Response 3: From AI to Arachnids: Something Beyond the Bomb

In a conference paper called “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” Ursula K. Le Guin opens in the following way: “Utopia is uninhabitable. As soon as we reach it, it ceases to be utopia. As evidence of this sad but ineluctable fact, may I point out that we in this room are inhabiting utopia” (1982, 3). Of course, inhabiting an uninhabitable utopia is both a tongue-in-cheek way to pay homage to the excitement of bringing together like minds in the exploration of utopian thinking but also to link utopia with the curse of Lot’s wife. This seems to be the central irony discussed at the “Knock at the Door” conference, and one that emerges in Larissa Lai and Sherryl Vint’s interview (this volume). Throughout the interview, Lai and Vint navigate a central irony that Donna Haraway in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” describes as one of the fundamental aspects of the cyborg, i.e., “the tension of holding incompatible things together because both are necessary and true” (2006, 177). Guided by Lai and Vint’s interview, this response paper comprises a mélange of different topics that hold incompatible truths, from a rocket-ship planet to the reality of AI in the Humanities, and designed to embody a cyborg heteroglossia because, of course, only a cyborg can cut the code.1Vint’s posthumanism assumes that, since the advent of information technology systems at the beginning of the twentieth century, humanity has undergone a shift that challenges traditional dualisms distinguishing organism and machine: natural/artificial, mind/body, human/technological, etc. As Vint points out toward the end of the interview, a fork in the road exists: between a posthumanism as an existential examination of self in relation to a Western liberal humanism; and one that prioritizes the modification of the body using technology (in pursuit of immortality, increased intelligence, uploading of consciousness, etc.), or what is described as transhumanism. No doubt, the centrality of technology to these arguments may be one of the many reasons why Haraway, nowadays, disavows the term posthumanism. The centrality of technology to this discourse seems to reinforce anthropocentric modalities connected with liberal humanist mindset or even a techno-capitalist ways of being. Even to locate this shift in the technological revolution around coding and cybernetics, as N. Katherine Hayles does in How We Became Posthuman (1999), might risk centralizing the conversation of the nonhuman versus human within the realm of technology: i.e., giving room to human-only histories.Instead, Haraway reframes the conversation around what she calls tentacular logic, akin more to an arachnid sensibility. It’s through this logic that she finds an entry into story:Lai and Vint are also grappling with this conundrum; certain types of storytelling tend to privilege certain types of literary production (white, cis-gender, heteronormative) and certain ways of thinking (Western, European, colonial, capitalist). For Lai, literary realism should incorporate or recognize speculative fiction (SF), doing away with the erroneous distinction that realism exists separate from the magical, surreal, speculative, etc. Vint on the other hand would rather do away with the category of literary realism altogether. The distinction that Haraway’s tentacular logic proffers is one where mode of entry is prioritized over point of entry—thinking precedes category, allowing category itself to contain multiplicities. In Haraway’s case this is encapsulated in SF, which holds speculative fabulation, science fiction, etc. In fact, Lai’s novels and When Fox is a Thousand, Salt Fish Girl, and The Tiger Flu not to mention her book of poetry Automaton Biographies, are perfect examples of how SF can exist in multiplicity rather than be confined by generic category, such as speculative fiction or literary realism.In the 2019 Chinese blockbuster The Wandering Earth, humanity propels itself away from a red-dwarf sun by retrofitting the planet with thrusters. Here, the earth is a sentimental orb, one that deserves moving light years to preserve, even if the move itself wrecks the surface, killing all plant life and destroying its structural integrity. Systems of capital and consumption are moved underground. Metropolises are immortalized under the crust of a planet that travels beyond its orbit. Within this reality, technology’s only use value is to ensure that humanity need not change; previous systems, traditional hegemonies, and the status quo are preserved. The conundrum of the retro-fitted earth could be framed as a problem with ideas: “It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas. . . . It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories” (Haraway 2016, 35). For Haraway, who disavows the posthumanist title for a more multi-organism focus, the problem is that the logic of contemporary technocratic systems is sedimented. For Vint, stories like The Wandering Planet might rely too heavily on the problem “with the metaphysics of modernity—the way we think about subjectivity and personhood and modernity—is that it is based on these hierarchies, leading to relations of domination.”In this way, Lai’s emphasis on relations and their reconceptualization is so profound: “it’s not so much about building bridges as changing the structures of relationships.” Again, it goes back to Haraway’s notion that mode of entry should be prioritized over point of entry: tentacular thinking rather than posthumanism. This process could help reframe what constitutes a permissible story not to mention relations with Indigenous populations in Canada (as Lai has eloquently described in the interview), as it might people’s relationships with technology. To fail to do so is akin to retrofitting the earth with rockets. To pay homage to one of Haraway’s more enigmatic statements: “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (Haraway 2006, 120). The implication connects to one of the central issues that Lai and Vint discuss in their essay: that is, how can discourse, storytelling, and/or theory promulgate structural changes in dominant populations whose body, habits, ideas, stories are so sedimented. N. Katherine Hayles takes up this very prospect in her book How We Became Posthuman: “The body is the net result of thousands of years of sedimented evolutionary history, and it is naïve to think that this history does not affect human behaviour at every level of thought and action” (Hayles 1999, 284). In a later interview, she describes how cultural and literary studies approach discourse with the assumption that discourse formation “could instantly change the body. . . . [when in reality] embodied materialities are resistant to our ideas about them, including the ways in which we construct them in discursive systems” (Hayles 2010, 329). The reality is discourse formation, by itself, has its limitations, which is why Lai’s creative work and the crossover between disciplines—genetics, biology, myth, fairy tale, horror, etc.—goes beyond discourse formation. Theory alone seems ill-equipped to make large-sweeping changes, which is why Lai’s reimagining of relations (human/nonhuman, animal/human, myth/history, etc.) is so fundamental to eroding at the sedimented history of the body.The core of Haraway’s original arguments still have enormous value in questioning coded human and nonhuman relations and how they produce the illusion of a singular story. One prurient example, relevant because it connects with the Humanities, is the introduction of AI and large language models (like ChatGPT) into the discipline. Again, the story is culturally coded; the Humanities has been embroiled in existential threats since the Enlightenment. These technologies have reified the debate about the Humanities’ value: not just its practice, pedagogy, and efficacy but the models of thought, distillation of knowledge, and application that are inherent to the discipline. Both Lai and Vint speak from the vantage point of academic institutions, and while they do not address this particular issue, the relationship between the human, technological, and biological underlies many of their points of contention. Perhaps, then, the cyborg as both a figurative and literal form of being is even more relevant today, not to reinforce the separation between human and biological but to reveal how absurd those distinctions ever were to begin with. Perhaps the intersection between revival and extinction is one that allows for new discourses and modes of embodiment. What Lai and Vint reveal in their interview is that the real work exists in the reformulation of relationships that, instead of being continuously fractionalized, can exist under the formulation of multiplicity, much like Haraway’s SF. Perhaps, embracing this ambiguity, this central irony, is a performance of Lai’s insurgent utopian thinking.As with all fables, the surface message of a moving planet belies simple moralization: determination and perseverance in the face of insurmountable obstacles or even one’s home and lineage is worth moving mountains for. Closer inspection complicates the fable: Is the task of moving earth truly more noble than just up and moving home? Do people’s ambitions produce nothing but burdens for future generations? In the movie, Earth falls too far into Jupiter’s gravitational field, computer simulations show how it will crumble against the enormous pull of the gas giant. Thankfully, the protagonist, in a nostalgic revelation, remembers how his astronaut father once told him Jupiter was mostly made up of hydrogen. The protagonist’s solution? Ignite Jupiter’s atmosphere to create an explosion that would propel earth away like a tennis ball struck off Jupiter’s racket. If the logic of hope feels awkward but familiar here, it should. As Vint says, “Hope pertains not just to one’s own particular circumstances being transformed for the better; to think so is the risk of that impulse being attached to regressive fantasies.” An explosion is a well-known solution within a liberalist, humanist framework.2 It is the fantasy of a quick solution. This is just one of many examples of how, in the midst of technology’s liveliness, people continue to remain inert. The only method of breaking this signifying chain is a restructuring of human/nonhuman relations, of how technology need not feed fantasies of immortality or end points, but can coexist with populations to create new ways of being.Larissa Lai and Sherryl Vint, these two profound artists and thinkers, discuss the ways that paradigms of story can be reimagined through the utopian and posthuman. Perhaps then, from this perspective, the curse of Lot’s wife, turned to salt for daring to look back, is not so much an omen as a necessary reconfiguration of relationality. Lai and Vint reveal new modes of entry, through story, history, myth, relationality, and so much more. Perhaps then, in the act of inhabiting the uninhabitable, maybe utopia is not necessarily lost but rather has created deep atomical change, a transformation that is not just necessary for reimagining human and nonhuman bonds and stories that refuse to replicate relations of domination but a future whose connection with technology does not reside in a bomb.