18 Instrumentalizing Colonial Reason

Interiority/Exteriority

The dualism of interiority and exteriority was taken up by many post-Enlightenment thinkers from René Descartes to John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and later Hegel. For instance, Descartes distinguished between what he called res cogitans, “a thing which thinks,” the soul or mind, from res extensa, “the extended things of the world.” This became more widely known as the Cartesian split between mind and body, interiority and exteriority, where the mind was privileged with the capacity of reason. Later, Kant saw perception as an idea of the mind of the world, and not as sensing or empirical. It is for this he developed his idea of the transcendental, where the universal, as in universal intuitions of space and time for all humans, shapes and organizes sensory experiences into meaningful knowledge and human understanding. By understanding these concepts and structures as the potential for thought, Man is able to reason on the extended things of the world as shaped by the transcendental. In other words, interiority becomes in direct relationship with exteriority. Denise Ferreira da Silva traces this history of the philosophy of the human and the ways in which interiority maintains an articulation that refers to reason, consciousness, and understanding of Man. The transcendental subject is self-posed and said not to depend on the world. Instead, the transcendental subject needs to mirror the interior reflexivity of reason. The world is subjected to the self, to the interiority constructing the world in Man’s image.

European reason became eclipsed by rationality and the calculus of capital in the seventeenth century due to the interest in objectivity and utility. As a result, reason lost its aim of emancipating the human from the condition of being a mere automaton. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (2002 [1944]) lament that reason was lost with calculation and standardization. To follow the dream of rationalization, Man turned the whole world and his interiority into an instrument and thus lost reason, that is, freedom and human emancipation. Horkheimer and Adorno refer to this shift from the human mind to instruments of science, technology, and history, as instrumental reason. The Enlightenment, they argue, sought to advance instrumental reason as a move of capitalism to displace the reasoning of the human mind into other valued instrumentalities for reason. Thus, although instrumentality is pure exteriority, man sought to instrumentalize interiority within it.

Man’s desire to instrumentalize itself has a long history in colonial capitalism. Man has long attempted to control and instrumentalize the enslaved, the indentured servant, the incarcerated, and even wage laborer. During the Industrial Revolution, Man shifted to the instrumentality of thermodynamic machines, especially to emplace the thermodynamic energy and labor of enslaved bodies. As the developments of mathematics, statistics, and technologies of calculation advanced and began to converge to support one another, this enabled greater capacity for the instrumentalizing of interiority in the pure exteriority of the machine. Post–World War II developments of the universal machine brought about the turn to cybernetics, the science of predictive communication and control. We see this as early as 1943 in the famous article “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Imminent in Nervous Activity” by neurophysiologist and cybernetician Warren McCulloch and cognitive psychologist Walter Pitts. This was the first mathematical model of neural network processes of the brain. They sought to formalize the neurological processes of the interior activity of the mind, including learning, into mathematical form. This early significant work of cybernetics eventually became the inspiration for what is now known as neural net machine learning in AI. Through cybernetics, Man sought to instrumentalize interiority in the development of self-regulating, self-organizing, self-generating recursive systems, including artificial intelligence. Similar to theories of learning in neuroscience, where neurons are produced along with new connections and projections, it is through the training of the algorithm on data and the self-regulating recursive process with new data that neural network algorithms “learn” by building increasing node layers and estimating the weights for their relationships. Each phase of instrumentalizing interiority in exteriority was not simply with the desire of objective and impartial observations for reason, but in the interest of efficiency, reliability, and speed in learning, and for maximizing capital accumulation.

As a result, the duality of interiority of Man and exteriority of technology haunts contemporary cognitive technologies. The interiority of the self-determining subject haunts all contemporary models of algorithmic governance. I extend Ferreira da Silva’s (2007) intervention to trace how Man attempts to model interiority and as such, Kant’s transcendental reason via Hegel’s transparent subject in the exteriority of technology; how algorithms employed in, for instance, an AI robot for children instrumentalize interiority, and with it, colonial reason. Yet, algorithmic governance is also haunted by the pure exteriority of technology (with interiority). Man’s attempts to control exteriority by disciplining the enslaved, regulating labor, programming and designing technology have long operated under the false assumption that exteriority is affectable without interiority, or that interiority is not mutually constituted by exteriority. The exteriority of the machine is not absolute pure indetermination. It also exposes the machine’s capacity. The machine is not just pure material affect; it is also a material process of cognition and thought. Like Judith Butler argues with regard to the instrument of language, exteriority is always out of control. The duality of interiority and exteriority is the result of a false anthropocentric assumption that the extended things of the world are without imminent forms of interiority. In each phase of Man’s attempts to control exteriority, there are ways in which exteriority is always out of control, in excess, slipping away, misbehaving, and fugitive. The exterior is what haunts the interior; the fear of its insurrection, of its subversion, of its lines of flight, of its pushing the system to an entropic, even apocalyptic condition, is interiority’s inability to compress the fugitive or, what Luciana Parisi calls “alien onto-epistemologies of exteriority” into its existing system or logic, and a reminder of the interior of its limits.

AI and Education

The instrumentalizing of interiority is threaded throughout the field of education, especially in AI-engineered platforms and technologies. These AI educational technologies are often in the service of supporting or enabling the learning and development of the student, and even temporarily supplant the role of the teacher or parent. These forms of human surrogacy, where the role and responsibility of the human is being replaced by a machine, are at the foundation of learning in artificial intelligence, including the development of robots. In reference to the use of robots in place of human labor, Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski argue, “the claim that technologies can act as surrogates recapitulates histories of disappearance, erasure, and elimination necessary to maintain the liberal subject as the agent of historical progress” (2019, 6). When surrogate technologies turn to the pedagogical process of education and parenting, it becomes what I call surrogate pedagogy—an instrumentalizing of the transparent subject in place of the teacher or parent mediating everyday processes of learning and development. This is not simply an effort at momentary intervention but, through the instrumentalizing of the interiority of Man, also does the generative work of racialization by shaping the child in the mold of the onto-epistemology of the transparent subject, violently erasing and subjecting the student to the machine’s overdetermination. We find this in the proliferation of learning analytics platforms employing AI both within and out of school, AI-engineered video games for education, and AI robots for children. The process of learning becomes a sociotechnical assemblage whereby learning is an accomplishment of the becoming intra-actions between human and machine. Yet, this sociotechnical assemblage remains haunted by the disciplining of Man and the interiority-exteriority of the machine.

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