The Inhuman

I argue that the philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard and the film "Brazil" are mutually enriching and illuminating when read in conjunction, particularly around issues of technocapitalism, private selfhood, nostalgia, and the concept of The Human

The concept of the subject relies on humanist presuppositions. Regardless of whether purported to be decentred and posthumanist, the subject conceived in poststructuralist and philosophical terms remains anthropocentric and anthropo-morphic. There is something irrecuperably Cartesian in the poststructuralist idea of the subject. Physicality, both bodily and that of the materiality of the machinic prosthesis, is barred from the constitution of the Self, as the real is barred but also foreclosed to it. The subject, therefore, is yet another philosophical phantasm, which in its material actuality is determined as an instance of the signifying automaton. I argue that the " posthumanist " self, if conceived in Marxian and non-philosophical terms, ought to be viewed as the radical dyad of the signifying automaton and the real. It renders Haraway's notion of the Cyborg more radical and unravels its inhumanity rather than posthumanity. Keywords Feminism · Automaton · Physicality · Non-human · Marxism · Non-philosophy […] the world of the symbolic is the world of the machine (Lacan, The ego in Freud's theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis).

It’s a damned thing scared to say. Nothing is going to be a thing.
But I’m the one who got on this rock.
-Benjamin (LSTM / Artificial Intelligence)

Similar to Jacques Derrida’s assertion that there is nothing outside the text, mathematical fictionalism suggests that mathematics is non-representational and more an historical construction and cultural artefact than an expression of a Platonic discovery of a transcendent and independent truth out there. This talk examines the status of autonomous production in the age of algorithmic self-replication and self-reproduction (i.e. self-evolving algorithmic texts that produce new narrative texts) and what that means for interpretive agents like us in the era of rapid developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. While algorithmically generated narratives can sound science fictional, self-adapting algorithmic narratives are in fact a common function that both operates behind and sculpts many of our daily tasks: from self-adapting advertising algorithms to self-generating narratives. As its central example, this talk considers the short sf film Sunspring (2016) written by a recurrent neural network called a long short-term memory (LSTM); or, Benjamin, as the AI named itself. The script for Sunspring was rapidly generated by Benjamin after being introduced to a large number of sf screenplays. After the script was printed out, it was then put to film by a cast and crew directed by Oscar Sharp and was made for the Sci-Fi London film festival as part of a 48 hour film challenge. Sharp collaborated with AI researcher Ross Godwin (the developer of Benjamin). Benjamin produced the notably inhuman screenplay while the acting roles were chosen randomly by Sharp. What is striking about Sunspring is that it is very strange and, often, really funny. Is our laughter the result of the director’s and actors’ choices making light of the oddness; or, may our laughter be the consequence of discomfort as it makes manifest biases we hold about how stories are generated and whether they really are our own or the product of a rigid linguistic/code expression? Mathematical fictionalism implies that that algorithmic code may generate uncanny narratives because it is an extension of us. On the other hand, mathematical Platonism may suggest that algorithmically generated narratives express the inhuman whereby the uncanny is neutralized by an encounter with that which is exterior to human agency (i.e. it is not familiar). Sunspring raises certain questions about narrative and the way it expresses either language (or code) according to its constitutive logic or whether the incompatibility between meaning and algorithmic processes in Sunspring reveal a glimpse at essentially inhuman narrative. Ultimately, this talk asks whether we laugh at Sunspring because we realize we are only “halfway there” in our AI technology or whether AI generated narratives may be suggesting a rigid logic incompatible with the messy illogic underlying much human storytelling. In short, we should stop for a moment to consider Benjamin’s output when it says: “nothing is going to be a thing.”

The concept of the subject relies on humanist presuppositions. Regardless of whether purported to be decentred and posthumanist, the subject conceived in poststructuralist and philosophical terms remains anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. There is something irrecuperably Cartesian in the poststructuralist idea of the subject. Physicality, both bodily and that of the materiality of the machinic prosthesis, is barred from the constitution of the Self, as the real is barred but also foreclosed to it. The subject, therefore, is yet another philosophical phantasm, which in its material actuality is determined as an instance of the signifying automaton. I argue that the “posthumanist” self, if conceived in Marxian and non-philosophical terms, ought to be viewed as the radical dyad of the signifying automaton and the real. It renders Haraway’s notion of the Cyborg more radical and unravels its inhumanity rather than posthumanity.