I started thinking about this question when reading the first chapter of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Basically, it goes like this: we imagine a "law" or some other system of judgment that can discriminate or categorize -- e.g. beings according to sex or gender.
I wanted to get acquainted with Butler's work which I haven't looked at before precisely because I wanted to read it "against" Turing's imitation game, which in its initial formulation is exactly a gender-discrimination test.
This law, where does it come from? Well, I'm imagining that optimistically speaking, it has been created as something like a social contract. The entrants to Turing's imitation game have, at least in principle, agreed to submit themselves to the experiment. (We can also consider Turing tests that are not voluntary.)
But here's where it seems to take a "phatic turn". What if phatic behavior creates a miniature "law" that can be used to discriminate -- between those who are "in" and those who are "out" of the conversation in particular? Between "noise" and "signal" in Kockelman's info-theoretic terms.
Once you see something, you start to see it everywhere.
Is there another option, in Deleuze or Butler? Can we think of a non-statist phatics?
I wanted to get acquainted with Butler's work which I haven't looked at before precisely because I wanted to read it "against" Turing's imitation game, which in its initial formulation is exactly a gender-discrimination test.
This law, where does it come from? Well, I'm imagining that optimistically speaking, it has been created as something like a social contract. The entrants to Turing's imitation game have, at least in principle, agreed to submit themselves to the experiment. (We can also consider Turing tests that are not voluntary.)
"I am the woman, don't listen to him!"And so on.
But here's where it seems to take a "phatic turn". What if phatic behavior creates a miniature "law" that can be used to discriminate -- between those who are "in" and those who are "out" of the conversation in particular? Between "noise" and "signal" in Kockelman's info-theoretic terms.
Once you see something, you start to see it everywhere.
The subject, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the "spiritual and moral training of the nation," to be achieved by "deriving everything from an original principle" (truth), by "relating everything to an ideal" (justice), and by "unifying this principle and this ideal in a single Idea" (the State). The end product would be "a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society" —each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. - Brian Massumi, Translator's Foreword to A Thousand Plateaus.Indeed, the same sort of State-centric rhetoric goes into the introduction of the Patterns of Peeragogy paper that I recently co-authored and submitted.
Is there another option, in Deleuze or Butler? Can we think of a non-statist phatics?
From the 1990 preface (p. xxxi in the Routledge Classics 2006 edition of Gender Trouble):
ReplyDelete"Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established?"
This seems to sum things up pretty perfectly. To emphasize it some more, let's go one sentence further:
"Does being female constitute a 'natural fact' or a cultural performance, or is 'naturalness' constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex?"
I have a "fuzzy feeling" that Turing is close to this idea but not approaching it directly. He might have instead written: "Does being INTELLIGENT constitute a natural fact or a cultural performance?" or, more starkly, "Does being A PERSON constitute a natural fact or a cultural performance?" Let's go one more sentence further:
"[John Waters' star] Divine notwithstanding, gender practices within gay and lesbian cultures often thematize 'the natural' in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex."
It seems to me that the "Turing test" is such a parodic context, at an extreme. As Butler works in her genealogy to show the instability of the category of "female", Turing does something quite similar with the category of "intelligence" or (to put it more colorfully) "enmindedness".
Let's go one more sentence:
"What other foundational categories of identity---the binary of sex, gender, and the body---can be shown as productions that generate the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable?"
Turing seems to be asking similar questions, though I think "identity" (i.e. the "correct" discrimination in the imitation game) is only used as a way to get at what is "inevitable" from the point of view of machine intelligence. Stiegler refers to inevitability as the "default" and puts a lot of stock in it -- for instance, in Stiegler, the inevitable is also the source of desire.
Butler asks (p. xxxii): "what political possibilities are the consequences of a radical critique of the categories of identity?", I think Turing is getting at something similar. But for him, identity is just a means to an end.
OK, one more quote from Butler, as this comment has gone on nearly long enough.
"A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view; rather genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin."
It seems to me that Turing is considering the multiple diverse causes of "intelligence" or "being female" or whatever other discernible feature we might notice in an observed process.
(Now, the question is, do we think of these "discernible features" as teloi or final causes, or how do we think of them? They seem like attractors, somewhere within the social field. But if the social field shifts, then what's discernible will also shift.)