The Dialectic of Difference
Why do we let the machine tell us who we are and who we should be?
Welcome to Dilemmas of Meaning, a journal at the intersection of philosophy, culture, and technology. This is the fourth entry in the Identity Series. This article is a sequel to a previous one, yet this time focused on identity, and serves as a bridge to a forthcoming one on deepfake technology. Nevertheless, it stands on its own, and asks one central question: How does the belief technology is objective and neutral impact our identities? It also focuses on the concept of difference, the values of hegemony, and the path to a pluralized liberation.
Why do we think we should be like the machine? Why do we listen to its vision of identity? The drive to find oneself in something outside of themselves becomes an issue when done according to the unified vision of technology. When scientific innovation and projects of classification are privileged above the naturally uncategorized world and inborn loci of meaning, difference is both instituted and erased and identity becomes selfsame. The next step in Enlightenment rationalism renders the human spirit technology’s object. The indomitable pursuit of progress leaves us deferring our existential strivings—the longing for meaning, understanding, and Self—to technology. Mythologized as perfect, technology will tell us who we are better than we can ourselves.
This logic reflects the artificialistic fallacy, where what is congruent with technology is considered better. The naturalistic fallacy establishes a hierarchy based on what is best connected to and argued as natural, and the artificialistic fallacy piggybacks on its claims. Artificialized concepts work off of naturalized ones, and the supposed objectivity of technology bulwarks these concepts against critique. Bound by naturalizations and artificializations, identity reflects “one of the ‘invisible demarcation lines’”1 habituated by society, as Pierre Bourdieu claimed. These lines reflect the difference that makes us, us. This feature can be positive, in coloring our world with meaning, but can also be negative, in delimiting what identity can or should be. The logic that hegemony calls upon to institute difference is thus crucial to interrogate for the positive and negative elements enacted upon identity.
Difference and Domination
Difference gained a mark of rational infallibility with the scientific revolution and its unified vision of the world was used to uphold destructive social norms.2 Iris Marion Young, for example, writes that scientific reason “is a gaze that assesses its object according to some hierarchical standard […] according to scales that reduce the plurality of attributes to unity.”3 The inherent difference and disorder of the world is integrated by science and made whole into a calculable order. A variety of coexisting things become unified and forced into hierarchy. These hierarchies, when substantiated by the unquestioned rationale of science, makes domination difficult to contest. The ardent attachment to scientific reason made real through technology thus enforces its unified vision of the world that perpetuates domineering social systems and prescribes a way of being that prevents alternative explorations of identity.
Yet, difference, understood here, can also be beneficial and affirming. Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference argues that difference is imperative for ameliorating the otherness of oppressed groups.4 Luce Irigaray’s work insists on the necessity of maintaining a sense of difference for there to be equality for women, or non-men,5 since otherwise the dominant group subsumes all meaning. For example, Irigaray writes that the es gibt—the ordered world of experience—“is constructed by man as one path, one project, and one conveying that unites him with himself as selfsame, in his world, with no alliance or exchange between two that are different.”6 When what is regarded as given—as neutral—is male, she argues, “what is removed, what is denied, is difference itself, difference between the two genders.”7 Indeed, if when technology is regarded as neutral it is but a default to the masculine gaze of normality then it instantiates patriarchy with every operation.
With technology’s attributed objectivity, its mediation with everyday life poses direct issues for identity—from the dominant ways of being it perpetuates to the marginalized ones it pushes aside. Technology has this affect because, as Vanessa Nurock argues, “this technological neutrality […] is considered a guarantee for ethical impartiality.”8 From this perspective, technology cannot be a conduit for the values of hegemony because it stands above human affairs on its pedestal of objectivity. The artificialistic fallacy thus enables the surreptitious maintenance of difference constraining identity to the will of hegemony. No identities outside of hegemony’s vision can exist because “one group occupies the position of a norm, against which all others are measured.”9 The perpetuation of this singular, masculine perspective of the world through technology is the focus here. Irigaray concludes that difference of the sort she seeks does not exist; and the unified logic of, and default to, the masculine is the reason for feminine absence.10
There is, therefore, a dialectic of difference. Difference can be used through the act of classification for the erasure of difference, but nevertheless has the potential to fulfill what is affirming in identity. The obedience to a singular perspective that gets cast over everything renders identity fixed; becoming is not simply stifled but rather made static. In this paradigm, identity shifts in its meaning. Identity can no longer be a process of continual revision, growth, and change, but one which must always adhere to a single set of values. There is no difference in the future for everything becomes mired in the past. Although scientific reason does not itself cause these oppressions, since “a white, male bourgeoise”11 was already the dominant group following its code, the “privileged groups assumed the privilege of that authoritative subject of knowledge.”12 Identities like race, gender, sexuality, ability, etc, are ordered according to the interests of the elite group, and their ascendent value in the hierarchy is justified by the objectivity of science.
However, not only does technology perpetuate a hegemonic perception of identity but also it does this using hollow archetypes. Despite being limited to a superficial and temporally restricted understanding of people, technology is used to predict, determine, and define who you are. Indeed, the issue is that the objective mark of technology allows it to mask its ability to determine what you are as who you are, which has consequences from our individual and quotidian use to application in governance.
What are you?
Instead of asking the belabored question of how AI sees identity, I am questioning how technology erases difference by inundating you with society’s reflection of what you are. How AI sees identity is dependent on the society it and its creators exist within. However, as articulated by the artificialistic fallacy, technology’s attributed objectivity enables it to reduce difference to unity by limiting our understanding to descriptions of whats, rather than of whos. Consider Hannah Arendt’s writing from The Human Condition:
The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a “character” in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us.13
Who you are is very different from what you are. Her point, put simply, is that there is a problem when our relation to ourselves and others is expressed through whats. While there are better descriptive whats than others, technology is not only seen as providing the best description but also is repeatedly used to make claims of who someone is.
This has very real consequences for people and society, as shown by Youjin Kong in her analysis of AI protocols used in recidivism prediction software and facial recognition tools. She finds that “AI algorithms […] actually reflect and reproduce racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of social injustice.”14 Technology’s supposed neutral and objective qualities allow its identity-based biases to pass as accurate representations of ourselves and others, which then inform decision-making. For example, since “structural cisnormativity is built into scanning/risk detection algorithms”15 used by TSA agents, what you are and how you are treated is determined by the machine, rather than you. It forces conformity to its single vision of self. You might say you are nonbinary, but the machine reads you as a man and projects its unwavering societal meaning of that onto you to run its analysis.
These issues apply not only to the oppression of gender, sexual, and racial identities, but of class as well. The hegemonic force of capital in our society is similarly apparent in technology. Virginia Eubanks term, the ‘digital poorhouse,’ reveals how the technologies meant to help the poor—such as, automating welfare eligibility, qualifying homeless people for housing, and predicting child neglect—simply reinforce societal biases toward poverty. She argues that “the digital poorhouse is framed as a way to rationalize and streamline benefits, but the real goal is what it has always been: to profile, police, and punish the poor.”16 The unsurprising irony is that the technology does innovate, it just does so in service of capital rather than those in need. Indeed, in directive of the unified logic of techno-capitalism, the digital poorhouse “reproduces racist and classist hierarchies of human value and worth.”17
The issues raised above make clear that our concern needs to be with how difference is being embedded into algorithms in the first place, instead of repeatedly altering the code until the outcomes show parity. Kong concludes by writing that “the literature has focused too much on technological solutions to intersectional bias in AI and too little on how AI algorithms, as part of the intersectional structure of oppression, reflect and reinforce this structure.”18 The unwillingness to accept the limitations of technology come from its mythologized objectivity and only furthers the harm being done to identity: “the coded gaze is supposed to be neutral and objective because it is shaped by technical elements.”19 Eubanks echoes such a sentiment, writing “the classism and racism of elites are math-washed, neutralized by technological mystification and data-based hocus-pocus.”20 This is why, despite some AI researchers recognizing the prejudice of code, they nevertheless consider algorithms as irrevocably part of the solution to identity without considering moving forward without it.
These examples are just some of the many ways that technology tries to affix what you are to its singular vision of meaning. In doing this, hegemony, which stands atop the meaning-bestowing apparatus, directly influences identity. Technology, no matter the attempts to free it, remains mired in the biases of society. Existing in a biased society engineered by its members, bias is built into the same systems claimed to be bias free. Indeed, rather than providing information about people from a standpoint beyond society, it simply perpetuates oppressive values of human worth. When these hierarchies are enshrined in code and seen as accurate reflections of who people are, they become the image of society’s biases—of hegemony’s value system—limiting our understanding of self and others to its unified logic. This decisive move prevents difference from taking shape and the self-affirming processes of becoming moving on an inertia all their own. While technology is meant to “illuminate our lives,”21 the values of hegemony outshine everything else. Thus, regardless of technology’s heralded view from nowhere failing to capture who you really are, our collective reverence for it is preventing us from capturing our own. We must thus consider this dilemma and look at the impediments to self-actualizing meaning more fundamentally.
Who are you?
Who you are is a continuous process endeavored by you; it is your prerogative who you become. With this in mind, consider how the hegemonic treatment of difference as supported by technology impacts identity formation. Identity becomes unable to express its inherent, complex difference when the technology mediating our everyday experience projects a singular logic onto everything. “Every(thing) being snared in sameness,”22 is the effect of a process “that establishes it within a system of relations that has the force of law over the existent and its growth.”23 With a singular vision for understanding the world, the difference of hegemony is a never-ending force to which all must relate.
To speak of sameness of identity is not to speak of everyone being identical; rather, it is to label the value system everything gains its meaning from as the same. Stuart Hall articulates this point well:
Hegemony is not the disappearance or destruction of difference. It is the construction of a collective will through difference. It is the articulation of differences which do not disappear.24
This clarifies, in some way, Irigaray’s problematizing of a unified es gibt. Patriarchy, the hegemonic force in question, is the logic which unites the meaning all people understand themselves from, the meaning all people are measured against. The implications of this being that everyone finds value, of self and other, based on this one system—these values benefit some and oppress many. Indeed, “difference thus becomes a hierarchical opposition between what lies inside and what lies outside the category, valuing more what lies inside than what lies outside.”25 This difference not disappearing—with the assistance of technology—is how it dominates, from inside and outside.
The sameness of difference means difference cannot exist without value, classification, and a grand narrative. This type of logic, Young explains, “seeks essence, a single formula that classifies concrete particulars as inside or outside a category, something common to all things that belong in the category.”26 This unitary ideal extended to everything is the issue. The male being the default and neutral position means any deviation is devalued—or punished. In this act of measuring people through a unified rubric, “this essentializing categorization also denies difference in that its universalizing norms preclude recognizing and affirming a group’s specificity in its own terms.”27 Ironically, the institution of difference, in its staying power, rejects what is self-actualized and differs from the unity of metrics approbated by hegemony. The label society ascribes you is permanent; becoming can only be became. Through its adherence to one logic, one taxonomizing system, and one standard of being, technology perpetuates the preordained and dominant social meanings that limits people both to what they are currently and how society chose to characterize them.
These classifications, as used by technology’s processes, structure the knowledges and meanings from which self-understanding is possible. Hall writes that “constantly repeated or institutionalized actions had the effect of rendering the meanings active in them stable, standardized.”28 The repeated meaning received from technology codifies various aspects of people into typified identities lacking in difference. As these processes are ultimately the directives of hegemony, they come to instantiate a structure of the world and society that reflects its hierarchy. Indeed, as Carolyn Merchant writes, “as the unifying model for science and society, the machine has permeated and reconstructed human consciousness so totally that today we scarcely question its validity.”29 The instituted difference of hegemony, as Hall reminds us, is already effective at remaining once it appears; and technology aids its perdurance by inserting difference in our everyday experiences.
Consider the power to a system which inundates our lives so totally that we understand ourselves through the hierarchies of hegemony without realizing it. Consider the power of interpellating the values of dominance without resistance. Indeed, the distribution of a unified meaning by the apparatus of technology classifies all people according to the same difference, a structure of sameness from which all people relate, ultimately limiting self-knowledge to one source. It is within this framework that Irigaray asks: “When will man open this shell that surrounds the enigma of his identity instead of producing it indefinitely as a power for appropriation whose finality escapes him?”30 There is a call to question, unpack, and recognize the power within the identity made by man for man, within the difference that dominates, and within an endlessly reproduced sameness. Thus, it is a call to escape the “tautological circle: to be—to think—the same.”31
The power technology has in shaping our identities is not only due to its inherent discursive presence in our lives but also because also because we mythologize its abilities to let it occupy such a position. The artificialistic fallacy elucidates how we exaggerate technology’s abilities as so much better than humans’ that we uncritically champion its perspective. That technology amplifies societies biases whilst presenting these ideals—beneath conscious awareness—as the correct and only interpretation of our world and our selves, is how technology, as Nurock writes, not only “reflects our societies but also reshapes them.”32 Technology, therefore, builds biases into society. The technological neutrality defaulted to patriarchy measures everything according to and against its hierarchy. Technology thus not only precludes alternative modes of being from flourishing but restricts identity to fit into its single classification. Ultimately, the Gestell is a subjugating rubric evaluating and producing identities according to hegemony.
The impact the reverence for technology has on identity is thus clear. By buying into the mythology of technology, we take its reflection of society’s biases as the true image of ourselves and the world according to a singular logical ideal: that of hegemony. Indeed, the difference produced to instantiate a solitary meaning defines everyone by hegemony’s will. As touched on previously, with patriarchy defining everlasting difference, Irigaray’s concern is that when our culture is defined by a singular subjectivity, it is bound to repeat indefinitely.33
The way to escape this is to 1) recognize the systemic sameness and the technologies distributing it into our every interaction, which allows us to 2) construct a culture of multiple subjectivities. This is a politics of difference. Instead of difference being centered in opposition and oppression, it can be emancipatory.34 It is a call to recognize the context and specific location of subjects and validate their differing needs based on these contexts; “equality as the participation and inclusion of all groups sometimes requires different treatment for oppressed or disadvantaged groups.”35 Rather than the oppressive and essentialist vision that holds difference “as absolute otherness, mutual exclusion, categorical opposition,”36 the politics of difference rejects rigid classifications in favor of “an understanding of group difference as indeed ambiguous, relational, shifting, without clear borders.”37 In doing so we allow the equal coexistence of other subjectivities, not the world defined by one; we “promote the recognition of all forms of others without hierarchy, privilege, or authority over them.”38
From here, we can “expand the horizons of the one […] and in so doing affirm that they are an other subject (sujet autre), and impose a two which is not a second.”39 This endeavor is essential, not only for the rejection of identity-based subjugation but also the rejection of tech companies that peddle the false-knowledge of who you are for profit. The identity that they present people with is superficial and rooted in systems of domination. Their digital snake oil must be rejected along with the hyperrationalistic worldview in favor of one that recognizes the plurality of life and identity. Only then will identity as flux and difference reflect the agent’s prerogative will. Only then will difference be truly empowering and resistant to the precepts of domination.
Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 50.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 291.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 155.
Ibid., 204-209.
Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, 125.
Luce Irigaray, “Why Cultivate Difference?,” 79.
Vanessa Nurock, “The Artificialistic Fallacy,” in Perceiving the Future Through New Communication Technologies, 82.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 205.
Fanny Söderbäck, “Being in the Present: Derrida and Irigaray on the Metaphysics of Presence,” 259.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 156.
Ibid.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 149.
Ibid., 6.
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality, 35.
Ibid., 147.
Youjin Kong, “Are ‘Intersectionally Fair’ AI Algorithms Really Fair to Women of Color? A Philosophical Analysis,” 8.
Vanessa Nurock, “The Artificialistic Fallacy,” in Perceiving the Future Through New Communication Technologies, 75.
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality, 153.
Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 4.
Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, 125.
Ibid.
Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Ethnicities,” in Essential Essays vol. 2, 79.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 128.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 206.
Stuart Hall, “The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge,” in Essential Essays vol. 1, 145.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 193.
Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, 159.
Ibid.
Vanessa Nurock, “The Artificialistic Fallacy,” in Perceiving the Future Through New Communication Technologies, 77.
Fanny Söderbäck, “Being in the Present: Derrida and Irigaray on the Metaphysics of Presence,” 257.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 25.
Ibid., 192.
Ibid., 205.
Ibid., 207.
Luce Irigaray, “The question of the Other,” 19.
Ibid., 18.
This article is a thoughtful reminder Why academia is and will always continue to be the central locus of neoliberal colonialism, moralizing normalizing and justifying the transformation of human sociality, kinship, friendship and relationships, into constant capitalist cost benefit analyses of emotional labor and privilege, creating virtue signaling societies that worship privilege.