FIELD NOTES :: Tech Pending Revolution :: POWER ON, Part 5
Editor’s Note — This special 5-part, bi-weekly Field Notes mini-series from Ginger Ko invites our community / audience / future readers & users of the POWER ON book and app into the framework, influences, and socio-cultural context that inspired the poet to go on this particular journey into a project marrying speculative world building, poetics, and technology. Entries will be offered here on the OS’s online platform leading up to the project’s release — in the meantime, discounted preorders of the POWER ON book are available directly through our website, here. — Elæ Moss
[cw: animal death from human-led resource deprivation]
I began my techno-pessimistic extrapolation with questions on how I was to complete a manuscript that was so unpleasant, in fact a kind of litany of dread and mourning for our treatment of the natural world and each other, after the August 2018 media coverage of the orca Tahlequah’s public mourning for her dead calf. Tahlequah, also known to researchers as J35, had conducted a mourning sacrament for her dead calf, which had survived for less than an hour after birth, the first birth to Tahlequah in nearly a decade — a failed birth of female calf that could have supported the J pod’s continuance had the calf survived to breed. Tahlequah swam with the calf balanced on her head, within range of researchers, photographers, and media onlookers, for seventeen days. Tahlequah’s relationship to her dead calf, one characterized by what was possibly private grieving behavior made public through its behavioral configuration, or what was possibly a mourning procession conducted intentionally in public, or even possibly a public protest as conceptual performance art, resulted in the dead calf’s corpse being held above water for more than two weeks, its small black-and-white body starkly apparent to non-ocean beings who were monitoring her status. Online responses to Tahlequah’s support of her calf’s corpse reflected the unbearable nature of witnessing the implications of a failed birth. Common social media comments that I came across deplored the “pain” of having to watch Tahlequah’s suffering, and, most surprisingly to me, I also frequently came across others’ wishes that Tahlequah’s performance would end quickly, that bearing witness to what was dubbed the orca’s “Tour of Grief” was causing suffering to onlookers. Tahlequah did not wish for the labor of her suffering to end, not for at least seventeen days, and reading media comments made me feel I was in the minority in wishing that Tahlequah would engage in a lengthy, even unending, performance of grief, striving for some kind of permanent reminder of her tragedy. Was the wish for Tahlequah to end her “Tour of Grief” a wish for the end of Tahlequah’s suffering (thereby implying that the performance of grief is a direct representation of grief’s progress towards resolution), or was it a wish for the end of our own suffering as unwilling onlookers? Did this desire for Tahlequah to end her performance mean that she had become an object of unhappiness to others by insisting on remaining turned towards unhappiness?
I read Tahlequah’s “Tour of Grief” as a non-human embodiment of the same turning toward pain as Sara Ahmed’s figure of the melancholic migrant, an immigrant to the first world who is characterized as resistant to the happiness imperative of empire. In The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed ties the migrant’s duty to find and demonstrate happiness to the initial civilizing mission of the colonizers, which began with the premise that the colonized other is unhappy, an abjection that justified the empire’s “liberation.” She writes of the imperial justification that “to be liberated from abjection is to be liberated from suffering even if it causes suffering.” As a continuation of this imperial justification, migrants into the imperialist space undergo a type of citizenship test in the form of demonstrated happiness, an imperative that is tied to an idea of freedom from family and tradition of origin, and the freedom “to identify with the nation as the bearer of the promise of happiness.” In this construction, it is only identification with the nation that can break someone into an individuality that allows freedom of movement, chiefly movement away from the past, which is associated with custom and the customary. The figure of the melancholic migrant, then, is one that resists freedom, and thus persists in looking backwards and harboring a sense of injury. Ahmed provides consciousness of racism as an example of a migrant’s fixation on injury, especially when identification of one’s own maltreatment from racism is read as a refusal to participate in the national game — identification of injury is read as unnecessary and misguided, and by being the vehicle of making racism apparent, this discomfiting action of the migrants transfers to the migrant themselves — they are discomfiting, melancholic, sore. The assimilation project aimed at migrants requires them to let the past go, but this imperative of letting go of the past also precedes the present:
Migrants as would-be citizens are thus increasingly bound by the happiness duty not to speak about racism in the present, not to speak of the unhappiness of colonial histories, or of attachments that cannot be reconciled into the colorful diversity of the multicultural nation…The happiness duty is a positive duty to speak of what is good but can also be thought of as a negative duty not to speak of what is not good, not to speak from or out of unhappiness. It is as if you should let go of the pain of racism by letting go of racism as a way of understanding that pain. If is as if you have a duty not to be hurt by the violence directed toward you, not even to notice it, to let it pass by, as if it passes you by. To speak out of consciousness of such histories, and with consciousness of racism, is to become an affect alien.
Letting go of a negative or even violent present happenstance, immediately relegating it to the past to which you should never turn, is a way to contribute to national happiness, and in this imperative to always be turning away from past unhappiness, the present is always dominated by a future national success.
We, as humans, have invaded and colonized the J-pod’s waters, and there is a civilizing mission in both animalizing colonized subjects and anthropomorphizing the species that persist in bio-regions that we have claimed as our own. In order to justify the takeover of lands that are already inhabited by humans, colonizers reduce indigenous peoples to nature; in order to justify the colonizer’s cohabitation with a natural space that does not belong to them, nature is uplifted to the realm of the anthropomorphic, enabling the civilizing of ourselves into identification with non-humans. Identification with non-humanity’s human tendencies in both animal and posthuman form is what Micali (first referenced in Part 4) refers to as “critical transhumanism,” an extension of anthropogenic vision in the spectrum between posthumanism and transhumanism. Whereas posthumanism “regards technology as a human product, which in turn contaminates and modifies us,” transhumanism “regards technology as an instrument of enhancement and liberation of Man, meant as the center, standard and purpose of the world.” In opposition to the “full trust in technological progress” of transhumanism, posthumanism “highlights the dangers of a mindless use of technology, as well as critically stressing both the unequal access to technological tools and their use as a means of control and hegemony.” If, in reflecting on the risks of technologizing, the critique “aims at extending the notion of humanity, of human dignity and rights to the most evolved animals, clones, AIs, androids and intelligent aliens,” then this in fact is still “a reinforcing and confirmation of the anthropocentric vision rather than its dismantling.” Micali calls this strategy “critical transhumanism” rather than posthumanism, since the rhetoric relies on centering anthropocentric qualities as the basis for rights and consideration. I am not sure that I avoided anthropocentrism in POWER ON. I am certainly unconcerned with advocating for the rights of automatons and AI; I think that humanity’s tools will be given rights, even rights over disenfranchised humans, as long as the tools serve the ends of the capitalistic state. I am, however, concerned with the non-human animal’s ontological suffering, their experiences of distress and death, at our hands. Perhaps I can give myself a pass for this reliance on personification, which Micali calls “the very functioning of fiction”:
Storytelling by nature involves an organization of reality based on the human standard, which regulates the processes of personification and attribution of narrative functions. We can tell a story about a dog, or a star, or an alien only if we humanize them, at least in part. In other words, it appears that narrative identification always requires a certain coefficient of anthropomorphization: without identification, storytelling does not seem to work.
The personae of POWER ON are not those of industrialized and colonized animals, but of the automated beings who carry out our work. They view the suffering of living beings, both animal and human, with a dispassionate but descriptive eye/lens. The suffering borne from feedlots, battery cages, polluted land and waters, habitat corruption and destruction will continue to be carried out by our automata, and in fact automata are being created in present time in order to further the suffering of others. I am unsure how to tell the story of this without remaining turned towards injury, and though the dispassionately detailed voice of the automata has been painful for me on a personal level, I hope that for readers of the text, the horror of the images will be as telling of the automated personae as what is being described.
In “Prosthetic Emotions” (chapter found in Prosthetic Emotions in Postmodernism, edited by A. Hornung and C. Heidelberg), Kathleen Woodward analyzes certain narratives of artificial emotions (such as Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey trilogy) as ultimately redemptive, in which artificial intelligence develops compassion for humans, which is concurrent with the development of human compassion for artificial beings. Woodward notes that “in many of our cultural narratives, machines are endowed with a subjectivity that is emotionally-inflected. They are desiring machines.” It is a reflection of our culture’s “technological socialization” that many of our narratives imbue machines with empathetic powers, so that we may produce a new emotional culture that can sustain a consumer society by having us invest in its objects. Woodward suggests a co-occuring interpretation of our culture’s technological animism, noting the view that technology serves as physical prosthetic, but also suggesting that technology serves as our emotional prosthetic:
The dominant view of technological development is that of an increasingly elaborated regime of tools and machines, or prostheses, that extend and amplify the capabilities of humans. What is taken to be human is modeled on the figure of the healthy, adult body. The various strengths of the body are augmented through technological prostheses in the broadest sense…To a great extent, this narrative is based on an ideology of progress defined in terms of increases in efficiency and in productivity — in short, rationality. But if, as I have been suggesting, we turn our attention away from the body and to the emotions, we find another narrative of technological development altogether, one that does not privilege cool rationality but rather empathetic understanding.
While I do agree with Woodward’s observation of technology as emotional prosthetic, I believe that the works that Woodward analyzes (those of Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke) represent a straight-male assumption that rationality is “cool” or detached or lacking in emotion. The emotions that technoscience rationality embraces are a giddiness at progress that comes at the expense of human and natural life, a respectful devotion to Western science with the intent to invisibilize alternative and Indigenous knowledges, and a covetousness that aims to conquer through violent means. The desiring machines may strive towards connection to humans, but they are also programmed by humans with all of our ethical problems. I reject the narrative that desiring machines will eventually move from objectivity to subjectivity; I think that desiring machines have been subjective from their inception, a subjectivity that reflects human tendencies. If our machines also possess the human desires for connection and love, then they may turn out to be the frightened and frightening figures that appear in POWER ON.
My own project attempts to sidestep the subjectification risked in digital representation by allowing users to collaborate with my poetry manuscript through their own media creations. I first processed each of my poems, breaking up the poems into legible stanzas so that they can be read in screen-by-screen sections on an iPhone screen, and then recording and editing an audio track of my reading each poem aloud. With the poems in their stanzaic versions and my audio recording, I then wrote a SubRip Subtitle (SRT) script for each poem, timing each stanza’s appearance with the poem’s audio recording so that each poem can have the accessibility options common to online and video content, namely captions and audio descriptions. Each poem in the app will appear, by default, in the app as a video with a black background. The stanzaic text will appear in the video in white SF Pro Text font with a black background, as that contrast will ensure greater readability. Users of the app will have the option to include or discard either of these two elements (the captions and the audio recording) for each poem.
Users of the app will be encouraged to interact with the manuscript through the following methods: uploading their own video or image to accompany the text of each poem. Each user-created poem will essentially take the form of a video poem, with the users choosing to have their own video or image recording to accompany either the poem text, the audio recording of the poem, or both. The app will provide users with a lot of control over how they are exposed to the poetry, allowing them to essentially design and create their own poetry manuscript in collaboration with whichever components are already provided in the app.
I recognize that many users are very cognizant of the power that they grant to technology when they themselves have not been full authors of the technology. As Helen Hester notes, in her explanation of Laboria Cuboniks’ xenofeminist advocacy, “specific design histories, the existing (technical, political, cultural) infrastructures into which they emerge, and imbalances of who can access them…[are] largely dependent upon the character of the specific technologies in question.” Users are made aware of the specific characters of technologies at the very outset of access to technology — the (often prohibitive) cost and regional availability of technologies is still an embedded fact of technology-use. But, when designing my poetry app, I did still want to make some progress towards centering embodied experience in the power of literary writing. Rather than invert readerly immersion through physical immersion of users into the media screen, I decided to emphasize each user’s visual and auditory perspective rather than the appearance of their bodies, which is but the first step in building each individual’s spatiotemporal location. A person’s physical presentation is determined by their physical and cultural geographies, but it also determines their social and political location, their knowledge, and what they see and hear. By prompting users to upload their own iPhone-captured image, video, or sound file, the poetry app does not emphasize person-as-body intervention into my manuscript, but person-as-perspective intervention into my manuscript. While the text remains unmanipulated, the digital qualities of the work are up to the user of the poetry app. And while the iPhone and app have been programmed by others, the perspective of the digital poems will be visibly and/or audibly marked by users in ways that are impossible to predict or reproduce by any other user.
Ginger Ko is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books) and Inherit (Sidebrow), as well as several chapbooks. Her poetry and essays can be found in The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.gingerko.com
