My Christmas present to me is time to digest a few books on my long list that I really must and want to read. This morning, I am looking at Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993). It’s so perfect for me! He quotes from Shapin and Shaffer (1985):
We still need to understand how such boundary-conventions developed: how, as a matter of historical record, scientific actors allocated items with respect to their boundaries (not ours), and how, as a matter of record, they behaved with respect to the items thus allocated. Nor should we take any one system of boundaries as belonging self-evidently to the thing that is called ‘science.’ (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, p. 342 in Latour, 1993, 16)
When I first started reading anthropology and archaeology books, I recall wondering why these two disciplines were not speaking to each other. They would answer a few of each other’s questions, I thought. But more than that, Latour’s book is so relevant, since my overarching project is an inquiry into shifting paradigms, from one filled with discrete objects to one that is entangled and messy.
I recently wrote the following in a proposal submission (which, incidentally, was rejected but in the nicest way possible!)
The AI revolution is linguistic
…/…
The feedback I received for my final AI project was, “You’ve begun to map, in this submission, how the development of AI might engender the breakdown of ‘us’ and ‘them’ rather than the dissolution of society…” For me, the critical phrase here is the “breakdown of ‘us’ and ‘them”. There is a breakdown taking place. It cannot be denied. But perhaps it’s better to call it a reconfiguration. Lines around words and concepts are dissolving, manifesting in a reality that is violent and terrifying in places. (If there is any comfort to be had, perhaps it is the hope that these seismic shifts I’m alluding to underpin a systemic evolution that will [could/may/has the potential to] eventually allow us to leave behind some of the deeply unhelpful habits that have become embedded in our societies, making room for more sustainable habits and ways of being. One of those habits is human exceptionalism and of course, Western white male exceptionalism.)
The shifts I discuss go far beyond us/them. They undermine many of the West’s and humanities long-held assumptions and self-image. The dissolution has led to an awkward, self-conscious, sensitivity between groups, within individuals, around knowledge, and most of all inside and around words. The digital revolution is fundamentally linguistic. We have internalised the ability to push our fingers on a keyboard or screen before immediately entering a door into ‘elsewhere’; here/ there is no longer what it once was (Hayles, 1999; pp 26-28). Like the quantum theory much of our technology is influenced by, everywhere can be here and there at the same time. Lines are rapidly dissolving all over the human universe. All sorts of binaries to a greater or lesser extent are in a state of flux; male/female, nature/culture, night/day, dead/alive, organic/machinic and of course human/non-human [I could, have gone on… ].
…/…
In a kind of fractalised iteration, word has become image and image has become word.
Ilya Sutskever (2020) asks in an interview about the future of AI, “Where does vision end and language begin?” (Alluding to yet another blurring of lines.) Hayles wrote in 1999, “The computer restores and heightens the sense of word as image — an image drawn in a medium as fluid and changeable as water” (1999; pp 26).
By ‘dissolving’ my family archive and reconfiguring the data with the help of proprietary AI, using image and word to create a speculative family album, I am engaging in the process of reconfiguring language and querying (or queering) the whole concept of ‘other’. In producing speculative others using a digital other, I am blurring and even dissolving lines between past/present, me/them, I/you, and even true/false.
Refs:
Friedman, L. ‘Ilya Sutskever: Deep Learning | Lex Friedman Podcast #94’. Accessed 20 November 2023.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13CZPWmke6A.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.