Abstract

Er(r)go… ,

… the situation is getting complicated: machines are running rampant, artificial intelligence raises ethical, moral and ontological questions, the tyranny of algorithms is spreading, capitalism corrupts desires – in short, humanism is crumbling. As someone says, if crocodiles practiced philosophy, they would most likely postulate crocodilism (Józef Bocheński), of course, in place of humanism. On the horizon lurk post-machines, biomachines with autonomous ethical intelligence, institutions eliminating the human factor for humanity’s own good, alternative circulations of knowledge powered by algorithmic engines, atrophy of individual capacity for moral judgement, privatization of affects and the inner life, machine as knowledge clothed in flesh, society under palliative care, and here and the re a dodgy synthesis of mysticism and science. 

Hounded by techne we seek shelter in geo, elbowing our way through various labyrinths: over here – technoscience, technocracy, technopoly, technology, technological artefacts, technological exclusion, technological systems, ordinary technicality, technicization of human behaviour, self-techniques, technological-corporate habitat, a regime of technical existence, techno-daily life, and even a technical poet; over there – geological wilderness, geopower, geontopower, geoknowledge, geontology, geomorphology, geomantics, geoengineering, geo-perspectives, and finally geo/techno-assemblages. And on top of the se, culture, ideology, and the reign of the algorithm. How to live one’s life, Professor? How about ethical anarchism as a cure for all evil?

To make matters worse, other questons multiply, too: how to teach morality to a machine? Does the machine have a conscience? How to widen the scope of moral norms to include intelligent non-human beings in the future? How to secure humanity’s safety? (What a pipe dream!) Is it possible to flourish through the active repression of free expression? Will machines rule over us? How to eviscerate the power of the algorithm? How to adjust an employee’s interior to external requirements? And what is an employee’s interior in the first place? Should everybody perceive their own interior as a corporation? Is the Neganthropocene an alternative to the exploited notion of the Anthropocene? How many Anthropocenes are there anyway? Should a bodiless being have its own gender? This last question is perhaps the most inquisitive.

And in the texts, as per usual, curious things: chatbot Taylor masters the principles of Internet hate-speech within just a few hours while the children of the Enlightenment remain in the shadow of ignorance; the ontology of some theory turns into the epistemology of the recipient, our clicks from the past shape our future, variant digital technologies diversify models of intimacy, organs smoothly turn into machinery, meditation appears to be the reproduction tool for a bourgeois individual and follows the logic of lubrication, sharpening or replacement of used parts, the private sphere loses its cultivated gentility and becomes a network entity, post-Gibsonian theory replaces the animal with the agent, and a different Gibson wanders around Singapore with the death penalty, contemplating Disneyland and fishing for things that broke down to finally move his ass to Hongkong; there emerges the anthropology of machinery, here and there neuroscience and Buddhism are cast in the roles of leading authorities, mindfulness becomes capitalism’s new spirituality, scientistic rhetoric replaces true science, and, by and large, the Neganthropocene requires the post-Anthropocene.

Art and literature offer but a modest consolation. Here, the poem works in an extremly asynchronous, automatized and algorithmic technological environment facing up to ecological imperatives; there, already quietened, the poem underlines the muteness of a useless cigarette butt, after all, we recognise a poet by their silence. As usual however, interesting things happen among the artists: a dead spider grows back its limbs, someone chokes on the prospect of being non-oneself, non-human Sophie punctures spectators with her punctum, human and non-human beings mix with one another, the hero has to kill the monster-mother but the mother never dies, human organism feeds (on) convictions, but when brought before the altar of discursive machines it becomes their engine (Bartczak), the last and ugliest dog on Earth loves drinking whisky, and a poem about America, written for fifty years, remains unfinished.

Various fascinations permeate the minds of artists and critics alike: affective flickering between bodies, silence as the domain of oppression, petrological wisdom, translation from legal language into legal language, thinking oneself into Being itself, a man with balls the size of durian fruit, love relationships between humans and non-human entities, awareness of the impossibility of full blown titanicity, relationships between men and non-human creations with unmistakably feminine traits, corporatized and precarized academia, ponderous lumps of bronze with equally ponderous holes through them, pianolas as musical equivalents of an artificial lover, human-non-human entanglements in love stories, anti-feminist clichés resulting from masculine solipsism. In the midst of all this circulate humans, non-humans and post-humans, gynoids, couch entities, artificial women, all manner of zooproletariat, digital mistresses, perfect post-human mistresses, biocybernetic animals, fembotic beings, animoids, replicants, marionettes, artificial bodies of machine-women, post-human children, and all of the remaining post-humanist ladder of beings.

And, in the end, the symbolic misery of the capitalist society: thoughtlessness, stupidity, docility, infantilization, non-reason.

Wojciech Kalaga
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734