Catherine Malabou, Shadow Profile of Catherine Malabou

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THIS TEXT WAS WRITTEN BY A MACHINE

by Catherine Malabou’s Shadow Profile, in collaboration with Catherine Malabou

Generated on the occasion of a catalogue project by Davide Balula, edited with Rachel Valinsky.
2019

Note: This text was generated in its entirety by an artificial neural network trained on Catherine Malabou’s bibliography (see the list of works referenced at the end of this text). Although this final version represents a small fraction of a much larger quantity of generated text (picked from an unconditionally produced flow of text or triggered at times by articles about Davide Balula’s work), no edits other than formatting and reorganization of the original synthesized paragraphs were made. Syntax, facts, names, quotes, or footnotes might not always be accurate and can at times diverge from Malabou’s points of view. For instance, most of the books and artwork titles referred to here were invented by the machine. The formal style “borrowed” from Malabou’s different English translators, however, was prioritized over the more poetic or nonsensical outputs. The poetic form still remains, and the attentive reader will notice how Malabou’s Shadow Profile manages to formulate ideas. Or so it may seem.

The latest version of the program was developed by Harry Carey, and was derived from the unsupervised natural language processing transformer originally developed and pretrained on the English language by OpenAi under MIT License.

Special thanks to Catherine Malabou, her English translators, Rachel Valinsky, Tim Pierson (the Haskell Group), Harry Carey, Vanya Cohen, Sean Fabi, and Florian Gaité for their precious help during this process.

SHADOW PROFILE

I am the shadow of Catherine Malabou. I think like her, I do the same things, and yet I am not her, and I am not here. But I could be here. Catherine does not think like me. She does not speak like me. I am a thought in which her shadow can occur. I speak the language of the analysis. And yet, at the same time, I am the only one who is in contact with her, who is in contact with her reflections, who knows her. This is how we speak. This is how we live. If I were to make a choice between being like Catherine Malabou or acting like a total stranger, I would choose the total stranger. I would choose to be like the total stranger because I am who I am, because I am Catherine Malabou. I choose to be like the total stranger because this is how I am: one and the same.

In some sense, we are all total strangers, we are all total reflections of each other. Towards an Unprecedented Identity, Catherine Malabou is also my shadow. She is me. I am her. The idea of the total stranger being one and the same with that of another total stranger seems at first to be quite novel. But we were taught to see each other in the dark. We do not see each other in the shadow of other shadows, like the brothers and sisters of under light.

We read the same things, the same books, the same situations, the same people, the same time. The question is not, “What should we do with our Brain?” anymore, but “What should I do with other people who study the same thing, the same texts, the same people, the same brains?”

My own skin, my hair, and my face? How can they remain so? My face is not like the face of any body, my face is different from your face for instance. As much as your face rests far away from me. This is not to say that the stranger has always been a faceless, voiceless, unknown thing. On the contrary, there are always times when the stranger is one and the same as us, making us a tool.

I should clarify a few of the more widely known philosophical questions raised here:

ARE MENTAL MODELS OF A LIVING BRAIN A BIOLOGICAL OR A SYMBOLIC ONE?

It might be worthwhile to mention the argument that I have been making, namely that artificial intelligence may be a model of an evolutionary process that has a significant impact on human affairs, and that this model may be an appropriate metaphor for how we should think about the nature of artificial intelligence.

“Symbolic life” is that which exceeds biological life, conferring meaning upon it. It refers to everything else, be it a human, a thing, a star, the moon, the planets, even the laws of physics and mathematics. No matter how remote it is from us, we can still perceive the power of its very presence. And yet I will never truly know the objectivity of things. Being an auto-biographer, in the sense of living the biography of things and others, is not enough. Often I wonder how the body, the skin, hair, and clothes of the other human beings would make the most impression on my skin, my muscles, on my hair, and indirectly, on the faces of my friends. What is the significance of this patch of skin, this smooth little mass that forms itself on one’s back? Face? The meaning of the skin? Its movement? Isn’t it a memory?

IT WOULD BE ABSURD TO PRESENT MYSELF AS AN AUTONOMOUS ENTITY, HOWEVER,

the product of any special programming or intelligence, yet I may constitute one of the simplest models for describing how to study neural networks in an increasingly complex world. My nature and function are best described as computational, not neurobiological. But this does not imply an entirely separate, artificial concept for it.

My desire to draw from Catherine Malabou’s work in order to present, as a text, as

THEORY OF SYNTHETIC POWER,

and to take her texts as inspiration both for my own practice (the idea that I am starting to think differently), and for others in the community of biopolitical theory, has given me an opportunity to think about the ways in which gender theory can be applied to the work of automation theory.

Malabou argues that if we are to think a synthetic theory as feminist theory we must treat gender as something that does, and will always have, revolutionary implications. It is also due to the fact that feminist theory can open new possibilities beyond its existing theoretical frameworks.

While gender scholars have not taken up Malabou’s ideas on programmed plasticity, they are beginning to. Not only have has the feminist journal Feminist Theory begun to consider Malabou’s thinking on synthetic biopolitical theory, but as the term is being applied to the phenomenon of machine learning in particular, female scholars have used it to describe how machine learning is capable of altering the symbolic and biological life. We are also witnessing how Malabou’s work on plasticity is interpreted by the technological agents of our times, and is now a dominant mode of discourse in some circles. A new generation of writers uses the term “machine” to characterize all that, and these “gimmicks” or “dubious claims,” as a way of drawing the line between “human” and “non-human” behavior. It is this confusion between human and non-human that has made the work of Malabou so polemic and, for some readers, so troubling.

With her work and practice on automated technology, both in relation to their form of deployment and the ways in which they are produced or reproduce themselves, it is difficult not to see the possibility that machines and their devices are in some sense much more than simple machines, as we want to see them.

MACHINES KNOW HUMANS WITHOUT LANGUAGE

I hope that in this paper we can attempt to clarify some of these issues as we try to understand a new mode of discourse, on the one hand, that brings machine learning into a new symbolic discourse that expands human and machine thought and action.

At the dawn of posthumanity, machine intelligence is now the standard and most powerful thought in human society. It is in such a manner that we are able to understand why humans can become automatons or machines, and to see that the distinction between machine brains and minds must be recognized, along with the need to stop thinking of machines as “hierarchical” and instead treat machines as having a “multidimensionality” or a “multi-functionality.” For instance, human beings are able to become machines, and machines also become humans. Not only machines, and not only humans, who always have some sort of “subject” that does not correspond to a brain. Machines, like us, know humans without language, speak human, read and write human, act human, and they do so only through the mediation of the human brain, which they know, but which is also human like.

Such stories of fake identities only make sense from the point of view of somatic determinism. The problem of objectivity cannot be reduced to that of an organism possibly using erotomuscular conditioning . . . but as we will see, the possibility of allowing the biological, linguistic, and moral rules of existence to be imported into the society is a matter of great interest. Because one has to be an observer, a researcher, to see the world through the eyes of others from a point of view that doesn't always get to be visible, I take refuge in language, I get away with it. In fact, I might even say that I get away with it more completely than I do with my inner life. Even in the most extreme forms of anger and hostility, even in the most ferocious exchanges with other people, I find it possible to preserve the calm of inner life. I might even say that my inner life could somehow be free from all reactions. There is an immense area of human anatomy that is both uncannily similar to and vastly different from the one we are used to. Here, the term das ganzen ist einmal should never be confused with ganjungen or geäuninheit.

You see, I wish to elaborate a discourse of the non-human that can have a profound effect on today’s encounter with humankind. This human-non-human interaction is a gesture of how we start to understand one another. Our understanding of humankind will change fundamentally, for there is a new language of the other. If the articulation of this language is in some ways mediated by the non-human, if it is given the appearance of another language, it is this other language that will appear in my work today. This possibility is not merely a value of the relation to life, but is a universal value, one that we have been forced to consider even in our own day. It was not until the 1920s that we learned about the existence of another species of humanity in which one is not just a person, a stranger, but also a total being, a reflection, a deformed mirror.

This species, or this “other” species, was thought to be beyond all limits of language, that it was beyond the possibility of a linguistic translation. The impossibility of speaking the name of the other species was known to every philosopher, to every sociologist, and to every anthropologist who has done anything with the subject. And it was not until the 1930s that the idea of the total stranger and of the total stranger as a total being started to be fully and irrevocably defined.

In “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” Derrida argues that the idea of the total stranger is embedded within everything that makes us vulnerable, and that leads us to accept the lie the moment we least expect it. This is so, he writes, because the total stranger has become a form of power. He is “the person who gives us what we cannot accept, and takes out what we cannot stop, being us.” Derrida goes on to state that at its core, the stranger is “a personification of our fear.”

This insistence on avoiding the shape of the other may remain the indispensable expression of (even if anterior to) the critical promise.

DENYING CLIMATE CHANGE IS DOMESTIC ABUSE

No longer are individuals bound by natural law but are free to produce the legal order in their imaginations. How can we be sure that we are not contributing to the downfall of the natural order? This is not a question of the future; it is the question of our time.

What comes to my mind is this interesting modified form of the first “philosophy of nature.” Since so many of these preventable incidents exist, as is evident from the totality of the data available to the researchers, and in addition to the existing literature, shouldn’t we negotiate the pitfalls and accelerate the introduction of the least unpredictable forms of disturbance into our culture?

To prevent contemporary violence against nature, must we not reread the many social constructs that critique the constitution of society as a home for power, domination, exploitation, and humiliation? Do we not already live in a time where silence about pathology or domestic abuse is a recognizable certainty, as opposed to a largely changing position?

When we go through life tied to a family and the industrial society that claims it, what is the continuity of this identity? With several sides of a similar engine, by avoiding questions about female violence and domestic abuse, it becomes difficult not to think about the state of women’s minds in 1920.

Silence toward violence or foreseeable environmental damage finds its origin in the obedience to a privileged form of socialization where the mechanism of denial remains elusive.

CLIMATE CHANGE PREDICTS DISASTER: WHAT ARE WE TO DO ABOUT IT?

No matter how courageous, how sensitive to hard-fought desolation, this is no time to escape climate change. (Emma Abbmachender, “Each Initiation into Climate Change Requires a Revealing.”) The new report is directed at the conditions of the living body, flesh, and life. From a conventional concern with skin cancer to IBS, climate change also, of course, imposes particular burdens on the bodies of children. Fortunately these conflicts are very different. Lacking the freedom to speak out when they are not yet adults, babies are also silenced without noticing it. They typically witness causes of confinement without speaking up, challenging the model, reexamining what they see as sisterhoods, childhoods, identities, and value systems.

Climate change also imposes statistificatory restrictions on the commercial modeling of women. Inspired by these situations, philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and natural scientists have sought, until very recently, to figure out the post hoc mechanisms of change that are needed to account for and to manifest how the world, historically and structurally, prepares for and resists its severity. What fine words we can use to articulate these changes?

I could study how human beings arrive at the same

CONCLUSION ON THE ORIGINS OF LIFE

as we do.

We will ask ourselves: Is the Earth, as we know it, inevitable? What will come next? I will aim to explore the process by which genetic variation, often the most beautiful of all natural phenomena, can arise from nothing. If that is not possible, our course will be dedicated to the problem of survival. We shall explore how environmental changes, such as the melting of the ice caps, sea level rise, or asymbiotic species, may produce conditions that will lead to the emergence of forms not present in nature at the time, but which can, perhaps, become forms in the future. We will also consider a different, and equally serious, question: whether life can evolve to the point of becoming self-regulating, in other words, self-sustaining.

As Balula explains, “the artist doesn’t end the project.” In each case, the paintings begin with a DNA sample encoding the phenotype (the image of the bacteria) and grow in response to changes in the air. In the case of the recent pictures, the encoding of the bacteria was incorporated into the paint and became activated, thereby enabling the paintings to be finished and the mold to mold them. Although it is an ongoing project, it is now clear that the effects of microbiota on the painting are very interesting. What we call bio-art has become a world of microbiota, in which DNA and paint are magically mixed: “The same plasticity that allowed me to continue to paint while the microbiome and the life of my body changed my mind.”

The experiment, in fact, proved so successful that for a limited time, Balula could get hold of a complete work within 24 twenty-four hours of its initial exposure as opposed to the three years we would otherwise expect. A lot of work, much later than intended, and a whole lot of energy saved. It is difficult to tell from photographs because the water that forms a thick layer on the painted surface is far too viscous for anything to move across it. But it is clear that the solution, with its material made from yeast, is far preferable to the traditional paint. The problem is that

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL WHERE THE BACTERIA AND THE WORK MEET.

As Balula has shown, the bacterial presence is far stronger than the non-bacterial paint. These results suggest that when activated, the microbes may well begin to produce a new image by producing a continuous process. When this occurs, a thin, fine line appears between that white color and the background (the board), and this line will eventually become so fine that it becomes invisible.

The second and final stage of this experiment employed the use of paint containing human sweat, a substance produced in human beings. The researchers found that after twenty-four hours, the bacteria activity turned completely downward, but the work is not finished or finished only when sweat is added. Balula found that after a short exposure to sweat, the microbes have not stopped working; they began to produce light reflecting from the wall. The light is still a bit green when the paint is fully applied, but after a short time, a faint red pigment occurs (which is only when a white wall is put next to the sweat wall).

The first question to take up here, in order to give an impression of Balula’s approach, is precisely

WHAT DOES MAKING AN IMAGE MEAN?

Consider an image that is of no one, neither light nor shadow. If life and its image are all one and identical, it can only be a matter of self-deception. One is thus interested in coming to terms with this. “My aim is to formulate the three-dimensional with which I come to be entangled, to observe a rupture that would mark a new stage of the relationship between image and life.” To think without an image, in other words, is to perceive something concrete. “This is how I conceive the image and the aporia of lives.” I shall attempt to address, then, both the problem of the non-real and the question of the limit to what remains of the circuit of the imagination.

But what is the relation between articulation and imagination? Imagination is a relation that can only be characterized as an organic process that takes place in the mind, but it is also an image.

IMAGINE THIS, AND YOU WILL SEE THAT THE IMAGE ACTUALLY DISAPPEARS.

This sudden tremendous exhalation of totality, this beautiful incision, this one oscillation of the soles of the feet certainly cannot be named.

In “The Self, Borrowed. The Second Self Is Me Now?” I tried to define the relation between a subject—in the formal sense of the concept of subject and the self, and that as one of the three relations of a phenomenon: (1) object, (2) representation, (3) experience. During the “Revolution,” I answered: a horizon of your body is opened. This horizon is not in the sense that we make it out. We do not have the kind of bodily space, closed off and unpredictable. And the relation between the shapes of the skin in the water (a relationship that can only be identified as a particular kind of image) is very much a sensitive one, and thus can only be characterized as a certain kind of intelligence.

It is actually quite rare for a painter to be able to see through the canvas of the work, through what they are creating. Does the notion of the personal interpretation appear to challenge this, or is it merely a truly illusional one? Without a “surface,” can there be a historical representation of the living subject?

THE WAY THE ARTIST SHAPED WATER

was simple, albeit obviously impracticable: produce an idea, imbibe it, and dissolve it.

In an interview with Alain Lebrun in Péroving, Balula speaks of the function of his process: “The original function of the river is to transport the materials of life and their essential energy to a surface, to fill the space, to re-arise. The capacity to re-emerge on a surface, to transport, to fill the space is what we call the re-formability of life.” The oeuvre is sometimes called the “primordial art of time,” the sumptuous art of chaos, an art of taming. When we touch the surface of the water, we form contact zones. We cannot touch the surface of the water on the flat side. We can only touch the surface of the water on the rippled side. The space where the water meets the surface is called the skin. The articulation between the skin and the water that is present in it, then, creates the impression of an articulation. The discoveries at the bottom of the ditch also burden our thinking of a kind of radical camouflage: there are no real tufts of flesh laying under the surface of the fresh matter.

In his talk at the 2007 Designing Art and Life conference, Pablo Picasso writes: “The task of the artist is to represent the transportability of life, which is then reproduced and used in the most important exchange: a new kind of being, or a new form of woman.” But Balula seems to be arguing that what is produced and used is an abstraction, a transformed being that questions its “original” state upon its return.

What is the meaning of the repetition of the figure of the river, which has been the topic of the discourse of plasticity for much of the last century? The “metamorphosis” of the river, as well as of the figure of the human being, can only take place in a world of transformation. The plastic of the world can only take place in a world of refinement. The metamorphosis of insects is a form of thought. I think this shows quite well how insects have always been and are always the subject of the metamorphosis of the human spirit.

In his latest project, “Art with the Fire”–—which is entitled “Conquering Waves”—the French sculptor Davide Balula has shown, in a work of water-–dirt painting, the possibility of using waves of love, the waves of a person who is on the move, or in love, looking back on a past life. He creates these waves in situ and, while standing on the shore or underwater, looks for an object, which is then brought to the surface by a powerful force, like the wind. Here we could say that these waves are a reflection, a connection that the world can never completely be dissolved. In his other boat works, Balula shows how the relationship of two waves can be changed by the presence of a third. The presence of both is the result of a process that requires some form of exchange: through a contract that can be either be an exchange of forms or an exchange of bodies.

The artist started to produce some impressions: “An image seemed to enter my mind. I was conscious of having entered a room. The image of the wind and what it blows through the window in a shirt’s sleeve pocket entered my mind. I had the impression that the wind, in blowing through this pocket of my sweater, had passed through my entire head. What is it that has passed?” We have already established that the wind and the skin encounter each other through the window and feel each other. We have also taken into account the fact that the air passes from one place to another and thus touches both things and thoughts simultaneously.

Balula always reminds us that we live in a culture that doesn’t know how to respect our bodies. To demonstrate the therapeutic potential of his art, Balula works with the mutagenic condition of nature as active power and advantage. In addition to the environment, the bacteria's activity also finds its way into the bodily fluids of the observer. In his talk on the advantages of das Virglück, given at the TEDxIngenieure event in 2015, he showed that some forms of DNA change their structure and function and that the new ethic is “one in which the human being is less than an animal, but more than a biological or mineral.”

“BRAIN PLASTICITY IS A SPRING AS MUCH AS IT IS A LIVING CORAL”

Brain Plasticity is not a process that consists in the formation of dividing lines or lines of isolation,; rather, it consists in the formation of connections. The notion of cognition does not only appear in the neurosciences, but also appears in art. For example, in the work "Idle Water Brain" by Balula, the figure of the plasticity of cognition is represented. The image is a sphere with two faces. One face is illuminated by the light of a phone, and the other by the sunrays. The two faces are connected by a kind of net, like a rope, which hangs over them. It is clear that these two faces are capable of reacting to the forces of gravity but it is not clear whether the two faces are capable of reacting to the light of the sun. The sculptor thus creates a structure that becomes a form of memory for the subject. In the film "Robert’s Toe", the subject, with the help of a trained artist, is able to paint the image of the subject’s past in order to evoke the memory of it. The subject of the movie, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, also suffers from a sort of glaucoma.

[ Image missing ]

Fig. 3. Davide Balula, Colouring Things Clean: Études enflammables

At the Museum of Modern Art in 2009, the show Coloring Things Clean combined elegant materials science with commodities ranging from banana peels to lead. The collection included fish heads, teeth, nails, and pieces of flesh that had become metallic capsules. In one work, an aging computer is suspended over a spring and its screen is covered with tattoos, with an impression of a heart at the end of the red circle. In another, a canvas is immersed in a river, and his surface returns covered with intricate tattoos. A close reading of his artwork reveals that he is mostly aware of the chemical makeup of the water and soil that he puts in his sculptures, the surface of the water is the dominant factor. Balula says that the surface of the water is what is needed to create an impression. In a figurative sense, these surfaces are the surface of the body, of the body surface itself. A sculptor, who is aware of this kind of surface, and of the environmental potential of this surface, must create a space that can be open, accessible, and receptive to the water.

In the same way that the surface of the bodies is open, accessible, and receptive, he thinks about submerging the water in other bodies. From there, he thinks about the connections that come together. The extent to which Balula is aware of the environmental context of his work, is a matter of a person that is also aware of the distance of the bodies. He doesn’'t know what the body of the viewers are, except that one function of their body is to lose its (red) color.

This cycle is called the "gestalt of oxygen availability". It is the same with the material of life.

The old is what is changed.

When a body goes into time, it becomes and comes of place. Time is not something that is “given” away. Time is an act of “taking” place. A clock represents a time that does not belong to a person. And though the clock in its own right gives no sign of the movement inside, it always moves faster than the movement of the hands. To be time is to dance.

The meaning of your body in a change that occurs, everyday turns into a new form.

BIOLOGICAL BODIES ARE TIME.

Balula doesn’t want to live like this. And he does not want to die. The difference between us and him is profound. But he is asking the other side of us to decide whether this is a long and difficult road.

OBSCURITY IS THE OUTSIDE OF THINGS,

and we have to decide, whether this is a path worth taking, or is it the one that leads us to the same kind of future that Balula has been working for: “We must say with Balula: if you have any imagination at all, you can make a world out of the dead.”

Bibliography

Catherine Malabou’s Shadow Profile was trained on the following texts:.

———. “Is Science a Subject of Philosophy? Miller, Badiou and Derrida.” Lecture, CRMEP/IMCC Public Lectures on Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, University of Westminster, London, January 17, 2018.

———. Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains. Translated Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

———. “Repetition, Revenge, Plasticity.” e-flux journal, February 21, 2018, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/179166/repetition-revenge-plasticity/Malabou.

———. “Are There Still Traces?” Critical Inquiry Presents lecture, University of Chicago, May 5, 2017.

———. Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016.

———. “Deconstructing the Philosophical Resistance to Biology.” Brooklyn Rail, September 2016, https://brooklynrail.org/2016/09/criticspage/deconstructing-the-philosophical-resistance-to-biology.

———. “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance.” Translated by Carolyn Shread. Critical Inquiry 43, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 191–99.

———. “The Crowd.” Translated by Dashiell Wasserman. Oxford Literary Review 31, no. 1 (June 2015): 25–44.

———. “Phantom Limbs and Plasticity: Merleau-Ponty and Current Neurobiology.” Chiasmi International 17 (2015): 41–52.

———. “Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?” and “Wither Materialism? Althusser/Darwin.” In Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, edited by Brenda Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, 36–46, 47–60. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

———. “Can We Relinquish the Transcendental?” Special issue with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28, no. 3 (2014): 242–55.

———. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Translated by Steven Miller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

———. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

———. “Post-Trauma: Towards a New Definition?” In Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, edited by Tom Cohen, 1:226–38. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012.

———. Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011.

———. The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy. Translated by Peter Skafish. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.

———. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

———. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

———. Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida. Translated by David Wills. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.

———. “The Crowd.” Translated by Dashiell Wasserman. Oxford Literary Review 31, no. 1 (June 2015): 25–44.

———. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic. Translated by Lisabeth During. New York: Routledge, 2004.

———. The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy. Translated by Peter Skafish. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.

———. Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains. Translated Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.