"Towards an Ethics of Animated Objects": Trauma, Technology, Transformation

This essay advances the “in-between” as an ethical project grounded in distance as a productive and disruptive force. Rather than reinforcing vertical hierarchies of class, race, or capital, distance is conceived horizontally, generating tension among languages, technologies, bodies and forms of life. It is not a tool of classification but a heuristic that sustains juxtaposition, enabling commonality to emerge through difference rather than despite it. The in-between thus becomes the condition for relationality in a digitized, conflict-ridden world. Three examples develop this claim: First, in dialogue with Donna Haraway and Audre Lorde, writing is framed as a cyborg technology through which marginalized subjects seize the power to signify and unsettle hierarchical dualisms of nature and culture, body and machine. Second, drawing on Louis Chude-Sokei, a creole history of race and technology is traced, exposing their co-constitution in slavery, industrialization and cybernetics, calling for an ethics of animated objects. Third, Kara Walker’s installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that stages Black automatons confronting viewers with trauma, memory and machinic life is scrutinized. Across these cases, the in-between emerges as a practice of collective transformation rooted in entanglement and political responsibility.