For me, the most useful and interesting part of my previous overly long post was the paragraph at the end, which I included to give a brief explanation of what I mean by structural determinism. The explanation oversimplifies and could be thought to mean all the images are similar, which would be wrong. It is important to my inquiry, however, so this post focuses on it in a little more detail.
I suggest that algorithmic machine-generated imagery often suffers from seeming structurally deterministic. Structural determinism is described in Capri and Luisi, (2014) The systems view of life: a unifying vision.
Readers are likely to point out that the text above refers to living structures, and that algorithms are not living things, despite the many Terminator imaginaries. This is addressed on the third page from A Systems View shared here under Social Autopoiesis – “While behaviour in the physical domain is governed by the ‘laws of nature,’ behaviour in the social domain is governed by rules generated by the social system itself.”
Rose Braidotti writes eloquently about overcoming this binary separation between culture and nature: “The boundaries between the categories of the natural and the cultural have been displaced and to a large extent blurred by the effects of scientific and technological advances.” And, say says, “social theory needs to take stock of the transformation of concepts, methods and political practices brought about by this change of paradigm”. If, like me, you query some of the tenets of post-humanism, which is where Braidotti’s work is situated, Donna Haraway (2016; p 32) suggests we might view ourselves as compost rather than post-human. To be considered compost may be alarming for people outside critical theory to contemplate, but I like it. I do not underestimate the difficulty though. We have to somehow remain caring about each other and the world. Metzinger (2009; pp 179) points out that there are mental health risks to this kind of thinking, exemplified, he says, by ‘vulgar materialism’; the idea that there is no magic, no wonder, nothing precious about life and that we are merely “gene-copying biorobots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe”. Personally, I am not sure what isn’t magic and wondrous about being compost AND achieving the many things we humans have managed. But there is evidence everywhere that he is right to point out this danger.
Metzinger goes on to say;
“The third phase of the Consciousness Revolution will affect our image of ourselves much more dramatically than any scientific revolution in the past. We will gain much, but we will pay a price. Therefore, we must intelligently assess the psychosocial cost” (Ibid).
To think of ourselves and social systems as structural and structurally deterministic, we can’t avoid materialism and the risks involved, including ‘vulgar materialism’. And so, all of this is to say that despite the many challenges of working with machine generated output – and there are many very real difficulties, mainly ethical (and not because it ‘scrapes’ but because of the ecological costs and the hidden workers who are paid too little to clean the data) – I will stick with it.
Through doing so, I am minded to remain conscious of and hope to explore;
- a) overly structurally deterministic social systems which visual digitisation points to elsewhere;
- b) wellness challenges for all of us as the paradigm continues to evolve and humanity is forced to contend with the blurring and reconfiguration of categories,
Capra, F. and Luisi, P.L. (2014) The systems view of life: a unifying vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Braidotti, R. (2013) The posthuman. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press.
Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press (Experimental futures: technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices).
Metzinger, T. (2009) The ego tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self. New York: Basic Books.