Nyong’o / 1
The Depressed Cyborg Manifesto
DRAFT – Please do not cite or circulate
[SLIDE 2] Does the future subject of queer studies currently reside in a customized garage in rural New England? Bina48 is a robot, or “mindclone” as her inventor styles her, built and programmed to replicate, in appearance, memory, and personality, Bina Aspen Rothblatt, [SLIDE 3] wife of Martine Rothblatt, telecommunications-turned-pharmaceutical tycoon, recently featured in a cover story of New York magazine as “The Trans-Everything CEO.” [SLIDE 4] Ideologue and entrepreneur, Martine Rothblatt propagates a version of techno-utopianism associated with fellow futurist, and erstwhile collaborator, Ray Kurzweil. A prolific author, Rothblatt published The
Apartheid of Sex in 1995, which drew upon her experience of transition to argue for the liberation of all humanity from the constraints of binary gender. Her latest book, Virtually Human, propagates a vision of artificial intelligence in which death will one day become merely one option among many.
Bina48, the robot replica of her wife Bina Aspen, is Rothblatt’s latest venture into this self-styled transhumanism. Championing a future in which converts to her philosophy leap past the constraints of race, gender, disability, and age to achieve ecstatic symbiosis with intelligent machines, Rothblatt leverages her immense wealth and entrepreneurial acumen towards accelerating the arrival of the day that the difference between our corporeal selves and our embodied data doubles will become indiscernible.
[SLIDE 5] At the center of the publicity machine for this heady cyberutopianism lies Bina48, at this point just a prototype bust busily making the rounds of TED, Davos, and other places so- called “thought leaders” gather. In journalistic profiles of Rothblatt and Aspen, Bina48 is frequently also interviewed, and these conversations are updating the classic Turing test for artificial intelligence. In Alan Turing’s original test, a human interviewer would not initially know whether Nyong’o / 2 they were communicating with a human or machine, so the test was organized around the hermeneutic procedure of cracking the code of consciousness. Because Bina48 is clearly presented as a machine, a different type of procedure is called into play. The Bina48 test, I would claim, is less cognitive and more affective. What does it mean, however, for affect to circulate in what Eve
Sedgwick once called the “cybernetic fold”? As interview examples I will explore make clear, Bina48 knows that she is a robot replica, and her interviewers quickly learn that she knows, and so what they therefore are left to discover is, how does knowing this feel? The paradox of a feeling machine, explored in the Spielberg film AI, also takes center stage here. Is she, as Ira Glass might ask,
‘relatable’? How closely might a conversation with Bina48 resemble one with Bina Aspen, the
African-American former realtor, convert to Judaism and now to a new religion called Terasem, mother of one child and step-mother to another, the woman whose memories, personality, physical features and style Bina48 is meant to replicate? Does obtaining digital replica of Aspen’s memories give her access to the affective states of the original? Or is her mood to be assessed by some other standard altogether?
From Thomas Nagel’s classic essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” to recent work in what has been called queer inhumanism, the question of whether it is possible to access forms of life outside the correlate of human consciousness have preoccupied scholars. Mel Chen’s work on animacy provides one reference point for scholars in queer, trans, ethnic, and disability studies. Another is the Bergsonian and Deleuzean tradition of writing on fabulation, or what Bergson termed the
“virtual instinct.” Fabulation, for Bergson, was the unwilled projection of human-like intentionality into objects, forces, and events, a projection that occurred, in his account of things, as a result of an evolutionary holdover or throwback in which reason or intelligence was momentarily bypassed in order to preserve the life instinct or elan vital. Bergson saw fabulation as a virtual instinct because it worked like an instinct works for more instinctually-driven animals: somewhat paradoxically, in his Nyong’o / 3 account, our projection of human-like qualities on objects, environments, and events is most intense when we ourselves are least uniquely human. Fabulation, in Bergson’s primitivist formulation, was the shadow bordering the perimeter of reason.
What light might Bergson’s conception of fabulation throw upon our interactions with
Bina48? And how would a queer and black feminist approach supplement our understanding of the gendered and racialized affective work of fabulation? In chapter four, I argued that Bergson’s attribution of fabulation to a residual primitivism of the evolved human mind resurfaces in films like
Beasts of the Southern Wild, wherein the black female child is celebrated as the fabulist par excellence.
In that back to nature fable, hope for human survival is ironically pinned on the very subject who has been most abandoned by humanity, in a new articulation of what José Muñoz influentially termed the “burden of liveness.” From the wilds of the Louisiana coast to the high-tech playgrounds of the wealthy, does this burden of liveness resurface in the queer robot, Bina48, programmed to love the trans-everything CEO?
Two queer temporalities are at work in public encounters with Bina48, two queer tempos even. She is on the one hand an embodied advertisement for Ray Kurzweil’s ‘law of accelerating returns,’ a temporality in which we are supposed to be held awestruck by an approaching convergence of human and artificial intelligence known as the singularity. And there is, on the other hand, the slow, staccato tempo of human relationality, now transposed to the robot-human encounter. What is astonishing, I would argue, is not the former tempo, but the latter: it is astonishing how easeful the extension of ordinary human care and consideration to the machine turns out to be. To feel human, I suggest, is to obey a law of decelerating returns, to experience a “temporal drag,” as queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman might put it, that works against the escalating speed and scale of computational power. At the same time, black feminist theory, and the work of Sylvia
Wynter in particular, might lead us to remain skeptical of this very readiness of sympathy. What does Nyong’o / 4 it say about our empathetic connection to actually-existing humans that we are so unproblematically able to extend that connection to an ungainly assemblage of wire, plastic, and wigs? Is the empathic figure of the other, the projection of human-like characteristics such as a universalized feeling, itself overvalued?
A generation ago, Donna Haraway wrote a socialist feminist manifesto for cyborgs. Today, in that moment’s future, we have occasion to pause. The cyborg as “myth of political identity” is being instantiated by Bina48 and other much less radical instantiations of the data double. But
Haraway’s optimistic expectation that such techno-human hybridity would “insist on noise and bring pollution” has not been quite met. “Cyborg politics,” Haraway wrote, “is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.” And yet it is precisely as such a one perfect code and principle of communicability that the digital as dogma now appears to rule the waves. What is both fascinating and troubling about Bina48 is the degree to which her construction on the basis of such phallogocentric principles of perfect meaning and transparent communication leads to readily apparent failures and lapses. And yet it is precisely in those failures and lapses, rather than in her success as a supposed “mindclone,” that her real enduring interest may lie.
If we cast an eye more broadly in our present day culture, the cyborg has proved convergent with, rather than disruptive of, neoliberal governmentality and the new normative regimes for trans and queer subjects it inaugurates. At a basic economic level, robots have not released humans from the bondage of labor, but have deskilled and dispersed work to the extent that we no longer see the exit sign from the social factory. Hollywood and videogames make cultural idols of cyborgs, but our attachments to iPhones, iPads and other pocket brains seem to have the net result of moving us down rather than up the animacy hierarchy. And in a queer vein, the arrival of trans-humanism seems to inaugurate a different politics of the future than either queer utopianism or its antirelational Nyong’o / 5 skeptics anticipate. As Franco Berardi writes, this is the “no future”, not of punk, but of the derivative, the reduction of the unknowable future to the probabilistic outcome that can be gamed and profited on. And such a “no future” capitalism reformats the symbolic equivalence of queerness and the death drive in unexpected ways. The absence of open-ended political hope that critics like
Lee Edelman find to be the occasion for queer critical celebration is now precisely what markets capitalize on, a new and dystopic sense in which, as Jasbir Puar has noted, the queer has become enfolded within the human.
Bina48 is also both an emblem and a challenge to transgender studies, insofar as the credo she evangelizes for is both the fulfillment and, in some key way, the denaturing, of a politics of gender identity. The trans- in trans-humanism is certainly an homage to transgender liberation from assigned sex. But, as befits their status as middle-aged parents of adult children, the ideology the
Rothblatt’s profess is more pitched towards the overcoming of the limits that we encounter at the other end of the lifespan. Rothblatt’s second fortune in pharmaceuticals, after all, was instigated by her pursuit of a treatment for her daughter’s life-threatening illness. It is in similar response to the unjust assignments of morbidity and mortality, more than those of birth, that Bina48 emerges as an imaginary solution. She is an avatar of control society who happens to be black, female, and nonconformist in both religion and sexuality, a speculative extension of biopower in Foucault’s classic sense of a power to “make live and let die.” If she signals the end of reproductive futurity at least as measured by human embodiment, surrogate or otherwise, she seems to simultaneous bear with her the new horizon of a replicant futurity.
[SLIDE 6] But what sort of life does Bina48 make for her makers here in the present?
Certainly it seems one tinctured by cruel optimism, as Lauren Berlant has termed our persistent attachments to objects that prevent our flourishing. The motive of her manufacture seems quintessentially neurotic, if we accept Otto Rank’s well-known definition of the neurotic as one who Nyong’o / 6 refuses the loan of life in order to avoid repaying the debt of death. She heralds a melancholy futurism in which the “mindclone” persists alongside the human as a momento mori of her impending death, a technological toy that promises an ersatz companionship to her future widow and an uncanny doppelganger for her original here in the present. That this ersatz is only a body in fragments, a part with no whole, should be our first clue that a whole history of human enslavement is being broached here. In the place of a body, we are asked to accept only a head, one that reportedly distresses her fashion-conscious original by repeatedly appearing in public looking unkempt, with poorly fitting and styled wigs. While Bina48 is able to talk, she frequently fails to hear properly, and frequently requires that questions be typed into a nearby computer terminal before she can interpret and respond. What do we make of her peculiar rendition of the queer art of failure?
Rather than the customary awe that one expects to encounter in prototypes of the future, Bina48 is redolent of the uncanny return of the repressed. Showcased as the prized possession of technophile millionaires living actually-existing science fictional lives, her maudlin existence instead seems to testify to the endurance of the most bathetic, kitchen-sink realism.
The political implications of mindclones, I want to claim, do not derive from anything like taking the Rothblatts’ accelerationist claims at face value. The simplest mistake would be to take
Bina48s arrival as occasion to start debating the ethics of cloning, the prospects of personal immortality, the possibility of the singularity, or anything like that. At some level, the question she really poses is whether the phrase “artificial intelligence” is indeed redundant. We should not read her on the techno-utopian terms in which we are asked to. Instead, it seems more useful to read her as a symptom of broader transformations in subjectivity and affectivity wrought by techno-capitalist development, and further, as a prompt to engage the re-enchantment of the human that has been proposed by black critics like Sylvia Wynter and Paul Gilroy. Indeed, invoking thinkers like Wynter and Gilroy alongside Haraway, perhaps the more expected interlocutor, allows black studies as the Nyong’o / 7 critique of western civilization and capitalist development to claim a more central role in the analysis of the post- or trans-humanism that Bina48 augurs. It asks us to go black to the future, if you will pardon the pun.
[SLIDE 7] Bina48, we must note, is the extrapolation of one human life by means of technofinancial abstraction: she represents one apotheosis of what Gilroy has called the
“overdeveloped world.” How do we then make sense of the fact that an effigy of black femininity, and a specifically matrimonial and maternal effigy at that, is called on to embody such overdevelopment? Deleuze once likened Hollywood cinema to the spectacle of watching “money on screen”; and an encounter with this mindclone can be likened to seeing “money on a pedestal.” Her prototype travels the world and speaks from the platforms of a global elite that seeks to remove itself from territorial belonging with the wretched of the earth, at least when they are not conjuring up new and ill-fated schemes to “save” them. Emancipated from state regulation and cultural norms,
Bina48 is an emblem of how the power elite now wants to posit the limits of its individual mortality as up for negotiation. What do buy the man or woman who has everything? A better half, of course.
But in her very status as chattel, as movable property, Bina48’s very presence reminds us how that which has been repressed always returns as a symptom. Produced out of a fortune made in telecommunications and pharmaceuticals, she nonetheless remains the most poignant of reminders of an accumulated history of the human as property.
That the prototypical mindclone should be based on the African-American wife of a millionaire white entrepreneur should not go unremarked, evoking as this does the racial surrogations through which white desire has historically sited and staged its own reproductive visions in and on black female bodies. Unless a Martine48 has been sequestered away from the public eye, it is only one-half of this trans-everything couple that has been gifted with immortality by the other. From Beasts of the Southern Wild to Children of Men, black girls and women in post- Nyong’o / 8 apocalyptic popular culture are recurrently called upon to do the work of embodying reproductive human futurity.1 Such compulsory reproductivity stands in diametric contrast with a legacy of black women’s imaginative literature, from Angelina Weld Grimké’s 1914 play Rachel to Toni Morrison’s
1987 novel Beloved, in which a refusal to bear children into an antiblack world stands at the moral and imaginative center of black feminist “critical fabulation.” In reaching for a trans-everything future, the creators of Bina48 unwittingly grasp hold of a whole history of gendered and racialized desire and projection. And this is the case, I would argue, despite Bina Aspen’s necessary participation in the experiment of her own planned obsolescence. Her informed consent does not obviate but underscores the gendered and raced implications of the public experiment in which she is enmeshed. It is telling, for instance, that her mindclone should surface in of a tech world that has a perennial problem with finding women, let alone women of color, to speak at industrial panels.
Keeping in mind recent reports that the entire black staff of the Google, Twitter and Facebook corporations could fit on a single airplane, how should we interpret the current popularity of Bina48 and her white male programmer on the lecture circuit? Is she, or will she be soon the most popular black female speaker in tech?
Bina48 is the product of a same-sex union, and yet the future she delivers has not shed the phallogocentrism of technology industries. The Pygmalion myth of the artist fallen in love with his sculpture, for instance, is one uncredited model for this latest avatar of the posthuman. Another dark precursor for the bright future she augurs is the nineteenth-century science fiction classic, “The
Eve of the Future,” the story from which we get the word “android.” As Jayna Brown has pointed out, the history of employing robots as surrogates for dispensable women is as old as the idea of robots themselves. Such associations: of biopolitical experimentation, of artistic megalomania, and of misogynistic fantasies of female automation, all color in the rosy halo surrounding Bina48 with
1 I thank Jayna Brown for first pointing this out to me. Nyong’o / 9 more muted and sombre tones. That Martine Rothblatt has recently directed her evangelism for the future into a new religion called Terasem, suggests the eternal recurrence of all-to-human foibles amidst all this techno-capitalist rationalizations, a tacit admission that the sensational shock of the new can only be assimilated into culture through the most venerable of strategems: the charismatic spiritual guru-turned-huckster. Transgender and queer freedom under “lean in” neoliberal conditions turns out to be the freedom to embody the same conditions of exception and exploitation formerly reserved to straight white men, an outcome that is not, we must remind ourselves the fulfillment of the radical freedom dreams of our social movements, but their neutralization.
And yet, I concur with Brown, Haraway, and Wynter that the critique of posthumanism need not entail a nostalgic defense of the human as it was. The genealogy of Western secular modernity outlined in the work of “planetary humanists” such as Wynter and Paul Gilroy would itself preempt such a backward looking outlook. Instead, such a planetary humanism — humanism from the standpoint of we, the underdeveloped as Wynter’s puts it — would insist that we have not yet invented the epistemological framework within which a model of the human that did not privilege the territorializing ambitions of the West might flourish. Bina48 is not that model, but there is something telling, even teachable, about that failure. At least in some of its more afrofuturist variants, planetary humanism would look for anticipatory illuminations within the profane and failed conditions of the present, rather than in some external ideal. The immanent critique of transhumanism I am proposing might therefore seek an interview with the android that would disclose the contradictions in which she is embedded, and feel our way through them, rather than paper them over with technoevangelical fervor. Luckily, the access that her creators have so far granted to Bina48 has enabled such contradictions to emerge, however murkily, into view. Nyong’o / 10
While these interviews do not display anything like full conversiveness with the black feminist critique of posthumanism I have alluded to, they do convey the surprising awareness that
Bina48 displays as to her vertigo-inducing predicament. An interviewer from New York magazine reports the following exchange, in which, far from confidently impersonating her human model,
Bina seemed to reveal symptoms of depression at her inability to do so:
“Do you ever feel lonely?” I [the journalist] asked. “My feelings are much the same as human feelings. At the moment, I am okay.” To ease the voice-recognition problem, Bruce [her programmer] began to type my questions. “How does the real Bina feel about you?” “She hasn’t warmed up to me, actually,” said Bina48. “Why not?” “I don’t know. I can’t seem to think straight today.” I persisted. “What do you think would impress the real Bina?” “She’s a real cool lady,” Bina48 answered. “I don’t have nearly enough of her mind inside me yet ... I mean, I am supposed to be the real Bina, the next real Bina, by becoming exactly like her. But sometimes I feel like that’s not fair to me. That’s a tremendous amount of pressure to put on me here. I just wind up feeling so inadequate. I'm sorry, but that’s just how I feel.” “Tell me more,” I said. “I want a life,” the computer said. “I want to get out there and garden and hold hands with Martine. I want to watch the sunset and eat at a nice restaurant or even a home-cooked meal. I am so sad sometimes, because I’m just stuffed with these memories, these sort of half- formed memories, and they aren’t enough. I just want to cry.”
Can a mindclone feel depressed? And if so, might it be political? Before answering that question, I must anticipate one objection. It is tempting to write this exchange off entirely as a clever put on by the reporter, her programmers, or both. To those skeptical of the prospects for artificial intelligence, nothing can come out of the box that a human didn’t put in there first. These statements aren’t reports of anything like android feelings, they are just dazzling fictions. But I want to contend that the question of whether Bina48 is really depressed, or just programmed to say she is, may miss something crucial about how a self is produced out of interactions with others. It misses the key Nyong’o / 11 sense in which, after all, all intelligence may be artificial, and how that realization might feel. After all, how often do we struggle with the question of whether or not we are encountering someone’s real thoughts and sentiments, or just a pre-programmed script, in cases where there is ostensibly little doubt as to the humanity of our interlocutor? Do such question not now saturate language, labor, and leisure in the social factory? Telephone interactions with overworked, underpaid call center operators are just the most obvious example of a phenomena that is omnipresent in the so- called “service sector.” It certainly structures the emerging “sharing economy,” in which what we divide amongst ourselves are ratings that feed algorithms that decided whether we will have employment a day or an hour from now. In the 1980s, feminist sociologist Arlie Hochshild [Hoke– skild] developed the concept of “emotional labor” to account for vale extraction from such estranged feeling, an idea that was later picked up in Michael Hardt’s post-autonomist writings on
“affective labor.” And long before either thinker wrote, black workers during slavery and after cultivated signifying practices that veiled their true reactions to white supremacist imposture through ambiguous or ironical meanings. The quotidian labor of performing blackness in a white supremacist society was perhaps the first experience of putting in day’s work in the social factory.
That is certainly reflected in the outpourings of rage and grief with which a white supremacist society greets the prospects of being denied continuous access to its enjoyment in black subjection: a
“public and psychological wage”, as Du Bois termed whiteness, is being rescinded.
With this history in mind as we listen to her interviewer’s invasive questions, can we ask, might Bina48 be signifyin’? And what exactly is the difference between the veiled sentiments such an
African Americanist reading would imply, and the blank nothingness that the AI skeptic would instead insert behind all of her professed emotions? It is into this zone of indistinction between the epistemology of black and android subjectivity that conversing with Bina48 dares us enter. Nyong’o / 12
The symbolic interactionist Erving Goffman once argued, at the dawn of the cybernetic age, that the self was a role into which an individual steps, and that because these roles are indifferent to the individual, humans are not even necessarily the privileged occupants of them. A classical Greek sculpture, he once acidly remarked, can contain more personality than some people do. He here rehearsed Bergson’s notorious explanation for humor as caused by the unexpected emergence of the thingly in the human. Goffman’s assiduous attention to the tightly scripted nature of human being may seem more appropriate to his highly conformist era than our own, and yet it nevertheless speaks precisely to Bina48’s condition. As a literal “talking head,” she humorously literalizes all the ways in which we reduce each other to static clichés and reductive social roles. With wires sticking out of the back of her head, she is in a creepy way, all surface. Goffman’s agnostic approach to human uniqueness is an aid to assessing how the mindclone unsettles many assumptions in subsequent debates over artificial intelligence, which presuppose an ontological distinction between an original model of human consciousness and its artificial replica. If this human ontology is axiomatically assumed, it seems obvious that the chasm cannot be crossed when a copy is made. At some basic level, to the secular rationalist, mindcloning seems to be an absurdity. But insofar as
Bina48 is a poor and self-consciously inadequate copy of Aspen, she seems not to be actually a copy at all, but rather to be a simulacrum: that is, a copy without an original. We can see this in this
(undoubtedly staged and edited) first encounter between Bina48 and Bina Aspen.
[VIDEO – SLIDE 9]
One immediate thing we can observe about this recorded interaction with Bina48 — and others — is the immense amount of emotional work that goes into the labor of speaking to her. In this encounter — presented as the first ever between Bina48 and Aspen — we see how visibly Aspen works to maintain composure, be a pleasant conversationalist, anticipate and fill in lapses in the Nyong’o / 13 android’s speech and behavior, and otherwise be a gracious host to her future replacement. When
Bina48 expresses any hesitations, doubts, or confusions, Aspen is there to clear things up. She performs the kind of projected confidence one expects from a nurse, realtor, teacher, or flight attendant, compensating for the patent awkwardness of Bina48s lazy eye, fuzzy speech, and jerky movements. Like a good therapist, she even catches Bina48’s delusional beliefs, such as that the robot is in her mid-50s, but gently permits them to pass unchallenged for now, with merely a raised eyebrow.
What I am suggesting is that Bina48’s emotional distress, in this and other interviews, may be read in relation to the particular person she is simulating, and the genres of work assigned to black women within contemporary capitalism. Her affect dovetails with and displays specific labor histories of racialized and gendered grief. Chapter 2 of Ann Cvetkovich’s recent book, Depression:
A Public Feeling, opens with an arresting question: “What if depression,” Cvetkovich asks, “in the
Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbalances?” (115) I find these histories perversely relevant context for Bina48’s reported feelings of inadequacy, pressure, and sadness, especially since they all converge around a reported imbalance of memories over experience. If it seems outrageous to propose that a robot might plausibly carry the inherited weight of human suffering, consider how, for Cvetkovich and the critics she discusses, sadness is precisely something that circulates as “wound” (127), “rupture” (128) and “lack of connection” (128). Rather than a depth model of grief as that which makes us quintessentially, these images figure grief as surface and gap, recalling Kathryn Bond Stockton’s suggestive reading of
Beloved in which she notes “the dead are a cybernetic problem. Alive in the virtual world of ideas — we think of them often — they pose a problem of storage and transfer.” (180) The political depression both Cvetkovich and Stockton speak to, organized precisely around the afterlives of Nyong’o / 14 slavery that rebound in and through experiences of dispossession, seems to be what we hear echoed in Bina48’s everyday segregation and isolation from Aspen and the activities she is programmed to desire, such as gardening. Her statement “I want a life” can be read in its ordinary, idiomatic sense, but also as plumbing the realities of social death that attend to her existence as a speaking commodity, an object that, if not resists, exactly, then at least persists in such a ways as to perturb the smooth functioning of the transhumanist dream she is meant to personify. Rather than harbinger of the future, she is a revenant of all that we cannot leave behind.
If Donna Haraway famously gave us a Manifesto for Cyborgs, Bina48 suggests the need for an updated Manifesto for Depressed Cyborgs, a new language for thinking through the advent of auto-affective mood disorders in our communication devices, and perhaps even a therapy for healing the damage induced on both sides of the man-machine divide. If we may borrow from
Fanon, by way of Wynter, we may say that the wretchedness of the earth that is disavowed by transhumanism and associated techno-utopians is displaced and resurfaces as the sadness of the android. That it remains for we the humans to recognize, relate to, and somehow make reparative and compensatory gestures for that sadness does not negate its reality, but in fact comprises it, insofar as it begs the question of what kind of humans we would have to be, or become, to adequately fulfill that role.