Surrogate Humanity (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe) by Neda Atanasoski & Kalindi Vora

Author:Neda Atanasoski & Kalindi Vora [Atanasoski, Neda & Vora, Kalindi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2019-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Ekman’s neo-Darwinian position on the ability to read genuine versus simulated emotions (and to therefore inscribe intent) reasserts agency in the realm of whiteness by privileging interiority (intent) over exteriority (display). The correspondence of display and true emotion is rendered complex when tethered to white bodies (especially those working in the service of US empire building). In contrast, the correspondence between interior states and emotional display is understood to be exact only when apprehended on bodies of not-quite or not-yet human others (those whose interiority is not yet fully developed).

The surrogate effect of programmed emotions, engineered into robots’ affect space, assert transparency and affectability as the condition of obeyant, racialized sociality within technoliberal capitalism. The definition of “the social” built into the robot’s interactive design holds the affectable “I” as the condition of possibility for the transparent “I.” Breazeal’s emphasis on robots as human complements that are not the self-same as the human carries forward the foundational need for the not-quite-human affectable “I” as the mirror through which the transparent “I” can understand what it means to be fully human. Affectability is also the mark of subservience. As Breazeal herself put it, robots are a mirror to reflect what it means to be human, including what our values are, precisely because they are the not-quite-human other in our imagination.77 Thus, when Elizabeth Wilson makes the point that the coassembly of machines and affect is not a thing of the future, but that it is “the foundation of the artificial sciences,” we might also observe that this engineering of emotion into the artificial person is at the same time a reassertion of the racial in the figurations of the mechanical/artificial nonhuman and human boundary.78

Wilson is critical of the Kismet project. She explains that in Breazeal’s Kismet, emotional states in the other are deduced intellectually rather than systematically known, and “mutuality is executed rather than sensed.”79 She demonstrates that the commitment to the view of the human mind itself as a binary system (the neuron is either firing or it is not) continues to the present, even in projects like Kismet that make claims to emotion and sensing/perception rather than the intellect.80 Wilson connects this to her treatment of Alan Turing’s earlier and foundational commitment to intellect as being directed through fundamentally logical “channels of symbolic language.”81 She concludes that Breazeal, like Turing, is drawn to emotion but loses her nerve in the end.

Though Wilson’s critique of the theory of emotion behind the design of Kismet as not truly expressing emotion, but rather intelligence as programmed drives, opens up a space, as does Ahmed’s writing, to rethink the relationship between emotions and the social by disregarding the centrality of the Darwinian evolutionary model in roboticists’ imaginaries of sociable, emotional robots, Wilson also misses the role of the racial in that design. By neglecting the racial ontoepistemological field that governs understandings of both exterior environments and interior states, as well as both thinking and feeling, Wilson inadvertently replicates the erasure of race as the condition of possibility for articulating and imagining affective states as interiority.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.