I also want to think through the political-ethical work of time, especially in relation to the problem of colonial articulations in the development of the human. I want to offer some propositions toward rethinking time and haunting, as well as their relation to the recursive. Again, the disjointedness of time and space affectively shapes and indicates spectral presence.įor Derrida, time was signified through the sign, a mark of the complicated and non-full presence of a ghost. Yet, what I seek to advance on haunting are the ideas that it is fundamental to the recursive process, it is part of the logics of technologies, and it is both an analytic and computational process of potentiality. In addition to Derrida, my thinking on haunting is informed by Avery Gordon’s focus on the seeming dis/continuity between social structures, social institutions, and everyday life, Karen Barad’s dis/jointedness of time and space and entanglement of the here and now, and especially Mark Fisher’s argument that haunting is also about the temporalities of technology that produce a virtuality, a relation of what is no longer and not yet, and a shaping of affects of nostalgia or anticipation. Haunting is both the inseparability and discontinuity of time and that which viscerally and affectively shapes behavior. Haunting, and what I will discuss later of Black techno-conjuring, provides an analytic to identify, read, and tease out how the post-Enlightenment subject is configured in the epistemo-logics of technology while also referring to a potential process of computational fugitivity. It is a complicated and indeterminate ontology that is a result of the relation of power imbued in technology.Īs an extension of my work on inheritance, 2 I am interested in the haunting logics of colonialism in the epistemology of technology. This haunting is often unseen yet is affectively registered or perceived by those interpellated by the algorithm. The model’s attempts to compress and recursively enfold indeterminacies into its logic produces a temporal break or discontinuity that points toward a haunting. As a process, finite models seek to compress infinite information, including that which is indeterminate to the model’s system. In every being there’s always already an absence of presence, an inheritance, a trace of that which was and that which is to come. Thus, contained in these deepfake faces are the disjointedness or discontinuities that mark the spectral immanence of the (actual) human faces in the present.ĭrawing from Derrida’s concept of hauntology, a play on the pronunciation of “ontology,” haunting points to the non-full, non-total presence of being. I’m particularly interested in examining how time and space configure into these computational iterations of human faces-faces that are said to not be real yet are based on the deterritorialized and reterritorialized dividual data of human faces. I’d like to use this example to provocate a set of propositions on haunting.
As Parisi argues, the variation of these faces is scaled based on the recursive enfolding of difference into universal or Promethean Man. In her dialogue with Denise Ferreira da Silva in this issue, Luciana Parisi comments on a 2020 New York Times article entitled “Do These AI-Created Fake People Look Real to You?” 1 In this interactive feature, generative adversarial networks (GAN) are employed to produce “new” human faces that can be toggled to range in age, eyes, mood, perspective, gender, and race/ethnicity.