Ghosts in (and out of) the Machines

It is in homage to David Ng's Police post of yore that I invoke this album cover to inaugurate the final installment of this three-part post on mystery, the unknown, and the remainder, all loosely filtered through quotes by Theodor Adorno.

The term "ghost in the machine" originates with the philosopher Gilbert Rile, who used it to mock the mind-body dualism of Rene Descartes (who claimed that the physical body was guided by the nonmaterial mind through the pineal gland).

For my purposes, I want to talk less about any vestiges of the noncorporeal within the body - those spirits in the material world . Rather, I want to explore the implications of assertions made in those previous posts. Namely, why does it matter if human knowledge of the world is incomplete, does not quite capture the world as it is, but rather offers a simplified version of the world that isn't false - just not total? And here I want to turn to technology.

Because even if we can never know the world fully, we still have to act within it. And those actions must be taken in the context of incomplete knowledge, and incomplete power (a condition Sartre suggested led to despair - being forced to choose, and to be responsible for the choice, but not having the power to ensure one's choice becomes reality). But as we have already discussed, the issue of the remainder cannot be reconciled to that choice - when we make claims about (and in) the world, we do so at the exclusion of that which does not fit.

Again, we must act. And that is a positive venture. Adorno noted that "technology allows humans to speak their own language" (that's quote three). Lionel Trilling put it even more eloquently, in his 1972 lecture "Mind in the Modern World," as a point of honor:

The ideal of objectivity requires only that, before the personal response is given, the effort to see the object as in itself it really is be well and truly made.

It is an effort which can never wholly succeed. That it must at least partially fail, that the object as in itself it really is can never finally be known, is guaranteed by the nature of individual persons, by the nature of society, even, the philosophers tell us, by the nature of the mind itself. In the face of the certainty that the effort of objectivity will fall short of what it aims at, those who undertake to make the effort do so out of something like a sense of intellectual honor and out of faith that in the practical life, which includes the moral life, some good must follow from even the relative success of the endeavor.

Or, if you prefer, there's the graphic representation of sequential art:

Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, in their book Sorting Things Out, have attempted to deal with this reality - of the necessity and utility of classification schemes for organizing our world, while at the same time creating necessary occlusions and simplifications which may result in prejudice and insult against certain peoples.

They advance the idea of infrastructural inversion to attend to this phenomenon, which would, through time, seek to reevaluate classification schemes based upon realities that emerge in reaction to those schemes. This process would be perpetual, as well, because of the constantly shifting realities that occur. Take the example of the label of "Hispanic".

Such perpetual reevaluation, however, is not easy - those schemes are expensive, and inertia takes hold which can prevent change, lest there result major upheavals in both bureaucracy and in how we think of ourselves. This occurs in part because other mechanisms and technologies and even senses of self in turn base themselves on those initial choices.

So, we have technologies (and ways of knowing) which require the world to be a certain way (and not others) that other technologies, in turn, depend upon in order to function how they do, that we, in turn, depend upon to be who we are. We end up with a kind of sociotechnical palimpsest.

I think it can be argued, though I will do so only partially here, that this trajectory of layering and knowing and doing, though inescapable, tends toward increased simplification and rigidity. In honor of intern Kate Lee's recent post on food , I think it's worth briefly contemplating the trajectory of the domesticated food animal as a technology that has enabled the development of a particular type of world. One where, now, cheap and available protein has facilitated our mode of living.

Even a brief thought experiment will suffice - from animals that were many things (or at least their own thing) that humans had to seek in the animals' own world in order to possess as a source of nutrition among other things; to animals that became increasing inscribed into the humans' world as primarily protein producers (so much so that previous parts of the animals' world - from predators to even the outside air - become threats to the meat machine; or, as it was put to Michael Pollan, a "protein machine with flaws"); to animals that cease to be animals and instead become, well, this:

That's a diagram, from Edelman, et. al. , graphically representing the process of creating in vitro meat - animal flesh without the other inefficiencies of the animal. See more here.

But what happens when the world, our world so defined, gets increasingly populated with ghosts - those remainders that are not given official sanction within the articulated world? What can one do when we are so inextricably tangled within the world that exists?

Maybe nothing. Or, rather, there is nothing that can be simply done, once, and then be over. Rather, this is an unending process. For Adorno, it is a process of negative dialectics, of teasing apart the synthesis of mind and world to recapture what he called the "primacy of the object". That is, we must seek to continually acknowledge the inadequacy of our knowledge. Put more clearly: "Contemplation without violence, from which arises all the joy of truth, requires that the contemplator not annex the object: nearness by distance." Even when all knowledge attempts to make a claim about that world, it must also seek to hint at the ghosts that undermine how close, how representative those claims are. Bowker and Star's infrastructural inversion suggests a method. Nietzsche's tension between the Dionysian and the Apollonian also highlights the perpetual nature of this struggle.

Regardless, it is perhaps the recognition (and the reminder to recognize) of the consequences of inscribing partial knowledge into permanent things that represents some positive movement, lest the world be squeezed smaller and smaller, and the remainders be seen only as threats.

That's the thing about ghosts - they haunt. Though, apparently, sometimes they are friendly.

*WG's bio can be found at the end of his first guest post here.