I was recently surveying some work by the Ottawa-based artist, Catherine Richards. In particular I was diverted by a piece of hers called Method and Apparatus for Finding Love, 2000. For this project Richards has chosen the patent as her site, locating the work of art actually within a patent application. The patent applied for is a sort of machine that, using very simple metrics, purports to a) determine your attractiveness, and b) match you up with acceptable mates (ie. about your level of attractiveness, quantifiably ascertained). This kind of codification of ‘romance’ would seem bizarre if it weren’t so consistent with actual available technologies ranging from biosensors reading skin conductivity, heart rate and pupil dilation, to people-matching programs such as lavalife, etc. This brutal simplification of such central human experience has two principal effects on me: a) it saddens, and b) I feel its straight forward pragmatism to be kind of liberating. If neither my romantic attractiveness, my capacity for romance, nor this deep beehive of emotions and desires are either special or mysterious, then what am I?
Sociology and psychology have been observing the repeated and predictable patterns in our behaviour for over a century now and they perform a similar function of reduction, demystifying the human shell. Am I, as the psychologist Guattari declares, just the result of ‘forces of subjectification’? An individual, yes, but not a subject, per se, at all?
Yet as disconcerting as it is to be such a straightforward, predictable, and codifiable thing, it carries with it a great deal that is of comfort. As we know from cybernetics, codification is great for making things work together: it’s really the whole point. If two machines are operating in the same language then you can plug them into each other, you can network them. It’s the same with humans: our great systems depend on our predictable and understandable behaviour, or perhaps, if you will, our performance.
Which, of course, is not new. Authoritarian powers have always imagined their subjects to be regular and consistent. All systems of organization and domination have required a certain regularity to their parts, implicitly or explicitly, and of course this is one of the purposes served by our institutions such as psychiatry and even more obviously, law. We have Michel Foucault to thank for making this so clear back in the 1960s.
What is striking for me is that it is also kind of comforting! Realizing that we are but simple machines, engineered to network with other machines, removes a great deal of the burden from our shoulders, after all. If we malfunction we can be fixed. ‘You are not alone,’ as the large banner above Main Street reads here in Cambridge in a bid to spread awareness of depression, which frankly I’m not sure if I should find comforting or terrifying in a Big Brother kind of way. Perhaps the real driving force behind all ‘human science’ is just to render us more appropriate for this vast networking project we call civilization. And maybe the best solution to alienation would really be just to give in to the insidious forces of codification and quantification: there is safety in numbers, no?
With thanks to N. Katherine Hayles for her insightful commentary on Richard's work which inspired these thoughts, which can be found in the catalog for Richard's Excitable Tissues exhibit from 2003
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