2013), The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Braidotti, Rosi. (2012), Nomadic Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. (2009), “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” PMLA 124, 2: 526–532. Brand, Carina. (2018), “‘Feeding Like a Parasite’: Extraction and Science Fiction in Capitalist Dystopia,” in Economic Science Fictions, edited by William Davies, 95–124. London: Goldsmiths Press. Chatwin, Bruce. (1987), The Songlines. London: Jonathan Cape. Chen, N. N. (1992), “‘Speaking Nearby:’ A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh– ha,” Visual Anthropology Review 8, 1: 82–91. Cheng, Kai. (2018), “Surviving Utopia: Finding Hope in Larissa Lai’s Piercing Novel The Tiger Flu,” Autostraddle​.c​om (6 December). Online. https://www​. autostraddle​.com​/surviving​-utopia​-finding​-hope​-in​-larissa​-lais​-the​-tiger​-flu​ -439136/ Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. (2021), Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coleman, Christian A. (2019), “Interview: Rivers Solomon,” Lightspeed Magazine 114 (Nov). Online. https://www​.lightspeedmagazine​.com​/nonfiction​/interview​ -rivers​-solomon/ Coleman, Patrick. (2020), “Riding a Racehorse Through a Field of Concepts,” slate​. c​om (30 November). Online. https://slate​.com​/technology​/2020​/11​/interview​-k​ -allado​-mcdowell​-pharmako​-ai​.html Connolly, William E. (2017), Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Durham: Duke University Press. Couldry, Nick and Ulises A. Mejias. (2019), The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Crawford, Kate. (2021), The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1995), Negotiations, 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Light Books. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ghosh, Amitav. (2022), The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ghosh, Amitav. (2017), The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glissant, Edouard. (2002), “The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World,” in Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization, edited by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, 287–295. New York: University of New York Press. Gottschall, Jonathan. (2012), The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Storying Relations as Posthuman Ethics  197 Grosz, Elizabeth. (2004), The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. London: Routledge. Guattari, Félix. (2009), Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–1985. Cambridge: MIT Press. Guattari, Félix. (2000), The Three Ecologies. London: The Athlone Press. Haraway, Donna. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna. (1988), “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, 3: 575–599. Haraway, Donna. (1991), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2017), Assembly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. (2021), Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational. New York: Columbia University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. (2017), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. (2012), How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herman, David. (2018), Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Fredric. (2007), Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Lacombe, Michele. (2016), “Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Decolonial Aesthetics: ‘Leaks’/Leaks, Storytelling, Community, and Collaboration,” Canadian Literature 230/231 (Autumn/Winter): 45–63. Lai, Larissa. (2020), “Familiarizing Grist Village: Why I Write Speculative Fiction,” Canadian Literature 240 (Spring): 20–39. Lai, Larissa. (2018), The Tiger Flu: A Novel. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Le Guin, Ursula. (1986), The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. London: Ignota Books. Mbembe, Achille. (2017), Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press. Moore, Jason W. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Murphy, Michelle. (2017), The Economization of Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Murray, Janet H. (2017), Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Neale, Margo and Lynne Kelly. (2020), Songlines: The Power and Promise. Port Melbourne: Thames & Hudson Australia. Niccolini, Alyssa D., Shiva Zarabadi, and Jessica Ringrose. (2018), “Spinning Yarns: Affective Kinshipping as Posthuman Pedagogy,” Parallax 24, 3: 324–343. Nixon, Rob. (2013), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nunes, Rodrigo. (2015), “Pack of Leaders: Thinking Organization and Spontaneity with Deleuze and Guattari,” in Occupy: A People Yet to Come, edited by Andrew Conio, 97–125. London: Open Humanities Press.

198  Carolyn Lau O’Neil, Cathy. (2016), Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown Books. Plumwood, Val. (2009), “Nature in the Active Voice,” Australian Humanities Review 46 (May). Online. http://aus​tral​ianh​uman​itie​sreview​.org​/2009​/05​/01​/ nature​-in​-the​-active​-voice/ Protevi, John. (2019), Edges of the State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rose, Deborah Bird. (2017), “Connectivity Thinking, Animism, and the Pursuit of Liveliness,” Educational Theory 67, 4 (August): 491–508. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2015). Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: John Hopkins university Press. Sands, Danielle. (2019), Animal Writing: Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of Empathy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sassen, Saskia. (2014), Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scott, James C. (2008), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shiva, Vandana. (2019), Oneness vs The 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom. Oxford: New Internationalist Publications. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. (2014), “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 3, 3: 121–132. Solnit, Rebecca. (2023), “‘If You Win the Popular Imagination, You Change the Game’: Why We Need New Stories on Climate,” The Guardian (12 January). Online. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/news​/2023​/jan​/12​/rebecca​-solnit​-climate​ -crisis​-popular​-imagination​-why​-we​-need​-new​-stories Springgay, Stephanie and Sarah E. Truman. (2017), Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World: WalkingLab. New York: Routledge. “Telescope” (2019), Experiments with Google (Nov). Online. https://experiments​. withgoogle​.com​/telescope Terranova, Fabrizio, dir. (2016), Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival. Brussels: Atelier Graphoui. Tsing, Anna. (2011), “Arts of Inclusion, or, How to Love a Mushroom,” Australian Humanities Review 50 (May). Online. http://aus​tral​ianh​uman​itie​sreview​.org​ /2011​/05​/01​/arts​-of​-inclusion​-or​-how​-to​-love​-a​-mushroom/ van Dooren, Thom and Deborah Bird Rose. (2016), “Lively Ethography: Storying Animist Worlds,” Environmental Humanities 8, 1: 77–94. van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. (2016), “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness,” Environmental Humanities 8, 1: 1–23. Zerilli, John. (2021), A Citizen’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zuboff, Shoshana. (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Profile Books.

18 The World After, Lost Eons David Blandy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-23

200  David Blandy

The World After, Lost Eons  201

202  David Blandy

19 Hello, World! Hello, Poetic Zombies! Winnie Soon and Susan Scarlata

readme.SpamPoem is a collection of poems composed out of the found materials that have been filtered as “spam” through the infrastructure of an email system. We invite our readers to send an email with your “customized subject line” to readme​.spampoem​@gmail​​.com with any mobile devices or personal computers to receive a spam poem. It operates as an auto-reply email within a post-human body (Soon 2015, 69), transmitting sentences of poetic natural language via computational automation, commercial economy, and networked infrastructure. The auto-reply feature and filtering email system enable these spam as zombies to recursively interact with readers across digital sites: We are with you every day, we live in the Internet with peculiar addresses and enticing titbits, but you call us “spam”. We wander around the network, mindlessly, and you wanted to trash us, but we are still everywhere. We are just the children of your economic and social system, but you ignore and avoid us. We are not dead, we write, we create.​ (Soon 2014, 87)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-24

204  Winnie Soon and Susan Scarlata

Figure 19.1  readme.SpamPoem: A Room In Your Dream.

Figure 19.2  readme.SpamPoem: Just Rent the Data.

Hello, World! Hello, Poetic Zombies!  205

Figure 19.3  readme.SpamPoem: Before I Was Confused.

Figure 19.4  readmeSpamPoem: Make Your Site Erect.

References Soon, Winnie. (2015), “Zombification: The Living Dead of Spam,” APRJA 4, 1: 66–77. Online. https://doi​.org​/10​.7146​/aprja​.v4i1​.116106 Soon, Winnie. (2014), “Hello Zombies,” The Writing Machine Collective 5: 86–92. Online. http://writingmachine​-collective​.net​/files​/WMC_e5_PROCEEDINGS. pdf

20 Foreign Bodies Pippa Goldschmidt

When I was a child growing up in London, I would often spend the weekend with my grandmother. Each night I watched her extract from her mouth a set of prominent and brilliantly white teeth, before she dropped them into a glass of water where they sank slowly to the bottom, grinning away in their nocturnal home. The teeth were made in Britain, the rest of her was not. She had grown up in Vienna and fled that city in the summer of 1938 following the Anschluss with Nazi Germany, before she found a sanctuary in Hampstead, the north London district that became an ersatz home to so many Jewish refugees. Sigmund Freud also fled Vienna in 1938 and also settled in Hampstead. During shopping trips with my grandmother, it was quite common to hear older people chat to each other in German. Listening to them was like listening to one of those old-fashioned and badly tuned radios that is hard to ignore and yet simultaneously hard to understand, the words rendered almost inaudible by the static hiss of history. Actually, my grandmother didn’t like speaking German and was proud of her ability to speak fluent English, although she had only learnt it as an adult after moving here. Perhaps, as she learnt to navigate her way around London to “Lesster Square,” “Hoebun,” and “Youston,” her false teeth helped her to overcome those endless shibboleth hurdles of the English language. Freud didn’t just have false teeth, he had a series of prosthetic palates which were necessary after repeated bouts of mouth cancer required more and more of his own jaw and palate to be surgically removed. In Civilization and its Discontents (1991) he writes, “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but these organs have not grown on him and they give him much trouble at times” (Freud 1991, 42). When I first read this, I assumed it to be metaphorical, but perhaps it is literal. His diaries make clear that these prostheses were painful and tiring to wear, one photograph shows part of his face is swollen. He commented that he found it difficult to speak French because of the prostheses. I don’t know what he thought of English. DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-25

Foreign Bodies  207 False teeth don’t just talk, they eat. They bite, they chew. Clack clack clack, they say as they grind up food for their human host. My grandmother cooked many dishes from Austria, such as Apfelstrudel and Wurstgulasch, but I’m not sure she enjoyed eating them. Perhaps she found their preparation comforting, the repetitive chopping and stirring. But perhaps the taste of the food itself was too similar, or equally not similar enough, to what she had once eaten in Vienna. The dish that I enjoyed most of all was Schinkenfleckerl, a delicious combination of pasta, cream, and ham that was decidedly un-Jewish in its defiance of the kosher prohibitions on eating pork, and on eating milk and meat together at the same meal. In fact, pork featured often in my grandmother’s cooking, a possibly rebellious act not only against the strictures of kashrut (kosher laws), but also against the antisemitic propaganda she would have been subjected to that depicted Jewish people as pigs. Propaganda that played endlessly on the idea that Jews should not be thought as properly or fully human. I’m in a plane flying from Germany, where I have been staying for three months, back to my home in Edinburgh. Somewhere high above the North Sea in international airspace, and just after I’ve been handed a complimentary glass of white wine, the teeth on the upper right-hand side of my mouth suddenly go numb. A few minutes later agonising pain shoots upwards from these numb teeth and circles around my right eye, as if looking for a way in, or out. I can do nothing but clutch my cheek and gulp down the wine, hoping that the alcohol will help ease it. It does not. I’m suddenly made very aware of the physiological nature of my mouth, not just there to give voice to words or ingest food. I spend the rest of the flight hunched up in my seat, trying to ignore the pain, but it keeps pulling me back, no matter how hard I attempt to separate myself from it. It is both me and not me. Within me and yet part of the fabric of this strange experience. When the plane starts to descend, the pain recedes, left behind in the thin air above the clouds. By the time we’ve landed and I’m inside the terminal building, I can feel my teeth again, and everything seems to have returned to normal. The border control at Edinburgh airport is automated – first my passport photo is scanned, and then me. My face is displayed on a screen above the gate and I reach up to touch my right cheek as if to reassure it, or myself, and the scan is interrupted by my movement and has to start again. But I look the same as usual; there is no swelling, any problem must be internal. Some lines of software compare this image to the one in my passport, make a decision, and the gate swings open. I am allowed home. A few days later, I have an appointment at a dental clinic for a special sort of panoramic x-ray. I’m told to stand completely motionless while a camera tracks its way around my head, taking an exposure every fraction of a second. Click click click, an ersatz heartbeat.

208  Pippa Goldschmidt According to my dentist, there is nothing visibly wrong in this x-ray that can explain the pain I experienced. When he invites me to look at it on the screen, I see that it contains nothing that is visibly me. A view of jaw bones almost as distorted as Holbein’s anamorphic skull frame two rows of teeth lined up one above the other like letters on a keyboard, a symbol of all the words I have ever spoken and will ever speak. But I cannot recognise myself in the x-ray, cannot make the link between interior bone and exterior skin, even though this link is only millimetres thick. Eventually I identify myself from the artificial additions; the crown on one of my upper teeth, and the root canal whose twin rubber tendrils entwined in my jaw are a permanent memorial to a bad afternoon in the dentist’s chair. I have to be guided through this image, as if shown a map of a land that I have – allegedly – visited. From the inner to the outer. For several years I worked as an astronomer, using many telescopes around the world to make observations of extreme objects called quasars located at the centres of galaxies. Although quasars are intrinsically luminous, they are very far away, often found in the most distant galaxies known. This means they are too faint ever to be seen with the naked eye, and we must rely on telescopes for all our knowledge of them. But the days, or rather nights, of the astronomer gazing directly through a metal and glass tube at the heavens are long gone, because that would be a waste of time. Human recall is never as accurate or as comprehensive as that of a mechanical device, and nowadays digital cameras record all the light that the telescope captures. Only at the end of the exposure time are we astronomers permitted to see what the telescope has already seen. During my astronomical career I used telescopes based at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, situated in the high altitude Atacama Desert in the north of that country. This is one of the best places in the world to do astronomy, where nothing – no nearby cities, no light pollution – interrupts our view of the sky. In fact, the only visible signs of human life are the metal domes of all the different observatories that have mushroomed across the mountain peaks in recent years, flashing sunlight to each other as if transmitting messages. At dusk, these domes swing open and reveal themselves for what they are, protective housings for nocturnal eyes. Inside the control room I sit watching a computer screen, while unseen by me the telescope next door settles its gaze on the object of my interest. A telescope is more patient than a human. Our eyes refresh themselves every tenth of a second but cannot concentrate for longer than this. In contrast, a telescope can make a single exposure of several minutes, never once blinking or forgetting. At the end of each such exposure, the resulting image is read out to the computer screen and I bend forward, peering closely to view every aspect of this digitised version of the universe.

Foreign Bodies  209 Astronomy is unusual amongst scientific disciplines in that it doesn’t consist of active experiments, but rather of passive observing. We cannot do anything to affect the objects we are interested in; all we can do is detect their light. In the case of distant galaxies and quasars, we’re looking at objects that have long since ceased to exist, we do not share any “now” with them, and their only remnants are the rays of light they once emitted that are still travelling towards us billions of years later. This observatory in Chile was first founded in the 1960s by a consortium of European countries and has been growing in size ever since. Now there are around twenty telescopes (actually located on three different sites; the main one is at La Silla and there are two more further north), as well as support buildings, a residential place for people to sleep, a library, offices, and a canteen. At any one time there might be a few hundred people on site, staying for a few days or several months. The observatory has been continuously operational since the first telescope saw its first light in 1966. During the coup led by General Pinochet on 11 September 1973, and throughout the entire span of his dictatorship, the telescopes kept recording light, and the astronomers from various European countries kept arriving, working here and departing with their images of distant stars and galaxies. I first came to Chile in 1990, the year that the regime came to an end and society started easing itself back into a democracy. Even so, before I left home in Edinburgh, I was warned not to discuss politics with any Chileans I met because to do so might put them at risk. Although Pinochet had just stepped down, a lot of people in power still supported him and it was a very divided country. I did as I was told, and I kept my mouth shut. A few hundred miles to the north of La Silla is an ex-mining town called Chacabuco which was used as a concentration camp in the first years of the Pinochet regime. Here, hundreds of political opponents were imprisoned. Many people who were killed by the regime elsewhere had their bodies dumped in the Atacama Desert, where their relatives still search for their remains (the documentary “Nostalgia for the Light,” directed by Patrizio Guzmán, has heart-breaking interviews with these relatives). Tiny fragments of human bone rub against particles of sand. Scraps of cloth and shoe leather have been identified. We astronomers never talk about any of the local surroundings or current events, not even with each other when we are safely back at home. We are too intent on peering into the remotest aspects of the universe. Several years after my trips to Chile, I wonder if there is a link between the way that astronomers work and how we view the world. Perhaps the habit of collecting light without any means of influencing the sources of that light has rendered astronomers rather passive. We put all our effort into deciphering the light that we receive. We don’t even have to go outside to look

210  Pippa Goldschmidt at the night sky, it’s conveyed to us as we wait in front of the computer screen. During the day when the sun was bright and the shadows were perhaps sharp enough to reveal man-made features in the local landscape, features that might have disclosed bodies buried in shallow graves, I was fast asleep, recovering from my nocturnal work. But there is one sub-discipline of astronomy that is not quite so passive, either in its scientific constructions or in its emotional relationship to its surrounds. Since the 1990s NASA has been successfully sending rovers to Mars. Sojourner, Opportunity, Spirit, Curiosity, and Perseverance (the most recent rover and active since February 2021) are designed to move around the planet and analyse their surroundings for signs of water and microbial life. They’re able to crush samples of rocks, not so different to teeth patiently grinding their way through food. The rovers are not autonomous, they must be told where to go and what to do by scientists back on Earth. Because of the immense distances and the correspondingly appreciable light travel time between Earth and Mars (which varies from seven to twenty minutes), these instructions can’t be relayed instantaneously. We don’t share a simultaneous “now” with the rovers. Instead, the relevant teams at NASA work out the daily instructions in advance to guide and operate the rovers and relay these instructions via satellites orbiting around Earth and Mars. In-depth studies by the sociologist Janet Vertesi of these NASA operators have shown that they have had to learn to embody the rovers’ movements in order to understand their behaviours. On Earth, the scientists’ eyes must act as substitutes for the rovers’ cameras, and the scientists comment that they can “see like a Rover” (Vertesi 2012, 397). In order to work out how to program the rovers, the scientists rehearse the desired movements with their own bodies, and even when they are not at work they say they can still feel the presence of the rovers within their own bodies. In response, these rovers have evolved from pieces of machinery, becoming something other than pure material, gaining unique characteristics and responding in individual ways to their programming. These personalities are heightened by the fact that they’ve suffered physical damage as a result of their experiences on Mars. In 2006 Spirit’s right front wheel became frozen and consequently could only move backwards. After getting stranded in a sandstorm in 2009, Opportunity’s right front wheel stopped being able to pivot. Additionally, both rovers suffered more cerebral problems. In a news release, NASA referred to Opportunity’s “amnesia” events in which it failed to write information to its memory banks, an apparently agerelated fault and one that sounds oddly human (“Rover Amnesia” 2015). Janet Vertesi states: “imaging that places the observer behind the Rover’s eyes builds empathy and intimacy between team members and their distant

Foreign Bodies  211 robots” (Vertesi 2012, 408). Some of the NASA scientists worked with the rovers before they were launched into space, but many others have only ever known them through this long-distance relationship. And the rovers’ trip to Mars is one-way, they will never return to Earth. Unlike Freud, who died in London just over a year after he moved there, my grandmother did return to Vienna. Many years after the war was over, she went back to her erstwhile home but she found it very awkward and challenging, no longer feeling any affinity to the country which had failed to protect her. Furthermore, as with other Austrian Jews who’d fled overseas for refuge, she was deemed by the Government to have been “disloyal” to her Vaterland for abandoning it and becoming a citizen of another country. Now, several years after my grandmother’s death, I have been doing research online into her family and their origins across the Austro-Hungarian Empire (many of them came from the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia and settled in Vienna after the legal emancipation of Jews in 1867). Sometimes when I try to access various online databases I’m required to verify that I am in fact a human being. Either I’m asked to tick a box captioned “I am not a robot,” or I must consider a grid of photos and identify the ones containing traffic lights, or motorbikes, or other commonplace items. The tests reliably ignite a spark of anxiety in my chest. What if I fail? What if I’m not viewing these everyday street scenes the way that other people do? Does that mean I’m not a real human? It doesn’t help to know that there are no objectively correct answers to these tests, that what you need to do to “pass” is to click the same photos as other people have done before you. This is what being human means, that you can appear to behave as others, that you don’t buck the trend. I recognise the irony in that I’m being required to pass these CAPTCHA tests in order to access Jewish records from a time when Jewish people themselves were being typified as less-than-human. But it doesn’t quell the worry. The shibboleth of photographs of traffic lights is as anxiety-provoking as the correct pronunciation of English names. Jewish people have been criticised for trying to “pass” as non-Jews by changing their names, or having nose jobs, or converting to Christianity; there are a myriad of ways in which you can try and fail to leave behind your former identity. I think of my grandmother’s journey across the North Sea in 1938. Perhaps the pain I experienced when I flew across that same sea was a vestigial memory, deeply rooted in my body and inherited from hers, of the psychological anguish of leaving her home. I feel we are being asked to prove ourselves again and again, but I would rather do so by feeling empathy for a distant machine.

212  Pippa Goldschmidt References Freud, Sigmund. (1991), Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Guzmán, Patricio, dir. (2010), Nostalgia for the Light. New York: Icarus Films. “Rover Amnesia Event Follows Latest Memory Reformatting.” (2015), NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (27 March). Online. https://www​.jpl​.nasa​.gov​/news​/ rover​-amnesia​-event​-follows​-latest​-memory​-reformatting Vertesi, Janet. (2012), “Seeing Like a Rover: Visualization, Embodiment, and Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission,” Social Studies of Science 42, 3 (Jun): 393–414.

21 Melanin Object Ari Larissa Heinrich

If melanin can be cultured in a laboratory, then it can be transferred, transplanted, or transmitted. When cultured on a substrate of E. coli, melanin borrows the aura of communicability. If melanin reduced to molecules in a laboratory represents the smallest material unit arbitrarily imbued with the significance of that “social organizing principle […] known as race” (Heinrich 2018), then can “race” be transferred? Xenophoria pushes the envelope. Is race communicable …?​ Melanin is pigment, so you could say that melanin is aesthetic by definition. In this sense, the pigment is an unusually voluble example of biomimesis, or the alignment of form, function, and observational technique in science.1 But melanin is also an object, both social and material. As a social object, the artist Jes Fan cites Mel Chen’s study of the racialized animacy of lead during the “lead scare” in the US in 2007 as a reference point. Mel Chen describes how at this time, “the lead painted onto children’s toys was animated and racialized as Chinese,” while “its potential victims were depicted as largely white” (Chen 2012, 15). Chen adds: In the context of the interests of the United States, the phrase Chinese lead is consistently rendered not as a banal industrial product, but as an exogenous toxin painted onto the toys of innocent American children … effectively replacing domestic concerns about black and impoverished children and their exposures to environmental lead. (Chen 2012, 15) Melanin’s animacy – here its investment with values related to artificially constructed categories of “race” – is of course also the foundation of what scholars after Fanon have described as the “epidermal notion of race” (Lee 2014, 210).2 “When we speak of races – for example, Blumenbach’s influential quintuple chromatic schema,” writes scholar Rachel C. Lee, “we refer to the differentiation of humans (homo sapiens) into subdivided DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-26

214  Ari Larissa Heinrich

Figure 21.1  Xenophoria (2020). Source: Color HD 07:56. Made with support from Recess Art, HKVAC, and Empty Gallery. Videography by Asa Westcott. Still courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong.

populations distinguished, for the most part, phenotypically” (Lee 2014, 210). Historically speaking, this understanding of race as a science of phenotypes (including skin color), though it claims to be based in age-old scientific “truth,” is actually highly contextual; just compare to other histories where the introduction of visual taxonomy as authoritative race “science” (and colonial values) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries clashed with existing non-“scientific” taxonomies of difference. In the case of China, for instance, serious objections were raised to race taxonomies when these ideas were first introduced. Only later, when the various agendas of “science” packed the punch of military and economic authority, did a more phenotypically oriented understanding of race start to take hold, eventually becoming part of a more familiar view of race and racial hierarchies today.3 Yet, as Lee and others remind us, even science now confirms that “race” is a social construct, since “greater genetic variability exists between individual members of the same racial group than across supposedly distinct racial groups” (Lee 2014, 54). Melanin by nature functions to “make visible” by defining “observable traits” where it appears; the social life of melanin, meanwhile, has evolved tautologically to explain or support narratives related to the taxonomization of humans according to color. In this sense, if we can describe the bond between the molecule of race and the element of lead as almost allegorical, then we can describe the bond between the molecule of race and the pigment melanin as almost ontological. Yet, even as the social life of melanin is made meaningful through the construction of mythologies of epidermal race (and even as the real-time

Melanin Object  215 danger of these narratives remains as powerful as ever), melanin’s material life has evolved rapidly, to the point where the emergence of “material” melanin has begun to undermine its own social life (Meredith and Sarna 2006). Attempts to isolate melanin as such have been going on for more than a century, and to isolate “pigment” much longer.4 An historical review from 2006 in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology traces European “scientific” inquiry into the source of skin color to the seventeenth-century Italian biologist Marcello Malphigi (1628–1694); another article notes that “the advent of electronmicroscopy […] and the development of methods for subcellular fractionation allowed the site of melanin synthesis and deposition to be identified many years ago as the membrane-bound granule, termed a melanosome” (Kushimoto et al. 2001, 10698). Attempts by mouse-fanciers to breed a mouse with a yellow coat, while focused on questions of breeding for pigment, eventually led to incidental evidence not only about the genetics of obesity, but also in support of theories of epigenetics. Researchers found that mice bred to be yellow were also fatter than their brown cousins. However, they discovered that this obesity, despite being a heritable trait, could nonetheless be modified if certain changes were made early enough in the mouse’s development (Landecker 2016). The artist Jes Fan could probably have commissioned a laboratory to help him purify melanin and develop strategies for adhering it to the surfaces of bioglass sculptures as recently as ten years ago, but he would have run into many technological obstacles. When he began experimenting with it in 2018, however, the building-blocks of melanin were much easier to come by. Scientists could culture microbes that had been engineered to produce melanin. DNA could be made much more efficiently and therefore cheaply, so all a scientist had to do was call in an order for a certain chemical sequence – in this case, tyrosinase or laccase – and then melanin could be synthesized in the laboratory from L-dopa or tyrosine based on the activity of these laccase or tyrosinase genes, similar to (as it was explained to me by a scientist at Brooklyn Bio) using a scoby to start a kombucha. Together with Brooklyn Bio, Fan was able to experiment with two strains/ varieties of homemade melanin: one cultivated on fungi, and one using E. coli denatured. In short, by the time Fan began to use the pigment melanin as an art material, “material object melanin” could be grown, transported, and maybe even consumed. The material object that is melanin could be teased apart fully from the social object that is melanin, with little to no residual abstraction. Perhaps the clearest indicator of this shift in the paradoxical relationship between the social and material lives of melanin (or at least the thing

216  Ari Larissa Heinrich that renders this shift most legible in contemporary life) is that melanin could also be assigned a market value. Feel free to buy some online. I don’t know what the going price is today, but on August 5, 2018, around the time the artist was working with the pigment, melanin powder cost about $385/gram – more expensive than gold.5 As a substance in a world of increasing technological and commercial sophistication, the fact that melanin can now be “produced” means that like cell-lines or hormones, it is now more openly a commodity. Advances in technology since 2018 only increase the urgency of these transitions in the social life of melanin. Notes 1 See, for example, Heinrich (2008). 2 See also English (2007) and Weheliye (2014). 3 On this, see Dikötter (2015), Heinrich (2008), Keevak (2011), and Liu (1995). 4 See Gortner (1910). In this early paper Gortner refers to a journal article from 1896 that refers not to “melanin,” but to “pigment.” The reference given is Abel, John J. and Walter S. Davis. “On the Pigment of the Negro’s Skin and Hair,’ Journal of Experimental Medicine 1, 3 (1896): 361–400.” 5 For one approach to this question, see Azikiwe (2019).

References Azikiwe, Nnamdi. (2019), Melanin is Worth More than Gold: Is this the Era of the Blessed Generation? Silver Spring, MD: The Mhotep Corporation. Chen, Mel Y. (2012), Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press. Dikötter, Frank. (2015), The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. English, Darby. (2007), How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gortner, Ross Aiken. (1910), “Studies on Melanin,” Journal of Biological Chemistry 8, 4: 341–363. Heinrich, Ari Larissa. (2018), “Applied Co-enmeshment,” Recess Art (October). Online. https://www​.recessart​.org​/arilarissaheinrich/#​_ednref4 Heinrich, Ari Larissa. (2008), The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West. Durham: Duke University Press. Keevak, Michael. (2011), Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kushimoto, Tsuneto et al. (2001), “A Model for Melanosome Biogenesis Based on the Purification and Analysis of Early Melanosomes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, 19 (Sep): 10698–10703. Landecker, Hannah. (2016), “The Social as Signal in the Body of Chromatin,” The Sociological Review 64, 1: 79–99. Lee, Rachel C. (2014), The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. New York: New York University Press.

Melanin Object  217 Liu, Lydia H. (1995), Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity – China, 1900–1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Meredith, Paul and Tadeusz Sarna. (2006), “The Physical and Chemical Properties of Eumelanin,” Pigment Cell Research 19, 6: 572–594. Weheliye, Alexander G. (2014), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

22 An Interview with Jes Fan Ari Larissa Heinrich and Jes Fan

Ari Larissa Heinrich interviews contemporary artist Jes Fan. Fan lives and works in Hong Kong and Brooklyn, USA. Originally trained at the Rhode Island School of Design in glass making, Fan has expanded his practice to encompass diverse media and approaches. Interested in process rather than technique, Fan’s trans-disciplinary artworks today speculate on the intersection of biology and identity in relation to the materiality of the gendered and racialized body. Ari Larissa Heinrich: How do you see your work with materials such as melanin, oestrogen, testosterone, urine, and blood – things either produced by or within or adjacent to the human body (but also other bodies) – in relation to critical posthumanist visions of the world? Jes Fan: Often, in the beginning of making the melanin works, the glass bubbles would just self-implode. Out of nowhere, the organic liquid encapsulated in the silicone will expand under heat and crack its glass shell. Imagine a yolk expanding in a non-porous eggshell. One of the larger bubbles in System I started leaking everywhere during the exhibition, and I swear one explosion was so loud that it really could have taken my life! It was truly a headache for me. So I had to test with various silicones, waxes, and gels to find the one that is compatible with the glass and the organic liquids. During this process, I realized that the objects (the glass, the melanin, the hormones, the gels) have a life of their own. It is futile for me to fight against it. It is during the same time that I was also consuming the new materialism texts of Mel Y. Chen and Jane Bennett, while I was also reading Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks. A quotation from the book stuck with me: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects” (Fanon 2008, 82). An object in the midst of other objects … it’s truly how I felt for most of my life until I started making objects and witnessed how objects have DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-27

An Interview with Jes Fan  219 a life of their own. Water doesn’t disappear forever when it dries up, it is absorbed in the clouds and sky and in the air we breathe and somehow in the future it’ll become part of the tea I drink and then my pee … I am not sure if I am trying to consciously defamiliarize the human body, but the objective here is to tweeze out the complicated entanglements between the “I” and the “Thing,” and one way to do so is to emphasize and empathize with the materials that have become synonymous as biological truths. So, in harvesting melanin from E. coli, then treating the biopigment as no different to sepia ink that comes out of a tube, there’s something absurdist in the gesture. Like, here it is, here is the puddle of spill you’ve always looked for. And I am indeed an object in the midst of other objects, and so is every one of us. We are all puddles in some way or another. ALH: Can you tell us a little about your creative process when working with melanin? How do you conceive of individual works or collective works? Do you see these works as being in direct dialogue with specific other artworks or artists, or are they more in dialogue with science, or other “creatives”? Or perhaps this question recreates unnecessary binaries…. JF: I was at a residency at Recess Art at the time I stumbled across some papers by Ekaterina Dadachova and Radames Cordero on melanin’s radioactive properties;1 that in some black fungal species, the organism uses melanin to convert radioactivity into energy for its own consumption – similar to how green plants use chlorophyll for photosynthesis. The research made me realize how mundane science fiction is, that it is not fictive for a lot of species. So in this particular project, the work did start from an research interest in the materiality of melanin. Not all projects start this way. In my work I often start with three questions: “How is it made?”, “What is it made out of?”, and “How can I make it?” These questions are posed not in the expectation of an answer, but more as a way-finder. One example of this is the “Mother is a Woman” work. I was asking myself “how can I make kin?”, “Can kin be made without blood?” And in pursuing this absurd line of questioning, I arrived at the point of filtering oestrogen out of my mother’s urine in order to feminize folks outside of my blood kin. In doing so, I questioned if you can be feminized by my mother’s oestrogen, what is your relationship to her? And what is her relationship to you? Most of my works are in series, they are always in duplicates and multiples, never really “one offs.” I guess in a way they are all in dialogue with each other. Early on in my career, an artist I worked for asked me to note down a genealogy of artists that I felt related to, and I marked out a chart that described a confluence of artists I feel indebted to. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Noguchi, Patty Chang, as well as Liu Chuang.

220  Ari Larissa Heinrich and Jes Fan ALH: In a utopian future dream where we have successfully upset the classic and destructive dichotomies of the universalist (white, man) human vs. the anomalous (for example, sexualized, racialized, gendered) “other,” what does the world look like? How does your work relate (or not) to such utopian/dystopian (or even neo-f​uturi​stic/​Sinof​uturi​stic/​Afrof​uturi​ stic/​Gulf Futuristic) visions? JF: A utopia only exists on the horizon. I want this to be the now. ALH: When did you first begin to question the boundaries of the human? Or has this never been a question for you? What is the difference between you and a pearl-producing oyster? JF: I think it started with a book, Pig 05049 by Christien Meindertsma. In this book, she traced this one single pig from a slaughterhouse, Pig 05049, to the subsequent objects that its body generated. From gelatine, to paper, to heparin … This one singular life became the mother of this network of consumable goods that are indispensable to the seamless standard of living of the neoliberal person. Each part of the body is indexed to a chapter, each chapter branches to an unimaginable entanglement of consumable goods, which in the end, is connected to me. As I was reading this book, I also started taking testosterone, and charting the changes in my body. One day, as I was finishing the book, I held the vial of hormones and read it in the same light – “Where is this from?”, “How is this made?”, “How can I make this?”, “What life is involved in its production?” Upon asking these questions, I discovered that the source for pharmaceutical production of steroid hormones is soybeans, which is then suspended in cottonseed oil. So who am I to the soybeans? And what is its relationship to me? I think it was around then that I began to realize that I am beyond myself. And in asserting “I am,” I am also aware that the “am” is a verb, an extension of “to be.” So I am constantly in a verb-action relationship with the idea of being beyond myself. (Does this make sense?) A pearl-producing oyster and I have so much difference! Just last week I went to the Natural History Museum and I saw the Suriname toad’s reproduction process – the eggs sink into their backs, and upon hatching, the babies crawl out of its honeycomb structure. Much more evolved than the human hatching process … Note 1 For example, see Cordero et al. (2017) and Dadachova et al. (2008).

An Interview with Jes Fan  221 References Cordero, Radames J. B., Raghav Vij, and Arturo Casadevall. (2017), “Microbial Melanins for Radioprotection and Bioremediation,” Applied Microbiology International 10, 5 (Sep): 1186–1190. Dadachova, Ekaterina et al. (2008), “The Radioprotective Properties of Fungal Melanin are a Function of Its Chemical Composition, Stable Radical Presence, and Spatial Arrangement,” Pigment Cell Melanoma Research 21, 2 (Apr): 192–199. Fanon, Frantz. (2008), Black Skin White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press. Meindertsma, Christien. (2007), PIG 05049. Rotterdam: Flocks.

Part V

Potnia Theron (6000 BC)

Extending the discussion on hybridity to diversity in the context of our ongoing environmental crisis, this section offers a vision of posthuman kinship that spans across species and communities, rather than limiting the category to the family unit and blood relations. The Potnia Theron, a deity portrayed in ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern art, is an emblem of cross-species relationships. At her most domesticated, the “Mistress of Animals” adopts the form of a female figure who is flanked by, or reaching out to, two animals. But at her most striking, she becomes a disturbing goddess-monster – a woman with the head of a Gorgon, a woman with tendrils for limbs, a woman become nonhuman. Yet, if she is a monster – something that is frightening and therefore difficult to descry – it is precisely because she is the embodiment of human coexistence with all living things. The Potnia Theron disrupts the idea of Man in Western culture. In combining elements of the beastly (species-other) and the female (gender-other), the sense of human exceptionalism in toto collapses – but in so doing opens up (frightening) new possibilities of being-with nature. Contributors to this section address the human-driven ecological change codified in the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, as well as highlight the fundamental creative forces of symbiogenesis found in non-human, planet-changing agents such as bacteria, fungi, and plants. Resisting the anthropocentric assumptions behind new geological markers, these entries propose the formation of multispecies communities based on change as a strategy of survival in the midst of the sixth extinction. Sherryl Vint’s Chapter 23, “Beyond Transcendence: From ‘human’ to ‘Human’ in Tchaikovsky’s Children Series,” examines the key posthuman coordinates of embodiment and community through reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children series of science fiction novels. Drawing on the affordances of science fiction to tell stories across thousands of years, these books open with a human terraforming and colonization project intended to perpetuate humanity far beyond Earth. The fecundity of life takes the protagonists to unanticipated destinations, aided by an engineered virus intended to “uplift” primates to better serve the colonists. Instead, first DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-28

224  Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau spiders and then octopi become the recipients of this enhancement, and across the generations each produce radically different material cultures that express the phenomenological experiences distinct to each species. Each offers new concepts of mind, language, and intelligence, on the one hand, and innovative objects of technological culture, on the other. Given this, Vint argues that the novels therefore stage important philosophical questions about the relationship of body to mind, and evolution to sentience. The few human terraformers who survive must find a way to communicate across the species barrier, transforming themselves into posthuman beings able to become part of multispecies communities. In this way, Tchaikovsky’s fiction offers an important imaginary of the future – not the transcendence of unchanged humanity that is appropriating the stars, but a posthuman vision of what is possible beyond human limitations. In Chapter 24, HSURAE’s experimental piece “Scoby skin, Yellow soup” features a monologue of (a) bacteria that highlights the movement and aliveness of the non-human. What is it like to view the world from the eye-level of the bacterial? HSURAE proposes that bacteria, like everything else, are always mediated through others. Created in the context of the ongoing pandemic, this complex art project not only addresses the contentious act of (mis-)labelling and naming of diseases, but explores the impact of the signals of microbiota on the embodied nature of cognition and its relationship with endosymbiosis as a theory of the origin of life. HSURAE’s work seeks to recreate the materiality of kinship based on the principles of infiltration and contamination, change and exchange. Francesco Ferrando and Debashish Banerji’s vignette of a glossary on posthuman spirituality in Chapter 25, “Posthuman Spirituality,” notes that the etymology of spirituality brings the notion back to “life” and “breathing.” In this, spirituality is literally vital to the human condition. Importantly, both posthuman affirmative ethics and spirituality affirm the possibility of humans to endure through non-dualistic worldviews and relationships. While at first sight spirituality seems to be at odds with the materialist tradition of posthumanism, Ferrando and Banerji point out that both ways of thinking are imperative to a post-anthropocentric survival that depends on and enables the coexistence of matter and life. Continuing the exploration of the relationship between spirituality and posthuman thought is Evelyn Wan’s provocative Chapter 26, “The Lefthand Click and the Left-hand Lay: Intersecting Technology and Folk Belief in Posthuman Spirituality.” A speculative attempt to unlock the political potential of witchcraft’s way of the left hand, Wan’s chapter unravels a history of witchcraft and folk belief that hints at an unwritten form of resistance to capitalist and colonialist systems. The final chapter is Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska’s Chapter 27, “Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities:

Potnia Theron (6000 BC)  225 Staying with Environmental Violence, Ecological Grief, and the Trouble of Consumption.” In this chapter, Åsberg and Radomska argue that the problems caused by the slow violence to oceanic and coastal environments that have arisen from human systems of living can only be solved by the connected, affective, and cultural studies-informed approaches of a posthumanities that complements scientific insight on how to commune better with the sea. Human-induced impacts on such environments range from ocean warming, acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication, and marine pollution to the degradation of local coastal habitats. In order to deal with the nested challenges of such oceanic violence, Åsberg and Radomska discuss four cases of coastal and marine slow violence from their Scandinavian “backyard” with the purpose to tell the story of exposures and provide counter-narratives on how to reinvent our consumerist ocean imaginary. In doing so, the authors have developed what is here referred to as “low-trophic theory,” which is to say a situated local stance that attends to entanglements of cultural theory, food practice, affect and grief, violence, more-than-human humanities, multispecies ethics, and the oceanic consumer imaginary. In this way, Åsberg and Radomska combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, eco-art, and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea regions to develop analytical notions for the practices and theories of feminist posthumanities.

23 Beyond Transcendence From “human” to “Human” in Tchaikovsky’s Children Series Sherryl Vint

As posthumanism has become central to scholarship in the humanities, the meaning of the term has come under pressure. In her foundational How We Became Posthuman (1999), N. Katherine Hayles identifies and critiques a fantasy of transcending the limits of embodiment and mortality – now more typically called transhumanism – even as she opens the door to understanding the posthuman in a more radical way: “the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice” (Hayles 1999, 286). Donna J. Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” has been equally influential in shaping the field, premised on the collapse of the binaries between human/animal, organism/machine, and virtuality/materiality that require new thinking about humanity’s entanglement with other beings. Although Haraway’s work has anchored an ecologically oriented branch of posthuman thought, she rejects the term “posthuman” in her later work, teasingly preferring the term “compost”: “Human as humus has potential if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making and planet-destroying CEO” (Haraway 2016, 32). Another figure who has more recently become central to the field, Rosi Braidotti, argues for critical posthumanism as a zoë-centred, ethical stance required in an era of climate, capitalist, and technological crises; a way of navigating such transitions to shape them toward “ethically affirmative and politically sustainable alternatives” (Braidotti 2019, 15). To say the least, then, what posthumanism is remains unclear.1 While some regard posthumanism as a positive development that may help us move beyond the contradictions and exclusions of the liberal humanism and anthropocentrism that have long dominated western political thought, others fear it as a discourse that either intensifies aspects of the liberal human that are elevated to an augmented Human 2.0 or, in complete contrast, as one that disregards human dignity by equating DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-29

228  Sherryl Vint humans with machines or animals, thereby destroying any foundation for ethics. In this chapter, I make a distinction between the critical discourse of posthumanism, which critiques anthropocentrism and liberalism, and the celebratory discourse of transhumanism, an intensification of liberal binary and hierarchical thinking. I also follow Haraway and Braidotti in their interest in thinking ethically and relationally beyond Homo sapiens in order to consider our kinship with other species and planetary ecosystems as a whole. I use this framework to analyse the posthuman community achieved by the end of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children series, arguing that the novels articulate a philosophical version of biomimicry by which human sociality is reengineered through models provided by other species. The novels articulate this as the difference between being “human” and being “Human,” the latter term designating not only Homo sapiens but also the uplifted spiders, octopi, and alien organisms that make up this new collective – but not homogenous – species. Tchaikovsky’s series is consistent with the ethics of kinship and reciprocity associated with critical posthumanism, but nonetheless its nomenclature of the Human betrays a lingering investment in the ideals of liberal humanist personhood: rationality as the privileged form of intelligence, a hierarchy between those recognised as persons and other kinds of life, and an emphasis on technological development understood as a marker of progress. On the one hand, then, the series exemplifies how posthuman thinking can expand our philosophical discourse beyond anthropocentrism, while on the other it demonstrates how easily posthumanism can fall back into the binary and hierarchical thinking that plagues humanism. It thus points to our ongoing struggle to find a way, as Haraway so succinctly put it decades ago, to “suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (Haraway 1991, 181). I suggest that it embodies the contractions of ongoing struggles over the meaning and trajectory of the field we call posthumanism and thus reveals our need to work through this “maze of dualisms” as an urgent task. Genres of the Human I approach this task through Sylvia Wynter’s work on what she calls “genres” of the human. While Wynter herself remains invested in a revised idea of the human, her work resonates strongly with posthuman thought and, moreover, offers a strongly needed historical grounding of humanist thought in relation to colonialism and systemic racism.2 Wynter begins from the problematic of articulating a universalist theory of the human from within the ethnocentric cultural perspective of the west. As Steve Fuller puts the issue, humanity can mean either “a specific group” or “a

Beyond Transcendence  229 distinctive idea” (Fuller 2020, 172).3 Wynter begins her essay “Toward the Sociogenic Principle” with a consideration of Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” – also often discussed in animal studies scholarship. While Nagel’s phenomenological enquiry focuses on the gap between human and animal experience due to specificities of embodiment (we can imagine what we think it would be like to be a bat, but not what it is like), Wynter connects this with Frantz Fanon’s work on how systemic racism creates conditions through which Black subjects experience a split subjectivity: something they understand as “acting black” through racist stereotypes and the responses of others to their skin tone, versus the actual experience of being a Black person, which is invisible to the dominant culture. Wynter develops her notion of the sociogenic principle from this dualism, arguing that it is a cultural or mythological system that programs or creates the category of the human. Like phylogeny (evolutionary development) or ontogeny (maturation from infant to adult), sociogeny is a shaping force that can produce different results over time and with different inputs, and thus it is analogous to the kind of intervention that critical posthumanism seeks to make in our categorical understanding of the human. Building on Fanon’s work on the self-destroying experience of being the target of systemic racism, Wynter argues “we can experience ourselves as human only through the mediation of the processes of socialization effected by the invented tekhne or cultural technological to which we give the name culture” (Wynter 2001, 53). The western humanist tekhne of the human is foundationally anti-Black, as Wynter explores here and (as a central concern) in her essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being.” In this essay, she outlines a history of a putatively universalist, yet truly exclusionary, concept of humanity – first rooted in notions of universal Christian fellowship and the inhumanity of those who refuse Christ; later anchored by nineteenth-century, colonial anthropology, inflected by Darwin, that biologised race and ranked skin colours as species. Both traditions rest on the non-humanity of most people and specifically target Africans as the least humanised. She dubs these “Man1” and “Man2,” thus noting gender bias as well, and calls on theorists to acknowledge and counter a history through which this limited figure “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself” (Wynter 2003, 260). Wynter shows us that there may be more than one “genre” of the human and that the dominant genre in western modernity simultaneously rendered “the indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as the transported enslaved Black Africans as the physical reference of the projected irrational/subrational Human Other to its civic-humanist, rational self-conception” (Wynter 2003, 281–282). Humanity as a species is constituted by so much more than this narrow figuration, and Wynter emphasises our need for both scientific and cultural

230  Sherryl Vint knowledge created from the position and representing the experiences of this wider genre of humanity. This new discourse of a transformed human will not only more accurately capture the true variety of human experience, but will also serve as a cultural system that reinforces a better way of being human – a way of being human that does not require binaries and hierarchies, that does not become human through the dehumanisation of other modes of being. Sociogeny, then, is a system for making the human that acknowledges that we can make the human otherwise. Writing and works of the imagination are central to Wynter’s notion of the sociogenic, but she also insists on a strongly materialist element, which she often discusses as part of the opioid system of human physiology that chemically rewards certain behaviours while negatively reinforcing others. Systemic racism, then, in both its use of overt violence and its microaggressions, works chemically to damage the phenomenological, embodied experience of those it dehumanises. Thus, Wynter argues, we need new cultural narratives that “as a transculturally applicable constant, [is] able to serve as the ‘common reality’ of our varied cultural modes of being/experiencing ourselves as human” (Wynter 2001, 60). Elsewhere she talks of the knowledge systems that ground sociogeny in terms of “ceremony” or cultural practices/understandings that make certain configurations of thought possible, beyond what is conceivable within western modernity, such as the full humanity of Black people (Wynter 1984). Similarly, in “How We Mistook the Map for the Territory,” Wynter contends: the systematic revalorization of black peoples can be fundamentally effected only by means of the no less systemic revalorization of the human being itself, outside the necessarily devalorizing terms of the biocentric descriptive statement of Man, over represented as if it were by that of the human. (Wynter 2006, 119) Wynter makes two additional and crucial observations about the function of sociogeny as a tekhne for making the human in this essay. First, she emphasises the co-production of societies with the kinds of people who inhabit them, and, moreover, that biology and culture are equal partners in this co-production: “the processes by which we produce our societies in order to live are the same auto-instituting processes by which we at the same time produce ourselves as this or that modality of an always already socialized, and therefore sociogenic, kind/genre of being human” (Wynter 2006, 134). Second, and relatedly, that the narrowly problematic version of humanity conceptualised by western modernity is deeply entangled with and serves to legitimate “the ways of functioning of our

Beyond Transcendence  231 ostensible extra-humanly mandated, global economic global-order based on free-market capitalism, to its subjects, whatever the grave social injustices and flagrant ills that continue to be generated as the logical costs of its functioning” (Wynter 2006, 144). Thus, the crisis of the ecological world and the crisis of the economic world order and the crisis of the white supremacist human subject are in important ways the same crisis. To put it differently, if we conceive of these interrelated problems through the perspective of sociogeny, it becomes clear that we cannot address one without addressing the others. Although it does not use Wynter’s language, and it differs in important ways from elements of her vision, this entanglement lies at the heart of the challenges thematised in Tchaikovsky’s Children series and inform the posthumanist solution it envisions. Varieties of the Posthuman The series Children of Time (2015) and Children of Ruin (2019) narrates events that take place across hundreds of thousands of years and engage evolutionary as well as sociogenic change. The first novel opens with future humans guiding a terraforming project on multiple planets, one of which, Kern’s World, will conduct an uplift experiment on primates. In this context, the term “uplift” means to raise the intelligence of these animals to a higher level (implying also a higher spiritual or moral level) – that is, to human equivalence. The primates to be sent down to the new world will be infected with a nanovirus capable of rewriting their DNA and thus both accelerating and directing their evolution, specifically along pathways associated with tool use and the development of scientific knowledge. Although humanity of this period has the resources to mount such an expedition, as well as extensive bases on other planetary bodies within the solar system, Earth itself is on the verge of environmental collapse and is rife with political instability. A fundamentalist religious faction, agitated about Dr Kern’s planned “exaltation of beasts” (Tchaikovsky 2016, 79), sabotages the project and indeed all the extraplanetary infrastructure, sending a computer virus that destroys the artificial intelligence (AI) systems the habitats depend upon. All of this happens in a few pages of prologue. Almost everyone on Earth dies in the military war that ensues, including almost everyone on space stations and orbiting ships. The lone human survivors are Kern herself, but only as an uploaded mind who, over the centuries, becomes fused with what remains of the ship’s AI; the crew of another terraforming mission, whose computer is offline at the crucial moment, thus missing infection by the virus; and a small crew of remnant humanity who manage to cobble together one final ship, the Gilgamesh, from what they can understand of legacy technology, using its cryo-sleep to reach another habitable planet and thus “save” the human species from extinction (their voyage

232  Sherryl Vint begins some 2,000 years after the world-destroying war). Kern’s primates are destroyed in an explosion initiated by a saboteur, but the nanovirus itself makes landfall and begins its work on another species, similar to Portia or jumping spiders, the main characters in the first novel. In the second novel, we follow the experiences of the second terraforming crew, whose number include octopi that have been selectively modified to aid in the construction of underwater facilities on the planet. The human members of the crew are killed by a different accident, leaving the octopi, like the spiders, to evolve as their species particularities direct. Each novel offers a compelling portrait of how, respectively, spiders and octopi might develop technology and a complex civilisation that is not merely a mirror of hominid evolutionary and technological history. The overarching narrative of the whole series concerns how each of these new cultures confronts the revenants of old humanity on the Gilgamesh when they arrive at Kern’s world, at first seeking to claim the planet as their own. The novels contain a range of transhuman and posthuman characters: the AI network to which Kern’s mind is uploaded, enabling her to live long enough to observe the entire evolutionary history of the spiders on the planet below; the original machine-based AI, Eliza, whose assessments often conflict with Kern’s as they struggle for hardware control; a robot spider who receives a copy of the uploaded Kern/Eliza fused entity, created as a technology to facilitate communication between human and spider across their distinct embodiments and semiotic systems; the uplifted and evolved spiders and octopi; and finally reanimated bodies of the infected crew of the second mission, controlled by a unicellular collective, akin to a slime mould, the original lifeform of the second planet, that absorbs or assimilates all life with which it comes into contact.4 Across these varieties of embodied/cultural personhood, the series shows us the pathways forward to find kinship and mutuality, without collapsing into a flat ontology. It also shows us how challenging it is for humanity, as we currently understand and experience it through western metaphysics, to be open to the changes required for mutual thriving and kinship across morphological difference. In each case, the humans originally regard the nonhuman species they encounter with fear and respond with violence; and each time, the novels insist, violence will lead only to environmental destruction and mutual extinction. As readers learn these lessons alongside the characters, the novels function as something akin to the new tekhne or “ceremony” that Wynter calls for – what she also calls a “new poetics” (Wynter 1995, 47) or new episteme that can shift us “from genetic to rhetorical-figurative systems of group bonding” (Wynter 1984, 24). Wynter’s new episteme requires us to see Europe from the outside, and the Children series similarly positions us with characters for whom what they call the Old Empire – that is, humanity that produced the terraforming,

Beyond Transcendence  233 resource-extracting, hierarchical culture – is foreign. Even the humans of the Gilgamesh come to distance themselves from this Old Empire, even as they envy the easier life enabled by its technology. Yet they remain enough like the humans of old that they initially approach the terraformed worlds with acquisitive intent, arguing that they are entitled to this world because they need it to survive, and the survival of humanity trumps the needs of the existing nonhuman species. Karst, their chief of security, comments: while we get ourselves set up, we’re going to be burning them out, too: clearing forest, driving off the wildlife, exterminating anything that looks at us funny. It’ll be fun. Frankly it’s the sort of thing I’ve been looking forward to since I first got aboard. (Tchaikovsky 2016, 496) The Earth from which they come is so damaged by war and the environmental damage ultimately triggered by this war’s pollution that they have trouble understanding the green colour of the terraformed world when they first view it on screen. Kern’s project to uplift primates might suggest some cross-species solidarity, but the very structure of uplift betrays the transhumanist modes of thinking that infect some versions of posthuman thought. She describes the project in terms that suggest transhumanist escape from materiality and embodiment rather than critical posthuman engagement with zoë-centred ethics. To Kern, “The whole point of civilization is that we exceed the limits of nature” (Tchaikovsky 2016, 4), and her culture’s investment in the terraforming project overall has an imperialist agenda, to ensure that: Even in the unthinkably far future, when Earth itself had fallen in fire and dust, there would be a legacy spreading across the stars – an infinite and expanding variety of Earth-born life diverse enough to survive any reversal of fortune until the death of the whole universe, and perhaps even beyond that. (Tchaikovsky 2016, 5–6) Her investment in the success of her experiment emerges from her own dreams of transcendence rather than from reciprocal notions of kinship. She describes it as a continuation of, rather than break with, the values of the Old Empire: “her dream, her planet. The first of many, she decided. This is the future. This is where mankind takes its next great step. This is where we become gods” (Tchaikovsky 2016, 3). And on both Kern’s Planet and the other terraforming world, the involvement of other species is initially envisioned within the colonialist hierarchies of being that Wynter critiques as the project of western liberal humanism. The uplifted

234  Sherryl Vint primates are sold to “the people back home” as “a race of uplifted sentient aides and servants” (Tchaikovsky 2016, 9), and the octopi are on the space mission in the first place as “a workforce” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 30) for engineering projects on the sea floor. The posthuman intervention of the narrative frustrates these dreams of human immortality: “Earth-born life” does indeed survive the destruction of the planet, but the kind of humanity that imagines itself the pinnacle of evolution is a liability to any kind of future, not the rightful inheritors of the universe. When the Gilgamesh arrives at the planet, Kern is their greatest threat, occupying an armed orbiting satellite. She prepares the spiders to fight off the human invasion so the conflict is a zero-sum game. Yet along the way, there are also hints that other genres of human are possible. The classicist Holsten, whose job it is to translate Old Empire materials, comes to see them “not as spacefaring godlike exemplars, as his culture had originally cast them, but as monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters” (Tchaikovsky 2016, 276). When the moment arrives to go to war with Kern, he questions the anthropocentric logic that legitimises their plan in the eyes of the mission’s leaders, thinking of “the Old Empire, which had been so civilized that it had in the end poisoned its own homeworld. And here we are, about to start ripping pieces of the ecosystem out of this new one” (Tchaikovsky 2016, 544). Similarly, the indigenous lifeform on the planet in Children of Ruin survives and becomes part of the eventual multispecies Human collective because one crew member feels unease about the terraforming mission objection, “which was, of course (and entirely incidentally), to destroy all this and replace it with something more like home” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 19). He thus decides to run a side project learning about this alien life in an area segregated from the terraforming initiative. It is only when the humans of the Gilgamesh meet with the evolved spiders on Kern’s world, however, that the species as a whole is changed to another genre, something less ecologically damaging, able to respond to difference with something other than fear and violence, and capable of cultivating empathy within the social fabric that holds both society and the embodied experience of being Human together. The evolution of spider technology and culture, and how that enables them to choose a pathway other than mutually assured destruction in the confrontation with the Gilgamesh, is the first step in this journey. Spider Technology and Octopoid Politics While the series uses the term “uplift,” and Kern imagines her project in a typical transhumanist way that equates rational intelligence with species superiority, what the nanovirus actually accentuates is social solidarity.5 Tchaikovsky adopts the convention of reusing the same name across generations of characters to chart the evolution of the spiders from when

Beyond Transcendence  235 their cognition begins to change to the advanced technological culture that develops its own computers, space travel, and genetic engineering. One of the names used is Portia, and for the first generation that experiences the virus, the focal character does not even conceive of herself as having a proper name – the changes inducing a greater capacity toward sociality also put the species on this pathway toward individual identities.6 The first change is that this Portia is able to perceive another of her species through a framework other than the reductive logic of “prey/mate/irrelevant.” This enables the two to hunt together, and a “new category appears that expands her options a hundredfold: ally” (Tchaikovsky 2016, 22). Thus, while the virus works on her cognition, the new kind of reason it enables grants her better survival strategies and ultimately access to more resources that in turn fuel further morphological and sociotechnical changes that enable additional newfound cognitive capacities and a greater capacity for cooperative actions. The cycle is self-reinforcing, but ultimately solidarity is what matters over abstract intelligence. Children of Time documents how Portia’s people develop technology through successive generations: they adopt practices of husbandry that increase the food supply, farming aphids and cultivating a tree whose sap they can consume; they fight a war over territory with ants, a species capable of acting collectively, but not consciously. They are aided in this project by the fact that the nanovirus changes their reproductive capacities such that they can inherit knowledge in Lamarckian fashion. Adopting techniques that they observe in Paussid beetles, who use chemical signals to misdirect ants, they ultimately turn “tamed” colonies of ants into an organic analytical engine that is able to perform complex calculations. Spider technology as a whole is organic and sustainable, based on silk, algae, ant colonies, and similar living components. They adopt an ethics of care in relation to this technology, which is never simply disposable, but always repurposed. Through research into chemistry, they discover reactions that produce heat and flame, which leads to an understanding of glass and metal work, finally enabling them to develop capacities to receive the signal that the uploaded Kern continually sends to the planet: the signal is a test, and once the uploaded species can respond to it and answer its mathematical queries, she will deem them ready to join with her in the project of founding a new civilisation. These sections of the narrative unsettle anthropocentric hegemony in this vision of how evolution might have unfolded otherwise, showing that the technological achievements that supposedly set humanity apart could conceivably have been achieved by other species, by different pathways. The more important posthuman intervention, however, lies not in how the spiders can replicate human achievements, but in how they differ from the genre of the human that became dominant in western modernity. When the Gilgamesh threatens to take the planet, Kern helps the spiders

236  Sherryl Vint to prepare weapons to defend the planet in a manner distinct from their previous encounters of warfare with the ants. In that battle over territory, rather than seek to eradicate the ants and keep all the territory for themselves, the spiders found a way to incorporate the ants into their culture. Thus, while Kern approaches the conflict through the same ethos that drives the leaders on the Gilgamesh – that either spiders or humans will destroy the other entirely, that the planet will wholly belong to the victor – the spiders have a different metaphysics: “For a species that thinks naturally in terms of interconnected networks and systems, the idea of a war of conquest and extermination – rather than a campaign of conversion, subversion and co-option – does not come easily” (Tchaikovsky 2016, 334). Kern prepares them to fight a genocidal war, but the spiders deviate from her plans. Just as the first Portia was able to perceive a male of her species as an ally, enabling a new kind of sociality to emerge that was not possible within traditional classifications of the other, the spider culture can perceive the arrival of the Gilgamesh outside of the frame of reference that dooms both Kern and its crew to repeat the errors of the Old Empire: Faced with the arrival of humanity, the creator-species, the giants of legend, the spiders’ thought was not How can we destroy them? but How can we trap them? How can we use them? What is the barrier between us that makes them want to destroy us? The spiders have equivalents of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, but they think in terms of intricate interconnectivity, of a world not just of sight but of constant vibration and scent. (Tchaikovsky 2016, 589) That is, contra that famed moment of evolutionary leap canonised in Stanley Kubrick’s influential science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when primates discover the power of technology through the use of a bone as a club, from the point of view of spider culture the primary technological orientation is building. This intuition enables a posthuman future in which humans and spiders can prioritise connection over difference, not the gap between vertebrates and invertebrates but the fact that “they share ancestors five hundred million years old” (Tchaikovsky 2016, 455). While this is obviously different from Wynter’s critique of the ethnocentrism of European thought and its narrow conception of the human that has anchored modernity, we can understand this moment through her theorisation of the necessary link between biological and cultural development. The virus rewrites the species on a genetic level, but it is the values of interconnection that structure that spiders’ worldview that functions as sociogeny. And both are required in the transition to shared

Beyond Transcendence  237 community that the series describes as the move from human to Human culture: The Portiids took the virus that had aided their evolution, which had allowed them to know one another and come together rather than living out their lives as single hunters, and introduced it to their creators, who were also the virus’s creators, gifting them with the understanding that here, too, were minds who looked out and sought to know the universe. And so it was that peace was made between the humans and the Portiids, and a new golden age dawned, and the humans would forever after be not just humans but Humans, which is a far better thing. (Tchaikovsky 2019, 74) Yet even as we see in this example the programming of a new culturalmythological system that allows a more capacious understanding of the category human/kin, we also see in the use of the capital H “Human” a hint that the series retains some of the hierarchical tendencies that are more typical of transhumanism. This is apparent as well in the shared bond rooted in “minds” and the desire to “know the universe,” which can easily translate into an imperialist ethos. Tchaikovsky’s work, then, is post-anthropocentric, but it does not always fully deconstruct and rewrite humanism. Nonetheless, especially in its critique of the ecological destruction wrought by the Old Empire, the series demonstrates a connection between post-anthropocentrism and new ethical ways of living that is pushed further in the second novel, Children of Ruin. This novel shows yet another path to a technologically advanced society invented through the aptitudes of octopi. But, more importantly, it also begins to push against the liberal notion of a unified self that is replicated in how Children of Time represents spider interiority. Here, too, Tchaikovsky uses the convention of replicating names across generations of individuals – the main one being Paul in this case – to allow some sense of continuity while portraying events that take place across thousands of years. Children of Ruin alternates between two timelines: the story of the Old Empire expedition that is cut off when Earth collapses, and the rising culture of the octopi that develops after the humans die. Most of the original crew are killed when they become infected by the indigenous organism. Yet “killed” is perhaps the wrong word: the humans’ memories and aspects of their personality become assimilated into the vast unicellular network of the organism, and thus they have a kind of continued existence, just not as autonomous individuals.7 As the former captain Yusaf explains to Senkovi, the crew member who modified and trained the octopi, the attempt by reanimated bodies

238  Sherryl Vint such as Yusaf’s to infect the remaining human crew members should be understood as a liberation, not a death: We are Yusuf still, your friend. We will do no harm. You will never be alone again. Isn’t that a good? Yusuf, this vessel and These-of-we, we understand now that all the limits of your world are needless. We are greater and greater. You expand our world. We cure your singularity. Isn’t that a good? (Tchaikovsky 2019, 271) Nonetheless, the first human generation fears infection and each tries in terror to avoid succumbing. The narrative voice used for the organism is instructive, signalling as it does collectivity – “we” – but also the capacity for multiplicity within that collective identity: it is “These-of-we” speaking, not some undifferentiated group mind. When the organism reanimates a particular person, it speaks as if the continuation of a specific individual, reconstructing or simulating the original neural network, “and, for as long as the simulation lasted, believed herself to be this [the original person]” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 488). The cellular entities are thereby similar to uploaded minds that run on silicon rather than the alien’s organic form of information storage and processing. This parallel will be the key to rapprochement between the Human collective and the alien biota, but before that is discussed in more detail, it is important to first turn to the other plotline regarding the octopus’ culture. In his final act, their protector Senkovi crashes and buries the human ship to prevent the alien organism onboard from infecting the now terraformed surface that is home to the octopi. In his last communication to them, he marks this site and human morphology in general as objects of extreme danger, hoping to prevent all future generations from excavations that could release the single-celled organisms. This is relevant because it sets up this culture, as with the spiders, to regard the arrival of different kinds of people as an existential threat. Thus, when a crew of Humans from Kern’s World arrive to investigate a planet that they know was part of the Old Empire terraforming project, they encounter an octopus civilisation that has been primed by Senkovi to respond with all-encompassing war. Just as in Children of Time, however, the ways in which the octopi are not like Old Empire humanity is the key to a non-genocidal outcome. Octopi have a distributed rather than centralised nervous system, with about two-thirds of their neuronal material located in their arms; Tchaikovsky uses the language of “crown” and “reach” to differentiate these kinds of cognition. The result is an organism that is an individual and yet does not have an experience of self that aligns with the liberal humanist language of autonomy, will, choice, and independence. The octopi process

Beyond Transcendence  239 information as much through affect as through reasoning, communicating conscious and subconscious content simultaneously as they cannot help but reveal their emotional state through coloured patterns on their skin. This different kind of cognition results in a personhood that has “an ego that looks upon itself and recognizes its separation from the rest of the universe, just as it recognizes distinct parts of that universe which are its kin, rivals, potential mates,” but at the same time does not see these categories or identities as fixed: “a rival one day may be a friend the next”; even the self is “a protean being, psychologically as well as physically” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 198). The octopi lack a concept of sovereignty because they govern by consensus, collectively but also within their own bodies. Reach and crown sometimes disagree on the appropriate course of action, which can result in behaviour that looks random and contradictory from a human point of view, as several courses of action are tried, abandoned, returned to, or dropped before a consensus is reached. As one Human character reminds herself as she struggles to communicate with the octopi, it is not that “They don’t even know what they want!”, but rather that “They want many things,” and that these “conflicting urges and drives” are “literally on the surface all the time” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 332). This distinct kind of cognition produces a political system very different from the theories of sovereignty that ground western modernity. The octopi are driven by curiosity more than anything else, as Senkovi discovers in his attempts to train them to use the terraforming and computer equipment. They do not respond to Pavlovian conditioning or follow direct orders. Instead, he gives them long-term goals, flagged by associating certain conditions with good emotions, rather than blueprint or tasks, and the octopi find their own pathways to achieving them. They often seem distracted and as if they are doing anything but pursuing the objective, yet in truth they “were employing something like abstract reasoning, free association of ideas. The individual arms still at work were their subconscious” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 122). This creates challenges when the Human crew first try to communicate with the octopi, as they similarly have no central governance: individual factions are entitled to pursue the course of action that seems best to them, and so the first octopus ship the Human crew encounters tries both to communicate with them (curiosity dominating this faction) and to destroy them (the warnings of danger dominate for others). Until the Humans learn how to read and reproduce the emotional part of the octopi language, these changes in action seem to erupt “without any sign or warning” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 180). But eventually the Humans learn that the ever-shifting consensus is communicated by threat displays, a way of winning others to one’s perspective through affect rather than deliberation. As in the encounter between humans and spiders, this Human collective eventually finds a way to communicate across their differences, forming an

240  Sherryl Vint even-wider Human collective that now includes the octopi. Just as the spiders’ capacity for building and networking lends new modes of being to this collective which temper the original human tendencies that could lead to Old Empire destruction, so too do the octopi’s distinct methods of nonconscious cognition and political consensus building offer new tools to forge the future. The octopi civilisation itself also requires this fusion with the Human collective, for its own tendencies toward expansion have created internal problems of overpopulation and pollution that would otherwise put the octopi on a path too similar to the one that destroyed Earth. They work together to confront – and transform – one final threat, the slime mould organism that constituted the original ecosystem of the alien planet. The transition from human to Human at each stage involves a more diffuse concept of selfhood and a wider empathetic connection to other life. The conclusion of the series brings the alien slime mould creature into this collective to convey one final new lesson about the new ethics of posthuman personhood, teaching the slime mould to connect with the other species, as it has been doing, but not to transform the new into the same. Instead of continuing to assimilate all life into versions of itself, a mode of existence akin to the imperialist impulses of the Old Empire terraforming project, the slime mould entity is shown, via computer simulation, the futility and boredom that would result from taking such a path, which leaves it “utterly alone despite all its plurality” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 531). This entity, too, is driven by curiosity and intelligence: it wants to see the wider universe of which it has become aware through its ability to look at human memories, lamenting: “How We tried and tried to know the universe through our simulated Lante [a human character] and found it only dust, because all we could generate was from within ourselves, and the true wonder was outside, in the sky” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 525). Seeking mastery over the environment and using intelligence to transform that environment for oneself – the path of the Old Empire – provides only inadequate transcendence. As the novel puts it, the entity “is a child reaching for a soap bubble in innocent wonder, and finding only an oily residue on its hands, and the world cheapened and coarsened” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 531). The real wonder, transcendence that will reach for the sky, the stars, requires “accepting the other … only by allowing the universe to be separate from it can it have the infinite variety it craves” (Tchaikovsky 2019, 541). This is posthumanism beyond transcendence. Conclusion: Sociogency, Ceremony, Posthumanism Tchaikovsky’s series, then, through its critique of anthropocentrism and its image of a collective Human species that embraces kinship with nonhuman others, offers ways to think beyond humanism. Its concern with

Beyond Transcendence  241 nonhuman species connects to ecological themes, in which the drive for territorial acquisition and resource expansion on the part of the Old Empire doom Earth and the human species to extinction. The revised Human species will continue to a better future. The nanovirus that enables these transitions focuses on cultivating solidarity across species, rewriting kinship based on what Children of Time calls “empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too”; a quality, it argues, that “conquers all, in the end” (Tchaikovsky 2016, 598). The continued investment in technological achievement and interstellar exploration suggests elements of the transhuman remain active in this future imaginary, which is not entirely consistent with the zoë-centred ethics celebrated by posthuman theorists such as Haraway and Braidotti. Nonetheless, it offers a vision of how humanity might rewrite what Wynter calls our sociogenic programming – that is, “the invented tekhne or cultural technological to which we give the name culture” (Wynter 2001, 53). The novel does not address the damage of racialisation that is the focus of Wynter’s critique, and I want to stress that in using her work to read the series I do not intend to render equivalent the different tekhne of personhood uncovered by the post-anthropocentric vision in the Children series with Wynter’s argument that genres of “being human” exist that are invisible to western humanism because of its history of anti-Black racism. Rather, my point is to suggest that the post-Anthropocentric themes of this series can fruitfully be put into dialogue with Wynter’s work to deepen our understanding of how sociogeny works as a cultural system of subject- and world-making and to ask what role literary representations can play in shifting this value system. Wynter calls for critics to enhance our understanding of the “laws of functioning of the rhetorically coded modes of figuration” (Wynter 1984, 44), which is urgently needed because of the damage done to Black subjects by the “structural contradiction between their lived experience and the grammar of representations which generate the modes of reality by prescribing the parameters of collective behaviors that dynamically bring that ‘reality’ into being” (Wynter 1984, 39). Further, she argues that we urgently need to do this work because we live collectively in a common environment, which has connotations both of our shared political-economic global order and of the ecological world upon which we all rely to continue to exist. The “reality” of racial capitalist modernity puts us on a path of doom as certainly as that followed by the series’ Old Empire. Thus, Wynter argues: we must now consciously alter our mode of self-troping, together with the related orienting desire/aversion machinery of our orders of discourse and the related semantic charter or rhetor-neuro-physiological program that constitutes our “world of mind.” This is the price, in

242  Sherryl Vint the face of the possibility of our extinction, or our self-realization as a species. (Wynter 1984, 52) In the years since she published this essay, the problem has only become more dire. The term “ceremony” which Wynter uses is another word for this “self-troping” or for “rhetorically coded modes of figuration”: while it does not address the question of racial justice that must be the priority, the Children series’ interest in rethinking personhood beyond anthropocentrism and rethinking community beyond humanist transcendence does enable us to begin to think about what consciously altering our mode of self-troping might look like. The rewriting done by the nanovirus, combined with the cultural shifts demanded by a multispecies community, is an example of how biological and sociocultural evolution can work jointly. The critique of anthropocentrism in the series might usefully be connected to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s indispensable work showing how the categories of blackness and of animality are coproduced and mutually reinforcing in Eurocentric modernity and thus why recognition as human under the organising rubric of liberal humanism does not best serve to dismantle the anti-Blackness that grounds modernity. Instead, Jackson follows Wynter in arguing that we need to alter “the meaning and significance of being (human)” (Jackson 2020, 1). Tchaikovsky’s series offers one such example of changing the content of “being (human)” as it also decentres the idea of a human that takes its meaning from the gap between it and abjected others—animals, but also and foundationally what Jackson calls “black(ened) humanity” (Jackson 2020, 3), a term that emphasises the sociogenic constitution of this subject position. In reading Tchaikovsky through Wynter, I hope to have shown how political commitments to post-anthropocentric require us to work in solidarity with antiracism as we come to terms with the damaging history of modernity and to hope, with Wynter, to rewrite this “rhetor-neuro-physiological program” and ourselves as a better genre of the human. Notes 1 And this is simply within western tradition. As Indigenous scholars such as Mark Minch de Leon and others point out, the notion of being “post”-human is required only in a philosophical tradition that emerged from the segregation of humanity from all other species – a characteristic of western philosophical systems than finds no parallel in indigenous thought. See Minch de Leon (2020). 2 Regardless of their differing fields of research, both Alexander Weheliye (biopolitics theorist) and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (animal studies theorist) put Wynter’s thought into dialogue with posthuman thinking. See Weheliye (2014) and Jackson (2020).

Beyond Transcendence  243 3 Fuller’s interest lies in differentiating a Greek tradition of thought interested in the question of “how to render a being ‘human’” (Fuller 2020, 173) through education from a Judeo-Christian tradition interested in the distinct and chosen people who constitute the true community of humanity. Wynter draws similarly on this Christian tradition, but also thinks outside of western frameworks. 4 As Steven Shaviro explains in his book Discognition – which considers slime mould among other examples as evidence that thinking itself is far more common and far more diverse in form than humanism concedes – slime mould “has millions of nuclei; but they are all contained within the membrane of a single enormous cell” (Shaviro 2016, 193), and it demands a way of thinking outside the individual/collective binary: “it cannot quite be defined either as a single individual (like most unicellular organisms), nor as a superorganism composed of multiple individuals (in the manner of coral reefs, anthills, and beehives)” (Shaviro 2016, 195). 5 Several sections in the novel discuss in detail why the Portia spiders are the best hosts for the virus among other species it infects, explaining why they thus become the dominant form on the planet. The novel also asserts that the virus was originally designed to work on primates alone and to eschew other vertebrate species (Kern wanted no competition with her chosen species), thereby explaining why other mammals are conceptually excluded. While this makes little sense scientifically in a novel that is otherwise based in detailed research about the capacities of Portia spiders and octopi, it is a useful conceit for the novel’s posthuman theme. Rather than imagining a new community of humans and the other mammal species most like us, it demands that we stretch our imagination to conceive of kinship with species who have evolved very differently. 6 Most of the central spider characters are female, reflective of the mating and hunting habits of the species. There is an entire plotline about how their hierarchical gendered arrangements, which in this case favour females, are transformed toward greater equality as part of their more complex culture. A generational series of male characters is introduced, using the name Fabian (they become known for their craftsman/scientific abilities). 7 This version of takeover by an alien organism that replaces everything with itself is a familiar trope in science fiction, which can be traced back to John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1938), best known through John Carpenter’s film adaptation, The Thing (1982). Unlike these originals, in which humans must save the planet by rooting out and destroying what is alien, the novel takes this trope in a new direction. The original vision is exemplary of a rigid humanism carefully policing the boundaries of the fully human, and has been read as thematising the patriarchal, capitalist, and heteronormative foundations of this genre of the human. See Vint (2005), Rieder (1982), and Pearson (1999). There are also echoes here of Jack Finney’s influential novel The Body Snatchers (1954), which is perhaps better known through the 1956 film adaptation, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It is a film that has been remade several times, which speaks to an ongoing preoccupation with this motif.

References Braidotti, Rosi. (2019), Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity. Fuller, Steve. (2020), “The Unity of Humanity,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, edited by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg, 171–182. London: Bloomsbury.

244  Sherryl Vint Haraway, Donna. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna. (1991), “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. London: Routledge. Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. (2020), Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press. Minch de Leon, Mark. (2020), “Race and the Limitations of ‘the Human’,” in After the Human: Culture, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century, edited by Sherryl Vint, 206–219. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearson, Wendy. (1999), “Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer,” Science Fiction Studies 26, 1 (Mar): 1–22. Rieder, John. (1982), “Embracing the Alien: Science Fiction in Mass Culture,” Science Fiction Studies 9, 1 (Mar): 26–37. Shaviro, Steven. (2016), Discognition. London: Repeater Books. Tchaikovsky, Adrian. (2019), Children of Ruin. New York: Orbit. Tchaikovsky, Adrian. (2016), Children of Time. London: Pan Books. Vint, Sherryl. (2005), “Who Goes There? ‘Real’ Men, Only,” Extrapolation 46, 4 (Winter): 421–438. Weheliye, Alexander G. (2014), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. (2006), “On How We Mistook the Map For the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Dèsêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, 107–169. Boulder: Paradigm. Wynter, Sylvia. (2003), “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, 3 (Fall): 257–337. Wynter, Sylvia. (2001), “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black’,” in National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, edited by Mercedes F. Duran-Cogan and Antonio Gomez-Moriana, 30–66. London: Routledge. Wynter, Sylvia. (1995), “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5–57. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Wynter, Sylvia. (1984), “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism,” Boundary 2 12, 3: 19–70.

24 Scoby skin, Yellow soup  

HSURAE

COMMOTION I ​

Figure 24.1  Two single-celled organisms. Source: HSURAE.

Hi there I’`m m`istre^ss kin$hi?p. (my pronouns are they/it) I’l! b(e yo`ur ho/st tod@y. gatcacaggt

DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-30

246 HSURAE But to be completely honest, I’m not just hosting you. (a second set of breathing) (a butterfly flutters) (surround sound - bubbling) I am a puppet of the microbial, my thoughts   encoded by viral genes, (ctatcaccct) my desires  conditioned by bacterial wants. Like the insect whose gender—       is bent by the Wolbachia bacteria; Like the      ant aimlessly aimlessly aimlessly lurching under the persuasion of the Cordycep fungi;

Scoby skin, Yellow soup  247 Or the zombie snail that climbs up to the top of a tree, (pulsating) (awaiting) the bird that consumes it. (agency) —who decides? “me” or “my microbes”? attaaccact Can the two ever be distinct from, outside of, each other? I want you to know this joy of being through others. We are not in ourselves, we are through others, always through others. COMMOTION II​

Figure 24.2  Passport skin. Source: HSURAE.

248 HSURAE When syphilis swept across Europe in the fifteenth century “it was ‘French pox’ to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese” (Sontag 1988, 48). Six centuries later, the same rhetoric brands immigrants as “invasion” and COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus,” “Kung flu.”  The focus on the questions of “origins” cacgggagct reveals the anxieties to contain or find a container for. The bat, the pangolin, the Chinese. HOW MANY CITIZENS ARE LIVING IN THIS BODY? Who counts? {Are you still there?} Who’s counting?

Scoby skin, Yellow soup  249 COMMOTION III ​

Figure 24.3  The body without skin. Source: HSURAE.

How to begin? (a third set of palpitations) Before humans evolved a central nervous system, there was the “BRAIN IN THE GUT” – a powerful displacement of cognition and agency. We have gut feelings, we get butterflies in our stomachs, we are gutsy. There is no point in our physical development that was not heavily influenced by signals from our microbiota. Long before the scientific field’s recognition of our “brain in the gut” we have known of its presence, viscerally. Cognition isn’t an artifact of the mind, but a result of the enactment of a full body experience. void loop() { // brain in the gut THINK (digest); Drink kombucha (ctccatgcat); } Can there be one beginning? Where should coordinate (0,0,0) be set? There are two main theories on the origins of life on earth – panspermia and endosymbiosis. The former postulates the source of life while the latter considers the evolution of life forms. Panspermia advocates that the source of life came from extremophile bacteria resting inside asteroids, which

250 HSURAE crashed on earth and multiplied exponentially. Endosymbiosis holds that prokaryotes swallowed each other, and due to indigestion evolved into new life forms, just as the mitochondria in our cells. ttggtatttt :herein lies the first line of the human mitochondrial DNA, inherited from ancestral bacteria. WE originated from a primordial intrusion of alterity WE did not learn to live symbiotically {BUT I DID} WE celebrate the cult of individualism WE fear the stranger. The etymology of “alien” is “originating from another.” We are, after all, aliens. Through and through, infiltrated by and contaminated with others, we owe everything to these endosymbiotic relationships. Contamination is not just inevitable; it is an ontological state.

Scoby skin, Yellow soup  251 COMMOTION IV ​

Figure 24.4  The coprolite. Source: HSURAE.

))(( (Manifestly fecal) “yellow soup,” as recorded in The Compendium of Materia Medica from 4th Century China, is the earliest literature on fecal matter as medicine. Today, the fecal microbiota transplant is a therapeutic option in a variety of conditions. In mice, stool transplants lead to a    in personality. (Is this some form of empathy?) What if empathy wasn’t a choice? This B e co  m  i   ng

(mind the leak) contaminated,

252 HSURAE dOminated, non-human, (mineral) morethan-human, host, (parasite) is ridden with danger and seduction. But aren’t we all embodied “contamination”? In material —endosymbiosis; microbiome; the human virome. In affect —the moment that intrudes consciousness— empathy, wonder, or something in between. (deep breath)  1  2   3 You were always already ready ready for change ready to be changed Let us begin our first exchange. Reference Sontag, Susan. (1988), AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

25 Posthuman Spirituality Francesca Ferrando and Debashish Banerji

Etymology and Genealogy The term “spirituality” has a long history with changing meanings. Etymologically, spirituality comes from the Latin word spiritus, which means variously “breath,” “life,” “soul,” and sits in relation to the verb spirare – “to breathe.” As such, the term “spirit” refers to the animating, or vital principle of living things – something that can be traced to many different world traditions. For instance, in Christianity, through the medieval period in Europe, the term “spirituality” acquired connotations related to being animated by the Holy Spirit. It also became associated ontologically with the realm of Heaven as opposed to that of the Earth, socially to the monastic life, and psychologically to the domain of subjective praxis such as prayer, contemplation, the analysis of feelings, and the practice of purity of motives (Waaijman 2002, 360–361). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through exposure to world religious traditions and practices, the term developed both wider religious and non-sectarian connotations. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American transcendentalists, Theosophy and its allied schools of Western esotericism, perennialism, and a growing exposure to Asian religious ideas and practices were largely responsible for this shift in meaning.1 The World’s Parliament of Religions of 1893 introduced a number of Asian traditions, such as Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism to the Western understanding of spirituality.2 Several Asian traditions, based on the Vedas and Upanishads in India, and on Daoist texts and practices in China, have espoused a non-dual spiritual phenomenology. Spirituality, conceived as the essential perception of the non-duality of natural and supranatural phenomena, is at the foundation of natural religions, expressed in shamanistic and animistic practices. It remains a vital path of revealed religions as well. For instance, Sufism is considered by Sufis the spiritual essence and the inner dimension of Islam, while religion is considered the outer dimension.3 Yet spirituality does not need to be part of any religious path. Since the 1950s, the term

DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-31

254  Francesca Ferrando and Debashish Banerji “spirituality” has increasingly separated itself from organized religion (Waaijman 2002, 361). In the 1960s, spirituality became the cornerstone of a social movement in the USA – “spiritual but not religious” – that not only made it a contemporary identity marker, but further allowed for the distancing of it from notions of an organized tradition of practices and customs – religion.4 Spirituality has also come to be equated with non-ordinary subjective experiences in newer academic fields of psychology such as Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology (Houtman and Aupers 2007). This academic turn is often associated with William James’s influential book Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Spirituality today has closer connotations to mysticism and modifications or extensions of consciousness in universally oriented experiences. Such experiences may include theistic, pantheistic, and/or non-theistic experiences of monistic and/or relational varieties. They may refer to the mystical aspects of existing orthodox religious traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and/or indigenous or eclectic traditions of the world, such as Shamanism, Paganism, or Tantra, as well as non-traditional or modern synthetic approaches. For the purposes of this glossary, we acknowledge this meaning of spirituality along with its admittedly fuzzy boundaries. Posthumanism and Spirituality Spirituality has a number of important overlaps with posthumanism. As a critique of humanism, posthumanism questions the definitions and boundaries of the human. In this sense, spirituality is seen as an important genealogy for the transcendence of the human. Though historically access to education has been severely limited, spirituality has been available to all humans in even the most challenging of times. A history of beliefs, visions, prayers, and rituals has accompanied the historical outcomes of the most oppressed categories of human beings.5 For instance, in response to a profound experience of generational dehumanization, African-American slaves expressed their feelings through songs characterized by the recurring theme of a trusting faith in the afterlife, as attested in the tradition of slave spirituals.6 The long lineage of European women mystics of the Middle Ages is another example of the power of spirituality, which the violence of patriarchy could not silence.7 The spiritual traditions of the world have assumed the capacity of the human to modify or exceed its “given” boundaries based on the goal of a Deleuzian becoming. Moreover, humanism is based on foundational assumptions of dualism, such as mind and body, thinking and feeling, reason and madness, subject and object, West and East, World and Earth – identifying with and privileging one side of the binary equation while subordinating, othering, or exiling the other.8 Critical posthumanism seeks

Posthuman Spirituality  255 to problematize these binaries and eventually overcome them. Spirituality assumes transpersonal experiences and forms of being in which apparently distinct ontological boundaries may similarly be blurred or erased, leading to non-dualistic experiences. Differences and Qualifications Although the modern development of spirituality has had an anti-materialist emphasis, posthumanism has premised itself exactly within and on material realities as a means of responding most directly to empirical inequalities. That said, posthumanism includes a critique of reductive materialism and embraces immanent ontologies in which matter comprehends and/or co-exists with life, mind, and/or spirit. Therefore, the overlap between posthumanism and spirituality includes predominantly those traditions and practices which are life- and matter-affirming. In this sense, the rich trajectories of material feminism and feminist spirituality have been foundational to a posthuman thought that seeks to privilege a relational ontology that refuses the erasure of difference.9 Spiritual traditions have also, in some cases, adapted to humanistic, anthropocentric, and biocentric privileging. Posthuman spirituality rejects these hierarchic aspects. Furthermore, it aligns with the possibility of technological enlightenment, as suggested by recent adaptations according to which technology can be a site of spiritual awakening through the phenomenology of human–machine relations, inspired by technological animism as well as by the Mahāyāna Buddhist perception of the all-pervading Buddha-nature.10 Therefore, its overlap with spirituality endorses those experiences which conserve the expression and play of the world while grounding these in a connected, transcendent, as well as radically immanent, consciousness or being (Banerji 2016). This is an embodied and situated perspective that, because it is located, can be(come) both an all-pervading awareness and an inclusive relatedness as of a mirror reflecting mirrors, where there is no centre. Given these ontological and ethical perceptions, the intersection of posthumanism and spirituality may be referred to as posthuman spirituality. Posthuman Spirituality As such, posthuman spirituality can be thought of as the final form of deconstruction of any dichotomic approach. For this reason, spirituality can be seen as an important resource for posthumanism when it is consulted as a way of existing. Developed out of the understanding of the posthuman as a non-hierarchical, all-encompassing location of posthumanist and post-anthropocentric revelations, a posthuman spiritual approach does not rely on any words, notions, intentions, thoughts, or

256  Francesca Ferrando and Debashish Banerji acts and beliefs that are constructed from human or non-human hierarchies. Posthuman spirituality retains traditional spirituality’s capacity to conceive existence more extensively than the “given” individual perception. It is a recognition of the self in others: within the posthuman spiritual realm, there is no division based on caste, colour, creed, gender, age, nationality, religion, or species (to name just a few typically wellemployed categorical markers). Posthuman spirituality leads to a state of consciousness, which may be approached as the transcendence of the human in toto, which is to say as a condition that exceeds and precedes humanhood. In this spiritual sense, humans have always been posthuman (Ferrando 2016, 2024). By attuning to a spiritual dimension, the posthuman seeker becomes aware of humanist, anthropocentric, and dualistic tendencies, as real obstacles to an integral experience of existence. In this way, posthuman spirituality becomes a discipline based on full existential honesty. Overall, although posthuman spirituality is indebted to many spiritual traditions, its offerings are unique and much needed in the twenty-first century. Notes 1 For a clear discussion of American transcendentalism, see Schmidt (2005). And on perennialism, see McMahan (2008). 2 On the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, see Hartz (2015). 3 On Sufism, see Nasr (1999). 4 On this cultural movement, see Erlandson (2000). 5 On the many varieties of posthuman thought, see Ferrando (2019). 6 On the tradition of slave spirituals, see White (1983). 7 See, for example, Petroff (1994) and Furlong (1996). 8 On those that have been excluded from the Humanist notion of Man, see Braidotti (2013). 9 On material feminism, see Alaimo (2010), Coole and Frost (2010), and Bennett (2010). On feminist spirituality, see Finson (1987). For a profound staging of a relational ontology that simultaneously refuses the dissolution of difference, see Barad (2007). 10 On the notion of technological animism, see Jensen and Blok (2013). On the specific relation of Buddha-nature to robotics, see Mori (1981).

References Alaimo, Stacy. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Banerji, Debashish. (2016), “Individuation, Cosmogenesis, and Technology: Sri Aurobindo and Gilbert Simondon,” in Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, edited by Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape, 257–277. New Delhi: Springer. Barad, Karen. (2007), Meeting the Universe Half-Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Posthuman Spirituality  257 Bennett, Jane. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. (2013), The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Erlandson, Sven. (2000), Spiritual But Not Religious: A Call to Religious Revolution in America. Bloomington: Iuniverse. Ferrando, Francesca. (2024), The Art of Being Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Ferrando, Francesca. (2019), Philosophical Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury. Ferrando, Francesca. (2016), “Humans Have Always Been Posthuman: A Spiritual Genealogy of the Posthuman,” in Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, edited by Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape, 243–256. New Delhi: Springer. Finson, Shelley. (1987), “Feminist Spirituality within the Framework of Feminist Consciousness,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 16, 1: 65–77. Furlong, Monica. (1996), Visions and Longings: Medieval Women Mystics. Boston: Shambala. Hartz, Richard. (2015), The Clasp of Civilizations: Globalization and Religion in a Multicultural World. New Delhi: DK Printworld. Houtman, Dick and Stef Aupers. (2007), “The Spiritual Turn and the Decline of Tradition: The Spread of Post-Christian Spirituality in 14 Western Countries, 1981–2000,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46, 3 (Sep): 305–320. James, William. (1902), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902. New York: Dover. Jensen, Casper Bruun and Anders Blok. (2013), “Techno-Animism in Japan: Shinto Cosmograms, Actor-network Theory, and the Enabling Powers of Non-human Agencies,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, 2: 84–115. McMahan, David L. (2008), The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mori, Masahiro. (1981), The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion. Tokyo: Kosei Publishing. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. (1999), Sufi Essays. Chicago: Kazi Publications. Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda. (1994), Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, Leigh. (2005), Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperOne. Waaijman, Kees. (2002), Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. White, John. (1983), “Veiled Testimony: Negro Spirituals and the Slave Experience,” Journal of American Studies 17, 2 (Aug): 251–263.

26 The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay Intersecting Technology and Folk Belief in Posthuman Spirituality Evelyn Wan

Minor Gestures of a Cyborgian Left Hand What will the climate crisis bring? What kind of future lies ahead of us? In front of the seeker was the screen, and a deck of digital tarot cards was laid out. After a question was asked, the seeker reached out for the mouse with her left hand. She navigated to her desired card and clicked on it. The card flipped in swift animation and revealed a title. The card chosen was Extinction …

What question would you pose in front of an oracle for the climate crisis? The 22Mirrors Project by the Digital Witchcraft Institute was presented for the first time in front of an audience at the V2_Lab for Unstable Media in Rotterdam in May 2022, where participants sat in a circle awaiting the wisdom of the tarot oracle. Artist Danae Tapia and writer Javier Bertossi joined hands in writing a series of speculative literary fiction based on key archetypes found in the climate debate. Drawing on commonly evoked tropes that have come to play an increasingly important role in climate discourse, they created narratives from such figurations as “The Child,” in reference to the activism led by Greta Thunberg, the “Space Colony,” in reference to the dream of the ultra-rich to build new habitats and colonise other planets in the hope of escaping an uninhabitable Earth, and “The Cow,” a nod to the dairy industry’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. The affective discourse and talking points around these archetypes were reworked literarily into short speculative narratives, and in the presentation, Tapia and Bertossi read out these stories and generated readings of the tarot cards in relation to the questions posed by the participants. As a project, 22Mirrors represents a growing field of practices in the crossovers between technology and spirituality, which can be grouped under the phrase “digital witchcraft.”1 Healers, mediums, artists, and other practitioners who self-identify as witches make use of digital devices, algorithmic automation, and social media platforms in order to re-enchant technology as a tool for empowerment against dominant capitalistic structures. 22Mirrors, for instance, is part divination, DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-32

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  259 part storytelling, part community-building around ways to rethink approaches to the unfolding climate emergency of our times. Funded in part by the Climate-KIC International Foundation, the project aims to open up alternative climate conversations through speculative fiction and spirituality. Rather than presenting statistics and scientific information, the speculative climate stories appeal to the imagination, folk beliefs, and affective responses. Throughout the evening, the artists emphasised that the cards had to be selected with the left hand, a practice that is common to traditional tarot reading with cards – transposed to today’s digital setting as a left-hand click. The left side is the preferred hand to use for card shuffling and selection, as it is associated with intuitive and receptive energy. The repeated instruction of clicking with the left hand struck me throughout the evening as an audience member. Why is the left hand imbued with such importance for a spiritual practice? What potential does the left hand open up that the right hand, the one associated with logic and reason, fails to address? This chapter is premised upon the potentialities of the left hand as a minor gesture. Erin Manning proposes the term “a minor gesture” after the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) on minoritarian becomings, which challenge the status quo of majoritarian norms and structures. Minor gestures are “sites of dissonance, staging disturbances that open experience to new modes of expression” (Manning 2016, 2). Minor gestures are speculative in nature: From a speculatively pragmatic stance, [a minor gesture] invents its own value, a value as ephemeral as it is mobile. This permeability tends to make it ungraspable, and often unrecognizable: it is no doubt difficult to value that which has little perceptible form, that which has not yet quite been invented, let alone defined. (Manning 2016, 22) The left-hand click is a minor detail in the process of 22Mirrors, and yet a highly emphasised aspect of the performance. Following Manning’s invitation to read the politics of minor gestures, the left hand works in this chapter as an invitation, a hand extended towards the unknown futures of speculation and divination, and a hand extended towards a history of folk beliefs, spiritual traditions, and alternative cosmologies. It is a left hand that perhaps gestures towards the left-hand path in occultism, “in rejection of religious authority and societal taboos” (Beyer 2018) and in defiance of the right-hand path that is more aligned with religious dogmas and rules. It is a left hand that has historically been seen as the sinister hand, and the hand associated with the Devil. But it is also a hand rewired to click on a mouse and navigate digital interfaces. A cyborgian left hand, if you will.

260  Evelyn Wan This cyborgian left hand connects spiritual practices with our radically interconnected posthuman digital world. Here, I take on Francesca Ferrando’s invitation to think about spirituality as “the genealogical source of the posthuman” (Ferrando 2016, 243). Spirituality, she explains, refers to the human tendency to conceive existence more extensively than the individual perception. Existence, in a spiritual sense, contemplates a non-separation between the inner and outer worlds. It is a connectedness between the self and the others: within the spiritual realm, there is no division based on caste, color, creed, gender, age, nationality, religion, or species. (Ferrando 2016, 244) Through a historical overview of non-Western religions and practices, she proposes a spirituality-based posthuman view that sees the human merely as one entity in an entire ecology of other beings, things, and energies. What I extract from Ferrando’s work is also the emphasis that spiritual practices (like that of witchcraft, or indigenous rituals) have been wielded as tools against capitalist expansion and colonial domination by communities of tribes, slaves, and women – “a history of beliefs, visions, prayers and rituals have accompanied the historical outcomes of the most oppressed categories of human beings, and can be recollected during the most challenging times” (Ferrando 2016, 253). Against this backdrop, the cyborgian left hand is raised in defiance of capitalist and colonialist systems, a minor gesture against such forms of oppression. Here we must also connect Ferrando’s post-dualistic characterisation of the posthuman with Donna Haraway’s cyborgian vision of human enmeshment with technology as a potential emancipatory route. Ferrando writes that “the human itself is seen as a process developing within a material net, a hybrid, a constant technogenesis” (Ferrando 2016, 248) with reference to Haraway’s ontology of the cyborg (Haraway 1991). Science, technology, and spirituality can be aligned along a natural–cultural continuum that reconnects these seemingly disparate fields. From this perspective, the cyborgian left hand is an opening to think about how these perspectives might indeed intersect. Alongside the left-hand click featured in this work, I will also make reference to another instance in the history of technology where the left hand came into prominence. This anecdote will take us into a minoritarian moment in history of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1857, the feasibility of which was threatened by the left-hand lay (a counter-clockwise twist) in its construction and almost caused the unravelling of the telegraph connection. The left hand appears to be a hand of undoing, and of defiance against order.

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  261 In the rest of this argumentative and speculative account, I will use the cyborgian left hand to open a door to the intersections of posthuman technology and spirituality, and reflect on how minor gestures through folk belief and posthuman spirituality might offer resistance to capitalist and colonialist progress. The Left-hand Click: Digital Witchcraft as Posthuman Spirituality To raise a cyborgian left hand – I am reminded of the hand featured in performance scholar Rebecca Schneider’s lecture performance Extending a Hand (2018). The lecture departs from a Palaeolithic hand print forever preserved in rock, and asks how we might respond to this ancient hand in the geological time of climate change and in the face of the devastating effects of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Schneider writes: Gestures necessarily jump off of themselves and onto another – I, here, was greeted as other in the space of this hail – time, space, and bodies change places because gestures, to be gestures, become themselves in reiteration […]. So I was both other to and, to the degree that one meets one hand with another, one. Gestures, like greeting, inaugurate relation […] and relation inaugurates both distance and proximity. (Schneider and Rae 2018, 16) The minor gesture of the left-hand click inaugurates the relation between spirituality and technology, and enfolds the history of witchcraft with its present digital, cyborgian reincarnation. The left side represented a connection with the Devil, one that was allegedly celebrated by witches (Federici 2004, 184). In 22Mirrors, the left-hand click opens up the connection to the spiritual realms, in the amalgamation of the human with the divine, mediated through a digital interface. According to the artist, digital witchcraft is evoked here as a way to explore the role of speculation and imagination in the design and application of digital technologies (Tapia 2022b). Magical thinking acts as “advanced prototyping” (Tapia 2022b) that brings other potentialities of technology into being. Such explorations use technology in affirmative and activist manners and may open up technology from its otherwise capitalistic registers. But what is digital witchcraft in the first place? 22Mirrors is one specific artistic example, but the practice itself is flourishing in digital spaces like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. In the last decade, scholars from a range of fields have identified the resurgence of witchcraft in times of uncertainty, and its interconnection with the digital. Along with her colleagues, Nadia Bartolini has situated alternative practices around witchcraft and spirituality in uncertain economic times (Bartolini et al. 2013). Their paper is set in the economic downturn in London after the

262  Evelyn Wan 2008 credit crunch, prompting an investigation of what they term “esoteric economies” around spiritual practices. Others have situated growing interests in magic after Donald Trump’s election to office in 2016, where a degree of political resistance took shape through “magical activism and resistance witches” (Fine 2020, 68). This resistance emerged “in a highstakes situation of great anxiety” (Magliocco 2020, 46) around political order and the Republican government in the United States. A minor gesture against Trump, spells appeared on blogs and instructions were shared on social media profiles. Magic practitioners responded to calls circulated on Facebook and other networking sites and gathered in person to perform group hexes and rituals, which were then recorded and circulated online. For the uninitiated, circles of conjurers murmuring chants may seem far removed from real life, and TikTokers self-identifying as “baby witches” may sound like a passing fad for Gen Z. But rather than debating whether magic and the supernatural is “real” or makes any sense, this chapter considers (digital) witchcraft practice as a minor gesture that has its own practices, norms, and values, and observes how these spiritual beliefs and their associated cosmologies situate practitioners in a more-than-human world that challenges post-Enlightenment rationality. Despite the varied practices of digital witchcraft, several key traits (discussed under the headings of “networked kinship,” “vibrant matter,” and “political entanglements”) may be observed across its repertoire, which allows one to elaborate on the posthuman nature of this minoritarian spiritual practice. Networked Kinship Firstly, digital witchcraft is usually a network of practices with social media presence, appearing on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and often includes a hybridised mix of rituals. Religious Studies scholar Chris Miller analyses the “WitchTok” phenomenon on TikTok, and describes a digital subculture of witches across multiple Pagan traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, and Heathenry (Miller 2022, 118). He observes that posts on WitchTok may reference several hashtags, including #PaganTok, #NorsePaganTok, #BrujaTok, or #CrystalTok, all of which signal a variety of origins of the practices on display. Media Studies scholars Berit Renser and Katrin Tiidenberg term this “eclectic neo-Paganism” (Renser and Tiidenberg 2020, 4) in their study of witches networking on Facebook. They observe that folk beliefs, indigenous beliefs, New Age, shamanism, Eastern religions, and monotheist religions intersect with a sprinkle of self-help advice. This is similarly observed in Frampton and Grandison’s study of identity construction in contemporary witchcraft and how online communities enable witchcraft-related identities. They point out that “the digitisation of group rituals collapses hierarchy within

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  263 witchcraft knowledge exchange, as practitioners are now able to blend vast sources of individualised knowledge” (Frampton and Grandison 2022, 18). In other words, rather than seeing digital witchcraft as a homogenous practice with clear lineages, it is clear that it is an umbrella term that represents a re-invention of traditional practices adapted by contemporary practitioners. Networked witchcraft, with its associated hashtags and virality, allows for dissemination of hybridised and bastardised practices across social media platforms, as well as their associated cosmologies. A platform like TikTok only encourages the mixing and blending, as the recommendation algorithm automatically associates videos of similar nature and provides them for users based on their displayed preferences. Instagram similarly provides suggested reels and posts based on recorded user activity and interests. Digital witchcraft on such platforms becomes a practice of nonlinearity by default, due to algorithmic sorting that draws from multiple cultures and multiple cosmologies by way of association and homophily.2 This is very different from older ways of transmitting witchcraft knowledges such as through membership to a coven.3 Witches, in this sense, are no longer old hags with broomsticks and pointy hats, but savvy tech-wielding young cyborgs looking for networked kinship. Becoming a witch through digital spaces can be a “completely customisable” (Walker 2020) experience that allows for individual cultivation of folk and New Age practices.4 The community-building in digital witchcraft as afforded by digital connectivity recalls Haraway’s mobilising call: “make kin, not babies” (Haraway 2016, 103), where kinship is about being with “something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy” (Haraway 2016, 102–103). Interviewees in Frampton and Grandison’s study unanimously recognise the dynamic knowledge exchange in online communities, and emphasise the sense of solidarity and mutual support within groups formed via social media platforms, forums, and online courses (Frampton and Grandison 2022, 13–14). The interviewees conveyed largely positive experiences, citing “alleviating loneliness, improving self-esteem, and affirming practitioners’ spiritual beliefs” (Frampton and Grandison 2022, 18) as part of the digital exchange. Friendships are cultivated online, and sometimes extend into the offline world as well. This sense of openness, experimentation, and networking in digital witchcraft communities seems to echo the emancipatory potential of feminist cyborgian embodiment that is celebrated in Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” Networking, in the manifesto, refers to the “profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic” (Haraway 1991, 170). Afforded by networked spaces of social media, digital witchcraft builds kinship not only through human-to-human networks. Rather, the network, or the ecology of relations set up, is characteristically permeable and plays host to

264  Evelyn Wan a world of spirits, deities, faes, fairies, crystals, spells, tarot cards, cats, and plants, which is decidedly more-than-human in nature. For instance, the West African cosmos, which is influential in witchcraft practices hailing from the Caribbean, “includes interaction between divinities, spirits, ancestors, humans, animals, and natural forces” (Monteagut 2021, 27). In the revival of witchcraft popularised by the internet, not only is there a profusion of witch identities that extends across a spectrum across race, ethnicity, and gender, there is also a profusion of objects and beings which are imbued with magical power.5 Networked kinship in this sense is not limited to human participants – something that perhaps puts the following quotation on cyborgs in a different light: cyborgs are “constitutively full of multiscalar, multitemporal, multimaterial critters of both living and nonliving persuasions” (Haraway 2016, 105). Cyborgian witches are certainly multiscalar in the more-than-human worlds that they inhabit, multitemporal in their evocation of ancestral spirits and ancient spells passed down the generations, and multimaterial in the various tools (natural and manmade) and companion species (animal helpers that witches keep, also known as familiars) that they use for conjuring magical powers. Vibrant Matter The recognition of the magical power of objects and beings beyond the human leads to the important observation that digital witchcraft practice encourages the re-enchantment of objects as well as the re-enchantment of technology. Susan Greenwood proposes that “developing a magical consciousness is learning to see the natural world as vital and alive” (Greenwood 2020, 9). The practice of witchcraft is necessarily premised upon a belief in the agency of magical objects and nature. Crystals are enchanted with protection powers; white sage cleanses a space when burnt; celestial movement of planets affects collective moods and individual decisions. Material objects, from this vantage point, are recast as powerful agents that mediate between the spiritual and human realms within witchcraft cosmologies. This dismantling of binaries and boundaries can be read in light of today’s philosophical movement of new materialism. Magical witchcraft practice operates with what Jane Bennett would term “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010). Bennett discusses “Thing-Power,” which is to say, “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett 2010, 6). Bennett’s philosophical account challenges the centrality of human agency and instead envisions distributed agency across a complex assemblage of actants and factors from personal memories to bacteria, from weather to noise (Bennett 2010,

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  265 23). The re-enchantment of objects and the turn to their power represent a key moment in posthuman philosophy. As Ferrando writes: Posthumanism does not recognize humans as being exceptional, nor does it see them in their separateness from the rest of beings, but in connection to them. In such an interconnected paradigm, the well-being of humans is as crucial as the one of nonhuman animals, machines, and the environment. (Ferrando 2016, 246) However, it should be noted that animist ontologies have long existed in indigenous cosmologies, and Western scholarship is only just catching up with these long-standing beliefs through philosophies such as new materialism and posthumanism.6 Indeed, some of the popular witchcraft practices promoted on social media, such as “smudging” with white sage, draw on indigenous rituals and shamanic medicine in the Americas, which shows the prominence of indigenous beliefs in contemporary witchcraft and folk practices. These practices, though at times rife with accusations of cultural appropriation, represent the practitioners’ recognition of the Thing-Power and sacred potential of these objects. In Brujas: The Magic and Power of Witches of Color (2021), Lorraine Monteagut analyses Bruja witchcraft, which connects to “traditions of West Africa that made their way to the Caribbean and the Americas through slavery, and to the traditions of the Indigenous people of the Americas, who were displaced and forced to assimilate to the cultures of European colonizers” (Monteagut 2021, xii). Bruja practices, often carried out by witches of colour, tend to draw from cosmologies from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. In a way, to call these practices posthuman is to recast them within a European way of knowing. In this sense, I side with Ferrando’s comment that in the spiritual sense, humans have always been posthuman, and that these spiritual practices have long been situated in interconnected paradigms with their ecological environments. In digital witchcraft, the vibrancy of matter is not limited to altar objects and ingredients for potions and spells, but is also extended to technology itself. Artist Ginevra Petrozzi, who self-identifies as a witch, proposes a techno-divinatory practice that she calls “digital esoterism.”7 For a tarotlike reading, she makes use of an individual’s smartphone, and looks at the algorithmic predictions materialised through targeted advertising, predictive text typing, and suggested songs on Spotify. The imagery and content would be used to read the individual’s fortune, like one would read the imagery and content of tarot cards. Petrozzi draws parallels between the “mysterious processes” of algorithmic prediction with divinatory practices – technologies are used to predict the future with only the expert control of computer

266  Evelyn Wan engineers and software developers, reminiscent of the all-powerful sorcerer who is able to foretell what is to come and manipulate forces beyond our control. She also recognises the uncanny moments when algorithms are able to provide extremely accurate predictions in targeted ads, as if they are able to read our deepest desires. This is also sometimes experienced in card readings, where cards reveal secrets in the unconscious of the seeker. Petrozzi’s project focuses on reclaiming practices of the digital to rebel and heal from modern technological structures of control (Petrozzi 2021b). Her identification as a digital witch involves “reclaiming the archetypal role of the sorceress as a healer, and as a political rebel” (Petrozzi 2021). This continues a long line of tradition where the disenfranchised use magic to reclaim power against institutionalised forces – something well recognised by Ferrando.8 Tarot cards often appear on YouTube videos as digital witches offer free standardised readings for anyone interested in picking one of the preselected cards on display. Others do a card pull for new moons and full moons as a way to read the collective energy in a planetary sense. Tarot cards demonstrate their Thing-Power as spiritual guidance from beyond and are celebrated as future-telling oracles. This, of course, is also the practice from which the 22Mirrors project discussed in this chapter draws, and is reliant upon in its artistic and dramaturgical design. From the perspective of performance studies, Natalia Esling and others have previously argued that the future-casting performance of a tarot reading might be seen as a “diffractive practice,” drawing from the philosophy of Karen Barad (2014). Tracing the speculative history of tarot, Esling et al. postulate that tarot functions in a decentred way with no authoritative single origin in defining how the cards ought to be read. In their analysis, tarot makes use of images, signs, and symbols and helps seekers discover meaning and purpose by way of an “intra-active exercise relying on the agency and dynamism of forces within – but not bound by – a process, beyond any individual actor” (Esling et al. 2020, 11). A tarot reading emerges in the intra-action between reader, seeker, symbols, and meanings of the cards, the order in which they are drawn, and how they are laid out in the spread. Near infinite possibilities arise in the combinations and recombinations of questions, cards, and potential answers. For this reason, Esling et al. suggest a Baradian frame of reference in order to highlight the “innumerable and as-yet indiscernible orientations and possibilities” of a given reading, which forms a “productive instability” (Esling et al. 2020, 11) that diffracts the many futures and potentialities of the future. In this process of future-casting, the agency and Thing-Power of the tarot cards are emphasised: if we can learn to sit quietly enough, “turn off the thinking brain” for long enough, the card will “speak” through a quiet voice or through a

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  267 vivid mental image – an image that speaks so fully that it can be felt. […] The full materiality of the card, its symbols, and its elements can communicate. (Gregory 2016, 231) Both Petrozzi’s Digital Esoterism and the Digital Witchcraft Institute’s 22Mirrors take inspiration from the diffractive possibilities embodied by tarot symbology and cards, and are built upon years of experience of listening to and communicating with tarot cards and the intimate knowledge fostered through their relationships with their decks. Political Entanglements 22Mirrors’s direct engagement with climate politics is emblematic of yet another common feature in digital witchcraft. Various practitioners are driven and motivated by political causes or identity politics. Aside from the example of hexing as a response to the Trump administration, strands of other political questions are also found. During the #BlackLivesMatter movement in 2020, the hashtag #WitchesForBLM was trending with spells, hexes, and calls for donations and activism. One of the digital witches explained how the spells work in an interview with Bustle: These spells work in the form of asking our Ancestors – those who have been subjected to the injustices of this land, stolen Africans, murdered revolutionaries, martyrs and innocent lives taken during the Civil Rights Movement – and our own ancestral background [for help]. (Wylde 2020) From a decolonial perspective, such activities of spellcasting align with the activism of Black Lives Matter and actively recognise colonial violence in its engagement with the legacy of slavery. In Monteagut’s account of brujas, she argues that being a bruja is “inherently political” (Monteagut 2021, 117). Quoting an example from Puerto Rico, Monteagut points out how the practice of witchcraft was used to keep Indigenous and African traditions alive amidst the imposition of Catholicism by colonisers as “private modes of healing and dissent” (Monteagut 2021, 5). The continuation of Bruja practices is important today as the legacy is carried on by younger generations. Brujas, together with other witches of colour, can make use of magical practices to fight against the internalised colonisation that has devalued indigenous ways of knowing. Ancestral wisdom, such as plant medicine, spiritual systems of healing, and divination, provides a way out of the binds of capitalist and patriarchal ways of living (Monteagut

268  Evelyn Wan 2021, 63). For these practitioners, magic becomes a stand-in for resistance against the coloniality of knowledge, and an opportunity to heal generational trauma inherited from histories of systematic oppression.9 In addition, Frampton and Grandison observe that “being drawn to witchcraft often came in tandem with participants’ experiences of being socially ostracised or stigmatised by mainstream standards” (Frampton and Grandison 2022), usually in relation to disability, neurodiversity, sexuality, and gender. Many of their interviewees experienced depression, anxiety, and grief, and some also attributed this to the ills of society, which the practice of witchcraft may have helped to heal. As observed by Jane Barnette, there is a general desire among young adults to use (digital) witchcraft to solve problems of today – “from global warming to the ‘endless wars,’ to racial injustice and misogyny, the problems of the twenty-first century appear insurmountable without divine intervention” (Barnette 2022, 102). While it would be naive to suggest that magic and witchcraft could be a cure-all for the ills of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonial violence, it is necessary to establish how magic and witchcraft have been subjugated in Western history, and why their revival is appealing as a potentially powerful set of instruments for their practitioners. What is helpful here is perhaps a return to Silvia Federici’s authoritative analysis of the history of the witch-hunt in early modern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which provides insight into why magic and witchcraft were banned in the first place. During this period, magic was seen to be at odds with a scientific and rationalistic worldview, and for this reason an unwanted interruption to the developments of a changing episteme that was underwriting an emerging capitalist economy. Put another way, magic challenged capitalist ways of living: At the basis of magic was an animistic conception of nature that did not admit to any separation between matter and spirit, and thus imagined the cosmos as a living organism, populated by occult forces, where every element was in “sympathetic” relation with the rest. […] Every element – herbs, plants, metals, and most of all the human body – hid virtues and powers peculiar to it. Thus, a variety of practices were designed to appropriate the secrets of nature and bend its powers to the human will. From palmistry to divination, from the use of charms to sympathetic healing, magic opened a vast number of possibilities. (Federici 2004, 141–142) The cosmology of magic depends on the lively, animist materiality of nature, of objects, and of the human body. These entities are situated in dynamic relations to one another. Magical beliefs are predicated upon a world that

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  269 is unpredictable, where the winds of fortune blow in particular directions, and there are lucky and unlucky days: “days on which one can travel and others on which one should not move from home, days on which to marry and others on which every enterprise should be cautiously avoided” (Federici 2004, 142). Within such a belief system, one could hardly expect men to follow an instituted system of work, to follow a schedule, come rain or sunshine, or ignore the signs and signatures of bad fortune. In magic, the human individual is seen as powerful – magical incantations allow the possibility of manipulating invisible forces at work, whether it is to make someone fall in love, or to win a battle at war. Eradicating magical practices was therefore necessary in order to institute a work discipline, for magic was seen as the trick that could allow one to “obtain what one wanted without work” (Federici 2004, 142). In short, capitalism realised that “the world had to be ‘disenchanted’ in order to be dominated” (Federici 2004, 174). But neutralising the power of magic was only one step in the process of capitalistic domination. Federici further proposes that the phenomenon of the witch-hunt not only destroyed women’s bodies, but also our human connection to nature in order to make way for capitalist progress. Witches stood for the wild, uncontrollable side of nature; they held knowledge of folk medicine and worked with herbs as healing remedies; and they were guardians of birth and reproduction as midwives. Quoting Carolyn Merchant’s work, Federici argues that the persecution of witches allowed for a paradigm shift in scientific revolution towards a Cartesian mechanistic philosophy.10 This shift replaced the “organic worldview that had looked at nature, women, and the earth as nurturing mothers, with a mechanical one that degraded them to the rank of standing resources” (Federici 2004, 203). Witches and their female bodies represented the wild side of nature that seemed “disorderly, uncontrollable, and thus antagonistic to the project undertaken by the new science” (Federici 2004, 203). Control over their bodies signified the domination over nature and land, and nature could be exploited as commodity, valuable only for its use value and exchange value, rather than appreciated and embraced as nourishment and habitat. In Federici’s narrative, witches were midwives or were seen as “wise women” – the holders of reproductive knowledge and control. The witchhunt allowed for the expropriation of women from control over their own bodies, which was a first step in ensuring state control over the reproduction of labour power. Female friendships were “an object of suspicion” (Federici 2004, 186), and captured witches were forced to denounce their friends as accomplices in crime, effectively destroying kinship bonds in the community. As such, the revitalisation of witchcraft today signifies the important return of the power of magic and the vibrant materiality of nature and other

270  Evelyn Wan beings, and the reclaiming of the label of witches connects with ongoing feminist struggles to reclaim agency over bodies and reproduction against capitalist expropriation. Cyborgian connections through digital witchcraft and the sharing of magical tools also carry the potential to revitalise kinmaking and community-building across geographical and cultural borders. Witchcraft Re-enchanted In strong alignment with Ferrando’s characterisation of magic and spirituality as a source of rebellion and struggle, one might view today’s digital witchcraft as the return of earlier themes which were suppressed in the process of instituting capitalist control by government and church in the European history of the witch-hunt. How might animist and new materialistic magic, indigenous and posthuman ecologies, and feminist and decolonial politics join hands through such a reloaded practice and popularisation of digital witchcraft? Artists working in this domain wish to reclaim “ritual-making, spell-writing, and prophecy-telling as an embodied, relational and collective practice that occurs in symbiotic communion with one’s environment” (Collier Broms and Calderón 2021, 7), where magic and mysticism are approached as “a feminist, ecological practice of receiving, listening, collaborating, and composting” (Collier Broms and Calderón 2021, 7). Through the three pillars of networked kinship, vibrant matter, and political entanglements, I see digital witchcraft as the revitalisation of a once-feared practice that was violently eradicated through witch-hunting in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. It is a spiritual practice that sees tapping into the energy of the natural world as ally and as resistance, one that is now also taken up in the digital realm, mediated through technological networks. It is a re-enchantment of the world that allows us to see beyond Anthropocentric control, where humans are but one node in a series of interconnections with other beings, animals, spirits, stones, or otherwise. As Greenwood argues, “re-enchanting the world […] means learning to see nature as alive and also as having a spiritual dimension; this type of thinking is not possible within a cosmology that conceives the world as de-spirited or as a machine” (Greenwood 2020, viii). The “unscientific” nature of witchcraft is perhaps precisely why it is a valuable perspective – it is the death of magical thinking and belief that paved the way for rationality and early modern science in the Enlightenment, and it is the literal death of witches, as Federici would argue, that allowed for the emergence of capitalist control of land, nature, and labouring bodies. There is no promise that digital witchcraft can bring about the divine intervention that would solve the problems of today’s world, even if “baby witches” in the US get together to hex the patriarchy. Yet there seems to be an observable attempt to make use of this spiritual practice as a

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  271 means of political organisation.11 TikTok and Instagram, although subservient to the logic of algorithmic control, seem to offer the possibility of (re)kindling new relations of kinship through shared interests of users in witchcraft and related spiritual practices.12 One might even suggest that there are glimpses of collective consciousness raising and political protests in the cyborgian politics inaugurated, as evidenced by movements such as #WitchesForBLM. Artist, herbalist, and witch Cy X suggests that digital witchcraft practice opens up the opportunity to re-examine the politics of using technology: How can this perspective, one that is steeped in deep listening, one that is relational, one that moves beyond human-centred ideology offer new frameworks of being that move beyond fear and offer new methods of entry for those who have been systematically erased and harmed in a multitude of other capitalist tech spaces? (Cy X 2022). 22Mirrors is taken here as a prime example of a project that capitalises on the affordances of the digital to bring together ecology, divination, kinship, and a more-than-human cosmology. Technology becomes the conduit for this new form of witchcraft and magic, through which the issue of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene is addressed, and ecological consciousness cultivated. The archetypes evoked in the Arcana and the process of deciphering a tarot reading are not unlike Haraway’s discussion of figurations in her book, Staying with the Trouble. SF is a recurring acronym that appears in the book: “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far” (Haraway 2016, 2). SF is a figuration that opens up possibilities and connects facts with fiction, speculations with images, politics with possibilities. It is not a one-size-fits-all type of answer, but a type of speculation. A reading of the future is about potentialities and openings, and the tarot reader’s task is to string together a narrative that fits these various components: the seeker, the question asked, the card’s imagery, significations, and its position within the spread. A skilled tarot reader needs to understand not only the card drawn, but also the intentions of the seeker, sometimes in combination with other sets of techniques such as astrology and numerology. What results from the reading of the card spread is a story, a narrative, a worlding that connects these different components together. It is in essence a kind of “figuring” akin to the SF practices Haraway espouses (Haraway 2016, 3). Haraway writes: I think of sf and string figures in a triple sense of figuring. First, promiscuously plucking out fibers in clotted and dense events and practices,

272  Evelyn Wan I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places and times. In that sense, sf is a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who lives and who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice. Second, the string figure is not the tracking, but rather the actual thing, the pattern and assembly that solicits response, the thing that is not oneself but with which one must go on. Third, string figuring is passing on and receiving, making and unmaking, picking up threads and dropping them. sf is practice and process … (Haraway 2016, 3) In the presentation of 22Mirrors at V2, the artists read out the speculative stories they wrote around the particular card drawn, and collectively co-constructed a reading to the question posed by the seeker. The interconnections drawn were always open to interpretation, modification, and discussion, and were speculative in nature. Like the figuring described by Haraway, the question of the seeker was revisited and unpacked, the reading contingent upon the tangles and patterns the artists drew upon in constructing the speculative stories. These stories, written from a first-person perspective of the archetype, bring yet another subjectivity onto the scene – that of the figuration of the card. The often non-human archetype (Glacier, Oil, Cow, Lithium, Drought, the Amazon …), in turn, stood for different things for the artists and seekers, and enabled “multispecies storytelling, multispecies worlding” (Haraway 2011, 5). Knowledge around tarot in general also played a role in the interpretation. One of the seekers brought up that the card Extinction, which was mentioned in the opening anecdote of this chapter, corresponds to the tarot card of Death, and in effect could mean rebirth and a new beginning as much as death. This spurred on another round of interpretation and discussion, providing fertile materials for the speculative unfolding of what the oracle, through the agency of the technological interface, was telling the audience. These tarot readings functioned as Haraway’s SF that allowed the audience to trace diffractive relations to the Anthropocene. It is a performance that fits well with Manning’s concept of the minor gesture in the larger domain of climate activism. This appeal to the spiritual, to the intuitive that is governed by the left hand, to digital witchcraft, is no doubt an unconventional way of advancing the climate cause. But as Manning reminds us, “while the grand gestures of a macro politics most easily sum up the changes that occurred to alter the field, it is the minoritarian tendencies that initiate the subtle shifts that created conditions for this, and any change” (Manning 2016, 1).

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  273 22Mirrors gestures towards the ecological consciousness embedded in cosmologies of witchcraft-based spiritual practice, and is a rather fitting step in reclaiming the agency of land and nature from the extractive politics of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. As such, digital witchcraft holds the promise of an alternative engagement with climate politics through generating new posthuman kinship ties with the natural and the supernatural. The Left-Hand Lay: Minoritarian Potential of Folk Belief and Spirituality But let us once again return to the minor gestures of the left hand. In answering the call of the cyborgian left hand, this chapter would not be complete without evoking another instance in history in which technology and spirituality intersected, and where superstition around what the left hand stood for played a role in technological development. As argued by Jeffery Sconce in Haunted Media (2000), the history of communicative technology has long been imbued with spiritualist overtones. He observes the twin development of telegraph communications and the spiritualism movement in the US, where the telegraph cables laid between New York and London fostered the imagination of being able to communicate with other people at long distances. This translated into enthusiasm about another type of communication – spirit communication, also known as the “spiritual telegraph” (Sconce 2000, 23) or “celestial telegraphy” (Sconce 2000, 28). The concluding section of this chapter therefore turns to the telegraph cable as an object of curiosity. In this concluding discussion on the cyborgian left hand, I connect the left-hand click of digital witchcraft with the left-hand lay, which refers to the directional movement when twisting the metal wires of a telegraph cable. The left-hand lay was almost a source of failure in the series of experiments that led up to the first successful laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Much like the left-hand click of 22Mirrors that inaugurates the interconnection between spirituality and technology, the left-hand lay also brings together folk belief and superstition with technology. I return to and deepen the engagement with the intriguing power of left-handed minor gestures through this anecdote. In “The Left Heresy and Directional Preference in Early Science and Technology” (1982), Blake-Coleman links the curious tendency to avoid leftward (counter-clockwise) directions in the design of early machines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to folk beliefs about the left. It is an observation that coincides with Federici’s statement that the witch was “the living symbol of the world turned upside down” (Federici 2004, 177), with their backwards and counter-clockwise dances, as well as nocturnal rites that challenged the capitalistic regularisation of worktime. The left is

274  Evelyn Wan associated with the Devil – the folk tradition of throwing salt over one’s shoulder, for instance, is done on the left: Christian beliefs hold that the devil hangs around behind your left shoulder, waiting to take advantage of you. If you spill salt, the devil sees it as an invitation to step in and do evil. Throwing it over your shoulder into his face blinds him and renders him helpless. (Ronca 2021) Likewise, leftward, interpreted also as counter-clockwise movement, is considered “ill-omened, malevolent, destructive, unlucky, unclean – in a word, ‘sinister’” (Blake-Coleman 1982, 151). Directional preferences might seem innocent enough until one looks at the history of witch-hunting and recognises that a woman walking counter-clockwise in a churchyard several times could be reason enough to persecute her as a witch. Counter-clockwise movement was seen as deviant and potentially dangerous. Counter-clockwise movement is important to witches as it represents movement against the direction of the sun – a movement that generates the friction and therefore energy necessary for the conjuring of spells. In 1591, a Scottish witches’ dance (with explicit counter-clockwise directions) came to prominence during the North Berwick witch trials. The witches were accused of purposely dancing in a way that had raised storms that had caused a menace to King James and Queen Anne’s sea voyage from Denmark back to Scotland. Leftward and counter-clockwise dances were to be suppressed in the process of witch-hunting, further solidifying folk belief around directional preference in the early modern period. Blake-Coleman identifies the tendency to prefer clockwise movement in tools and buildings created during that historical period. According to his research, spiral staircases were generally clockwise in nature, so that the “right-handed swordsman had the advantage of facing an opponent below with a clear cut and thrust” (Blake-Coleman 1982, 157). Tools like hand cranks, wheels, and mills too had a preference for clockwise movement, where some even included extra wheels and gears so that the final motion of the machine would be clockwise (Blake-Coleman 1982, 158160). He argued that this preference was probably not simply due to the dominance of right-handed workers, but also due to the longstanding folk beliefs around the sinister left hand. The directional preference for clockwise over counter-clockwise movement persisted into the nineteenth-century development of telegraph cables. During the construction of the very first 1857 transatlantic telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland, the Atlantic telegraph company contracted two firms in London, Newall and Glass & Elliot, each

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  275 to create half of the 2,500-nautical-miles-long cable. Newall’s half of the cable was made with the traditional right-hand lay (the clockwise twist), while the section made by Glass & Elliot had a left-hand lay (the counterclockwise twist). Glass & Elliot realised that the act of coiling the cable would be done clockwise (as was preferred) in the storage tanks of the ship that would take the cables out to sea. They decided to twist their wires in the opposite direction so that it would cause less strain on the core and insulation of the cable. Notably, the left-hand lay eventually became the universally adopted directionality of cable-twisting because the reasoning to prevent strain was completely sound. However, as it was not communicated at all during this first construction, a temporary splice had to be put in place to prevent the cable from unravelling on its own when the two ends were joined together. The Illustrated Times of London of 1 August 1857 describes the fix: It was not discovered till some time after the work had begun that the two separate halves had been twisted in opposite directions. When joined in the centre the natural tendency of this counter formation would have been to untwist the cable altogether. A very ingenious species of clamp, somewhat akin to the coupling screws and weights used to connect railway carriages, has been devised to counteract the natural effects of this blunder. (Burns 2021) Read this way, the left-hand lay in fact threatened to unravel the entire length of the first telegraph cable if a weighted splice was not put in place to prevent the natural tendency for the cable to untwist. In this imagined untwisting motion, the left-hand lay threatened to undo the technological dimension of colonial control – for the same communication technology would have allowed more instantaneous communication between empire and colony, with the speed of administrative control and of orders travelling from the British Empire to its subjects expedited. Despite the fix, the cable ultimately failed due to tumultuous weather conditions that made it near impossible to lay the parts properly. The agency of the natural world is doubtlessly not to be underestimated in such an ambitious endeavour to bring the world into connectivity. Indeed, it seemed like there was a certain kind of rebelliousness to the left-handed directionality, one that is as connected to the left-hand lay of the telegraph cable as to the leftward, counter-clockwise movement of the witches. In my reading of this historical episode, the left-hand lay embodies the performative power of materiality that threatens to undermine colonialist expansion, represented by the set-up of a colonial telegraph network. Perhaps there was reason after all to fear leftward,

276  Evelyn Wan counter-clockwise movement, witches and wires alike. As Manning reminds us, “the minor is a force that courses through [the major], unmooring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards” (Manning 2016, 1). In this case, the minoritarian and unexpected appearance of the left-hand lay in cable-making quite literally unmoored the structural integrity of a colonial communicative system. In this turn to vibrant matter, perhaps there is a power of resistance after all in the minoritarian gesture of the left hand, and the associated folk beliefs and superstitions that designate it as the spiritual hand, the sinister hand, and the hand that defies rational logic. By bringing together the left-hand click and the left-hand lay, I have attempted to weave a speculative account of the potential of spiritual beliefs and magic against capitalistic and colonialist systems. The cyborgian left hand may be minoritarian, but it is a figuration of posthuman spirituality, one that is attentive to the magical cosmologies of an interconnected more-than-human world, whether through telegraph cables, internet cables, spirit communication, divination, or otherwise. If, as Federici argues that “the world had to be ‘disenchanted’ in order to be dominated” (Federici 2004, 174), it remains to be seen what the minor gesture of spiritual re-enchantment and the resurgence of digital witchcraft might offer in defiance of the capitalist and colonialist order that rules the Anthropocenic present. Notes 1 See Tapia (2022). 2 Homophily refers to the phenomenon that birds of a feather flock together, and describes algorithmic organisation as a matter of grouping people according to their preferences with the assumption that like attracts like. See Chun and Leeker (2017). 3 See, for instance, the anthropological accounts of witch covens and memberships in Luhrmann (1991). 4 Some might argue, however, that these practices shared online are rife with misinformation and that this way of sharing witchcraft is dangerous. See Barnette (2022). 5 On the profusion of witch identities that extend across race, ethnicity, and gender, see Frampton and Grandison (2022). 6 See further Todd (2016) and Povinelli (2016). 7 See Petrozzi (2021b). 8 See also Campagna (2018). 9 See further Quijano (2000). 10 See further Merchant (1980). 11 See, for instance, accounts via MacColl (2020), Wylde (2020), Fine (2020), and Magliocco (2020). 12 Digital platforms are caught up in other problems like digital surveillance, but to dwell on these issues would be beyond the scope of this chapter. This line of inquiry may be pursued via Zuboff (2019).

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  277 References Barad, Karen. (2014), “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart,” Parallax 20, 3 (Jul): 168–187. Barnette, Jane. (2022), “Hocus-Pocus: WitchTok Education for Baby Witches,” in TikTok Cultures in the United States, edited by Trevor Boffone, 97–107. London: Routledge. Bartolini, Nadia et al. (2013), “Psychics, Crystals, Candles and Cauldrons: Alternative Spiritualities and the Question of Their Esoteric Economies,” Social and Cultural Geography 14, 4 (Jun): 367–388. Bennett, Jane. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Beyer, Catherine. (2018), “Definition of Left and Right Hand Paths in Occultism,” Learn Religions (13 April). Online. https://www​.learnreligions​.com​/left​-hand​ -and​-right​-hand​-paths​-95827 Blake-Coleman, B. C. (1982), “The Left Heresy and Directional Preference in Early Science and Technology,” Folklore 93, 2 (Jan): 151–163. Burns, Bill. (2021), “Wire Rope and the Submarine Cable Industry,” Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications (14 March). Online. https://atlantic​-cable​. com​/Article​/WireRope​/wirerope​.htm Campagna, Federico. (2018), Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. London: Bloomsbury. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong and Martina Leeker. (2017), “Intervening in Habits and Homophily: Make a Difference! An Interview with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun by Martina Leeker,” in Interventions in Digital Cultures: Technology, the Political, Methods, edited by Howard Caygill, Martina Leeker, and Tobias Schulze, 75–86. Lüneburg: Meson Press. Collier Broms, Naomi and Amalia Calderón. (2021), “Spells for Sky Serenaders & Water Worshippers: Encounters with the Moon, the Sea, and Shapeshifting Voices,” Kunstlicht: Journal for Visual Culture 42, 1/2: 7–9. Cy, X. (2022), The Season of the Witch. IMPAKT Online Panel, Utrecht. Online. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=Ki61B​-HVOzE Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Esling, Natalia et al. (2020), “Diffracted Readings of the Future: Practices of ‘Differentiation-Entanglement,’” Performance Research 25, 5 (Jul): 10–16. Federici, Silvia. (2004), Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia. Ferrando, Francesca. (2016), “Humans Have Always Been Posthuman: A Spiritual Genealogy of Posthumanism,” in Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, edited by Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape, 243–256. New Delhi: Springer. Fine, Julia C. (2020), “#MagicResistance: Anti‐Trump Witchcraft as Register Circulation,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 30, 1 (May): 68–85. Frampton, Alexandra and Alexandra Grandison. (2022), “‘In the Broom Closet’: Exploring the Role of Online Communities in Shaping the Identities of Contemporary Witchcraft Practitioners,” Current Psychology (28 July). Online. https://link​.springer​.com​/article​/10​.1007​/s12144​-022​-03441-z

278  Evelyn Wan Greenwood, Susan. (2020), The Nature of Magic: An Anthropology of Consciousness. London and New York: Routledge. Gregory, Karen. (2016), “In the Cards. From Hearing ‘Things’ to Human Capital,” in Object-Oriented Feminism, edited by Katherine Behar, 225–245. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna. (2011), SF: Speculative Fabulation and String Figures. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. Haraway, Donna. (1991), “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. London: Routledge. Luhrmann, T. M. (1991), Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacColl, Margaux. (2020), “WitchTok, TikTok’s Online Coven, Is Mobilizing Against Racism,” Digital Trends (22 July). Online. https://www​.digitaltrends​. com​/social​-media​/witchtok​-activism​-tiktok​-protests​-black​-lives​-matter/ Magliocco, Sabina. (2020), “Witchcraft as Political Resistance,” Nova Religio 23, 4 (Apr): 43–68. Manning, Erin. (2016), The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke University Press. Merchant, Carolyn. (1980), The Death of Nature. New York: HarperCollins. Miller, Chris. (2022), “How Modern Witches Enchant TikTok: Intersections of Digital, Consumer, and Material Culture(s) on #WitchTok,” Religions 13, 2 (Feb): 118. Monteagut, Lorraine. (2021), Brujas: The Magic and Power of Witches of Color. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Petrozzi, Ginevra. (2021), “About Ginevra Petrozzi – Designer and Artist,” GinevraPetrozzi​.com​. Online. https://www​.ginevrapetrozzi​.com Petrozzi, Ginevra. (2021b), “Digital Esoterism, Or to Be a Witch in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Institute of Network Cultures. Online. https:// networkcultures​.org​/longform​/2021​/11​/15​/digital​-esoterism​-or​-to​-be​-a​-witch​ -in​-the​-age​-of​-surveillance​-capitalism/ Povinelli, Elizabeth A. (2016), Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Quijano, Anibal. (2000), “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, 3 (Nov): 533–580. Renser, Berit and Katrin Tiidenberg. (2020), “Witches on Facebook: Mediatization of Neo-Paganism,” Social Media + Society 6, 3. Online. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /2056305120928514 Ronca, Debra. (2021), “Why Do People Throw Salt over Their Shoulders?” HowStuffWorks​.c​om (6 August). Online. https://people​.howstuffworks​.com​/ why​-do​-people​-throw​-salt​-over​-shoulders​.htm Schneider, Rebecca and Paul Rae. (2018), “Extending a Hand/Lending an Ear,” Performance Research 23, 3 (Apr): 13–24. Sconce, Jeffrey. (2000), Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press.

The Left-hand Click and the Left-hand Lay  279 Tapia, Danae. (2022), “22Mirrors,” The Digital Witchcraft Institute. Online. https://digitalwitchcraft​.works​/22mirrors Tapia, Danae. (2022b), “Posthuman Tech,” The Digital Witchcraft Institute. Online. https://digitalwitchcraft​.works​/Posthuman​-Tech Todd, Zoe. (2016), “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism: An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, 1 (Mar): 4–22. Walker, Josh. (2020), “TikTok Has Become the Home of Modern Witchcraft (Yes, Really),” Wired UK (1 November). Online. https://www​.wired​.co​.uk​/article​/ witchcraft​-tiktok Wylde, Kaitlyn. (2020), “3 TikTok Witches Explain How Spells Can Help #BlackLivesMatter,” Bustle​.c​om (8 July). Online. https://www​.bustle​.com​/ wellness​/witches​-on​-tiktok​-support​-black​-lives​-matter​-with​-spells​-hexes Zuboff, Shoshana. (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Barack Obama’s Books of 2019. New York: Profile Books.

27 Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities Staying with Environmental Violence, Ecological Grief, and the Trouble of Consumption Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska As indicated in a 2018 Global Witness report, the years 2002–2017 saw 1,558 “environmental defenders” – activists, local community members, NGO staff, lawyers, journalists, and indigenous people fighting for the protection of land and other natural resources – killed in 50 countries, predominantly of the Global South (Butt et al. 2019, 742). These deaths usually occurred in relation to conflicts around the extraction of natural resources by companies that often lacked legal property rights, but nonetheless perpetuated old colonial patterns of appropriation, control, dispossession, and destruction. Along with ecological disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, these murders, accompanied by threats and acts of intimidation towards activists striving to protect natural resources and landscapes, are some of the oft-cited examples of direct environmental violence that is taking its toll on both human and nonhuman lives. It has become clear that climate change, environmental degradation, and diminishing biological diversity constitute the key pillars of an ethicopolitical crisis of planetary proportions. Yet, what has also become increasingly apparent in this epoch that some now call the Anthropocene is that not all forms of environmental violence are as immediate or “spectacular” as these statistics seem to suggest (Nixon 2011). Rather, there is an environmental violence that is much more insidious and which takes place on a much grander scale of time. As environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon argues, there is another type of violence – a “slow violence” – which “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2011, 2). Earth’s geosphere, biosphere (including human bodies), hydrosphere, and atmosphere being affected through climate change, deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, plastic pollution, wars’ toxic and radioactive aftermath, and ocean acidification, among others, are all examples of a slowly unfolding and frequently overlooked violence that takes place “out of sight,” but certainly not without consequences for DOI: 10.4324/9781003322603-33

Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities  281 humans and nonhumans alike. Simultaneously, both the spectacular and slow forms of environmental violence mobilise affective responses – not only feelings of anxiety or anger, but also of a grief experienced in relation to the present or anticipated ecological losses of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes that have or shortly will result from severe anthropogenic environmental change (Cunsolo and Landman 2017). Such ecological grief is described by scholars as a “disenfranchised” form of grief (Doka 1989), which is to say one that is not openly accepted or acknowledged in society. It may be experienced by individuals as well as groups or communities. But far from being a disabling affect, ecological grief has the potential to generate reparative actions. As such, it is something that must be considered in any discussion of environmental violence. What has become particularly evident in the present era is that the environment is in us, and we humans are fully in the environment – both physically and affectively. This makes the conventional concepts of nature and culture as dichotomous, hierarchically arranged entities obsolete.1 Nature is no longer separable from culture. Quite the contrary. The enmeshment of nature and culture should be seen as merely the mundane site of contestation for societal power and violence, but also care, affect, and co-existence.2 Clearly, this situation does not just have theoretical and disciplinary ramifications (as nature can no longer be regarded as the sole reserve for scientists); the stakes are high for ethics and politics at large.3 It matters which naturecultures get materialised and therefore get to flourish, and which ones get to suffer and die. And this is how we approach gender, environment, and violence in this chapter – through a wide post-disciplinary critique of anthropocentric speciesism that we call feminist posthumanities. The management of invasive species might be one example close to hand. Importantly, we all inhabit, embody, and are embedded in the world differently, as variously situated people, divided by national, sexual, religious, bodily, and economic status, and as very variously situated nonhumans in an increasingly anthropogenic world. Gender, race, class, and other power differentials, including species, which mark living bodies render them vulnerable and prone to environmental (and other types of) violence in very different ways that routinely borrow gestures from human-to-human xenophobia, sexism, racism, and biological determinism. In and around the Baltic Sea, one of the most environmentally exposed and researched marginal seas in the world,4 such differences between people, and between human and nonhuman inhabitants, play out as a multispecies politics that shapes the Baltic Sea today and its future(s) to come. With intensified shipping, migration and trafficking, waning fish stocks, oil pipelines, militarism and war-time heritage, eutrophication, pollution, and invasive species, the Baltic Sea has been transformed into a naturecultural domain of renewed territorialism. While mostly surrounded by land, it is

282  Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska connected to the North Sea through Kattegat and Skagerrak. The North Sea itself endures significant pressures from industry and agriculture, as well as extensive fisheries, intensive shipping, and the increasing expansion of various forms of mariculture such as Norwegian salmon farming. At the same time, ship ballast water and the unexpected transport of fish and shellfish are primarily responsible for the introduction of alien species into the waters of the Baltic and North Seas. How such environmental exposures get storied, what affects emerge, how values and social imaginaries get shared, and the new communities forged matter crucially in the Baltic and North Seas region. This is why we turn our attention to the oceanic and the coastal sites of environmental violence with a particular concern for consumption and the unfolding of grief. Grounded in feminist posthumanities5 and environmental humanities,6 this chapter combines insights from marine science and species biology, art, history, and field philosophy in order to investigate prospective multispecies futures of coexistence and care at sites of intense but slow oceanic environmental violence. Since the end of the First World War, major military powers have dumped chemical warfare agents such as mustard gas, tabun, and Lewisite into the planet’s oceans. Indeed, intended as a peaceful “farewell to arms,” whole ships filled with hazardous military waste were deliberately sunk and weaponry tossed overboard en masse – acts that revealed a view of the oceans as an endless medium of purification. One particularly intense site for the dumping of European military stocks was the Gotland Deep, a trench in the middle of the shallow Baltic Sea. However, this storying of the refiguring of the Baltic and North Seas by human hand would not be complete without also recognising that the pollution caused by such military waste is only compounded by the constant inflow of invasive chemicals from pharmaceuticals and fertiliser run-off from the land. Add to this the arrival of non-local animal species in these waters, and the picture that emerges of the Baltic Sea is one of devastation. Indeed, it is reported that “Invasive alien species are listed among the most important factors threatening the aquatic biodiversity in the Baltic Sea, together with eutrophication, contaminants, overfishing and destruction of habitats” (Olenina et al. 2009). That the Baltic Sea is listed as the largest “dead zone” area in the world only intensifies one’s sense of witnessing a profound tragedy happening before our eyes (Diaz and Rosenberg 2008, 927). In the critical literature, the term “dead zone” refers to a body of water where oxygen levels have become depleted, resulting in the disappearance of marine life. While hypoxia (low oxygen levels) may occur naturally from time to time, during the past century it has clearly been induced and sustained by nutrient pollution – the disposal of sewage and wastewater, and the inflow of nitrate agents from the land into the sea. The warming waters that have

Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities  283 resulted from climate change have also effectuated a plethora of ecological alternations in north and south polar seas (such as species migration). In this chapter, we focus on subtle “slow violence” unfolding through the instances of submerged (and forgotten?) chemical weapons, so-called dead zones, invasive species, and low-trophic marine ecosystems in the Baltic and North Sea regions. In the following four sections, we zoom in on select environed bodies,7 their stories of postnatural slow violence, and unexpected encounters with care and hospitality in the Baltic and North Seas. We do this with the aim of unfolding what we call a low-trophic theory that is interested in naturecultural research on violence, affect, and care within environmental humanities, and to engage a coexistential ethics of environmental adaptability informed by insights from feminist posthumanities. Methodologically, we engage with recent theorisations of exposure, toxicity, stress, slow violence, and vulnerability in the interdisciplinary literatures of posthumanities. More-than-human environmental humanities or posthumanities scholars break from traditional methodological practices and demonstrate that the composition of the subjects of their study – including extinction events, damaged heritage sites, everyday designs, queer animal relations, species data portals, and so on – are always a confluence of entangled meanings, matterings, and actors: techno-ecologies of interest.8 In our posthumanities practice of developing low-trophic theory, the key lesson concerns unlearning the given, and learning to consume with care in regard to energy consumption and drawing from the bounty of the seas. We assess the story-telling practices of habitats, bodies of marine knowledge, and science practice described in popular and science literatures, and other contact zones of cultured nature or naturecultures for the purpose of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016), which is to say slowing down thought and widening our horizons. This also means remaining attentive to which bodies and spaces count as something over which one can grieve, and which are determined as consumable.9 We visit and re-assess “extinction sites” or “dead zones,”10 attending to that which is waste to some and energy to others. We reformulate the status of these narratives as they seek to account for multispecies existences and technoecologies, be it in the Baltic Sea or in arctic North Sea settings. So in our on-going work with feminist posthumanities practices of low-trophic theory, we look to continue to story and expose multispecies ecologies and more-than-human technologies in alignment with the seminal time and field philosophies of Deborah Bird Rose. Storying Exposure I: Chemical Weapons and Military Waste at Sea From 1946 to well into the 1960s, it is estimated that several hundred thousand tons of chemical and conventional weapons were dumped and

284  Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska scattered into the waters of northern Europe. The density of military waste, including sunken decommissioned ships filled with munitions, is particularly large outside Bornholm and the south-east of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, in the Gulf of Finland, and in the Skagerrak Strait of the North Atlantic. Over the decades, tons of metallic canisters and containers have corroded and have been leaking their toxic contents into aquatic habitats, forging a sinister heritage of military waste, nationalism, and territorial proto-European masculinity at sea. Although no precise records of the clandestine dumping exist, estimates suggest that after the Second World War, approximately 10,000 tons of munitions were dumped near the Gotland basin in the Baltic Sea alone (Bełdowski et al. 2014, 11). The allied forces and militaries across the world often disposed of munitions and chemical weapons in deep ocean waters, but the Soviet military unloaded as much as 15,000 tons in the very shallow waters of the Baltic Sea. Outside Bornholm, the military dumping occurred between 1946 and 1956, and eventually submerged 15,000 tons of chemical munitions and over 2,000 tons of chemical warfare agents. Consequent research on the microbiota and fish in the area has revealed significantly high levels of mustard gas tolerance. In fact, the majority of the chemical weapons dumped consisted of mustard gas, which despite its name is actually more of a viscous orange-coloured liquid than a gas. Today, fishermen are still hurt by the substance as it gets trapped in fishing nets and other trawling tools. The mustard gas, modified to better fit the colder climes of the north, was often laced with arsenic, further adding to the toxic pollution and environmental violence at the dumping sites. Recently, through studies of the toxic bioburden or accumulation of toxins in the nonhuman inhabitants of such areas, it has been concluded that other chemical warfare agents like Clark I and Clark II were also added to the mix to increase the noxious and poisonous effects of the mustard gas. Somewhat unsurprisingly, finfish and other species embody these heightened levels of toxicity, and as such stand as a living archive of military waste and our slow oceanic violence that, it must be stressed, is occurring on a planetary scale. While the occasional resurfacing of these chemical agents in fishing nets, on the snouts of seals, or sometimes on white sandy beaches as objects that can easily be mistaken for amber poses a toxic threat to human and nonhuman bodies, the dominant scientific opinion has been to let these munitions lie in situ (Bełdowski et al. 2014) – monitored, but left in place. Considering the increased use of the seabed for pipelines, electricity cables, and offshore windfarms, the risk of human and wildlife exposure is escalating. Today, it may seem easy for us to criticise the dumping as stemming from old anthropocentric attitudes that “completely ignore the consequences for the environment” (Missiaen and Henriet 2002, 2), but such actions hinged on the common cultural phantasy of the dilutive power

Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities  285 of massive amounts of water. Toxic agents can dissolve and hydrolyse in such huge amounts of seawater, but the ocean’s capacity at that time was imagined to be “limitless.”11 Even today, such attitudes are not entirely washed out, but the strains put on the oceans have only multiplied. How much can the sea take? Storying Exposure II: Dead Zones of the Baltic Sea Oxygen is crucial for the survival and flourishing of different organisms, both on the land and in the sea. Low levels of oxygen can lead to migrations and, at worst, die-offs of fish, shellfish, aquatic plants, and other organisms, which in turn may result in the disappearance of marine birds and other associated members of the ecosystem. Indeed, hypoxia is seen as a cause of major-scale mortality, behavioural responses, variations of species distributions, physiological stress, and the loss of biodiversity (Zhang et al. 2013). Hypoxia may occur due to “natural” reasons – that is, specific physical characteristics of a given aquatic environment, like the shape of the water body, its depth, salinity, temperature, the inflow and mixing of water, the strength and direction of wind, and whether or how it is connected with other water bodies. Yet since the 1970s, oceanographers and environmental scientists have drawn attention to the anthropogenic causes of oxygen depletion in water bodies leading to large-scale “dead zones,” which typically occur along coastlines – where marine life is particularly concentrated, but also where waste from agriculture, factory farming, and other industries is at its most concentrated. Thus, the dominant cause of hypoxia, and by extension dead zones, is pollution – especially the inflow of nutrients from fertilisers, detergents, and other substances containing high amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus. Some of the most frequently cited examples of such dead zones, aside from the Baltic Sea, are Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, where urbanisation and the poultry industry (in the case of the former) as well as urban, industrial, and factory farming waste and sewage (in the case of the latter) are primary sources of nutrients pumped into the sea. High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus lead to algal blooms, or in other words, eutrophication. In the context of the Baltic region, nitrogen oxides are produced in common agriculture (from where they trickle into the sea) and in coal-fired power plants in Germany and Poland (from where the nitrogen oxides are carried on the wind and either fall out over countryside in the form of nitrates that over-enrich the land and eventually trickle into the sea, or directly into the sea itself). Local sewage systems and leaching from industry, forestry, agriculture, and tourist sites add to the resulting green soup of filamentous algae. While algae produce oxygen during daylight hours, at night the same algae use dissolved oxygen for breathing. As they

286  Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska die, the algae are decomposed by bacteria, which further contributes to the consumption of dissolved oxygen in the water body, and consequently, through the processes of eutrophication, to hypoxia and die-offs of marine life. Such is the formation of the world’s aquatic dead zones. Dead zones may occur permanently, temporarily, or seasonally. While periods of hypoxia have occurred in the Baltic Sea – especially in its central deep basins – throughout the entire history of the Holocene, it is only since the early 1900s (and especially since the 1950s) that human activity-induced eutrophication and hypoxia have significantly intensified in the coastal areas. Such intensification has led to an “unprecedented” and “complete deterioration of the macrobenthic community” in some areas of the Baltic Sea (Jokinen et al. 2018, 3994). While scientists search for geoengineering solutions to such moments of hypoxia in marine environments,12 others emphasise the potentially deep detrimental effects of such a solution on other ecosystems and therefore advocate for much stricter measures concerning human-induced nutrient input into the sea.13 Some environmental humanities scholars also draw attention to the very discourse surrounding the question of dead zones in the Baltic Sea, pointing at ways in which the “health” of the sea is defined in relation to the presence of fish species important for the economy rather than local ecosystems as such.14 What the question of dead zones reveals are both the complexity of relations, processes, and interests that press on the sea as a habitat for life and living, and the persisting imaginaries of the oceanic as that which washes away, hides, and allows one to forget.

Storying Exposure III: Invasive Species in Marine Ecosystems Alien or non-indigenous species are organisms (deliberately or not) introduced to a new habitat, where they are able to survive and reproduce. Such species are classified as “invasive” if they demonstrate a potential for spreading elsewhere and have a damaging effect on the biodiversity or ecosystem of which they form a part, cause economic loss, or have an impact on human health. In marine contexts, alien (non-native) species are introduced not only through ship traffic, but also as a means of modifying local aquaculture (European Environment Agency [EEA] 2015). As the data from 2012 indicate, there are currently 118 non-indigenous species in the Baltic Sea, 90 of which are classified as “established,” and only one of which is considered “endemic” (Helsinki Commission [HELCOM] 2012). The increased number and size of ships, their increased speed, the use of separate tanks for ballast water, as well as the introduction of new trade routes are all key factors in the introduction of non-indigenous newcomers to an area. While some researchers point out that in contrast with many other seas, the invasion of alien species has increased both species and

Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities  287 functional diversity of the Baltic Sea,15 others have emphasised the fragile character of the Baltic’s ecosystems resulting from its semi-enclosed nature and relatively low number of species at large.16 As various documents issued by HELCOM underline, in the already polluted waters of the Baltic Sea, non-indigenous species often appear to have a higher tolerance and adaptability to the demanding conditions that they encounter when compared to the native inhabitants of the area. Once established, it is all but impossible to undo their introduction (Littfass 2019). Experts argue that the best way to prevent potential damaging effects that the alien species may have on local ecosystems is by precluding them from entering the Baltic basin. While the management of ship ballast water has been regulated by the International Maritime Organisation’s Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments since 2017, the question of biofouling remains unresolved. Indeed, various anti-fouling means have proved to be unsafe for the environment – like the tributyltin that is used in ship-bottom paints, which we now know remains in food chains for long periods and disrupts the hormonal balance of marine creatures. With the ever-increasing number of shipping routes and pace of climate change, the issue of accidental species introduction to new habitats and their potential for altering local ecosystems have become a shared concern for different legal bodies and institutions focused on marine environment protection. Simultaneously, discourses dealing with the presence of “foreign” organisms in Baltic waters are reminiscent of cultural narratives and metaphors framing the questions of global migration. What is lacking in both cases (nonhuman and human migrations alike) is a new ethical imaginary. Thus, what is needed is a new modus operandi, one that allows for new ways of making sense of our “impure” selves as blue-green planet inhabitants and companion species.17 Storying Exposure IV: Pink Sea Farming and Low-Trophic Mariculture It used to be a luxury food. Now salmon consumption is three times higher in the US, Europe, and Japan than it was in 1980 – and the demand is growing fast. Salmon farming, a form of aquaculture that entails raising a specific strain of Atlantic salmon “from egg to market” and keeping the fish in net cages in marine settings along (for example) the Norwegian, Irish, and Scottish coasts, is the fastest-growing food production system in the world. While capture-fishery landings have been stagnant since the 1990s, and while wild populations of finfish have been dwindling fast, the increasing demand for seafood has been met by intensified aquaculture. Without adding to land-based stresses to soil and freshwater supplies, the increasing demand for food from the planet’s growing human population

288  Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska has put aquaculture centre stage. In the spotlight is the Atlantic salmon, a species that has been genetically bred from a few Norwegian strains for faster growth and economic gain (Schiermeier 2003, 753). In the same way that flamingos turn pink, the iconic pink hue of the salmon comes from wild salmon eating shrimps and krill – which allows the fish to ingest the colouring compound astaxanthin. Thus, farm-raised salmon would have a naturally grey-coloured flesh were it not for their chemically engineered feed, which adds the pink colour to the desired degree. An art installation exploring the oddity of the colour of farmed salmon by the duo Cooking Sections (British artists Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) describes salmon as “the colour of wild fish which is neither wild, nor fish, nor even salmon” (“Cooking Sections” 2020). A postnatural species par excellence, then, farmed salmon hosts an array of negative impacts on the ocean and contributes to a persistent environmental violence. It adds to eutrophication and the loss of biodiversity, not only through the constant employment of chemicals and antibiotics in the farming practice, but through the excess nutrients that the industry inevitably spills into the local environment as a product of its management of the fish – food discharge and faecal waste from the overcrowded net cages disturbs the oceanic flora and fauna directly under and around the farms. In addition to this, parasites (like the ubiquitous salmon louse) and viruses transfer easily inside fish pens, and ultimately between farmed and wild fish populations, since escapes of the designer salmon are not uncommon and will surely lead eventually to the loss of genetic diversity in wild populations through interbreeding (Schiermeier 2003, 753). The unintended consequences of such aquacultures for marine organisms and human health will only be fully understood in the years to come. In essence, what such fish farming describes is the cultivation of hightrophic marine species that are the top predators of their ecosystems, but which sustainability science shows depends on an unsustainable level of energy consumption given the environmental footprint necessary for production. Put simply, the calorific and nutritional product of such enterprises cannot justify the amount of chemicals put into the farming environment, the suffering of the fish, or the eutrophication that one commonly sees around such areas. Even from the anthropocentric viewpoint of sustainability, one must conclude that there is an urgent need to find alternative ways of producing nutritious food and biomass for the growing human population of the world.18 Land, soils, and freshwater resources are already hard pressed by agriculture (European Academies’ Science Advisory Council [EASAC] 2017). Clearly, one pathway to reducing pressures on the land involves looking to our oceans, but it must surely be in a completely different register of consumption to that which we see today.

Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities  289 For this reason, unfed low-trophic mariculture species such as kelp and seaweed, mussels, oysters, tunicates, and sea urchins have been seen by scientists as potential game-changers in terms of the sustainable provision of food and biomass.19 The low-trophic registers of oceanic ecologies, unlike salmon aquaculture, mitigate eutrophication and may even act as a carbon dioxide-capturing sink. Low-trophic marine companion species, like those of the kelp forests or the algae-rich intertidal zones at the edge of the sea, have for aeons served as environmental engineers of the blue planet. The low-trophic marine zones, with kelp and other macroalgae (seaweeds), oysters, mussels, and sea urchins, offer a host of benefits to various organisms, humans included – providing many species with sanctuary and shelter while mitigating the eutrophication and fading species diversity of the sea. Comparing this zone to the forests on land, Charles Darwin commented on the sheer “number of living creatures of all orders whose existence intimately depends on kelp” (Darwin 1889, 291), and warned of the insurmountable consequences to life should it perish: “Yet if in any country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe nearly so many species of animals would perish as would here from the destruction of the kelp” (Darwin 1889, 292).20 Today, kelp forests and mussel beds are diminishing with the warming waters of climate change. With the gradual accumulation of environmental violence, they seem to be slowly perishing regardless of how nutritious and beneficial they are for many other species (Aksnes et al. 2017). In dire times of environmental degradation and climate change, it is time that we turn our attention and appreciation to low-trophic creatures and what they can teach feminist posthumanities. Can Futures Be (Re-)Imagined? On Feminist Posthumanities and Low-Trophic Theory Feminist posthumanities are versatile forms of research approaches that situate humans in technological and ecological contexts. At the same time, they also situate the nonhuman in a humanities context of ethics and aesthetics, culture and communication, and poetics and justice that is conventionally reserved only for (some) people.21 In practice, posthumanities flips the script of the modern division of labour where science does nature and humanities do culture. Entangled in disciplinary demands, posthumanities entails a focused epistemic practice of situated knowledges, site-specific practices of paying close attention to detail as much as to the bigger picture (“staying with the trouble”), and storying with care.22 We argue for lowtrophic theory as an analytical device from such vantage points. Understood in this way, feminist posthumanities is not a new discipline per se, but a novel assemblage of approaches to different targets that introduces new interdisciplinary fields of research, new (post-disciplinary)

290  Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska methodologies, and (most importantly) new ways of knowing the world. Feminist philosophers, anthropologists, and scholars of science and technology studies (STS), in particular via actor-network theory (ANT), new materialism, bio-semiotics, eco-critique, and cyborg and posthuman theory, have generated a vivid and increasing interest across a number of disciplines. These interlinked research efforts have swept across Swedish humanities, artistic research, and social theory for more than a decade.23 International voices like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Spivak, Cary Wolfe, N. Katherine Hayles, Achille Mbembe, Karen Barad, Anna Tsing, T.J. Demos, Báyò Akómoláfé, Timothy Morton, Ron Wakkary, and Stacy Alaimo, among others, have become synonymous with various post-disciplinary implications for the arts and the humanities. Such posthuman theories imply a decolonisation of human exceptionalism in the traditional humanities – that which made Man the measure of all things. Theories, like the provocations of art and a sublime science, can in themselves constitute a practice of reimagining and reworlding, which is why we call our work a situated and science-infused low-trophic theory. Theories can shift the floor under us, force our attention, and provide new perspectives. Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz notes: “theory is by no means the only path to social change but remains a necessary condition for the creation of new frameworks, new questions, new concepts by which social change can move beyond the horizon of the present” (Grosz 2002, 83). What we will cultivate within feminist posthumanities are the theorypractices that allow for such an expanded vision of potential to be followed through with action-based research – storying the exposure and the reimaginings made possible by low-trophic theory. Thought in this way, posthumanities as a theory-practice has the capacity for great transformational change. Drawing from feminist theories (of relational care ethics, transcorporeal ontology, and situated epistemology) and overlapping other disciplines like anthropology, cultural studies, art theory, creative practice, science fiction studies, and science and technology studies, lowtrophic theory continues the critique of human exceptionalism that one sees in actor-network-theory (and post-ANT), new (feminist) materialism, bio-semiotics, eco-critique, multispecies studies, anti-colonial studies, and cyborg and posthuman theory. It is a body of work that is growing fast within the new forms of the “extra-humanities” – be it environmental-, geo-, oceanic- bio-, or citizen humanities. But in every instantiation, the question of what it means to be human – the character of our relationship to the world, our relative importance, responsibilities, entanglements, vulnerabilities, limits, and potentials – speaks to every aspect of life. This, then, is how posthumanities revitalises the conventional humanities, and in so doing lends the space to reimagine scientific concepts.

Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities  291 Perhaps, though, the defining characteristic of our sense of a posthumanities-in-practice is a willing experimentation with models of research (in its writing and designing, co-creating, curing and curating, documenting, exhibiting, and in collaboration across academic domains). It gives stressed communities “storied forms” in ways that eschew the trap of focusing only on stories of damage and finding ways of caring for the wounds of the world. Our wider research offers creatively written reports and multi-method accounts of “oceanic exposure” and the expositions of coastal dwelling. We develop theory-practices, all kinds of “exposure histories,” “exposure times,” “exposure geographies,” and field-philosophical site-exposures as modelled in Thom van Dooren’s Flight Ways (2014), Caitlin DeSilvey’s Curated Decay (2017), Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed (2016), and Anna Tsing et al.’s Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017) which she put together with others. We design by research, and research by design for the pluriverse of the more-than-human-centred worlds that we want to see. Low-trophic theory is our attempt at grappling with consumption and energy in ecological terms of a mutualism that stays with the trouble of violence. Of course, a range of philosophers have long argued for a re-imagined concept of ecology. Famously, Gregory Bateson argued for an ecology of (the collective) mind, while Félix Guattari envisioned three ecologies. Our argument for a reimagined notion of low-trophic theory bears resemblance with such transpositions from science to social theory. In the context of scientific ecology, the notion of “trophic level” describes a group of organisms occupying the same level in a food chain, which is to say that they have the same “distance” in relation to the primary energy source. Organisms that photosynthesise are thus qualified as autotrophs (primary producers), and those which consume either autotrophs or other consumers are described as heterotrophs (primary, secondary, tertiary, … consumers). What this ecological classification brings to the fore is the very question of nourishment and consumption, which all of life depends on. It is the matter of consumption that saturates each of the above-mentioned stories of both slowly and abruptly (on a planetary time scale) developing anthropogenic violence – the consumption of other creatures, of biomass, of space, and potential futures. Yet in the context of human cultures, consumption in both its narrow sense of food consumption and its broader sense of using the resources of the world is never only about nourishment and material survival. Consumption also amplifies and is amplified by one’s identity, belonging, culture, belief, and habits among other things. It is always linked to affects. Furthermore, none of these factors remains fixed, immutable, or independent from their surroundings; or innocent, for that matter. We do not live in a vacuum. Traditions or habits, even if cherished and preserved,

292  Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska are always performed and entangled in the social, cultural, economic, and ethico-political conditions of a given time and place. Some of these factors are challenged every day in a world where, as consumers, by way of making choice, we also choose to remain complicit or to resist the structures of environmental violence and injustice. Again, such choices are not only about the food we eat – its cost in terms of both its carbon footprint and the suffering or death it may have caused – but also about every product or service we decide to buy as well as the knowledges and stories we prefer to recognise, nourish ourselves with, digest, and consume. There is no “outside” or “elsewhere” to this economy of things. We are all differentially situated, affected, and differentially responsible inhabitants of this planet, and the question before each of us is how to imagine this world (from within and) otherwise. Inside, and with no exit from “field work,” how can we inhabit our earthly companionship with less of that slow violence that is hinged on human ignorance and supremacy? How can we get that shared feeling of belonging, together, responsibly? In the context of mariculture, the cultivation of low-trophic species is seen as beneficial to sea ecologies as it circumvents the many disadvantages of land-based food and biomass production, such as the need for fertilisers, chemicals (antibiotics and colouring agents), and irrigation. Indeed, sustainable sea farming counteracts coastal eutrophication, stimulates biodiversity, and acts as an important carbon sink. Coastal villages may gain value by a (re)development of maritime enterprise, and we may learn how to eat well amidst the challenges of climate change. But what is perhaps needed the most in order to inaugurate such a transformation is what is most often overlooked in such discussions – the cultivation of a sense of wonder about our ecological belonging, the merits of seaside dwelling to mental well-being, and a deeper understanding of how the development of sustainable low-trophic mariculture may influence our common future. Such an approach takes seriously environmental affects – which is to say, intensities or emotions emerging when bodies influence other bodies, be they human or nonhuman. While human emotional responses to environmental damage often take the form of anger, despair, grief, longing, and fatigue, a turn to low-trophic practices and thinking may allow one to better understand and work with such affects. Taking an in-depth look at the low-trophic practices of local coastal communities, like seaweed foraging done in a way that is attuned with the processes and capacities of the ecosystems in which they are involved, we ask what the concept of the “low-trophic” can do in terms of theory and ethics, affect and care. How can we theorise and sympathise in ways cognisant of our own patterns of consumption, potential violence, complexity, and the ecologies in which we as living subjects, creators, and knowledge producers are implicated? How can we – through our practices as thinkers,

Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities  293 scholars, educators, activists, artists, but also, plainly, humans – account for not only the relations into which consciously enter or connections we intentional cultivate, but also the exclusions that we constantly make?24 Cultural studies taught us to pay attention to the mundane matters of life – to look at them with curiosity and see everyday life, popular culture, affect, and consumption patterns not as unworthy aspects of low culture, but as the very essence of how we become who we are. If we now see multispecies studies as a form of cultural studies in the nonhuman turn, we may also begin to consider lessons from low-trophic mariculture – practices of eating, socialising, feeling, and thinking – in terms of an ethics of cohabitation and mutual flourishing. Thus understood, lowtrophic mariculture points us in a direction beyond the “twin spectres of sacralizing and cannibalizing” (Bryld and Lykke 2000, 225) nature and its resources (of which we are part); it seeks to conceive consumption in the sustainable registers of multispecies flourishing and in an accountable response to environmental change, exploring how to flexibly adapt to climatic season change and polluted periods of land and oceans. Looking closer at the entangled ecologies of low-trophic ecosystems of seaweeds, oysters, sea urchins, and other creatures reconnects us with humble origins in deep time settings without a detour to a mythic paradise (lost). And they may help us reimagine contemporary oceanic coexistence in the process. Inspired by these relations, while remaining accountable for the potential violence with which it may be complicit, and without an illusion of originary innocence, low-trophic theory strives to find comfort in the here and now in order to respond to the present as well as our potential futures. Low-trophic theory is thus a practice of thinking and theorising that requires creativity and imagination – that takes more-than-human hospitality and responsibility seriously; that is aware and accountable for the patterns of consumption it draws in both material and epistemological senses; and is accountable to the complexities, entanglements, and exclusions in which it is implicated. Low-trophic theory thrives with creativity. It cannot undo the ongoing assault on the “natural” world, like the marine ecosystems of the Baltic and North Seas. Yet it opens us up towards a better understanding of our own situatedness as both individuals and entities inscribed in various institutions and systems (of oppression), our complicity and complexities in which we are implicated, our patterns of consuming the world, and our ethical imagination. Our meditation on four different instances of environmental violence that are slowly unfolding, submerged and “out of sight,” moves us in this chapter towards thinking and theorising from within and transformed by the “field.”25 To conclude, then: the concept of low-trophic theory refers to the situated naturalcultural research and speculative work on the entanglements

294  Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska of consumption, violence, complicity, more-than-human care, and co-existential multispecies ethics of environmental adaptability. It is an analytic befitting the ecologies of feminist, queer, and crip-critical posthumanities as forms of more-than-human naturecultural research that move between art and science with agility. Epilogue When we consider the potentially compounded impact of human-caused environmental threats and violence, the work of environmental humanities scholar Deborah Bird Rose is particularly instructive.26 Rose helped us to remember that typical life processes unfold cyclically – with organisms living and dying, and returning to particles that are reabsorbed by bacteria and other microfauna, thus ultimately transforming into new life.27 Drawing upon James Hatley’s concept of “aenocide,” though, Rose knew that certain aspects of this cyclical process of life could be amplified and that such amplification held radical consequences. Rose called such amplifications that tipped the balance between living and dying “double death.” Additionally, when these processes amplify still further – such that the death of individuals threatens the future genetic viability or even existence of a species or of multiple species – the result is what Rose, together with Hatley, identified as “ecological aenocide, or the multispecies ‘murder of ethical time’” (Rose 2012, 128). Ethical time describes the reproduction of generations beyond our own, the continuity of generations (whether human or not) and all that entails for the passing on of histories, stories, and even evolutionary adaptations. As such, the amplification of the amplification that Rose describes is one that radiates beyond the individual species to affect an entire ecological network. Rose argues that we can understand this kind of multispecies amplification of an amplification as another kind of time process, one that is “embodied and embedded” (Rose 2012, 128) rather than chronological, linear, Newtonian. This frame anchors the folded temporalities of the Baltic Sea weapons dumps in the bodies of the nonhuman and human animals that bear their traces, creating an ethical obligation to the deep time future(s) of the multispecies communities of the Baltic. Drawing upon indigenous Australian eco-cosmologies, Rose argues: All living things owe their lives not only to their forebears but also to all the other others that have nourished them again and again, that nourish each living creature during the duration of its life. Metabolic processes require energy to flow across species and systems; embodied time is always a multispecies project. It follows that life depends both on the sequential processes of generational time/gift and on the

Towards a Low-Trophic Theory in Feminist Posthumanities  295 synchronous processes of multispecies nourishment. These processes and patterns intersect to form dense knots of embodied time. (Rose 2012, 131) In this way, Rose offers us a justice-oriented way to think through oceanic temporalities, their violence and affordances. Rather than an apocalyptic framework that highlights the spectacle of such poisons, we turn to Rose’s metaphor of a multispecies “knot” of “embodied time.”28 Such a knot might also encompass the multivalent threats to the Baltic that we note above. The weapons themselves might not have the capacity (yet) to murder generational time, but taken together with the capacities of dead zones, eutrophication, and warming waters, they might very well play a role in doing so in the future. Rose’s concept instils an ethical obligation to the multispecies communities with whom we share the Baltic and the North Seas. This obligation exists not because the death of other species could signal, like the archetypal canary in the coal mine, our own collective death as Homo sapiens, but because we share responsibility for all the bodies, stories, and temporalities we inhabit and consume. Their suffering and death matter, irrespective of our own, and as Rose argues, “if suffering does not matter, then it is difficult to assert that anything matters” (2012, 139). The animals in the Baltic Sea that embody the military chemical compounds enact a transcorporeal spectral return of the weapons that urgently calls for our attention – as do territorial white masculinity, neo-imperialism, and neo-nationalism. The toxic embodiment of these chemicals and others in the bodies of oceanic animals does not allow us merely to theorise on the haunting of folded, nonlinear temporalities, it allows us to fully ingest, in theory and corporeal practice, the absence of purity. Yes, the presence of the chemical weapons in these animal bodies, and in our own bodies, mixes past, present, and future, making multiple temporalities material in our own embodied time and flesh. The chemicals, long left for dead, have proven instead to be very much alive and ghosting the bodies of the human and nonhuman animals whose DNA they are slowly altering or whose cells they are slowly mutilating. As the amassed stuff of environmental violence gains new life in attracting new, unintended victims, we ask what our ethical obligations are to our fellow species to right this wrong that is intragenerational in scope. Are they “grievable”? Can we mourn and care for the demise of these species and peoples lost in time? The living ghosts of futures to come ask us to confront our past mistakes, our current violences, our voracity, and the unknown harms that we may be inflicting.29 As time folds in on itself, the hauntology of environmental violence, as lived through human and animal bodies, cannot be ignored. It lingers, and slowly we awake to its powers. Perhaps low-trophic theory, as

296  Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska a practice of the feminist posthumanities across our arts and sciences, will prove instructive in this regard. At least it stands as an imaginative tool for theory-practising differently, for learning to grieve in more encompassing ways, and to re-think oceanic practices of consumption. Notes 1 See Haraway (1991), Åsberg (2014), and Åsberg (2018). 2 On such entanglements, see Åsberg, Holmstedt, and Radomska (2020). 3 See, for example, Neimanis, Åsberg, and Hédren (2015). 4 See HELCOM (2018). 5 On this branch of posthuman thought, see, for example, Åsberg and Braidotti (2018) and Radomska and Åsberg (2020). 6 See, for example, Rose et al. (2012) and Neimanis (2017). 7 See, for example, Alaimo (2010) and Alaimo (2016). 8 See, for example, Radomska (2017). 9 See also Radomska et al. (2020) and Radomska (2020). 10 On the notions of extinction sites and dead zones, see Radomska and Åsberg (2021). 11 See Alaimo (2012). 12 See, for example, Stigebrandt (2012). 13 See Jokinen et al. (2018). 14 On this, see Peterson (2018). 15 See Olenin and Leppäkoski (1999) and Ojaveer et al. (2010). 16 See Littfass (2019). 17 See further, Haraway (2008) and Haraway (2016). 18 On this need, see Alexandratos and Bruinsma (2012). 19 On the need to obtain significantly more food and biomass from a lower trophic level than we currently harvest, see Aksnes et al. (2017). 20 See also Filbee-Dexter et al. (2016) and Filbee-Dexter and Wernberg (2018). 21 For example, see Haraway (1991), Haraway (2007), Plumwood (1993), Barad (2003), Wolfe (2009), Braidotti (2013), Åsberg and Braidotti (2018), and Åsberg (2021). 22 It is a formulation drawn from Haraway’s work. See, for example, Haraway (1991). 23 See Åsberg and Braidotti (2018), and Radomska and Åsberg (2021). 24 On such questions, see Giraud (2019). 25 On “field philosophy,” see Buchanan et al. (2018). 26 See, for example, Bird (2006) and Bird (2012). 27 For further elaboration on this process, see Radomska et al. (2019). 28 See also Geerts (2022). 29 See, for example, Tsing et al. (2017).

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Index

activism 258, 267; climate 272; magical 262 Adas, Michael 95 advanced visualization technologies 64 Alaimo, Stacy 290 aliveness of artificiality 27 Allado-McDowell, K. 190–191 Amoore, Louise 40 Anansi 11, 15, 81–82, 175–176 android 156 animality 94, 242 anthropocentrism 9, 15, 29, 33, 85–89, 193, 227–228, 239, 242; post- 188, 193, 237 anthropos 6, 88 anti-fascist 86 antiracist 86 Aristarkhova, Irina 124, 127 artificial general intelligence (AGI) 12–13, 111 artificial intelligence (AI) 5, 27, 34, 41–42, 44, 109, 113, 116, 134, 148–149, 151–159, 161–162, 179, 231; advanced 64; algorithms 176; applications 153; avatar 152–153, 161–162; bipolar 143; creative tools 162; darker implications of 10; developments 25, 152; entity 152–153, 156; -generated 44, 145; imitations 153; language systems 190; limitations of 153; missteps 39; network 232; newsreader 112; powerful 41; symbolic 42; system 152–153, 158–159, 161; techniques 64; threat of 12; transformative



potential of 113; virtual entity 152; world of 5 Asante 81, 175; community 175; slaves 175 Ballard, J. G. 9 Barad, Karen 29, 117, 127, 186, 266, 290 Barnette, Jane 268 Bartolini, Nadia 261 behaviour 12, 29–33, 36, 61–67, 69–71, 73–74, 141, 210, 230, 239; anti-establishment 81; biological 29; cognitive 33; goal-directed 69; human 63, 67, 73, 147; information 73; intelligent 26; intention 65, 67–68; mechanical 128; mimetic 187; nonverbal 33; real-life 68, 73; repertoire 32; responses 30, 285; tracking 74; worker 181 being-with 6, 223 Bellamy, Edward 83, 107–108 Bender, Emily 43 Benjamin, Ruha 7 Bennett, Jane 218, 264 biodiversity 286; aquatic 282; loss of 225, 280, 285, 288; stimulation of 292 bioethical debates 116 bios (the life of humans organized in society) 5–6, 8 biosemiotics 29–31, 33–34; cyber- 31 biospheres 165, 168 Black Lives Matter (BLM) 267 Blake-Coleman, B. C. 273–274

Index  327 Bottici, Chiara 184, 186 bourgeoisie 111 Braidotti, Rosi 2–3, 6, 9, 81–82, 85, 117–118, 120, 179–180, 186, 193–194, 227–228, 290 Brand, Carina 180–181 Branwen, Gwern 39–40 Burkert, Walter 14 Čapek, Karel 12–14, 111 capitalism 188, 268–269; advanced 91; free-market 231; global 111, 179– 181; late 1, 4, 6, 113, 145, 175, 191; neoliberal 181, 186; surveillance 179; transnational bio- 179 Cartesian 8, 269 causality 69, 186; blended 70 Cesaire, Aime 96 chatbots 61, 158, 160 Chatwin, Bruce 192 Chen, Mel Y. 213, 218 Chollet, Francois 12–14 Chomsky, N. 113, 152–153, 155, 157–160, 162 civilization 2, 12, 27, 44, 233; human 165, 170 climate: activist 185, 272; apocalypse 114, 182; breakdown 185; cause 272; change 86, 90, 189, 261, 280, 283, 287, 292; conservations 259; crisis 180, 227, 258, 271; debate 258; discourse 258; emergency 259; justice campaigners 185; patterns 187; politics 267, 273; stories 259 cognition 13, 29, 32, 34, 37, 45, 224, 235, 238–239, 249; algorithmic 30; artificial 34; computational 30, 34; disembodied 61; embodied 69; foundational definition of 31; machines 105; nonconscious 30, 240; plant 32 cognitive 31, 63, 90, 190; accessible 69; actors 30, 33; acts 29, 31, 45; assemblage 25, 34, 38, 42, 45; behaviours 33, 147; beings 127; capabilities 45, 190; capacities 25–26, 30, 32–34, 45, 191, 235; computing 146–147; ecology 190; effort 69; entity 29–30, 33; growth 119; level 63; linguistics 69; media 45; neuroscience 148; practices 25; processes 13, 65; processing 65;

prosthetics 13; science 155; subjects 128; systems 34, 191; texts 30; therapies 148 colonial 44, 185; anthropology 229; anti- 290; communicative system 276; control 275; domination 260; European powers 95; expansion 275; hierarchies 223; ideology 95; Japanese era 114; order 276; patterns of appropriation 280; progress 261; project 180; settler communities 95; systems 224, 260, 276; telegraph network 275; values 214; violence 267–268 colonialism 44, 96, 228; settler 182, 194; territorial bounds of 194 colonization 11, 223, 267 computational 30; algorithms 29; automation 176, 203; cognition 30, 34; devices 35; interpretation of information 30; learning theory 26, 49; media 25, 29–31, 34–35, 37–38; models 50; neuroscience 143, 149; power 49, 51; resources 50; sensory system 38; systems 34, 36–38, 42; task 13 conceptual persona 6, 14, 81, 89, 91 Connolly, William E 85, 186–187 Cooking Sections 288 Cordero, Radames J. B. 219 Coupe, Laurence 9 COVID-19 32, 248 Crawford, Kate 15–16 creativity 16, 29, 35, 107, 155–162, 181, 293; human 153, 156; potential for 30 Cy X 271 cybernetics 63, 155 cyborg 25–26, 61, 91, 176, 191, 258–261, 263–264, 270–271, 273, 276, 290 Dadachova, Ekaterina 219 Darwin, Charles 32, 97, 192, 229, 289 Davies, Tony 2 Deacon, Terrence W. 33–34, 36 decolonial 86, 96, 267, 270 DeepMind 40 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010) 280 Deleuze, Gilles 15, 87, 89, 180, 184–185, 187, 194, 259

328 Index Deutsch, David 50 Dinerstein, Joel 96 Dinkins, Stephanie 156 displacement 82, 179, 249 Dolly the Sheep 91 Domingos, Pedro 112 dualism 228–229, 254; rejection of 88 dynamic 109, 186; constitution of entities 9; images 70; information 61; knowledge 263; medium 119, 124; of technology 189; principle 87; recursivity 42; relations 268; vision of time 186 dystopian: age 117; convergence 182; despair 180; fantasy 121; fiction 181; future 1; realisations 112; view 67; vision 183, 220 ecological: aenocide 294; alternations 283; approach 87; belonging 292; catastrophes 187; change 223; classification 291; collapse 113, 134; community 183; consciousness 271, 273; contexts 289; crisis 176; damage 137; degradation 176; destruction 237; disasters 280; environments 265; grief 281; losses 281; network 294; practices 270; realities 180; reciprocity 25, 30, 44–45; terms 291; themes 241; turmoil 181; world 231, 241 ectogenesis 115, 117, 121–123, 127; human 115; imagining 121, 124– 125; technologies 122 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 253 empathy 177, 210–211, 234, 241, 251–252 encoding 53–54; amplitude 53 Enlightenment 2, 94, 96, 185, 270; anthropocentric worldview of the 192; counter- 187; Humanism 192; legacy of the 86; post- 286; project of humanism 86; technological 255; thinkers 2, 7, 181 environmental: adaptability 283, 294; affects 292; bottlenecks 13; catastrophe 45; challenges 30; changes 77, 281, 293; collapse 231; conditions 32; consequences 159; contexts 29, 31; contingencies 38; crises 34, 180, 223; cues 65, 69; damage 233, 292; defenders 280;

degradation 280, 289; destruction 179, 181, 232; dystopias 183; ecologies 191; engineers 289; exposures 282; factors 189; footprint 288; humanities 280, 282–283, 286, 290, 294; immersion 38; levels 176; problems 29; sciences 33; scientists 285; signal 31; threats 294; traditions 86; violence 280– 283, 288–289, 292–293, 295 episteme 4–5, 7, 232, 268; posthuman 6 Esling, Natalia 266 etymology 9, 224, 250, 253 European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC) 288 European Environment Agency (EEA) 286 European Renaissance 2 evolution 8, 32–34, 71, 96–97, 224, 231, 235, 237; autopoietic 181; history of 186; human 93; of life forms 249; of spider technology 234; pinnacle of 234; sociocultural 242; species 187 evolutionary: adaptations 294; algorithms 36; change 32; development 229; history 31, 232; leaps 94, 236; pathways 37; possibilities 83; potential 82; stories 8; strategies 32; theory 29–30, 32, 187; time 188; trajectories 38 extractivism 179, 187 fabulation 81, 89, 271 Fanon, Frantz 213 Federici, Silvia 261, 268–270, 273, 276 feedback loop 61–63, 67, 73–74; information 26–27; mobilizing the 70; post-reality 26, 63, 66; runaway 12; simulation 67 Feldman, Ruth 118, 128 feminism: materialist 7, 255; speculative 271 feminist 86, 179, 270, 294; critics 116; cyborgian embodiment 263; discussions 112; materialism 290; phenomenology 120; philosophy 91, 179, 290; politics 88, 118, 270; posthumanities 225, 281–283, 289–290, 296; science fiction 26; spirituality 255; struggles 270;

Index  329 technoscience studies 7; theory 91, 290; thought 96; utopian speculative fiction 182 Ferrando, Francesc 260, 265–266 Foresight Report on: Future Computing 144; Future Medicine 144; Future Neuroscience 144 Foucault, Michel 2–4 Frampton, Alexandra 262–263, 268 Fredkin, Edward 39 Freud, Sigmund 94–95, 206, 211 Fukuyama, Francis 1 Fuller, Steve 228–229 Gaia theory 33 Galison, Peter 7 Gates, Bill 12 gender roles 117 genealogy 5, 219, 253–254, 263 genetics 177, 215; epi- 215 genomic editing 5 Ghosh, Amitav 180 global dependencies 42 Great Inversions 37, 38 Greenwood, Susan 264, 270 Grosz, Elizabeth 186, 290 Guattari, Félix 87, 191, 291 Guzman, Patricio 209 Haraway, Donna 9, 15, 61, 120, 180, 188, 193, 227–228, 241, 260, 263–264, 271–272, 283, 290 Hardt, Michael 6–7, 182–183 Hassan, Ihab 4–5, 92 Hawking, Stephen 12 Hayles, N. Katherine 31, 43–44, 61, 63, 82, 92, 96, 190, 227, 290 Heaven, Douglas 41 Herder, Johann Gottfried 3 Herman, David 187–188 Hoffmeyer, Jesper 31, 34 Homo 94, 227; habilis 94; sapiens 27, 78–79, 94, 213, 228, 295; universalis 88 Human Brain Project human exceptionalism 6, 9, 15, 82, 86, 94, 187, 223, 290 humanism 2–4, 8, 85–89, 186, 192–193, 227–228, 233, 237, 240–242, 254 humanities 29, 91, 149, 187, 227, 289–290; citizen 290; conventional

290; environmental 280, 282–283, 286, 294; extra- 290; more-thanhuman 225; traditional 290 human–machine boundary 61 Huxley, Aldous 8, 115, 121–123 imperialism 82, 95; European 92; ideologues of 96; neo- 295 imperialist 179; agenda 233; aspect of humanism 1; conquests 186; ethos 237; exploitation of natural materials 180; extension of humanism 2; ideology 96; impulses 240; ontology 96; policies 44 Incingarette 71–73 information networks 5 Internet of Things 71 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman 242 James, William 254 Jameson, Fredric 183 Jasanoff, Sheila 8 Jim Crow laws 7 Judeo-Christian 8 Kant, Immanuel 3–5 Kellner, Douglas 121 kinship 6, 8, 33, 176, 180, 194, 228, 232–233, 240–241, 263, 269, 271; ethics of 228; intergenerational 180; materiality of 224; networked 262–264, 270; posthuman 223, 273 Kress, Nancy 117 Kubrick, Stanley 236 Kurzweil, Ray 1 Lai, Larissa 182–183, 185, 187 Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LamDA) 43 Le Guin, Ursula K. 9, 176, 182, 185 Lee, Rachel C. 213–214 liberalism 44–45, 228; modern 44 Lovelock, James 33–34 Lowe, Lisa 44 Lowentin, Richard 7 Lunar Land 72–74 Lymer, Jane 119–120, 124 machine learning 25, 54, 64, 156, 158, 190; algorithms 49, 52; approaches 54; framework 12; methods 26; programs 151; quantum 54; task 54; writing tools 189

330 Index Malphigi, Marcello 215 Manning, Erin 259, 272, 276 Margulis, Lynn 32 maternal: behavior 128; bodies 116, 119, 124; care 125; contact 112; figure 119; –foetal connection 119; guide 134; involvement 123; participation 116, 127; reproduction 122; sympathetic nervous system 124; technologies 116–117, 121, 127–128; touch 117–118, 120–121, 124, 126, 128; voice 126 McKittrick, Katherine 8 Meindertsma, Christien 220 melanin 177, 213–216, 218–219 Mellaart, James 14 Metaverse 61, 65, 152 Miller, Chris 262 modernity: alter- 6–7; anchored 236; capitalist 6; damaging history of 242; Eurocentric 242; hierarchies 6; ideologies of 95; models of 7; racial capitalist 241; reimagining of 6; technological 9, 11; theme of 94; western 229–230, 235, 239 Monteagut, Lorraine 265, 267 Morris, William 83, 107–109 Murray, Janet H. 189 Musk, Elon 12 mythoi 8 mythology 92; white 96 National Film Board of Canada (NFB) 159 natural language processing (NLP) 25, 152, 154, 158 Negri, Antonio 184 neural nets 36, 39–42; contemporary 30; deep 38–39; transformer 42 Nixon, Rob 280 Nunes, Rodrigo 184–185 OpenAI 43, 190 organism: alien 228, 238; animal 94; biological 32, 34, 37–38, 77; cognitive capacities of 34; complex 32; evolution of 33; foreign 287; higher-level 31; indigenous 237; living 31–33, 155, 268; marine 288; mechanistic 120, 124; micro- 32; multicellular 32; nonhuman 30; single-celled 238; super- 33; survival of 33, 118; unicellular 31–32, 37

patriarchy 254, 268, 270 Peirce, C. S. 30–31 Petrozzi, Ginevra 265–267 philosophy 44–45, 87–92, 96, 155, 179, 187, 194, 265–266, 269, 282 photo-resistor 64, 72 Planck, Max 5 plant cognition 32 Plato 93–94 Plumwood, Val 188 Pokémon Go 71 Pollan, Michael 32 potentia 88–90 potestas 88–89 Potnia Theron (6000 BC) 14–15, 223 Prometheus 4, 81–82, 92–94, 111 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria 117 quantum: algorithms 54; bits (qubits) 50; circuit 53; classifier 53; computation 26, 49–50, 52–54; computer 13, 26, 49–54; computing 26; data 54; entanglements 186; fluctuation 5; interference 50–51, 53; learning 26, 52–54; machine learning (QML) 54; mechanical phenomena 50; mechanics 5, 49–50; operations 53; parallelism 53; random access memory 54; resources 50, 54; state 52–54; superimposition 51; supremacy 5, 13; technologies 54; world 51 racialisation 241 racism 228–229, 281; anti-Black 241; systemic 229–230 Radius 13–15, 111 reality 50, 65–66, 74, 109, 115, 121, 147, 154, 175, 185, 241; augmented (AR) 61, 71, 152; common 230; everyday 112; experiential 119; extended 26; future 123; humaninhabited 73; material 5; mixed (MR) 61, 65–66, 68, 113; modes of 241; natural 61; original 63; post- 63, 66; reflection of 96; transcendental 175; virtual (VR) 61, 63, 148, 152, 156, 189 Rees, Amanda 8 region-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNNs) 39, 41 Renaissance 2–3, 5–6, 94, 96

Index  331 Renser, Berit 262 Rinehart, Robert 144 Rose, Deborah Bird 188, 294–295 Sands, Danielle 188 Schneider, Rebecca 261 Sconce, Jeffrey 273 Scott, James C. 184 Searle, John 35 Sedgwick, Helen 122–124 segregation 7, 114, 179 self 45, 239, 260; -absorbed 170; -augmenting 12; autonomous 45; -combusted 173; -conception 229; -contained 50–51, 120–121, 124; destroying 229; -driving 41–42; -esteem 263; experience of 238; -expression 162; feeling of 153; -fuelling 56; -help 262; -hood 188, 191, 240; -identify 258, 262, 265; -improvement 12; -making 227; -management 182; -organization 87, 181, 186–187; quantified 61; -realization 242; recognition of the 256; -reflexive 82, 149; -regulating 87; -reinforcing 96, 235; -repair 34; -replication 34; sense of 37, 153, 161–162; -styling 90; -transcendence 87; -troping 241–242; unified 237; vision of the 179 Shaw, George Bernard 10 Shelley, Mary 1, 8, 111 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 194 simulation: computer 61–63, 66–67, 69, 71–74, 240; data-driven 68; feedback loop 67; growth of 66; in-silico 146; mental 27, 61–63, 66–69, 71–73; microbiomic 146; operational 147; outcome 69–70; performance 66; process 69 sociogenic principle 229 sociotechnical: changes 235; imaginaries 9 Solnit, Rebecca 185 spirituality 224, 253–255, 258–261, 270, 273; development of 255; etymology of 224; feminist 255; posthuman 224, 255–256, 261, 276; traditional 256 Stivers, Carol 126 subject: collective 88; dominant 89; ethical 194; humanist 1, 120, 155;

political 77; posthuman 5–6, 118; relational 88, 118; splitting of 15; transcendental 3; transversal 90 subjectivity 175, 184, 272; constructions of 8; figurations of 89; model of 89; split 229; transcendental 3; transversal 10; vision of 88 symbiosis 175; cyber- 30; endo- 32, 224, 249–250, 252; techno- 30, 34 Tapia, Danae 258 Tchaikovsky, Adrian 224, 228, 231, 234, 237–238, 240, 242 technogenesis 82, 92–93, 95–97, 260 Telescope 189–190 Thunberg, Greta 258 Traina, Cristina L. H. 119 transcendence 3, 6, 9, 15, 78, 87, 89, 175, 224, 227, 233, 240, 242, 253–256 transhuman 89, 116, 125, 127, 232, 241 transhumanism 1, 86, 127, 176, 227–228, 233–234, 237 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 188, 290–291 Turing, Alan 50 unconscious 15, 90, 119, 266 user experience (UX) 153, 159–160 utopia 1, 9, 83, 107–108, 112, 114, 180, 182–183, 194, 220 van Dooren, Thom 188, 291 Velasquez, Diego 3 Vertesi, Janet 210 Virtual Futures 149 visualization 27, 61–65, 67–68, 70–71, 148, 192 Weiss, Gail 120 Weizenbaum, Joseph 10, 25 Wells, H. G. 8 Wheeler, Wendy 31, 34 Wiener, Norbert 63 witchcraft 224, 260–261, 268–271, 273; Bruja 265; contemporary 262, 265; cosmologies 264; digital 258, 261–265, 267, 270–271, 273, 276; history of 261; knowledge exchange 263; magical 264; networked 263;

332 Index practices 264–265, 267–268, 271; -related identities 262; resurgence of 261; revival of 264 Wolfe, Cary 290 World’s Parliament of Religions (1893) 253

Wynter, Sylvia 96, 228–233, 236, 241–242 Xenophoria 213 zoe (the life of all living things) 5–6, 227, 233, 241