More Than and Not Quite: Exploring the Concept of the Human

Abstract

More Than and Not Quite:Exploring the Concept of the Human Rebecah Pulsifer (bio) Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora's Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018 Megan H. Glick's Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018 For several decades, scholars in fields such as feminist science and technology studies, new materialism, and posthumanism have called into question several assumptions about the concept of the human. To what extent can humans be understood as rational and autonomous beings given the contingency of our understanding, and given that both interdependence and exploitation are integral to human experience and history? To what extent can humans be understood as bounded, agential subjects when our perceptions and reactions are shaped by ostensibly nonhuman forces, such as our microbiomes, our environments, and the objects with which we interact? How can we—and should we—disentangle the human from the conceptual divisions we have inherited, such as those between non­human animals, nature, and technology? And yet, if we do not distinguish the human from other conceptual categories, how do we name human responsibility in the Anthropocene? To this rich area of inquiry, two new titles from Duke University Press add helpful terminology and provocative frameworks of analysis. In Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora argue that contemporary discourse concerning technologies of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) draws from a key dynamic of liberalism: the surrogate relation between racialized others and subjects imagined to be paradoxically sovereign and vulnerable, self­determining and innocent of their actions' effects. Technoliberalism, the authors' term for our contemporary milieu, describes "the political alibi of present­day racial capitalism that posits humanity as an aspirational figuration in a relation to technological transformation, obscuring [End Page 254] the uneven racial and gendered relations of labor, power, and social relations that underlie the contemporary conditions of capitalist production" (4). Megan H. Glick's Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood shows how beliefs about species categories, species relations, and species hierarchies form the ground from which ideas about biological essentialism, humane behavior, and dehumanization often grow. Glick argues that the infrahuman—that which is "'almost' or 'near' human"—is a malleable contrast category for "the management of the human/nonhuman boundary" and, consequently, for "the justification of biological essentialism and the naturalization of social hierarchy" (3, 10–11). Both books confirm that the human is a contingent concept: a category whose definitions and meanings owe their inheritance to cultural values regarding race, gender, nation, labor, and power. Moreover, both books illustrate how efforts to distinguish the human and the nonhuman often disguise or rationalize the positions of oppressed and exploited subjects whose humanity has rarely been recognized. Surrogate Humanity presents six chapters that illustrate how contemporary "engineering imaginaries" often rely on all­too­familiar Enlightenment paradigms of invisible labor, "universal" rights available only to some, and racialized hierarchies in which humanness is a quality to be demonstrated or achieved (13). Drawing from Saidiya Hartman in their theoretical framing, the authors argue that while we are often told that we are in the midst of one or more technological revolutions, contemporary technologies are the heirs of long­standing structures of liberal humanism by reproducing the surrogate relation between slave and master, helpmeet and complex subject. The authors also spotlight how contemporary discourses concerning automation, in particular, alternately promise liberation and threaten debasement while eliding the roles of racialized and colonial subjects in producing the technologies and materials on which automation relies. Surrogate Humanity's first chapter focuses on the mid­twentieth century, tracing how robots held appeal under the ideologies of both liberalism for their promise of docile, deracinated workers. Chapters 2 and 3 show how contemporary labor arrangements such as the "sharing economy" and Amazon Mechanical Turk accelerate the inequalities of racial capitalism while diminishing the material presence of workers. Chapter 4 clarifies one of the book's core arguments—that the concept of the human relies on the surrogate relation—through a focus on "sociable emotional [End Page 255] robots" (25...