Claire Colebrook
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Penn State University. She has written books and articles on contemporary European philosophy, literary history, gender studies, queer theory, visual culture and feminist philosophy. Her most recent book is Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (2023)
At the time of writing this essay my social media feed has been dominated by two families of memes and hot takes. The first expresses horror, outrage and umbrage at the Olympic women’s boxing medalist Imane Khelif: a ‘biological male’ left a woman in tears after one punch. The second counters this series of misconceptions by pointing out that Khelif is biologically female, not a trans woman, and not some monster who cannot be beaten.[i] There’s a contested biological reality, and then a back and forth online meme war. Biology and cultural contestation: life on the one hand, and then cultural inscription. At least in this social media contestation there seems to be an agreement (for the most part) that biological reality should correct and settle fears that a man has invaded women’s sports, and that sports should follow the lines of life. Things would be easier, more peaceful, and fair if we could only think and reason with a clear sense of biological reality, and this would be especially true if this incident in a sporting industry so reliant on clear gender binaries were to accept that biology is not at all as rigidly dichotomous as either side of ‘she’s a man’ or ‘she’s a woman’ would assume. Let’s be intelligent, follow the science, understand biology and stop fighting about fighting. In both sides of the Khelif/Carini fight – those who wished to deny Khelif’s status as a woman, and those who corrected the biological fundamentalists – there was an assumed naturalness of the biological that is both impossible and crucial to professional sports. Performance achievements across sports have steadily risen, partly for ‘biological’ reasons (better nutrition and training protocols) and partly for advancements in information technologies – including the data-gathering and sharing of body metrics.
Perhaps nothing exposes the artifice of all life quite like the Olympics. Yes, there’s the sheer and undeniable power of some bodies that seems so genetically given that one might want to say that professional sports gives the lie to any sense of social/cultural construction. And yet, how does the non-negotiable power of a sprinter, boxer, swimmer or gymnast come to appear as brute biological fact? It’s not just that decades of training, nutrition, coaching and competing enable bodies to channel potential into actual outcomes, it’s also that centuries of geopolitical, epigenetic and epiphylogenetic forces compose bodies and their encounters. Epiphylogenesis (a term I draw from Bernard Stiegler)[ii] is one of the most pertinent concepts when trying to make sense of bodily encounters like that between Imane Khelif and her Italian competitor Angela Carini who quit a boxing bout in tears after 46 seconds. Only through an elaborate concept – artificial intelligence at its best – can discussion of sexual fundamentalism in sports make any sense. How is it that two bodies, clothed in regulated gear, surrounded by officials, media and spectators, entering into a highly choreographed space of conflict – with years of training, supplementation and coaching – appear as something added on to the basic brute facts of the biological? To what extent can the concept of the biological – despite the complexity and differences of power in the world – generate something like the spectacle of a fair encounter? To what extent can the distributions of force in the world be reckoned to be the outcome of the proper, natural or biological realities of life?
Two women appear in a boxing ring; we might perhaps want to imagine that Olympics boxing events have their origin in a biological drive for survival, with humans fighting humans as a material imperative that gradually takes on a technical form of its own, increasingly bound by rules and regulations, evolving to become a spectator sport tied to commercialization, and then intersecting with the adjacent formation of strict systems of gender testing, governing bodies and geopolitical wrangling. When Khelif fights Carini and social media wars flare up it is easy to see just how much artifice goes into any sporting controversy. The supposedly unfair genetic advantage enjoyed by Khelif is not only difficult to determine given the highly politicized disputes between various sporting bodies and regulators, the entire domain of professional sports is made possible by an impossible border between genetic advantage and an individual surrounded by coaches, technologies of enhancement and sexual politics. To what extent can one salvage a biological reality or life prior to artifice or technology, and what does this have to do with artificial intelligence?
Let’s go back to that supposed biological drive for survival that might offer some brute fact of humans fighting other humans. It is no accident that the most famous passage of Hegel’s Phenomenology concerns a fight for life: one becomes a master by fighting to the death, by positing a value – prestige, or not being defeated – that is in excess of biological survival.[iii] One could say that Hegel is here drawing a distinction between biology and the human, between life that simply survives and then the artifice of a human imagining a vlue that is more than life. But for Hegel, and in actual fact, that supposed biological survival is always already technical. For anything to survive, including plants and photosynthesis, there is a relation to a milieu that is not one’s own, with the time of life or the future being other than one’s supposed present. A being and its time are already other than the supposed bounds of an organism. One could define this necessary negativity of all life (it’s essential becoming-other) not as a linear emergence of order from chaos, but the intrusion or shock of otherness requiring something like stored time. This is Bernard Stiegler’s argument for both life in general and the event of the human: life exists through relations to a milieu and an ongoing technics, or the formation of complex systems that transcend individuals. The human is a necessarily technological event where psychic individuation takes on a complexity that forms the supposedly biological. Life is made possible by artifice – ranging from the creative responses of bodies to their milieu to the specific stupidity of artificial intelligence; this stupidity is made possible by the fantasy of the pre-artificial. Non-human animals have their specific technical systems – webs, migration patterns, anthills, beehives, birdsong – but they cannot be stupid. Only humans can be stupid, which is to say that only humans can take up a relation to intelligence that is violently artificial in its positing of the natural, biological or immutably given.
To say that an animal is intelligent is to attribute some degree of artifice or technology to its sense of the world. If animals can learn commands, be trained or possess a know-how beyond our ken this is because an animal is more than mere life, more than its immediate biology. For Stiegler, stupidity is only possible because of tertiary retention: beehives, webs, anthills, learned commands or birdsong individuate animals in their milieu, but humans bear relations to technologies or artifice that can take on short or long circuits. ‘We’ can take up a relation to the archive: an animal may have learned skills, may have developed and evolved alongside other fighting species – such as horses used in the military, or dogs used in policing – but an animal does not object to the artifice of these acquisitions. Anyone who has familiarity with dogs or cats has witnessed play fighting, fighting for the sake of fighting and fighting that is almost Hegelian in the animal’s attachment to winning at all costs. A fight is already artifice – a speculation regarding the other’s desire, an imagined outcome, a balance between one’s bodily capacities and the body’s energy (both of which are formed from a past with other bodies). Artifice is the outcome of dynamics: should one’s own being and the world be stable and determined there would be no need for languages and practices to become more or less complex, more or less confused. Without artifice there is no intelligence – this is true for all animals.
So what makes a human stupid? For Stiegler it is not the artifice of intelligence that is the problem – because all life and all intelligence is made possible by technology or a relation to milieux that remains the same through time beyond one’s body. A body involved in a fight is an event of artifice, with limbs becoming weapons, with the time of one’s life being inflected by the life of an other, with the limbs of another becoming obstacles or opportunities: we can say there’s an intelligence to fighting – the assessment or speculation regarding the force of an other, a sense of play (or not), an orientation to prestige (or not), perhaps a calculation of one’s life and its worth that is at odds with the body’s own intelligence where cortisol and adrenaline take over. A fight becomes stupid when it is not a fight, and isn’t this what Imane Khelif’s accusers were arguing? A fight between a man and a woman is a foregone conclusion! It’s not a fight! That accusation, though, relies on a transcendental stupidity we know all too well: this is x, and this is y, and ‘we’ all know this, and questioning that order of things is to make life more complicated than it needs to be.
The supposed brute biology or materiality of an organism’s survival is not only already structured by intelligence – or a negotiation of others – but also marked by the necessarily artificial nature of intelligence. The intelligence of any animal has already read the time and intelligence of others, and that time of intelligence is increasingly and intensively technological. Two dogs fighting: already the result of a species bred by humans, with varying degrees of aggression, varying degrees of domestication, varying levels of fear, hunger, anxiety and strength feeding into the two bodies. Two women boxing: the history of spectator sport, of training technologies, of spectatorship, corporate sponsorship, race and gender technologies, media apparatuses and social media interfaces that make possible a bout of Olympic boxing are perfect instances of epiphylogenesis. The two bodies are composed from stored memories, including the boxing ring, rules, regulations, gloves and headgear. The biological substrate is also artificially intelligent – human bodies evolved to speak, learn, interact, read, write and play in common with the exosomatic (or the time stored in inscriptive systems and things).
The biological is artificially intelligent, with the comportments of bodies – their excellence and genetic advantage – becoming actual through relations among forces beyond the organism. One can become an elite runner, boxer, writer or artist only through the creation of practices and technologies that exceed and precede a body’s individuation.
If all life is artificial life (already not the body’s own, already composed in relation to technologies that exceed any intentionality or self-present action), all intelligence is artificial intelligence. To sense the world through some form of know-how is to allow the present to be composed from relations and forces beyond the present. There is no brute biology, not because we only know biology from the position of cultural systems of language and sense, but because biology is intelligent – responsive, adaptive, relational and beyond the present of any individual. There is no strict border between vital individuation and psychic individuation; in order to live and be a relatively autonomous being, an organism must relate to its milieu, and to the ways in which others are also dwelling. That negotiation relies on the time and speculation of thinking or intelligence. A body is always already artificially intelligent – capable of living, thinking, deciding, desiring and fighting because of stored time. In the case of a fight between two bodies it is all too easy to see that any appeal to the hard facts of biology not only sets biology as some vital ground to which thought should pander, but also occludes the artificial intelligence of bodies – or all the ways in which bodies differ, transform, evolve, adapt, react or are affected by complex and temporally sedimented milieux. Any fight between non-human animals is always in excess of ‘biology’: any body is already bound up with complex and dynamic relations among forces. What makes a fight among humans distinct is not intelligence but stupidity.
To return to the exemplary stupidity of the fight between Khelif and Carini: there is a clear sense in which the event is both the outcome of artificial intelligence, and an intensifier of the transcendental stupidity that is a necessary possibility of specifically human artificial intelligence. If artificial intelligence appears as a problem today it is because it foregrounds the specifically human stupidity at the heart of what appears as the natural, the vital, the biological and the material. If any fight between two bodies requires a milieu not the body’s own, and forms of reading and intelligence that allow bodies to engage in combat, there will inevitably be forms of gesture, tactic, strategy and action that are technological: repeatable and inheritable relations that transcend the individual. What happens when that evolving, complex, dynamic and transindividual system or techne – fighting – becomes evaluated according to some mythic ground of the non-relational? We put two bodies in a space and in so doing produce the biological in its narrow fixity (XX vs XY). What happens when the complexity of artifice – everything that makes life worth living – attempts to reduce itself to the biological? Transcendental stupidity is the outcome of repressing artificial life and artificial intelligence.
Does a dog, trained to follow commands, adept at jumping through an agility course, and bonded with its human companion halt all its actions and desires to retrieve some pre-cultural and stable dog biology? Does a dog hop onto social media and circulate received memes about a woman being really a man? Does a dog fight another dog deploying the weapon of a pre-inscribed meme regarding dog essence? The problem of stupidity comes not from artificial intelligence but rather from the specific nature of human artificial intelligence, which through time manufactures an archive and fantasy of the pre-artificial.
More concretely, and outside the domain of sports and technologies of gender: this is the problem with having to read the output of what is colloquially understoodd to be artificial intelligence. Whether it’s the summary paragraph of a google search or the first line of a student essay, isn’t the problem of so-called artificial intelligence that there is a repression or lack of artifice? ‘Humans have always told stories….’. ‘Since the dawn of time…’ ‘There are two schools of thought when it comes to thinking about ideology.’ Artificial intelligence in its narrow sense is just this repetition of what is the case, as if the world might be given for intelligence and prior to creation, decision, contestation and fight. Stupidity is the incapacity to intensify the artifice of intelligence, accepting what is biologically self-evident, repeating what is so obviously the case, demanding that we step back from politics to reality, calling it out as it is, pretending that there might be this world in which intelligence is nothing more than the vital.
[i] https://theconversation.com/misinformation-abuse-and-injustice-breaking-down-the-olympic-boxing-firestorm-236061
[ii] Bernard Stiegler, States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century. Trans. Daniel Ross. (Cambridge: Polity, 2015)
[iii] G.W.F. Hegel The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) 124.
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 