Machine as other than Other

The following is a section form a talk I'm doing at the Digital Capital symposium at Johns Hopkins Tuesday-Wednesday 13-14 March 2012. Speakers include Wendy Hiu Kyong Chun, P{aul Goodrich and Paul Vanouze: worth tuning in to the live stream at https://connect.johnshopkins.edu/digitalcapital/

The paper begins and ends riffing on the previous post about the Kelly Gang


The ethical question, whether boring and stressful, repetitive work should be done at all, even by machines, then concerns how we conceptualise the labour condensed into the design of our technologies. The Western industrial tradition has lost its grasp on the dead, whose accumulated knowledge and skills is massed and condensed into our tools. Where traditional societies reverence and dialogue with the ancestors who gave them the techniques they use today, the techno-rationalist approach of capital, reverencing nothing but the pursuit of profit, crams the ancestors into the black boxes of our 'intelligent' machines. Technology is where the West keeps its ancestors, and the question then concerns how right it is to enslave the dead, even after they have passed on, in the service not of the living but of the mechanism of capital. The question is more than hypothetical, because it is a synecdoche of the idea of freedom: the possibility of an autonomous machinic phylum is today not only the pars pro toto of any larger autonomy but the Levinasian ground on which we might confront, in the autonomy of our technologies and therefore their claims upon us, the very possibility of our own freedom.

After all, as Marx is at pains to demonstrate, workers found themselves subjected to the technologies in which were concretised their own skills, and forced to work to the pace dictated by the factory, alienated and oppressed through the medium of the labours of the past congealed in the machines they served. Today, if we work not to the clock but the key-stroke, nonetheless, and perhaps to a greater degree than in the last century, our time is accounted for in relationships mediated through and accounted by machines in which the communicative skills of our ancestors have been encased. The embedding of the human past in technologies should make them our allies: instead we confront them as slaves, in the sweatshops of the global South, or as masters in the global software and finance industries which, it could be argued, are only the first to adopt the new servitude of artificial life and intelligence. A new question then emerges, which we can call the Levinas question: do our constructions (a) of the parameters of a-lifes, and (b) of the systems we use to visualise them and their functioning, act as screens in the sense of folding screens or room dividers, to hide rather than open onto an Other or other way of being? Do our relationships, as either servants or masters, to machines never open us up to the infinite demand of the Other that would come from a face-to-face encounter with the ancestral dead? Are we, in that case, ethically impoverished by our constriction of this Other as other-than-Other, as that which places no demand upon us?

Gagadju Dreaming

To walk the billabongs and woodlands up to the scoured rocks at Anbangbang, with their paintings tens of thousands of years in the making and restoring; to see there the three rock pillars where the lightning man has his home; and to see the stone platform where he consumated his illicit love with the woman who would become the rainbow serpent; and to swim in the pool that has become her home; and to do these things in the plain light of day. To walk, arms loose at sides, in the warmth and to smell the patchwork fires clearing the ground brush in the early day – is to walk in the landscape of Eden. Into this ancient world arrived the first woman from the island in the north west forty thousand years ago. The world of Anbangbang grew here because she and all of our ancestors needed it so perfectly.

What depths of memory would creationists rob us of?