I'm sure it's not the done thing to preemptively call dibs on concepts that I'd like to write about, so as to preserve their novelty in amber until I can get around to them. So I'm not doing that. What this is, however, is a rough plan of work for the next several years (without dates attached) and a sketchy summary of my "project" such that I have one. Part of why I'm writing this is that, recently, a couple of people whose work I take somewhat seriously have reached out to ask what I'm up to, and I'm somewhat embarrassed by my paltry answer. I'd like to take another crack at this below.
Unfinished Business
Returning to the work of O.K. Moore
Almost two years ago, I presented a paper at SIGCIS, in which I made a second attempt (the first being an undergraduate term paper from ten years ago) to make sense of the relationship between the research done by Omar K. Moore and others using the Edison Responsive Environment, and the development of the diagnostic criteria for autism. I'm not terribly thrilled with how it came out, and I owe that primarily to my desperation to get as much into what I thought could be my last opportunity to discuss this work in public for some time. As I'll discuss below, I see this as part of a larger theoretical contribution that needed far longer than the twenty minutes of exposure it could get from one conference paper delivered two weeks after my father died.
Telephone Girl
I have neglected Telephone Girl for some time now, since publishing excerpts of its introduction in Cara Esten and Lo Ferris's A New Session. Writing about telephony has been a mildly emotionally fraught task since my rushed departure from the telecommunications industry; until recently, I've not felt stable enough to touch this work without considering the tense year in which it was written. With enough distance from the telecom period of my life, however, I'm beginning to see this work with new eyes. There is, especially in this moment of data worker exploitation and the gradual encroachment of call center management tactics on all forms of office labor, a need to cast fresh eyes on the historical influences on and gender dynamics in which this oppression takes place.
The development of the dehuman
Both of the above projects, to varying degrees, deal with the process by which the dehumanization of already marginalized subjects (autists and women, respectively, but not exclusively!) occurs, and, as a result, both of these treat the product of that process, the output for which I argue we lack a correct name. "Subhuman" concedes too much to intractable scholarly anthropocentrism; "subaltern" addresses the colonized rather than the dehumanized; "dehumanized person/subject" is insufficiently pessimistic and suggests the eventual creation of "persons with dehumanization" to even further dilute the absolute horror one should experience upon encountering dehumanization itself. Other terms get closer, but have specific excesses or lacks that render them unsuitable for my particular use case. "Cyborg" comes to mind, especially insofar as both of my existing projects consider the relationships between certain kinds of people and their machines, but I cannot follow as far as to say that there remains enough human within the subjects under consideration to preserve the "org" while describing the effects of the "cyb." "Inhuman" is another option that is unsuitable; it suggest a kind of non-human being that simply is, without allowing us to name the process that makes it so, while also suggesting the "inhumane," lending a moral dimension to the product of dehumanization with which I find myself unable to reconcile.
Thus, "dehuman." The "dehuman" is the product of the process (the flow if you're a schizoanalyst or a business automation developer) of dehumanization carried to its climax. It is a figure acted upon until it cannot act, or until any action it can take is rendered always and already futile. The dehuman is utilized, in the proper sense that it has been made useful, and then it is used. When a dehuman is used, it is often to bridge the chasm between the properly human and the properly mechanical; it is the material to build a bridge over the uncanny valley. The dehuman is the customer service representative par excellence, the perfect interface of flesh-thought and machine-computation, torn down and rebuilt to fit any purpose, any discipline, any market. Most crucially, the dehuman is made, not simply emergent; to name oneself dehuman is to say "somebody did this to me, and now, like Iago, 'I am not what I am'" (I.i.65).
A grim look at the state of play
Disability studies in general, and critical autism studies in particular, are in the process of figuring out how to be properly negative, properly pessimistic. J. Logan Smilges, offering Crip Negativity, reframes disability itself as "a regulatory mechanism by which humanity can be distributed and withheld" (2023, 9) and further admits that it is possible to "contest the value of that designation" (ibid., 33). My question, of course, is "which designation?" Disabled, or human? The project of constructing this disquieting term "dehuman" is my answer: it is not only possible to "contest the value" of the human, it is a productive method by which to understand what comes of dehumanization.
It is not by accident that my interest in developing such a term emerges from watching a fascinating conversation play out at the corner of critical autism studies and human-computer interaction, and trying myself to enter the conversation at the wrong time and from the wrong room. Some of us, having read Remi Yergeau's Authoring Autism, and resonating with the position that "we, the autistic, are a peopleless people," that "we embody not a counter-rhetoric but an anti-rhetoric, a kind of being and moving that exists tragically at the folds of involuntary automation" (2018, 11), and we have started to ask a peculiar question. Really, we've started to ask two questions, which I'll call the "indirect" and "direct" forms:
- The indirect form, synthesized from the autistic HCI work of Rua Williams (taken broadly, but in particular "I, Misfit: Empty Fortresses, Social Robots, and Peculiar Relations in Autism Research"), as well as Josh Guberman and Oliver Haimson's "Not robots; Cyborgs — Furthering anti-ableist research in human-computer interaction": is there liberatory, or at least humanizing, potential in working with the perceived "natural affinity" of the autist for "technology?"
- The direct form, so-called both for its sharpness and for its being
shamelesslylifted verbatim from Os Keyes in "Automating Autism," which quote takes on new resonance having been re-read after J. Logan Smilges finally provided a negativity upon which to hang it, upon which my own hat now rests: "are autists, really, human?"
From the sidewalk, I have watched a collision developing, or perhaps a series of near-misses, have witnessed governments, and societies, and friends surrender to COVID-19's siege war against the paltry shreds of inter-ability solidarity I may have foolishly thought we would have built. After all of this, another question: what good, if this is what it is, does it do to be human, to assert our agency, or humanity (or even just our desire for humanity) to the allists, only to appeal to the lion after Caesar has lowered his thumb. It may very well be an accurate claim, but it bears little utility while we are being mauled to death. We are fighting a battle from which there is nothing to gain in victory.
The Dehuman and Telephone Girl
Much of our consideration of the dehuman so far has centered on its particular amenities for discussing the oppression of disabled, mainly autistic, people and the result of said oppression. Accepting it as my frame of reference, however, also bears upon how I might return to Telephone Girl, and what might change about my approach, should it properly take into account the dehuman (as opposed to, at the moment, the cyborg). One place where this adjustment is necessary is in my reading of an excerpt from an issue of the Montreal Witness used by Michèle Martin in "Hello, Central?" to illustrate "the change that occurred in the operator's labour toward the end of the 1890s": "The girls, then, are automata ... they looked as cold and passionless as icebergs. But that is only discipline" (unk., qtd. in Martin, 1991, 70; emphasis hers). Crucially, despite writing at a point when the term "cyborg" would have been ready to hand, Martin does not use it. Instead, the operators, the telephone girls, were faced with working arrangements which "[subjected] them more and more to the machine" (Martin, ibid.).
Decades after the newspaper clipping, but a decade before Martin, Robert Howard, writing for Mother Jones, pens "Drugged, Bugged & Coming Unplugged," a scathing indictment of work culture in the late Bell System, particularly its operating companies. One paragraph of this essay lends itself to a dehuman reading:
The Washington Service Center is a small, relatively backward facility. In the brand-new Centralized Repair Service Bureaus that are sprouting up throughout the Bell System, the techniques of work-force control are considerably more refined. Nearly 50 repair service clerks sit in groups of four, their eyes glued to the cathode flicker of jet-black video display terminals. Gone is the howler of the Washington office. In its place, a color television displays a bar graph with the office's "speed of answer" record for the day. Here, the clerks have only eight seconds to answer the electronic beep signaling another customer on the line-a 12-second speed-up over the Washington office. A supervisor rushes forward to explain the new system. What he says holds true for workers throughout the Bell System. "These girls are merely an interface between the customer and the computer" (Howard, 1981, 44; emphasis mine).
Having myself been such a "repair service clerk" (the title ends in attendant, thank you) during the latter half of the 2010s, I am confident in saying that very little about these conditions had changed, save for the equipment (and the answering standard — we were expected to set our phones to automatically accept new calls, no eight second delay). Minutiae aside, the phrase "merely an interface" is deceptively plain; every word screams its slights. "Merely," because dehumanity is mere, is only as much as, is the minimum viable being capable of those things not yet automated but too mechanical for real humans; "interface," insofar as these dehumans are conduits, pipes — surfaces, perhaps, of natural affinity — taking and rerouting the output of a real human into the input of a real computer, but never acting on that output or input (or, at least, not doing so with the sanction of the humans managing the dehumans). The telephone girl does not get to be human in a sense anyone could recognize, even as her "human touch" is thought necessary or desirable to advance the goals of the telephone company. In the era of the IVR, the chatbot, the automated workflow, we might be at the end of the road for the telephone girl. At the same time, the ongoing process of ecological and social collapse (both metaphorical and actual) could, paradoxically, save her from total absorption into the machine, by way of carrying becoming-dehuman to its extrema.
From here, where?
There are philosophical and practical questions on the matter of the dehuman that should be asked here, but will take far longer to answer. First, are the dehuman autist and the dehuman telephone girl isomorphic to one another? That is to say, am I excessive in attempting to argue that there are commonalities between the manner in which the autist and the call center worker are each dehumanized? I am not yet as confident as I would need to be in order to conclusively argue that the same processes are at work, or that the end results of those processes are subtypes of a unifying dehuman type. Another concern is that, despite my best hopes, I am not alone in my efforts to construct something called the dehuman; in particular, Timothy Luke (1996, 2000) engages with the term in a manner that, in some respects, resembles my own thoughts above, but at least at first glance depends, understandably, on the cyborg as a load-bearing modular component connected to his dehuman in a manner my own project (at least for now) intends to avoid. There is also the matter of whether Pierre Fédida means by déshumain something akin to what I mean by dehuman, as strong a motivation as any to learn to read French, as his works have not yet been translated. Those aside, my own understanding of dehumanization is insufficient to make the above claims any more than tentatively; it will be necessary to develop the deepest possible understanding of the term's use in all domains that speak of dehumanization in order to properly answer the question of whether dehumanization can truly be said to produce the dehuman.
One last thing
I have never really been that good at judging the level of effort a task requires, and this is no less true of the present plan of work. It's entirely conceivable that all of the above is already more effort than is necessary to approach this problem, and that I'll only know this after spending five years reinventing the very wheel under which I find myself crushed out of a theorist's vain certainty that I could have chosen a better name. I am, at the same time, concerned that I have taken upon myself a whole field's worth of work, which, compared to the previous concern is far more soluble: I should hope I'm not the only one who might want to think like this, and that potential fellow travelers might drop me a line so that we could work out how to go from here. Finally, it is certainly possible that one reason why the term "dehuman" has not been taken up in the way I outline is that doing so necessarily involves saying something about a large population (which includes many friends and colleagues) that sounds, well, dehumanizing. On this point I can only ask everyone's indulgence for however long it takes me to follow this thought where it leads.
Whatever the case, my hope is that this is as much a defense of my radio silence since '22, as it is a provocation. Again, if you're at all interested in this work, please send a message my way, using the email address on my About page; I have very little going on at the moment and would welcome advice, reading suggestions, cease-and-desist notices, fan letters, challenges to either debates or duels, offers to collaborate, unfounded accusations, and other ideas you think I'd rather pursue.
References
Eyal, Gil, ed. The Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2010.
Fédida, Pierre, ed. Humain-Déshumain. Petite Bibliothèque de Psychanalyse. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2007.
Guberman, Josh, and Oliver Haimson. “Not Robots; Cyborgs — Furthering Anti-Ableist Research in Human-Computer Interaction.” First Monday, February 7, 2023. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v28i1.12910.
Keyes, Os. “Automating Autism: Disability, Discourse, and Artificial Intelligence.” The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique 1, no. 1 (December 4, 2020). https://doi.org/10.25779/89bj-j396.
Luke, Timothy W. “Cyberspace as Meta-Nation: The Net Effects of Online E-Publicanism.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 26, no. 2 (April 2001): 113–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/030437540102600202.
———. “Cyborg Enchantments: Commodity Fetishism and Human/Machine Interactions.” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics 13, no. 1 (May 2000): 39–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/10402130050007511.
———. “Liberal Society and Cyborg Subjectivity: The Politics of Environments, Bodies, and Nature.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 21, no. 1 (January 1996): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/030437549602100101.
Martin, Michèle. “Hello, Central?”: Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1991.
Smilges, J. Logan. Crip Negativity. Forerunners. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
Williams, Rua M. “I, Misfit: Empty Fortresses, Social Robots, and Peculiar Relations in Autism Research.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 25, no. 3 (November 1, 2021): 451–78. https://doi.org/10.5840/techne20211019147.