What else is there?

I read a free, meticulously written collection of essays today about removing anthropocentric considerations from discussions of AI. It really was good. It also, in my opinion, felt like the exact same series of traps the broad swathe of post/anti-humanist analysis seems to fall into: what else is there?

I'm not naming the collection, partly because the authors are smarter than me, partly because I'm a lowly adjunct scrabbling around for a job and am correctly assessing the stakes, and partly because I just never want to be that guy who's beefing over academic strains til he has a heart attack. I know that guy. Not very happy, and I'm old enough and tired enough and have to grade enough to know that it's all too much but also too little. And, really, the essays are actually very good.

Ultimately, this is "just" philosophy (which is simultaneously not praxis and the most important, maybe only, thing there is).

I've been thinking quite a lot, for years, about just what the practical outcome of this strain of thinking is. There's the ground floor practicality: how do you pitch a politics of liberation to people based on the fact that people aren't really particularly special on their own terms? Answer: I don't think you can. Knock on a door during any campaign of your choice from any given set of political commitments and lead with "well I want to talk about quality of life, how to improve yours/make your neighbors worse/keep things the same, but I want to lead with the fact that you're (shorthanding) an assemblage of affects and technologies and, therefore, not particularly special because to say that you are special fits into a host of historically contingent constructions of what a human even is."

I don't think you'd be invited in.

But whatever. The point of academic writing isn't to write for or speak to the general public. Which is fine as it goes, but also we live in a world of activist-scholars and "the point is to change it" types. Which is also fine as it goes, but it all immediately goes to kettle logic and disclaiming responsibility for what that actually means, which puts us back to square one: what's the practical outcome of this?

In any event, I think the most practical outcome is that left-leaning academics end up doing a lot of intellectual heavy lifting for the right. There's often a charge, that the 21st century far right doesn't really have an intellectual tradition worth engaging with. But that intellectual tradition is mostly a garbled, misunderstood (maliciously or otherwise) version of left-intellectual posthumanism. The scaffolding may be rickety, but it's still there.

Here's something that came across my chats this morning, on the Oklahoma University TA (importantly, trans) who's the most recent subject of a two minutes hate firing:

Reading between the lines, it's all here: the identity politics (noting here that I'm not a class only Marxist), the focus on trauma and psychology, the strange power that comes with disclaiming responsibility. And I want to stress that I'm not saying all this across all politics has the same desires or ideal outcomes, but I am saying that I've heard this before, in wonderful, thoughtful ways, which come out in the opposite once it goes through the ringer. Rufo uses Gramsci, crudely but effectively, this student and Riley Gaines use trauma and identity crudely but effectively. They don't need to write the perfect treatise on using those things because they were already written.

That's not exactly about the posthumanist stuff, so let's get back there. Why should we care? There's certainly nothing special about the student, but there's also nothing special about the TA. Because there's nothing particularly special about humans and they're both human.

"But Ian," I hear you say or think. "Isn't the point that it's all a dehumanization project, where the Christian student is asserting her humanity over the inhuman trans TA? And isn't that the problem, that human is a slippery, contingent category?"

Well, yeah. But as I wrote a bit ago, "human" was always aspirational, but a worthy aspiration. If it ever becomes something not aspirational, well, good luck. Plus, the story is so appalling because we have some idea of aspirational humanity (lack of pain, free from want, fullness of living, recognition) that's still there, that we still know is worth something. Otherwise, why would we get upset?

Blow this up a little bigger. Again, practically, what's the argument for not letting people just die on the way to AI transcendence if a billion people aren't particularly special? If we can remake ourselves, are always in the process of remaking ourselves? Isn't the insistence of a non-human politics always prefigured to end with a select few people deciding who the human is? The essays which sparked this say that the struggle over power becomes the important bit in determining outcome, but why even struggle if there's nothing special to struggle for? And if you insist that there is something worth struggling for (people and outcomes), aren't we just back at some form of anthropocentric, humanist politics anyway?

And I believe this: that humans are, yes, assemblages of affects and technologies but especially technologies. We aren't the same after the tractor, after the smartphone, after the sword. We leave ourselves in the things we create and the things we create leave themselves in us, down through generation after generation after generation. But there's still a selves there, a fungible self which is ever moving but which recognizes, after never-ending contestation, that human both changes and remains.

It all feels recursive, cul de sac, a reckoning with violence upon violence. Deeply pessimistic, though I rather like that as a pessimistic person, even though I'm pessimistic for different reasons.

Practicality, though: who are we/they arguing with? Besides as a matter of interest for dorks (me, I'm one of them), did posthumanism lose the debate? Because the world I live in already insists there's nothing very special about humans, except for the very rich, and privileges tech as an answer very, very much. And those very rich people, despite a veneer of humanism so thin nobody at all believes it, are very much believers in a posthumanist ethos. It's a world of data centers sucking up water, rampant climate change, black box algorithms, you-are-what-you-own actualization through the hard numbers of commerce, war via drones. "Here in the land of the bigger buck/where nobody gives a fuck" as Kae Tempest says.

I find this frustrating for the practical reason that I just don't think humanism is the problem. It's not really a force in the academy, certainly not in politics except when the concept is affirmed as slippery, in which case it's already bought into the critique (which is correct!). The alternative, of course, is to say what do we do to exert power over cyborgization. But that never seems to come in any real sense, because even the relative autonomy held within rump Enlightenment ideals is increasingly absent. So we just add more scaffolding to the project of our own demise, but hey, as people like to say: the Earth will be fine, we won't, that's not so bad.

I'm going to write on the new season of Monster, about Ed Gein, soon. I think it's close to a masterpiece, though I think only Sean T. Collins fully grasps its message and why it has to be so heavy-handed, given the abysmal reviews. But my short take, for expansion later, is that the postmodern moment is born in slaughter and reassembling things to make sense again is also mired in slaughter. That the very thing that permitted Gein to be a monster is what permits us to be monsters, but it's also the moment of promise that frees us from the shackles of strict categories of human. But you don't get one without the other. And ultimately, it was all just dehumanizing a specific set of people on the way to removing the human all along.

We cover distance but not together.