[SLIDE] Feminism between Fish and Future AI: A Geotraumatic Critique
of Posture
[SLIDE]
There is a semiotic system on the corresponding stratum because the
abstract machine has precisely that fully erect posture that permits it to
"write," in other words, to treat language and extract a regime of signs from
it. But before it reaches that point, in so-called natural codings, the abstract
machine remains enveloped in the strata: It does not write in any way and
has no margin of latitude allowing it to recognize something as a sign …
[SLIDE]
After that point, the abstract machine develops on the plane of consistency
and no longer has any way of making a categorical distinction between signs
and particles; for example, it writes, but flush with the real, it inscribes
directly upon the plane of consistency.
—Deleuze and Guattari1
[SLIDE]
You have travelled the way from worm to human being, and much in you is
still worm.
— Nietzsche2
Dreams are our eggs, our larvae and our properly psychic individuals.
—Deleuze3
1
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004), 72-73.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Part 1, §3; 6.
3
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 250.
2
[SLIDE] I. Space: Geometry
Adriana Cavarero opens her thoughtful 2014 examination of the history of
representations of female subjectivity in Western art practices, Inclinations: A
Critique of Rectitude, with the following appraisal of Western philosophy’s
attitude towards ‘inclination’:
[SLIDE] ‘Philosophy, in general, does not appreciate
inclination; it contests and combats it. Its methods are
numerous and varied, depending on the epoch, but are all, in
essence, as Foucault would put it, dispositifs [configurations]
of verticalization the aim of which is the upright man. And
already, on the linguistic plane, this provides a clear indication
of the geometrical structure underlying [our] question.’4
Inclination is suspect, specifically for the modern Enlightenment
philosophical tradition that Cavarero interrogates — beginning with Kant —
due to its compression of two key problems.
First, ‘inclination’ denotes a deficiency in terms of a moral posture. A moral
vocabulary always accompanies the word, notes Cavarero [quote]: ‘for
instance, it is easy to encounter a conflict between “good inclination”, which
is to say “an innate or acquired disposition to act virtuously”, and its
opposite, “bad inclination”, a “natural and acquired propensity to behave
dishonestly”, which is to say, in a depraved manner’. The autonomous, free
4
Cavarero, Inclinations, 1.
and moral subject, if it is to be virtuous, should be upright. To incline is to
deviate from this uprightness.
Secondly, it denotes a deficiency in terms of an intellectual posture, for the
word ‘inclination’ relates dangerously to the world of passions, desires,
libidinal, irrational, or unconscious drives — a whole realm of animalistic
instincts that threaten the priority of reason and the autonomy of rational
thought. One’s clear-headedness is disturbed by the inclination to do
something irrational or emotional. To quote Cavarero, ‘in a speculative
vocabulary, “inclination” and “passion” are often used as synonyms’.5
The problem, for feminism, or for art, is that inclination — this so-called
susceptibility to depraved, immoral, irrational, and libidinal or unconscious
desires, is almost ubiquitously connected to the figure of woman, and
furthermore, perhaps more disturbingly, to a naturalised idea of woman’s
purpose in human society. Here she quotes Proudhon:
[SLIDE] ‘To speak of sexual relations, it is a law of nature in all
animals that the female, incited by the instinct to have children,
searches for a male in all manner of ways. Woman cannot
escape this law. She is naturally more inclined to
lasciviousness than man, first because her self is more fragile,
such that liberty and intelligence struggle in her with less force
against her animalistic inclinations, and secondly because love
is the great, if not only, occupation of her life.’6
And Schopenhauer:
5
6
Cavarero, Inclinations, 2.
Cavarero, Inclinations, 3.
[SLIDE] ‘[W]omen in truth exist entirely for the propagation of
the race, and their destiny ends here; they themselves are
childish, foolish, and short-sighted — in a word, they are big
children all their lives, something intermediate between the
child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the
word.’7
I.e., a human.
Thus, [SLIDE 1] verticality has, as its counterpoint, a [SLIDE 2] horizontal line,
which decants a set of binary oppositions.
While the vertical line of modern, autonomous and individualistic subjectivity
is always implicitly positioned as [SLIDE 3] masculine, human, and eminently
rational — a triad re-constitutable as ‘culture’, the vertical line is feminine,
animalistic, non- or not-yet-human, irrational and pathological. It is — via its
connection to the biological reproduction of the human species —
irrevocably natural and therefore in conflict with reason and culture.
Here we see the very typically modern nature/culture binary [SLIDE 4] in
sharp relief. In this configuration, nature and culture are essentially separate.
From the point of view of the rational verticality of ‘Man’, women are too
close to nature to be trusted, they tempt one away from clearheaded, moral
and intellectual decision-making. Meanwhile men are paragons of culture, for
only they have the ability to extract themselves from nature.
7
Cavarero, Inclinations, 4.
In order to resolve this antagonism between the vertical masculine (cultural)
line and the horizontal feminine (natural) line, Cavarero seeks a diagonal. This
is her ‘inclination’:
[SLIDE] ‘Next to the paradigm of the vertical axis, appropriated
by man because of his inborn rationality, appears the paradigm
of an oblique line, reserved to woman because of a constitutive
predisposition to maternity, which causes inclination. It is of
course indisputable that we are speaking here about outdated
stereotypes: the schema works, precisely, by emphatically and
repeatedly proposing conventional characteristics for the two
sexes. [SLIDE] But looking closer, and through a philosophical
frame, we see two postural paradigms referring to two different
models of subjectivity, two theatres for questioning the human
condition in terms of autonomy or independence, two styles of
thought, two languages: the first relates to individualistic
ontology, the second to a relational ontology.’8
Vertical ontology articulates itself via the upright and self-sufficient ‘I’ or the
inwardly-directed machinations of the rationalist Enlightenment ego,
grounded in self-relation. Meanwhile, the ontology of [SLIDE] inclined
relationality is, for Cavarero, one based on dependence, vulnerability and
outwardly-directed relationships of care, one best manifested as the eternal
[SLIDE] mother-child assemblage.
With the latter, she admirably dislodges the culture/nature binary that haunts
so much modern thought, however, despite her protest that it is simply a
methodology of ‘exaggeration’, her counter-model, with its iconology of
8
Cavarero, Inclinations, 10.
maternal femininity, sheers too close to reinforcing oppressive, binarising
stereotypes of feminine care against masculine self-sufficiency, even when
the revolutionary line is supposed to located in ontology of the former.
If Cavarero’s schema loosely aligns with that of modernity, then Elizabeth
Wilson’s 2015 book, Gut Feminism, interrogates the way in which this
postural geometry is prevalently figured within a broadly postmodern
paradigm — with the goal of moving beyond it. If Cavarero’s critique of
verticality is chiefly provided by the affective vector of love and maternal
care, Wilson’s is oriented by depression and aggression.
For Wilson, from the outset, nature and culture cannot be separated. In fact
their separation is to be rigorously questioned for the oppressive power
structures it smuggles in with it — that of (active) culture-creating man over
(passive) receptive-reproductive, natural woman; the repression of affects,
appetites and emotional drives that underwrite this separation; and again,
the propensity for these sorts of dualisms to cast women in the weaker role
as a means of keeping them in their place.
The figure of depression mixes these two sides of the nature/culture binary
in strange and unexpected ways. Using contemporary science, Wilson
makes much of the fact that mental, so-called rational states, are always
also biological insofar as thought itself is unabstractable from one’s
neurological dispositions and subject to complex chemicals released in the
brain (like serotonin) or ingested into the body (like tryptophan). Furthermore,
these are deeply interlinked with the complicated and embodied
machinations of the central nervous system, the enteric nervous system, the
composition of the gut microbiome, and further out, socially-regulated
possibilities and constraints upon the matter one has available to put into
one’s body. Various experiences and forms of depression are always
complex [SLIDE] ‘entanglements of affects, ideations, nerves, agitation,
sociality, pills, and synaptic biochemistry’.9
This is an interesting path to take, since, as Wilson points out, feminism has
been incredibly wary of bringing biological data to bear on feminist ideas and
theory in the last few decades. The dominant orthodoxy of postmodern
feminism, she points out, has been social constructivism, which favours
models of discursive individuation and enunciation, and is integrally
defensive against any form of ‘biologism’.
[SLIDE] ‘There is a powerful paradox in play: antibiologism both
places significant conceptual limitations on feminist theory and
has been one of the means by which feminist theory has
prospered. Even as it restricts what feminist arguments can be
made, antibiologism still wields the rhetorical power to make a
feminist argument seem right. Because feminist theory has
credentialed itself through these biological refusals,
antibiologism is not something that can be easily
relinquished.’10
Social constructivist feminism attempted to counter sexual essentialism by
arguing, not incorrectly, that social, symbolic and linguistic constraints
structure and feed-back into biological constructions of sex, sexuality and
the body, however, it becomes eminently unhelpful when it begins to
demonstrate an inherent distrust of biological discourse, to the point of total
ignorance or neglect of biological data, including — especially for our
9
Wilson, Gut Feminism, 1.
Wilson, Gut Feminism, 4.
10
contemporary era — that issuing from the domains of genetics,
neurophysiology, evolutionary biology, pharmacology and biochemistry.
In her diagnosis of the shortcomings of these more contemporary feminist
interrogations of the mind, intelligence, cultural power structures and the
biological or material substrate that underwrites both, we perceive a different
geometry.
[SLIDE 1] Here the vertical line is inhabited by feminist social constructivism,
with its heavy focus on cultural regulation and/or potentialisation of the body.
Its verticality is owed to this heavy investment in discursivity, sociality,
activity, representational politics, and linguistic-symbolic structures. It is, in
turn, antagonised [SLIDE 2] by the repressed horizontal line of the biological,
feared because it cleaves closely to overturned naturalistic ideas of the
body, which are nonetheless perceived without nuance, as essentialising,
inert, passive and oppressive in their passivity — not only for women, but
also for those who occupy a host of ‘minority’ positions, including the
racially-vilified, the differently-abled and the neurologically-atypical.
Although postmodern, social-constructivist feminism was deeply concerned
with casting off the oppressive naturalism of its modernist inheritance, it has,
she argues, simply re-instituted the fundamental dualism by which that era’s
power structures were managed and enforced. All it has done, is inverted its
terms: [SLIDE 3] aligning feminist critique with culture, and masculine
scientific recalcitrance with nature, and the biological, evolutionary, genetic,
and neurological sciences.
Like Cavarero, Wilson, seeks the diagonal line that will open a passage out
of this restrictive geometrical matrix. And like Cavarero’s line, it [SLIDE ]
inclines upon a vector of collapsed dualisms — here between culture and
nature, the artificial and the natural, intelligence and the imperceptible inner
workings of body — bringing thought and biology together in a complex
relational entanglement of the [SLIDE] ‘gut-mind’ that knits itself out of
transversal mental and biological crossings, as well as social and
pharmacological ones.
What is specifically compelling about Wilson’s solution to the
vertical/horizontal antagonisms we have been outlining here, is that
biological matter is not inert but dynamic, and her relational ontology,
contrary to Cavarero’s, no longer reports primarily back to the (conscious)
human subject and its social relations.
We are, nonetheless, still trapped on a [SLIDE] two-dimensional, spatial
plane, and Wilson’s argument begins to get seriously interesting, not to
mention increasingly wild, as she begins, in the latter part of her book, to
speculate on ways in which time becomes entangled in the relational
ontology of the inclined diagonal line — via something she comes to refer to
as the ‘biological unconscious’, whose role is to [SLIDE] ‘draw in the
periphery of the body as psychological substrate and de-isolate brain from
body, psyche from chemical, neutron from world’ across the entire
evolutionary spectrum of human—including pre-human and post-human—
evolution.11
Cavarero’s exploration of the etymology of ‘inclination’ is useful here. She
writes:
11
Wilson, Gut Feminism, 13.
[SLIDE] ‘This is a good place to highlight the etymological root
of the term inclination: to incline is to bend, to lean down, to
lower; in Greek, kline means “bed”.’12
As we have seen, for both Cavarero and Wilson, inclination communicates
across repressed affective, libidinal, biological or unconscious drives. It
marks out a space of dream or embodied trauma. And, once temporalised, I
want to argue, the inclined diagonal line occuppies the place of the dream,
or even the nightmare, of the two-dimensional spatial plane we have been
examining: a vast topological manifold extending, speculatively, ‘backwards’
to the dawn of the Earth and ‘forwards’ into its distant machinic future. An
[SLIDE] anorganic, transsexual, hybrid, gut-unconscious that overrides
nature/culture distinctions and redistributes intelligence beyond the limited
realm of the articulate human subject, bringing all sorts of archaic and
futuristic occurrences into play.
*
[SLIDE] 2. Spacetime: Topology
In an interview with Bruno Latour, Michel Serres gives a succinct and useful
image of what is meant by a spatiotemporal topology of the kind I’m
interested in exploring here:
[SLIDE] ‘If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to
iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities.
If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby
12
Cavarero, Inclinations, 3.
points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same
handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two
distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If,
further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close
can become very distant. This science of nearness and rifts is
called topology, while the science of stable and well-defined
distances is called metrical geometry.’13
Serres goes on to directly to relate this image to a notion of deep time,
beneath and beyond the linear, geometrical, and historical one we
experience every day in our spontaneous apprehension of the world. If
space can be temporalised in such a way — as the deep topological time of
evolutionary stratification — then travelling through a spatial configuration is
to travel through a temporal one.
This also means that there is a substratum of material ‘thought’ — or
intelligence that sits below what we take to be the conscious mind upon
which the upright subject, whether it's Cavarero’s philosophical one, or
Wilson’s discursive one, grounds its autonomy.
Welcome to the [SLIDE] ‘biological unconscious’.
Wilson, paraphrasing psychoanalyst, Sàndor Ferenczi (a colleague of
Freud’s) describes it like this:
[SLIDE] ‘[The biological unconscious] materializes the
protopsychic (ontogenetic and phylogenetic) inclinations native
13
Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1995), 60.
to the body’s substrata. By “ontogenetic tendencies” [Ferenczi]
means the desire to return to the womb (to fetal or embryonic
conditions) in order to “bring about the reestablishment of the
aquatic mode of life in the form of an existence within the moist
and nourishing interior of the mother’s body”. [SLIDE]
Phylogenetic trends are the desire for all creatures to return to
the water. As with the trauma of birth, terrestrial species have
been traumatized by their expulsion from the water as the
prehistoric seas receded. In this sense, ontogenetic and
phylogenetic events are coeval.14
‘What if the entire intrauterine existence of the higher mammals’ continues
Ferenczi in his clinical diaries, ‘were only a replica of the type of existence
which characterized that aboriginal piscine period, and birth itself nothing
but a recapitulation, on the part of the individual, of the great catastrophe
which at the time of the recession of the oceans forced so many animals,
and certainly our own animal ancestors, to adapt themselves to a land
existence, above all to renounce gill-breathing and provide themselves with
organs for respiration of air?’ — including, later, speech.
Ferenczi argues that these ontogenetic and phylogenetic inclinations are
latent in all substance but that they come to the fore most plainly in states of
psychopathology.
This latent, inorganic desire to return to the sea manifests in an affirmation of
positive fluidity, against rigidifying structures, including those of geometry,
gender and sexuality, and the autonomous self-grounding ‘I’. Importantly, for
Wilson, this trans-temporal, material-intellectual substratum becomes most
14
Wilson, Gut Feminism, 53-54.
active when [quote] ‘the cognitive, rational, symbolising structures’ that keep
the biological unconscious in check ‘have been destroyed’.15
To be clear, Wilson isn’t positing this as a legitimated scientific theory so
much as a new way of thinking natural-cultural, animal-human, humanmachinic, inorganic-organic relationships that can be [quote] ‘uniquely
instructive for feminists looking to situate their theories in a more dynamic
relation to biological data and [biological] theories’—especially in which
neither are figured as isolated or inert.16
Wilson writes [SLIDE]: 'Under Ferenczi, biology is strange matter, proficient
at the kinds of action (regressions, perversions, strangulations,
condensations, displacements) usually attributed only to nonbiological
systems. This biology is not the flat (sovereign, authoritative, juridical)
substrate seen in many feminist or neuro-humanities arguments; it is much
less tractable to conventional empiricism and politics.'
An interesting entrance point into exploring the artistic possibilities of
Wilson’s alternative route towards a feminist-political praxis, is to consider
how the evolution of human beings from the horizontal, bilateral symmetrical
bodily structures of the fish from which they evolved, led to and enabled
language, speech, and representational activity in general in the upright
posture of the ‘fully-developed’, fully upright human organism.
One can sketch (in treacherous linear form) the [SLIDE1] catastrophic
continuum from horizontal to vertical like this:
15
16
Wilson, Gut Feminism, 56.
Wilson, Gut Feminism, 51.
Primordial Swamp -> Gastrulation -> Oceanic Radial Symmetry -> [SLIDE2]
Evolution of Chordates (bony fish) and Crustaceans -> Bilateral Symmetry ->
Exit to Land -> [SLIDE3] Cephalisation and Verticalisation -> Mental
Production of Space and Time -> [SLIDE4] Conceptualisation and Language
-> Mental Time Travel -> Counterfactuals and Complex Cognition -> Artificial
Intelligence
Because the biological unconscious is topological, it ‘folds’ (to use Wilson’s
word), future and archaic potentialities together -- de-essentialising its
elements and collapsing female/male, natural/artificial, human/nonhuman,
speech and matter binaries in the process. These spatio-temporal folds can
be thought in terms of [SLIDE] palingenesis and [SLIDE] caenogenesis.
Palingenesis is the [SLIDE] reproduction of ancestral characteristics in
ontogenesis: it invades the present from the deep past.
Caenogenesis is the [SLIDE] introduction of characteristics in ontogenesis
that are not previously present in the evolutionary history of a species and
can be understood, techno-culturally, as machinic, chemical or mental
prostheses: thus, arriving from some unforeseen evolutionary future.
What these two vectors speculatively connect, via the biological
unconscious, for our purposes today at least, are fish and future artificial
intelligence, and both via a vector of fluidity that is roughly consonant with
the feminist insurrection of a materialised mind against top-down, rigidifying
symbolic, semiotic patriarchal structures of coding and control, whether
these are understood as the upright posture of a properly-human ‘Man’, or
the ways in which certain contemporary theories of artificial intelligence
understand the development and creation of AI as ultimately humanlyprogrammable.
To that end, I want to finish with a very short poetry performance piece that
enables a regression in language, from legible sentences to broken
phonemes, read a-syntactically, in a set of 3D printed ‘poems’ that
materialise language (through a phonetic cipher that I will display behind me)
sand thus work to fold the future-oriented digital technology of additive
manufacturing into the archaic evolutionary history of human terrestrial
development. A diagonal — topological — inclination through space and
time that connects fish and AI in the topological folds of its dream-black
laser-sintered polyamide dust.
[VIDEO]
‘Reading’ (beginning with legible segments of the poem).
The cipher for the 3D phonetic alphabet can be found here:
http://bit.ly/1UvQakY (Desktop) and here: http://bit.ly/1XRme5v (Mobile).
Download the printable poems here: https://additivism.org/cookbook