Race and Computation: an Existential Phenomenological Inquiry Concerning Man, Mind, and the Body by Dilan D

Race and Computation: An Existential Phenomenological Inquiry Concerning Man, Mind, and the Body by Dilan D. Mahendran A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Management & Systems and the Designated Emphasis in New Media in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Paul Duguid, Co-Chair Professor Kimiko Ryokai, Co-Chair Professor AnnaLee Saxenian Professor Hubert L. Dreyfus Fall 2011 Abstract Race and Computation: An Existential Phenomenological Inquiry Concerning Man, Mind, and the Body by Dilan D. Mahendran Doctor of Philosophy in Information Management & Systems University of California, Berkeley Professor Paul Duguid, Co-Chair Professor Kimiko Ryokai, Co-Chair This dissertation is concerned with two phenomena, race and computation, their emergence in modernity and their convergence today in our modern technological epoch. From the perspective of the traditional disciplines the concepts of race and computation are wholly incommensurable. Formally, race refers to a hierarchical taxonomic schema for classifying humans while computation refers to the formal mathematical logic of digital machines. I argue that race and computation share a peculiar modern conception of the body in relation to cognition. According to this modern schema one is more fully human if one appears toward the pole of the mind and therefore less or not human at all if one appears toward the pole of the body. It is this artificially strained relation between the body and the mind that had come to define the human in modernity and persists in our current epoch. In this way race became the measurement of the polarity between the mind and the body and as such the modern measure of humanity. The distinction that race makes is not lost in computation because it inherits this narrow model of the human as animal rationale and mechanizes it. I argue that this defining characteristic of the modern human as rational is both computational and racial and finds itself historically anchored in the normative conception of the human as Man [homo humanus]. My chief aim in this dissertation is not to indict modern technology as racist but to show how race and computation reveal the bipolar aspects of our normative schema for human being, one that has had a long "romance with disembodiment."1 Could both race and modern technology share a common origin in Western modernity? Could race and computation share a fundamental philosophical ground which the sciences themselves take as a priori? More urgently, what could race and modern computational machinery tell us about what it means to be human in our current age? Does the origin of the modern subject lay the framework for both the development of race and computation? 1 Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (New York, Routledge 1992), 180. 1 These radically disparate objects, race and computation, are grounded on a peculiar relationship between Man, his body, and thinking. By Man, I mean what has come to be accepted as the modern norm for human-being, the autonomous rational animal. The concept of the rational animal places thinking, the sine qua non of the secular human, in opposition to the body. The basis of my argument is that the historical idea of Man, as the secular human, had been developed through the violent devolution of bodily experience, in favor of detached calculative rationality, from which computation and race have emerged. This has placed Man over and against the natural world that extends beyond the mind, especially the body and others who are constituted outside the norm of Man. It is well known that Descartes inaugurates the modern concept of Man as the thinking subject by articulating this norm as the distinction between mind as thinking substance [res cogitans] and everything external to mind [res extensa]. I argue that this normative distinction between mind and body finds a more radical expression in Alan M. Turing's concept of the digital computer, a founding theory of computer science and information technology. On the one hand the digital computer decouples the bodily from existence, proof of the teleological development of a technological rational humanity. On the other hand, race limits existence to the bodily, as a fundamental barrier to humanity. It can be said that modern computation is the angelic ascent from one's body, while race is the hellish descent into one's body. 2 In Memory of Peter Lyman who showed me the path to thinking begins in friendship i Preface This dissertation sets out to apply some fundamental tenets of existential phenomenology to the inquiry of human identity in relation to race and modern technology. While it can be quickly ascertained that race is closely related to the problem of human identity, modern technology (particularly computational machinery) seems distant from such an inquiry and even more further afield from the idea of race. Yet simply, race and computation are historical characters in the narrative of the West's ongoing pursuit for personal existence and self-certainty. Race and computation are intimately linked to the telos of European reason. The following question could be posed: Why existential phenomenology? Why not provide a positive history of technology AND race in order to see where they may intersect? For example, why not provide a history of computing and how the racial identities of its founders impacted the design of the computer? Or how early computer manufacturers such as IBM assisted the Nazi's in developing information retrieval systems to further its genocidal campaign against Jews and so called “non- Aryans.”1 These are both valid and important topics of research but neither can reveal the basis upon which the idea of race and computation are grounded, that is, the idea of personal existence. Personal existence is normative because it asserts that in order to be human one must be actively reasoning and be certain of doing so. The uniquely European idea of the self-sufficient person as a rational animal is where the modern invention of race and the later development of computation find their unlikely origin. The theoretical concept of the digital computer descends from the traditional prejudice that human thinking is a type of interiorized mental symbol manipulation and calculation about the external world. As such, the digital computer is a mechanized model of the traditional model of the person. Moreover, two centuries before the advent of the theory of computation, race was intrinsically aligned with the history of rational personal existence because race provided a mechanism to distinguish between beings with reason and those without. The idea of the person is historical and not universal. Personal existence is captured by the normative concept of Man which modern Europeans allowed to stand-in as the universal human of all time. Both race and computation cover over the truth that the concept of Man as the human is their standard of measure. Today some have announced that Man is dead and we are now posthuman but I will show that this is a premature if not specious claim. The concept of Man has transformed into a more radical expression of calculative reason most clearly shown in the belief that the human and nature are computational, that is, comprised of hardware and software. Today the world appears as computable information. What's critical is the concept of Man still remains the hidden standard of measure for science and technology because the concept of Man has been buried deep within the artifice of the modern technological world. As such, the 1 Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust, (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001). ii concept of Man still functions as a central organizing principle of racial and technological experience. Existential phenomenology provides a way to reawaken and recover the forgotten and covered over idea of Man. First it provides a method to explicate the distinction between the human and human-being. Human-being is the way in which humans are encountered, the way humanity is perceived. The being who walked the Nile in 4000 B.C. is as human as the being who walks along the Rhine in 2011 A.D. What has changed is the epochal interpretation of human-being and not the human species. Race is a modern European facet of the perception of human-being. If we return to the question of human experience as that of encounter with the world this will, if only preliminarily, provide the existential basis in which to see how our current interpretation of the human and human-being is technological through and through. Race, as I will argue, is firstly about encounter. Race then is a way in which human-being is encountered. Encounter means how human-being is perceive in pre-objective experience. Phenomenology holds the view that all knowledge begins with perceptual encounter. Therefore phenomenological method starts from the first-person perspective. Perception is of course a widely used term in the sciences and in public discourse, often connoting the biological sensory system that delivers information to our brain which in turn are computed into meanings about the external world. In the public sense, perception can also mean opinion or appearance. However perception has a very specific meaning within phenomenology. It cannot be reduced to cognition, bio-chemical computational processes in the brain, or beliefs. Rather perception is the constitution of meaning manifest in immediate experience. From the phenomenological point of view, human perception goes straight through to the things-themselves and provides our most basic access to the world. Perceptual access is a founding access meaning that all other forms of access to objects such as reflection, epistemology, science etc.

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