Nyong’o / 1 The Depressed Cyborg Manifesto DRAFT – Please do not cite or circulate [SLIDE 2] Does the future subject of queer studies currently reside in a customized garage in rural New England?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.