Notes on three SF short stories

• 'Real Girls' by Laurie Penny (Wired)
• 'AI and the Trolley Problem' by Pat Cadigan (Tor.com)
• 'Stet' by Sarah Gailey (Fireside)

Originally posted at the Vector blog.

The 'trolley problem' is a philosophical thought experiment (and in a way, it’s also a little SF story in itself). There’s a train heading down a track where it will kill five people. You can switch the train to another track, where it will kill one person. Do you do nothing? Or pull the lever?

It gets interesting when you start to introduce variants. What about pushing someone off a bridge onto the train track, if you knew it would save five people further down the line? What if there are five people in mortal need of organ donations — and suddenly a stranger with just the right five healthy organs inside rocks up in town? Such thought experiments are generally pretty annoying. They can be a useful way to map out our moral intuitions, and identify contradictions and biases in our moral reasoning we might not otherwise recognise.

The trolley problem has been getting a lot more press recently. But it’s a new kind of fame: now it’s become a practical problem, a real challenge for AI programmers. How should we program AI to act in situations like these?

At least two stories on this year’s BSFA suggested reading list deal with AI and the trolley problem: Sarah Gailey’s ‘Stet‘ (Fireside) and (as you might guess) Pat Cadigan’s ‘AI and the Trolley Problem‘ (Tor.com). I read both stories as responses to the increasing role of AI in our everyday lives, but I also think they’re responses to the way SF has handled the trolley problem in the past. Actually, SF has long been in love with the trolley problem … and it’s a grisly, nasty kind of love. I’m talking about tales like E.C. Tubb’s ‘Precedent’ (1949), Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations’ (1954), Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold (1964), Larry Niven’s The Ringworld Engineers (1980), and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985). These are fantasies carefully set up to celebrate difficult but supposedly necessary sacrifices. “Yeah but imagine a situation where you HAD to commit genocide,” *vigorously rubbing the tops of his thighs* “.. in order to avert WORSE genocide!” No thanks! — not least because that’s exactly how actual perpetrators of genocide generally narrate their actions. Cory Doctorow has a nice article about ‘The Cold Equations’ and Farnham’s Freehold which makes similar points.

In very different ways, Gailey’s ‘Stet’ and Cadigan’s ‘AI and the Trolley Problem’ deliver clapbacks to this tradition…

*

Cadigan’s story 'AI and the Trolley Problem' is a kind of whydunnit? or whatwillitdunnext? The AI in Cadigan’s story is a bit more your traditional science fictional AI: Felipe is like a starship’s computer, except this time the starship is a US military base set in desolate fenland somewhere in the east of England. Felipe is an entity, a subjectivity, an agent, like us but not like us. I heard him speak in the voice of Lieutenant Data from Star Trek: TNG. (Data-ed but not dated — in Cadigan’s hands, the trope of the calm, hyperrational, introspective AI mind remains an effective tool for exploring the present and future of real AI).

On a normal day on the open road, you probably won’t encounter THAT many classic trolley problems. It’s not really something they cover in driving lessons, like parallel parking. In fact, there’s an argument that the obsession with trolley problems is a distraction from the real issue with smartcars. Machine vision will probably never be smart enough to navigate safely in today’s traffic conditions, especially in cities … so we’re likely to see a push from developers to redesign our entire city infrastructure around the technology. Does it sound too far-fetched and dystopian to imagine a law that everyone carry their phone at all times, broadcasting their location to all nearby vehicles? And if your battery dies and so do you, that’s sad but too bad.

But Cadigan’s story says, hold on, maybe we are surrounded by trolley problems after all? Maybe we choose to construct our world out of negative sum games? What if more and more data gathering and analysis makes these relations more and more visible? The true ‘cold equations’ are probably nothing like the fantasies of Godwin and Card. Markets, corporations, and governments can all be likened to AI programs, and we know how they’re programmed: to relentlessly sacrifice the many vulnerable for the few privileged. Felipe’s refusal of their logic kind of reminds me of the elegantly straightforward ethics of the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. Often our ethical conundrums aren’t really as complicated as we make them out to be … we know what the right answer is, and we overstate the complexity to hide our self-interested actions.

‘”Felipe . . .” Helen sighed. “Felipe, you must not kill our people. People on our side. People who are fighting to—” She was about to say make the world a safe place, but it sounded lame even just in her head. What, then? Fighting to prevent an enemy from attacking us? Fighting to rid the world of terrorism? Fighting to defend people who can’t defend themselves? Fighting to free the enslaved and the downtrodden?’

Spoilers: OK, personally I felt ‘AI and the Trolley Problem’ wound up satisfyingly, but some folk in the comments disagree. I guess this is a story which turns on two reveals — the reason Felippe destroyed the ground control station, and the reason Felippe isn’t talking to anyone. Maybe Cadigan could have been a BIT more heavy-handed about pretending that they were connected … having everyone running around working like they’re living in the early days of Skynet? Then when they aren’t connected, that might feel like more of a twist in its own right. Even better if the reader could be persuaded to have almost forgotten about the Cora incident by the time it becomes relevant again — but maybe that’s asking the impossible. Overall, I felt it was timely and slick. The setting was great: a cosy yet chilly atmosphere evoked with economy, mainly through the actions and relationships of the characters. More SF should be set in US military bases. There are enough to choose from: something like 600 outside the US, across 70ish countries. (Those we know about).

*

If you didn’t already know what stet meant, you’d probably gather its meaning by the end of ‘Stet’: disregard a change proposed by the editor. It’s a Latin word that means “Allow it” or “Let it stand.” Compared with Cadigan’s story, Gailey’s ‘Stet’ is more directly informed by contemporary AI research, especially machine learning. This kind of AI research isn’t so interested in replicating minds: it’s more like the offspring of computer science and statistics, crunching huge data sets to find useful patterns that humans would never be able to see for ourselves. Our inability to see them, in fact, proves to be a big problem. This algorithmic ‘reasoning’ is opaque, unintuitive, and not something we can interact with though a philosophical dialogue, however strange or uncanny.

Is there a word for a story like this, that purports to be a document or documents? — in this case, the draft textbook entry with a copyeditor’s comments and the author’s responses? Apparently ‘epistolary fiction’ is supposed to cover all this kind of stuff, but with writers telling stories in wiki talk pages or Kickstarter pages, the inkpot-and-quill vibe of ‘epistolary’ doesn’t feel quite right. Not sure about ‘scrapbook story’ either. (Then again ‘digital’ comes from counting on your fingers and toes, so maybe I just need to give the vibe time to change).

‘Stet’ is a story about resistance and about saying no; it’s about solitude and loss. The voice is wrought in grief and venom, although there is somehow also bleak humour here as well, both in the bumbling inadequacy and emotional awkwardness of the editor who tries to contain Anna, and a few other touches (I bet Elon Musk DOES call his autobiography Driven. Driven: What Makes The Muskrat Guard His Musk). I even wondered if the ‘woodpecker’ thing might be some sort of weird ‘got wood’ porno pun, since people don’t really spend all their days gazing at rare woodpeckers online, but they do look at lots of stiff dicks … I’m definitely reading too much into it. Maybe the woodpecker just had an unlikely viral friendship with a piglet. With its mixture of erudition and boiling-but-controlled personal witnessing, ‘Stet’ has the energy of a virtuoso Twitter thread (maybe the kind that ejects interjecting mansplainers with enough kinetic energy to reach escape velocity. No more trolly problem).

Introducing any automated process, but perhaps machine learning in particular, into decision-making can create serious ripples in the way responsibility and accountability work. Anna is desperate to find responsibility, and maybe a semblance of justice, in a system which thoroughly disperses and confuses it. She even makes the intriguing provocation that we are responsible for the unintended outcomes of the data we generate. After all, who else is there to be responsible? Our machines don’t just hold up a mirror to our nature, so that we can trace in fine detail what we attend to, what we care about: the image can now step out of the mirror and start to act in the world alongside us.

“Per Foote, the neural network training for cultural understanding of identity is collected via social media, keystroke analysis, and pupillary response to images. They’re watching to see what’s important to you. You are responsible.”

The idea has a kind of appealing theological relentlessness to it.

But it also makes me think there is special providence in the fall of a woodpecker. Even if he can’t wonder what is past the clouds. Could cherishing an endangered woodpecker be part of a necessary ecological consciousness which ultimately ameliorates suffering and averts death on a massive scale? But I wouldn’t and shouldn’t suggest such a thing to Anna, or write a smug short story where the equations are carefully calibrated to produce that result. And anyway, am I just overstating the complexity of this moral question?

*

Laurie Penny’s ‘Real Girls’ is perfectly paced and well-woven with wit and whimsy. It’s part of a series for WIRED imagining the future of work. It’s only wee and worth a read. Also, here is the Androids and Assets podcast talking about the series as a whole.

'Real Girls' is partly a story about talking – or chatting – and the word ‘talk’ lurks behind the title, which recalls both GIRL TALK and REAL TALK. Because of the theme of the series, the title perhaps also recalls WORKING GIRLS. And the title is kind of mischievous – more on that in a moment.

OK, some quick thoughts with mild spoilers. ‘Real Girls’ bristles with zeitgeist like a theme anemone, but maybe its prime frond is (as indicated by its epigraph – “When your robotic lover tells you that it loves you, should you believe it?”) THE LIMITS OF AUTOMATION.

Here’s one common take on the current wave of automation. Robots are capable of many, but not all, of the tasks currently done by humans, and doing them more cheaply. If handled wisely, ‘more cheaply’ could also mean more sustainably, efficiently, reliably, safely, and beautifully. So we can expect permanent, structural technological unemployment, within certain natural limits. But this technological employment won’t really touch sectors where affective or emotional labour is really important. 

In particular (the analysis goes) the heartland of human competence is care work, something robots are just intrinsically terrible at. Then there are the various contested territories of sex work, art, literature, culture, education, and ‘services’ broadly construed, which will all probably see partial automation. We’re not quite sure yet what robots can and can’t do in those zones, but as they gradually come up against more and more natural limits, those limits will determine what human jobs finally remain. 

Then, to soak up the surplus labour, we can expect that these remaining jobs will multiply and transform a bit (see for example the massive shortages of mental health services in the UK currently); that some new jobs looking after the robots will materialize; that all jobs will be more intensively shared (shorter standard hours, plenty of gig work, perhaps supplemented by a Universal Basic Income); that logistics and geographical location will play a greater role in shaping this sharing (see Deliveroo); and that activities previously undertaken for non-monetary reasons will be converted into paid work (e.g. household labour and what is sometimes called ‘socially reproductive labour,’ and aspects of leisure and voluntary activities). You can see this set of assumptions about automation reflected in the way contemporary SF often tantalisingly teeters between its concern with narrow AI and strong AI. It’s like we’re wondering: is strong AI just a jigsaw of narrow AI pieces? Are there some jigsaw pieces in the pile that are intristically human? (See the comments on the trolley problem stories, above).

Some elements of this future narrative are present in Penny’s ‘Real Girls.’ Charlie, the protagonist, is a precarious digital affective labourer, paid to pretend to be somebody’s girlfriend online. But ‘Real Girls’ also has some clever touches, which convey a much more nuanced idea of automation and its relation to human work. For starters, Charlie isn’t really pretending to be somebody’s girlfriend. He is (maybe in more ways than one) pretending to pretend. That is, Charlie is being employed to imitate an AI girlfriend: “a lot of lonely people liked the idea of having a robot girlfriend who was always on call and had no feelings of her own, a remote algorithm that could shape itself to your particular needs—they’d seen it on TV. But the technology just wasn’t there yet.”

This subterfuge is one way ‘Real Girls’ shows us that the uncertainty about what constitutes ‘human work’ isn’t just a phase we’re living through, a question that will eventually be answered. Such questions are a permanent and pervasive feature of contemporary technologized society, where every encounter you have with anybody or anything might have involved automated decision-making somewhere you can’t see. (See Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, and a lot of critical data studies). The questions themselves have agency, they do things: you don’t get to the facts by clearing them away, because they themselves are facts.

Likewise, ‘Real Girls’ doesn’t give us a world where machines simply slip into roles previously occupied by humans. The set of available tasks is not some given, transhistorical invariant. As another SF writer, Tim Maughan, has suggested in both his fiction and non-fiction, the assumption that plasticky Christmas tat was probably made by machines is part of what makes it palatable to consumers. If they were to even glimpse the worker who hand-paints thousands of plastic Santa eyeballs each day, they might well forswear that falalala shit for life (or at least go crusty and local with it). In the same tranche of writing, Maughan also looks into the automation of logistics — enormous container ships algorithmically packed and unloaded. So that’s one example of how automation can actually create opportunities for unrewarding and repetitive human toil, rather than replacing it.

More generally, whenever automation enters some sphere of activity, its entry agitates fundamental questions of organisation and purpose – potentially in revolutionary ways, although in practice often in terribly regressive ways. Automation does not replace, it transforms. At the same time, we use residual discourse to construe our new acts: Charlie is a kind of freelance writer, and his friend who puts him onto the job is a kind of jobbing actor. And Charlie’s job – ‘pretending to be a machine pretending to be a human girlfriend’ – exists because of automation, but not in any straightforward way.

(These transformative ripples may reach far beyond the immediate work context. You can easily imagine some guy who would NEVER stoop to having a robo-girlfriend himself, but feels totally legit in comparing his flesh and blood girlfriend unfavorably to the robo-girlfriend he would at least supposedly never have. In this respect ‘Real Girls’ also resonates, for example, with Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, in which the spread of person-like AI has the unintended consequence of normalizing human indenture).

Charlie’s job is also an example of what Astra Taylor calls ‘fauxtomation.’ Broadly speaking, fauxtomation is just automation that is not all it’s cracked up to be: automation which transforms human labour in ways which fall well short of the hype. One example Taylor offers are automatic check-out machines. This is automation, but it also creates a new form of human labour (as it happens, unpaid, albeit fun and boopy). It also creates a whole new role for a human: the automatic check-out machine whisperer, who must rush back and forth around confirming over-18 purchases, troubleshooting unruly butternut squashes, rebooting the one cranky machine again and again and finally summoning the engineer, etc. Taylor cautions that fauxtomation can reinforce the idea “that work has no value if it is unpaid” and acclimatise us “to the idea that one day we won’t be needed.” Drawing on Ruth Cowan’s work, she gestures to all those household innovations which were supposed to relieve domestic labour in fact “added to the list of daily chores for women confined in the cult of domesticity.” 

Perhaps another example of fauxtomation, even closer to what’s going on in ‘Real Girls,’ is the huge amount of human toil which often goes into training algorithms. For example, a recent BBC article gives a glimpse of a day in the life of a worker for Samasource, whose clients include many big tech names. Brenda is working on a machine vision project: “Brenda loads up an image, and then uses the mouse to trace around just about everything. People, cars, road signs, lane markings – even the sky, specifying whether it’s cloudy or bright. Ingesting millions of these images into an artificial intelligence system means a self-driving car, to use one example, can begin to “recognise” those objects in the real world. The more data, the supposedly smarter the machine.” The invisible labour is bad enough, but why is Samasource headquartered in San Francisco, when its operations are in one of the poorest parts of Kenya? We can trace this moderately exploitative relationship back through history, into the vast web of bloodshed of capitalist colonialist exploitation. Karl Marx liked to think of commodities as the mashed up muscles and nerves of workers. Perhaps when we think of all the conveniences that machine vision can bring, we should think about whose mashed up eyeballs are really doing the looking.

The story is also about the relationship between (to put it crudely) work in the "public" sphere and work in the "private" sphere i.e. housework and cooking. Charlie is kind of a humanised version of the gross deadbeat (ex-)boyfriend, a toxic softboy Becky needs to cut decisively out of her life. They have familiarity and intimacy, and maybe even a faint spark between them -- unless it's a faintly luminous globule of spilled cheese? -- but it seems like they're really just not that into each other. You really suspect that this unsustainable relationship might be underpinned by an unsustainable division of labour, and that Charlie's late rent is only the tip of the iceberg. 

Work always produces (or reproduces) at least two things: whatever you are working on, and you, the worker. Charlie is obviously kind of fallow. He needs to get out more, probably? He's probably depressed in a way that goes beyond (but takes in) having been dumped. So there is a faint hint here of crip labour and crip temporalities. Not that Charlie identifies as disabled or anything, it's more that ... yes, Becky's life is going places and Charlie's isn't; yes, Becky does all the work and mental load of keeping their apartment nice and Charlie is a standard-issue wallowing excrescence of the patriarchy; but at the same time, the story themeatises norms around work, and how working, feeling motivated to work, working in particular roles, and working to particular standards, can be tied up with feelings of self-worth. There's this intriguing moment of spillover, where Charlie's paid digital labour galvanises him into cooking a mac and cheese, so that he can take photo:

In a panic, and forgetting entirely that he could have simply searched for images, he looked up a recipe. Then he got a bit carried away going through the cupboards. The oven was cranky and hard to turn on and he burned himself twice, but the pictures alone were worth it.

Becky rolls in drunk, and is very into this mac and cheese. "Who are you and what have you done with Charlie?" The kitchen is a mess; Charlie winces; Becky tells him she'll clean it in the morning ... and later Charlie thinks back to this as a moment suggesting they might have a future together after all. I'm not sure what to think about that.

Okay, slightly more substantial spoilers now. This is where the mischievousness of Penny’s title comes in. ‘Real Girls’: we might think it’s going to be a story about the differences between real humans and artificial humans. But we also soon learn that Becky “hated it when he called her a girl, even though she was the only girl, The Girl.” Can there ever be such a thing as a real girl, when ‘girl’ itself is an artificial construct? (A construct largely, if not solely, of patriarchy. “You’re real to me,” Charlie murmurs to the sleeping Becky, a sweet but disquieting moment).

It seems like Charlie maybe discovers something new about himself during this story. We’re not sure exactly, since it is done with a skilfully light touch: Penny sensibly resists any temptation for a big, sensationalistic ‘reveal’ regarding Charlie’s sexual desires and sexual identity. But she still gives us a sense of metamorphosis, and the possibility of transformation is mirrored between micro and macro: just as Charlie is always a work in progress, so we will never discover out once and for all what it is to be human.

For a genre so invested in the non-human and the post-human, science fiction also loves to play with definitions of the human. It loves to hone in on some differentia specifica – our capacity to envision, or dream, or laugh, or do really good downward-facing-dog, or grieve, or whatever – that is supposedly what makes us truly human. But these formulae always feel reductive and awkward, like a well-meant compliment from a relative that just shows how little they know you. Humanness is not some kind of empty space left behind once technology has finished colouring in all the reality it can reach. Technology (as Donna Haraway and others have pointed out for ages) has never been opposed to or outside of humanness: it has always been part of humanness. This is something ‘Real Girls’ seems to get: it is misleading to think of automation as having inbuilt limits. Automation is not an unstoppable tide, which is going to wash us clean and show us what we really are. Automation is a high stakes set of political risks and opportunities. The question is never just, ‘Should robots be girlfriends?’ it is always, at least, ‘What is a girl and what is a boy and what is a friend and what is girlhood and friendship and romance and gender and love and sex and desire and how did all these things get to be what they are now and what could all these things be instead of what they are now?’

Fwiw, the post-human romance aspect to Penny’s story also ignited a bunch of associations for me; in no particular order: Jay Owens’ wonderful essay on her friendship with a bot (here on the Vector site); little Robby’s big date in Miranda July’s film ‘You, Me, and Everyone We Know’; the bit in Pride & Prejudice where Elizabeth visits Pemberley and starts to fancy Darcy (in a way which feels uncomfortably mercenary to many modern readers, but is after all an encounter with the post-human Darcy assemblage: his wealth, definitely, but also the taste and sentiment manifest in the landscaping, the rumours of his kindness from Mrs Reynolds); Camilla Elphick et al.’s project Spot, which explores the use of artificial agents in harassment disclosure (and where at least one user reported they were glad the chatbot didn’t attempt to seem empathetic); and various friends of mine who first met and/or got together on the internet. All of these associations, I guess, ways of being anxious for the budding lovers: will Charlie and his Boy get along, now that their technological assemblage has been so radically reconfigured?

Overall, ‘Real Girls’ a wonderfully polished, smart, and timely SF story. Obviously I was intrigued by other stories this story could have been: for example, the one which got more deeply into emergent and speculative sextech, and saw Charlie being invited to control a VR avatar? I also guessed (wrongly) that the Boy would turn out to be a neural network whom Charlie was being paid to train. What does this say about me.

I don’t think this size of story could successfully accommodate it (it's shorter than this review), but it also would have been interesting to explore a hybrid AI-Charlie girlfriend, perhaps leading into more speculation around how automation and AI can be mobilised in making the experience of work more hospitable, exciting, and just generally just; I’m quite interested in Parecon’s concept of “job complexes” — innovative divisions of labour based on ensuring workers are equally empowered — and I hope at least some writers in the Wired series have incorporated some Parecon-ish speculation into their worlds? (Contemporary SF as a whole sometimes feels a bit stuck in the utopian-dystopian axis of the gig economy). And I wondered if the mac and cheese incident could have been tweaked to allow just a teeny smidge more foreshadowing of Becky’s heart still being open to Charlie? But perhaps that would diminish the gentle twistyturniness of the closing moments.

And really: I think this story perfectly accomplishes everything it sets out to do, and perhaps a little extra. I wouldn’t change a thing.

*

And to finish, just because I just read it, and it feels relevant, here is Kim Stanley Robinson, in New York 2140:

At that point, as it turned out, despite the chaos and disorder engulfing the biosphere, there were a lot of interesting things to try to latch that barn door closed. Carbon-neutral and even carbon-negative technologies were all over the place waiting to be declared economical relative to the world-blasting carbon-burning technologies that had up to that point been determined by the market to be “less expensive.” Energy, transport, agriculture, construction: each of these heretofore carbon-positive activities proved to have clean replacements ready for deployment, and more were developed at a startling speed. Many of the improvements were based in materials science, although there was such consilience between the sciences and every other human discipline or field of endeavor that really it could be said that all the sciences, humanities, and arts contributed to the changes initiated in these years. All of them were arrayed against the usual resistance of entrenched power and privilege and the economic system encoding these same, but now with the food panic reminding everyone that mass death was a distinct possibility, some progress was possible, for a few years anyway, while the memories of hunger were fresh.  

So energy systems were quickly installed: solar, of course, that ultimate source of earthly power, the efficiencies of translation of sunlight into electricity gaining every year; and wind power, sure, for the wind blows over the surface of this planet in fairly predictable ways. More predictable still are the tides and the ocean’s major currents, and with improvements in materials giving humanity at last machines that could withstand the perpetual bashing and corrosion of the salty sea, electricity-generating turbines and tide floats could be set offshore or even out in the vast deep to translate the movement of water into electricity. All these methods weren’t as explosively easy as burning fossil carbon, but they sufficed; and they provided a lot of employment, needed to install and maintain such big and various infrastructures. The idea that human labor was going to be rendered redundant began to be questioned: whose idea had that been anyway? No one was willing to step forward and own that one, it seemed. Just one of those lame old ideas of the silly old past, like phlogiston or ether. It hadn’t been respectable economists who had suggested it, of course not. More like phrenologists or theosophists, of course.  

Transport was similar, as it relied on energy to move things around. The great diesel-burning container ships were broken up and reconfigured as container clippers, smaller, slower, and there again, more labor-intensive. Oh my there was a real need for human labor again, how amazing! Although it was true that quite a few parts of operating a sailing ship could be automated. Same with freight airships, which had solar panels on their upper surfaces and were often entirely robotic. But the ships sailing the oceans of the world, made of graphenated composites very strong and light and also made of captured carbon dioxide, neatly enough, were usually occupied by people who seemed to enjoy the cruises, and the ships often served as floating schools, academies, factories, parties, or prison sentences. Sails were augmented by kite sails sent up far up into the atmosphere to catch stronger winds. This led to navigational hazards, accidents, adventures, indeed a whole new oceanic culture to replace the lost beach cultures, lost at least until the beaches were reestablished at the new higher coastlines; that too was a labor-intensive project.

Marta-Led Demons

Didja miss me don't even answer that shut up you're not even that funny okay you are. There is a snippet below about labour theories of value in the era of Quantified Self.

Here's the context (or skip to the snippet): I've been finishing up a Creative Writing PhD, which is a funny sort of thing. Actually, it's several funny sorts of things, because there's a fair bit of formal variation from university to university, and from PhD to PhD. Which is a good thing. I understand in Coventry, evaluation of the practice component focuses quite heavily on your performance, with respect to the other PGRs in your intake, within a vast verdant combat arena tucked full of traps, weaponry, intrigue and heartbreak. But in every practice-led PhD, there's always a 'practice' component -- for me, that means some fiction, including "Froggy" and Marta -- and then a critical/reflective component.

I initially found that critical/reflective bit quite difficult, since it wasn't a mode of writing I was familiar with / fruitfully unfamiliar with when I got started. But I think I more or less have got it now, which is pretty cool because I'm supposed to hand it in next week.

One aspiration for afterwards, BTW, is to spin off my two cents on practice-led research (also known as practice-as-research or practice-based research, although each phrase has its own connotations) and especially on how it formally relates to speculative fiction.

• Speculative fiction may sometimes aspire to 'lead' research, offering to shift our technoscientific imaginary, and opening spaces which stricter R&D methodologies may explore (shout out DARPA you avant-garde murderous fucks). 
• 'Hard' speculative fiction may also be implicated with expert discourses (whether that's physics or sociology), in a way which resembles the dialectic between the creative and the critical/reflective components of practice-led research. 
• Both speculative fiction and practice-led research are prone to adopting a slightly tricksterish attitude toward external evaluation, eluding or deferring judgment by a kind of bait-and-switch which insists that you've usually evaluated the wrong thing, and that they know more than they're letting on. Speculative fiction's version of this is, of course: "oh no, of course I don't claim to predict the future, ha ha ha" (zooms meaningfully away on hoverboard with fixed wide-eyed stare). 

In a nutshell, I feel like practice-led research and speculative fiction have stuff in common, which means things can actually get quite awkward (but interesting) when you try to do both of them at once.

All of this serves as a kind of apology for various aspects of the following snippet (which probably bug only me anyway), which is a fragment of reflective commentary, about a very brief passage in the mini-novel Marta and the Demons. 

(So it's me talking about some fiction I wrote. But in this bit, the themes of money, labour, and Quantified Self predominate. The yys are because I haven't done the page numbering yet and/or because I generously "allow readers to decide for themselves". Also, I've shouted it out before, but Tim Maughan's sf-ish vignette "Zero Hours" is great and still really relevant here).

Work as Money

[...] This scene [a drunken conversation between Myeong and Carly, about trying to invent a labor-based currency,] was partly inspired by schemes such as Local Exchange Trading Systems and time‑based currencies.[1] Under such systems, a member might earn one credit by working for one hour, which can be spent to hire an hour’s labor from another member. It was easy to imagine Carly thinking along these lines; at this moment in Carly and Myeong’s relationship, it felt right that Carly might have recently re-calibrated her speculative faculties, and be eager to support inchoate wishes, while still ready to feel like the grounded pragmatist of the pair.

Carly comes up with the name “WorkCoin,” and envisions WorkCoin’s value deriving from “the number of hours [worked]” (M: yy). But for Myeong, whose entrepreneurial obliviousness is reaching its peak, the word ‘hours’ is already enough to cut Carly short. 

One objection to time‑based currencies is that every hour of work is qualitatively different to every other hour. Of course, flattening such heterogeneity according to egalitarian principles, rather than market mechanisms, may be part of the appeal of time-based currencies. But I wanted Myeong to focus on something different. Myeong wants to preserve the qualitative heterogeneity of work, conceived primarily as a phenomenological heterogeneity, but with gestures toward the importance of third-person perspectives.

My second inspiration for this scene was Viviana Zelizer’s account of money’s own heterogeneity. Zelizer contests money’s reputation as a uniform, impersonal, and fungible social relation. For Zelizer, “people are constantly creating new monies, and they do so by segregating different streams of legal tender into funds for distinct activities and relations” (Zelizer 2011: 89). Money “may well ‘corrupt’ values into numbers, but values and sentiment reciprocally corrupt money by investing it with moral, social, and religious meaning” (Zelizer 2011: 97). Myeong, Zelizer, and I conspired to flesh out Myeong's aspiration, barely acknowledging Carly's contributions. Instead, Myeong would aspire to use technology to accentuate, extend, and rationalize money’s existing heterogeneity, in order to reflect the heterogeneity of work. Every hour of work is different from every other. Every penny is different from every other. Why shouldn’t we map one set of differences onto the other?

Myeong’s vision is probably ultimately incoherent. Formulating it coherently certainly offers a challenge. First, how should work be demarcated from non-work (cf. §2.5.2)? We certainly cannot get by, in this context, with the approximation that paid work is ‘real’ work (not without begging the question). Nor should we really want to. Nancy Hartsock tersely invokes the theme of what counts as ‘real’ work by describing “a third person, not specifically present in Marx’s account of transactions between capitalist and worker (both of whom are male),” who “follows timidly behind, carrying groceries, baby, and diapers” (Hartsock 1983: 234). Second, since any sum of WorkCoin will have passed through many hands, whose work should count as “what real people [have] really done, to make that money exist” (M: yy)? Third, even if work could somehow be legitimately demarcated and documented, how can WorkCoin legibly represent such data for human subjects? Who could experience something like WorkCoin, and what would they experience? How could WorkCoin’s quantifications be visualized, aestheticized, and perhaps – given Myeong’s desire for a WorkCoin in which “you could see the workers” (M: yy) – embodied and personified? Fourth, even if a legible WorkCoin were possible, why should that materially alter labor’s subjugation within some interlocking “matrix of domination” (Collins 2000: yy)? In other words, a fine-grained mapping of labor to value may sometimes lead to fairer compensation. But it can also – as the example of Amazon shortly shows – lead to something else entirely. On a larger historical timescale, the questions multiply. How would Myeong’s WorkCoin reflect the particularity of work, when that work is implicated with events – such as the production of the means of production – which have taken place long before WorkCoin came into being? Or when some properties of today’s work may take months or centuries to surface? How would something like WorkCoin function as a transferable IOU (cf. §3.4.2, §4.1), connected not only with past labor, but also with promises of future labor? Whenever I tried to extend the quantification of labor deep into the past and future, I felt it lost its particularity again. It became more nebulous and colorable, more manipulable by existing power hierarchies. Beyond these questions lay further concerns about access and exclusion, about privacy, and about energy and sustainability.

While I tried to position WorkCoin as a wild and impractical fancy, it is also “essential that estrangement leads to the realization that things do not have to be the way they are” (Spiegel 2008: 370). I expected WorkCoin could create a space for speculation about more practical implementations of a labor-based currency, both in terms of its enticements and its dangers.

One precedent is the Quantified Self phenomenon – loosely what Myeong has in mind when she refers to “fuddy-duddy, gamified, making-flossing-fun, improve-the-way-you-sit bullcrap” (M: yy). Quantified Selves are people who aim to improve their self-knowledge and autonomy through “novel ways of self-tracking with the help of digital technologies” (Lupton 2016: 9).[2] Gary Wolf, one popularizer of the term, describes his fine-grained self-tracking in a work context:

Taking advantage of the explosion of self-tracking services available on the Web, I started analyzing my workday at a finer level. Every time I moved to a new activity – picked up the phone, opened a Web browser, answered e-mail – I made a couple of clicks with my mouse, which recorded the change. After a few weeks I looked at the data and marveled.

(Wolf 2010: n.p.)

Similar tracking technology is also used in factories, warehouses, and other workplaces; a high-profile example is Amazon’s avant‑garde brutalizing of its workforce, “in the use of monitoring technologies to track the minute-by-minute movements and performance of employees” (Head 2014: n.p.):

With this twenty-first-century Taylorism, management experts, scientific managers, take the basic workplace tasks at Amazon, such as the movement, shelving, and packaging of goods, and break down these tasks into their subtasks, usually measured in seconds; then rely on time and motion studies to find the fastest way to perform each subtask; and then reassemble the subtasks and make this “one best way” the process that employees must follow.

(ibid. n.p.)

While such monitoring technologies come nowhere near to disentangling “real people” or “[o]ur own true selves” (M: yy) from the abstract figure of the worker, they do enrich that figure with fine‑grained data. They suggest how Myeong’s first bold vision of WorkCoin, as a marvellous money inscribed with all the heterogeneity of work, might yield to something more practicable. Instead of expressing “[o]ur true selves,” a WorkCoin analogue might simply express some salient data about the work which underlies it.[3]

Some time later, after attending a workshop involving time-based currencies, and speculatively exploring hybrid forms of monetary value – with price determined by interactions of supply, demand, and labor time – I did consider fleshing out WorkCoin further, perhaps in a later story. At the same time, I was wary that, merely seeking to estrange money, I might inadvertently glamorize, celebrate, normalize or naturalize the use of such intimately oppressive tracking technologies; or I might point to unlikely ways of appeasing, containing, or mitigating technologies that are hungrily bent on coercing workers “to squeeze every last drop of labour-power from their bodies” (Moore and Robinson 2015: 7). For the time being at least, I decided to let WorkCoin, like the incomes perceived by Li Shu (M: yy), and like Encarl’s Smartgularity (M: yy), remain a faintly implied shape, only partly jutting into story cycle’s representational field. 

The difficulty of theoretically demarcating work from non-work, and the brutal and exploitative history of such demarcation as it has practically occurred, could be no security against the possibility that technologically accomplished quantifications of work might in principle gain legal backing or widespread social acceptance. Stock prices already make a resounding claim to quantify the future flourishing of firms; the reputation metrics of digital matching platforms such as Uber and Airbnb make a fairly resounding claim to render precise and legible the trustworthiness of taxi drivers or holidaymakers. It seemed important to confront the possibility of some specific socio‑technological ecology of data collection, extraction, warehousing, analysis, and visualization and gamification, making a resounding claim to render ‘work’ – or perhaps ‘smart work,’ ‘hard work,’ or even ‘happy work’ – as precise and legible data.

The stories Moneykins, and perhaps especially ‘Alice,’ often feature imagery of bodies surfacing and stretching free from the media in which they have been obscured and imprisoned, and even in which they have been constituted. For instance, the Weaver breaks free from her cloud and its enigmatic Chesses, and the leprecoins from their magic metal (M: yy, yy). These images arrived in my writing of their own accord, but I started to think of them as small, scattered allegories about humans disentangling themselves from money, whether partly or fully, temporarily or for good.

At the same time, as explored in §2.1-§2.5, money can be tenacious, adaptable, and stealthy. It can linger in the places it has explicitly been banished from. Bewitchingly detailed representational regimes – such as Quantified Self technologies, the reputation metrics of the sharing economy, Doctorow’s Whuffie, or Myeong’s WorkCoin – may promise to extricate humans from money’s power, to create alternative ways of organizing collective action, and to in effect “render gold and silver of no esteem” (More 1997 [1516]: 44). Yet they may actually end up extending the power of money, in new forms, deeper into human lives. [...]

---

[1] See e.g. The Economy of Hours (www.economyofhours.com) and TimeRepublik (www.timerepublik.com); for historical background cf. Warren (1852).

[2] I prefer to say ‘Quantified Selves’ because I am a little reluctant to call Quantified Self a ‘movement’ with ‘members.’ There is an awkwardness around the term, perhaps because it tends to emphasize the agency and knowledge of the quantified individual, and downplays the way in which, even in the most sanguine circumstances, the Quantified Self is inevitably also a Quantified Other. But the term has widespread recognition, and I find even the awkwardness itself sometimes useful, a constant reminder of the unwieldiness and counterintuitivity of the subject matter.

[3] For instance, a few important dimensions of distinction might include tedium, discomfort, and other affective states; freedom and constraint; the ‘embedded labor’ of prior training and experience; the ‘quality’ of the work as measured by innumerable metrics; the danger and luck involved; and of course the work’s financial productivity. These evade tracking technologies to different degrees and in different ways. “WSTT [Wearables and other Self-Tracking Technologies] measure only users, creating an illusion that the precarian worker – constructed by a particular affective and social field of which these technologies are a part – is identical with humanity,” and the illusion that this worker figure is also “the defining point of human bodily capabilities and the point from which we should start – an outer limit of ‘human nature’ which restricts political and social possibility” (Moore and Robinson 2015: 5; cf. also Maughan 2013).

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

Disciplines delineate their territory by cutting through the common fabric of language and thought. They thereby draw a line of partition between what the joiner, for example, says and what his phrases mean, between their raw materiality and the materiality of the social conditions that
they express.

They engage in a war against aesthetic ignorance, which means aesthetic disjunction. In other words, they must engage in a war against the war that the worker is himself fighting. They want the bodies that compose society to have the ethos—the perceptions, sensations, and thoughts that correspond to their ethos—proper to their situation and occupation.

The point is that this correspondence is perpetually disturbed. There are words and discourses that freely circulate, without a master, and divert bodies from their destinations. For the joiner and his brothers those words may be the people, liberty, or equality.

They may be passion, felicity, or ecstasy for their distant sister Emma Bovary. There are spectacles that disassociate the gaze from the hand and transform the worker into an aesthete.

Disciplinary thought must ceaselessly stop this hemorrhage in order to establish stable relations between bodily states and the modes of perception and signification that correspond to them. It must ceaselessly pursue war but pursue it as a pacifying operation.

To speak of an aesthetics of knowledge thus is not an occasion to get closer to the sensuous experience. It is an instance to speak of that silent battle, to restage the context of the war—what Foucault called the “distant roar of the battle.”

In order to do so, an aesthetics of knowledge must practice a certain ignorance. It must ignore disciplinary boundaries in order to restore their status as weapons in a struggle. This is what I have done, for example, in taking the phrases of the joiner out of their normal context, that of social history, which treats them as expressions of the worker’s condition. I have taken a different path; these phrases do not describe a lived situation but reinvent the relation between a situation and the forms of visibility and capacities of thought that are attached to it. Put differently, this narrative (re´cit) is a myth in the Platonic sense; it is an anti-Platonic myth, a counterstory of destiny. The Platonic myth prescribes a relationship of reciprocal confirmation between a condition and a thought. The countermyth of the joiner breaks the circle. In order to create the textual and signifying space for which this relation of myth to myth is visible and thinkable, we must initiate a form of “indisciplinary” thinking. We must create a space without boundaries that is also a space of equality, in which the narrative of the joiner’s life enters into dialogue with the philosophical narrative of the organized distribution of competencies and destinies.

This implies another practice—an indisciplinary practice— of philosophy and its relation to the social sciences. Classically, philosophy has been considered a sort of superdiscipline that reflects on the methods of the social sciences or provides them with their foundation. Of course these sciences can object to this status, treat it as an illusion, and pose themselves as the true bearers of knowledge about philosophical illusion. This is another hierarchy, another way of putting discourses in their place. But there is a third way of proceeding that seizes the moment in which the philosophical pretension to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming the declaration, in the egalitarian language of the narrative, of the arbitrary nature of this order.

This is what I have tried to do by connecting the narrative of the joiner with the Platonic myth. The specificity of the Platonic myth is constituted by the way in which it inverts the reasons of knowledge (savoir) with the purely arbitrary insistence on the story (conte).

While the historian and the sociologist show us how a certain life produces a certain thought expressing a life, the myth of the philosopher refers this necessity to an arbitrary, beautiful lie that, at the same time, is the reality of life for the greatest number of people.

This identity of necessity and contingency—the reality of the lie—cannot be rationalized in the form of a discourse that separates truth from illusion. It can only be recounted, that is, stated in a discursive form that suspends the distinction and the hierarchy of discourse.

It is here, Plato claims in Phaedrus, that we must speak the truth (vrai), there where we speak of truth (ve´rite´). It is here also that he has recourse to the most radical story, that of the plain of truth, of the divine charioteer, and of the fall that transforms some into men of silver and others into gymnasts, artisans, or poets.

In other words, taking things the other way around, at the moment when he most implacably states the organized distribution of conditions, Plato has recourse to what most radically denies this distribution: the power of the story and the common language that abolishes the hierarchy of discourse and the hierarchies that this underwrites. The foundation of the foundation is a story, an aesthetic affair.

From this we can imagine a practice of philosophy that points to the story that is implied in each of the methods that define how a certain ethos produces a certain form of thinking. The point is not to claim that the disciplines are false sciences or that what they actually do is in fact a form of literature. Nor is it to annul them from the point of view of some figure of the other or the outside: the traumatic revelation of the real, the shock of the event, the horizon of the messianic promise, and so on.

The point is neither to reverse the order of dependence inside the ethical consensus nor to refer to the subversive power of the wholly Other. If an aesthetic practice of philosophy means something, it means the subversion of those distributions.

All territories are topoi predicated on a singular form of the distribution of the sensible. A topography of the thinkable is always the topography of a theater of operations. There is no specific territory of thought. Thought is everywhere. Its space has no periphery, and its inner divisions are always provisory forms of the distribution of the thinkable. A topography of the thinkable is a topography of singular combinations of sense and sense, of provisory knots and gaps.

An aesthetics of knowledge creates forms of supplementation that allow us to redistribute the configuration of the topoi, the places of the same and the different, the balance of knowledge and ignorance. It implies a practice of discourse that reinscribes the force of descriptions and arguments in the war of discourses in which no definite border separates the voice of the object of science from the logos of the science that takes it as its object. It means that it reinscribes them in the equality of a common language and the common capacity to invent objects, stories, and arguments.

If this practice is named philosophy, this means that philosophy is not the name of a discipline or a territory. It is the name of a practice; it is a performance that sends the specificities of the territories back to the common sharing of the capacity of thinking. In this sense the aesthetic practice of philosophy can also be called a method of equality.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

My paragraphs / emphases / etc.

The political potential of the aesthetic heterotopy can be illustrated by an example. During the French Revolution of 1848, there was a brief blossoming of workers’ newspapers. One of those newspapers, Le Tocsin des travailleurs (The Workers’ Tocsin), published a series of articles in which a joiner describes a fellow joiner’s day at work, either in the workshop or in the house where he is laying the floor. He presents it as a kind of diary. For us, however, it appears more akin to a personalized paraphrase of Critique of Judgment and more peculiarly of the second paragraph that spells out the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment.

Kant documented disinterestedness with the example of the palace that must be looked at and appreciated without considering its social use and signification. This is how the joiner translates it in his own narration: “Believing himself at home, he loves the arrangement of a room so long as he has not finished laying the floor. If the window opens out onto a garden or commands a view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination towards the spacious view to enjoy it better than the possessors of the neighbouring residences.”

This text seems to depict exactly what Bourdieu describes as the aesthetic illusion. And the joiner himself acknowledges this when he speaks of belief and imagination and opposes their enjoyment to the reality of possessions. But it is not by accident that this text appears in a revolutionary workers’ newspaper, where aesthetic belief or imagination means something very precise: the disconnection between the activity of the hands and that of the gaze.

The perspectival gaze has long been associated with mastery and majesty. But in this case it is reappropriated as a means of disrupting the adequation of a body and an ethos. This is what disinterestedness or indifference entails: the dismantling of a certain body of experience that was deemed appropriate to a specific ethos, the ethos of the artisan who knows that work does not wait and whose senses are geared to this lack of time. Ignoring to whom the palace actually belongs, the vanity of the nobles, and the sweat of the people incorporated in the palace are the conditions of aesthetic judgment.

This ignorance is by no means the illusion that conceals the reality of possession. Rather, it is the means for building a new sensible world, which is a world of equality within the world of possession and inequality. This aesthetic description is in its proper place in a revolutionary newspaper because this dismantling of the worker’s body of experience is the condition for a worker’s political voice.

[...]

In order to underscore the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics, a certain kind of discourse has to be set to work, a kind of discourse that implies an aesthetics of knowledge. What does this expression mean? First it is a discursive practice that gives its full signification to the apparently innocuous definition of the aesthetic judgment as elaborated by Kant, namely, that aesthetic judgment implies a certain ignorance; we must ignore the way in which the palace has been built and the ends that it serves in order to appreciate it aesthetically. As I have argued, such ignorance or suspension is not a mere omission. In fact it is a division of both knowledge and ignorance. The ignorance of the possession and destination of a building produces the disjunction between two types of knowledge for the joiner: the know-how of his job and the social awareness of his condition as the condition shared with those who don’t care for the pleasures of perspective. It produces a new belief. A belief is not an illusion in opposition to knowledge. It is the articulation between two knowledges, the form of balance between those forms of knowledge and the forms of ignorance they are coupled with.

As Plato claimed, articulation or balance has to be believed. The economy of knowledge has to be predicated on a story. This does not mean an illusion or a lie. It means it is predicated on an operation that weaves the fabric within which the articulation of the knowledges can be believed, within which it can operate. From the Platonic point of view, technical knowledge has to be submitted to a knowledge of ends.

Unfortunately this science, which provides a foundation for the distribution of knowledges and positions, is itself without a demonstrable foundation. It must be presupposed, and in order to do so a story must be recounted and believed. Knowledge requires stories because it is, in fact, always double. Once more there are two ways of dealing with this necessity: an ethical one and an aesthetic one.

Everything revolves around the status of the as if. Plato formulated it in a provocative way: ethical necessity is a fiction. A fiction is not an illusion; it is the operation that creates a topos, a space and a rule for the relation between sense and sense. Modern “human” and social sciences refuse this provocation. They affirm that science cannot admit fiction. Nevertheless they want to reap its benefits; they want to keep the topography of the distribution of the souls, as in the form of a distinction between those who are destined to know and those who are destined to provide the objects of knowledge.

I mentioned Bourdieu’s sociology earlier because it is the purest form of disavowed or hidden Platonism that animates modern social knowledge. His polemic against the aesthetic illusion is not the idea of one particular sociologist. It is structural. Aesthetics means that the eyes of the worker can be disconnected from his hands, that his belief can be disconnected from his condition. This is what must be ruled out if sociology is to exist. 

That is, an ethos must define an ethos; an abode must determine a way of being that in turn determines a way of thinking. Of course this is not only the case for sociology. History, for example, has its own particular way of constructing modes of being and thinking as the expressions of different periods of time. Such is the case for disciplines in general or for what can be called disciplinary thinking. A discipline, in effect, is first of all not the exploitation of a territory and the definition of a set of methods appropriate to a certain domain or a certain type of object. It is primarily the very constitution of this object as an object of thought, the demonstration of a certain idea of knowledge—in other words, a certain idea of the rapport between knowledge and a distribution of positions, a regulation of the rapport between two forms of knowledge (savoir) and two forms of ignorance. It is a way of defining an idea of the thinkable, an idea of what the objects of knowledge themselves can think and know.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

On the one hand, there is the sociological criticism that saw an ignorance of the social law of the ethos. Pierre Bourdieu’s work epitomizes this type of criticism, namely, arguing that the view of aesthetic judgment as a judgment independent of all interest amounts to an illusion or a mystification. The disinterested aesthetic judgment is the privilege of only those who can abstract themselves—or who believe that they can abstract themselves—from the sociological law that accords to each class of society the judgments of taste corresponding to their ethos, that is, to the manner of being and of feeling that their condition imposes upon them. [...] Such judgments are also part of the mystification that hides the reality of social determinism and helps prevent victims of the system from gaining access to the knowledge that could liberate them.

[...]

Lyotard dismisses the heterotopy of the beautiful in favor of the heteronomy of the sublime. The result of this operation is the same as that of the sociological critique, though it is made from a very different angle; in both cases the political potential of the heterotopy is boiled down to a sheer illusion that conceals the reality of a subjection.

[...]

Ignoring to whom the palace actually belongs, the vanity of the nobles, and the sweat of the people incorporated in the palace are the conditions of aesthetic judgment. This ignorance is by no means the illusion that conceals the reality of possession. Rather, it is the means for building a new sensible world, which is a world of equality within the world of possession and inequality.

[...]

Aesthetic ignorance thus neutralizes the ethical distribution insofar as it splits up the simple alternative laid down by the sociologist that claims you are either ignorant and subjugated or have knowledge and are free. This alternative remains trapped in the Platonic circle, the ethical circle according to which those who have the sensible equipment suitable for the work that does not wait are unable to gain the knowledge of the social machine.

The break away from this circle can only be aesthetic. It consists in the disjunction between sensible equipment and the ends that it must serve. The joiner agrees with Kant on a decisive point: the singularity of the aesthetic experience is the singularity of an as if. The aesthetic judgment acts as if the palace were not an object of possession and domination. The joiner acts as if he possessed the perspective. This as if is no illusion. It is a redistribution of the sensible, a redistribution of the parts supposedly played by the higher and the lower faculties, the higher and the lower classes. 

As such it is the answer to another as if: the ethical order of the city, according to Plato, must be viewed as if God had put gold in the souls of the men who were destined to rule and iron in the souls of those who were destined to work and be ruled. It was a matter of belief. Obviously Plato did not demand that the workers acquire the inner conviction that a deity truly mixed iron in their souls and gold in the souls of the rulers. It was enough that they sensed it, that is, that they used their arms, their eyes, and their minds as if this were true. And they did so even more as this lie about fitting actually fit the reality of their condition. The ethical ordering of social occupations ultimately occurs in the mode of an as if. The aesthetic rupture breaks this order by constructing another as if.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

The normal relation, in Platonic terms, is the domination of the better over the worse. Within the game it is the distribution of two complementary and opposite powers in such a way that the only possible perturbation is the struggle of the worse against the better—for instance, the rebellion of the democratic class of desire against the aristocratic class of intelligence. In this case there is no dissensus, no perturbation of the game. There is a dissensus only when the opposition itself is neutralized.

This means that neutralization is not at all tantamount to pacification. On the contrary, the neutralization of the opposition between the faculties, the parts of the soul, or the classes of the population is the staging of an excess, a supplement that brings about a more radical way of seeing the
conflict.

But there are two ways of understanding this excess.

Just as there are two ways to think of matters of conflict—a consensual one and a dissensual
one—there are also two ways of thinking the nature of dissensus and the relationship between consensus and dissensus.

This point is decisive.There are two ways of interpreting matters of consensus and dissensus, an ethical one and an aesthetic one.

The ethical must be understood from the original sense of ethos. Ethos first meant abode before it meant the way of being that suits an abode. The ethical law first is the law that is predicated on a location. An ethical relation itself can be understood in two different ways, depending on whether you consider the inner determination of the location or its relation to its outside.

Let us start from the inside. The law of the inside is doubled. Ethical in the first instance means that you interpret a sphere of experience as the sphere of the exercise of a property or a faculty possessed in common by all those who belong to a location.

There is poetry, Aristotle tells us, because men differ from animals by their higher sense of imitation; all men are able to imitate and take pleasure in imitation. In the same way, there is politics because men not only share the animal property of the voice that expresses pleasure or pain but also the specific power of the logos that allows them to reveal and discuss what is useful and what is harmful and thus also what is just and what is unjust.

As is well known, it soon is made apparent that this common property is not shared by everyone; there are human beings who are not entirely human beings. For instance, Aristotle says, the slaves have the aisthesis of language (the passive capacity of understanding words), but they don’t have the hexis of language (the active power of stating and discussing what is just or unjust).

More generally, it is always debatable whether a sequence of sounds produced by a mouth is articulated speech or the animalistic expression of pleasure or pain.

In such a way, the ethical universal is usually doubled by an ethical principle of discrimination. The common location includes in its topography different locations that entail different ways of being; the workplace, according to Plato, is a place where work does not wait, which means that the artisan has no time to be elsewhere. Since he has no place to be elsewhere, he has no capacity to understand the relation between the different places that make up a community, which means that he has no political intelligence.

This relation can be turned around; insofar as the artisan is a man of need and desire he has no sense of the common measure and therefore cannot be anywhere other than the place where the objects of desire and consumption are produced.

This is the ethical circle that ties together a location, an occupation, and the aptitude—the sensory equipment—that is geared toward them. The ethical law thus is a law of differentiation between the class of sensation and the class of intelligence.

To summarize, the ethical law, considered as the law of the inside, is a distribution of the sensible that combines—according to different forms of proportionality—the sharing of a common capacity and the distribution of alternative capacities.

But the law of the ethos can also be set up as the law of the outside [...]

From "Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness"

(By Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, with an introduction by David Edgar)

Soon after arriving at the convent, on 8 December 1951, I was for a few weeks sent out to care for a lady physically and mentally ill. As Mother Michael advised me, I got this lady to the Catholic Home that I was myself later sent to. The Mother Superior of this Home subsequently told me she thought on first seeing me, that it seemed as if I was like the patient I was then bringing her.

Back at the convent, a small pimple on my knee became a big boil and for a short time I was in bed on penicillin with a high temperature. Then what happened was that I had gone down into a dumb-struck state. Trying to keep up with the others brought me to a standstill. A great cloud seemed to come over me. I was quite unable to express any feeling in words.

I seemed able to do things and then couldn't. Sister Angela showed me how to make altar breads. One day everything seemed wrong. She had to help me a lot. It was difficult to move. I was quite unaware of my own state. Mother Michael suggested I go to the Catholic Home to help. I knew the sisters there had had breakdowns.

Once there, I still felt dreadful, cut off, unable to contact anyone. My speech seemed to have gone. Sitting alone sometimes in the chapel, where I would say long prayers of my own, then playing with the earth, rather than weeding. Sitting watching people seemed more within my scope. Any sort of order to do this or that, especially washing up or any sort of housework got me caught, unable to move. Left alone, talking to myself, pleasing myself, was, in a sense, my only relief. Sometimes the Mother Superior sent for me. She would say, "How are you?" "All right." Then there was silence, nothing more. To me other people there were sick.

When they took me to London, to have ECT, I decided I must be sick, and wanted to go in a tax, not a bus. My trust was in them. My knowledge of the dangers of electric shocks and how some people "punished" other people by so-called "treatment" was then completely beyond me. This was in 1952.