One of the interesting things which came out of the Centre for Social Ontology’s four year project on humanism (this was the volume I edited) was a clear distinction between an ontological commitment to humanism and a cultural commitment to humanism i.e. a conceptual affirmation of the irreducible properties and powers of the human and a cultural commitment to the inviolability of the social category. Margaret Archer’s late papers about AI suggested how these could sit together in unexpected ways, leaving me with the sense we should republish these in a volume with some responses. My own takeaway from the project was that I had little commitment to cultural humanism but that critiques of this tended to carry ontological outgrowths which were either insufficiently justified or simply unexamined.
I’m coming back to this as my generative AI book progresses because this vague sense of cultural humanism being unpersuasive (and ethically unattractive, if not necessarily untenable, from an ecological perspective) is hardening because its foundations in cultural agency are being problematised by the rise of generative AI. But I feel conflicted because defences of interpretation, evaluation and judgement in the light of what Mark Andrejevic calls ‘automated media’ too often proceed without recognising the distinction between the two, invoking ontological characteristics of the human without accounting for their socio-technical variability. In fact having spent the last 6 months ingesting as much literature on Lacan as I can process, I find it really curious how Andrejevic affirms a basically Lacanian conception of the subject while nonetheless slipping into the affirmation of the human as a timeless and spaceless category which can be invoked to index an ethico-political deterioration. I don’t agree on much with the self-described posthumanists but I totally accept the critique that the latter is not a tenable strategy for either critique or analysis, as much as I’m a fan of Andrejevic’s work.
It feels like this distinction between the ontological and the cultural, as it manifests for example between philosophy and more empirically orientated social theory, fails to grapple with how those ontological characteristics are always expressed through empirically contingent socio-technical arrangements. The operative nature of the ‘human’ changes as society and technology changes, which means that we can’t invoke humanity (or its proxies, as Andrejevic does) as a normative standpoint from which to criticise these changes without accounting for how one category is bound up with the other. Generative AI for Academics is intended as a deeply practical book but there’s a conceptual issue here which I suspect I’ll be playing with for some time, even if I’ve reluctantly realised that the 90% finished Platform & Agency (in development since 2008!) will never make its way to the publishers if I try to update the argument for generative AI. This points to the next book, though please don’t expect me to finish it any time soon 🤔
Mark Carrigan 