On lovehating “The Computational Unconscious” (Tania, Core Post #4)

 

1. The final section of this chapter, “Technohumanist Dehumanization,” totally works. The claims are lucid and Beller's examples are utterly convincing. Suddenly the idea of a computational unconscious is exceedingly clear, and even given precise expression: “the structural repression and forgetting that is endemic to the very essence of our technological build-out” (96).

2. In getting to this place of clarity and precision, however, Beller takes us down a circuitous, frustrating, and not always sound path. His arguments splatter across the page in lengthy multi-clausal sentences that, far from elucidating or even performing the points he’s trying to make, buries them. Theory never required this kind of prose.

3. The use of psychoanalytic concepts (adept as that tradition is in getting at paradox and pathology) to map the place of computation in the social is pretty refreshing—a new use for an old toolkit. The flexibility of the concept of the unconscious makes it well-suited for the nimble purposes to which Beller puts it. I do want to quibble over the emphasis placed on page 77 on the idea (taken from Lucy Liu) that “Lacan modeled the theory of the unconscious from information theory and cybernetic theory.” All well and good to cite cybernetics as one among numerous other streams of influence; but I’m not sure it can be accorded pride of place. To do so would be to discount (or repress) Lacan’s long engagement with Merleau-Ponty specifically, who repeatedly and pointedly differentiated his ideas on consciousness from computational abstraction. He was at pains to specify, for example, that his philosophy drew from the precise experience of his own embodiment, that he looked at the world from the position of his body, and that this differentiated phenomenology from scientific abstraction: “not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine,” (Eye and Mind, p160). My point here isn’t that Liu’s book-length argument, which I haven’t read, isn’t sound. Rather, I’m stating a dissatisfaction with Beller’s partial and passing citation of Liu in the service of a totalizing claim.

4. On the topic of totalizing claims. Beller on page 80: “the function of the camera’s program organizes the psychodynamics of the image-maker and spectator alike in a way that at once structures film form through market feedback, gratifies the (white-identified) male ego, and normalizes the violence of heteropatriarchy—and does so at a profit.” A sentence we might be tempted to agree with on sight i.e. accede to—but which falls apart once you plug it into a history. No room here for bell hooks, Ann Kaplan, or any of the many other theorists of oppositional spectatorship. Beller’s sentence totalizes the history of cinema, narrows its purview, and deletes the contributions of non-dominant filmmakers, spectators, and theorists all at once. There are other examples in the chapter of this type of argumentation-through-excess-abstraction, which is disappointing and strange for a piece that takes abstraction as one of its main concerns, and which in does in fact end up in a convincing place.