This extract from a recent Rob Horning newsletter left me thinking about my frustration with ‘AI realism‘ in the mode of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Horning describes what we could think of as the impasse of atomisation:
The Verge articles take it for granted that this “we” won’t come together and will never be ready — it takes tech companies to have already achieved their basic goal of atomizing and isolating everyone into discrete but fungible units that can’t form collectivities on their own terms, that are only ever “populations” bracketed and processed into different sets by some higher controlling force. The articles assume, perhaps correctly, that the possibility of conceiving collective responsibility, of having any faith in other people to do anything other than what strikes them as most convenient in any given moment (as tech companies have instructed them, promising endless amounts of pleasure if they do), has been extinguished.
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/fragments-scraps-the-bits-and-greasy
In making this assumption, which he acknowledges might be correct, we are affirming there’s little possibility for responding to emerging technologies in organised and collective ways. There’s a degree of performativity at work here in the sense that affirming that we are already atomised contributes to that atomisation by perpetuating a social imaginary which is atomised. However in spite of the magical thinking which late-stage poststructuralism was sometimes prone to generating, simply pointing to that performativity doesn’t impact upon the reality the claim designates (fallibly or otherwise).
It confuses the discursive act with the sociopolitical reality in relation to which that action takes place. Those discursive acts certainly, in their totality, contribute to the constitution of that sociopolitical reality but (a) they do not determine it (b) their causal influence is about transformation or reproduction. The causality operates through the role social imaginaries play in conditions agency, rather than be something which operates in a quasi-autonomous way. There’s a degree of performativity but it’s not, so to speak, performative all the way down. Nor is it performative in the present tense.
Mark Carrigan 