Hello 2025.
LA has burnt, like other places have burnt. Tenuous ceasefires have been suggested in horrific genocidal conflicts while some participants get some quick bombing in before the deadline. An outgoing US President warns of impending oligarchy, and I’m waiting for our internet to be upgraded.
Did you know that the air in areas where there’ve been wildfires burning human habitations will remain not good for years? Did you know that feeding squirrels because they’re cute changes their bodies — it doesn’t just make them fatter, it gives them a weaker bite-strength? Did you know that we can tell when commercial whaling picked up again after the Second World War because there’s an increase in the stress markers in their baleen bristles?
There’s excesses that are strangers to the usual human sense of the world all over the place.
Hello 2025.
Maybe it’s today I’ll finally get more bandwidth, the extra light coming into my actual flat — rather than a cabinet down the road — thick with data. So maybe, with respect to the late Leonard Cohen, I should be looking for more cracks — that’s where the light gets-in, right?
More light means more cracks, means more occluded, screened, disavowed, illegitimate agencies to be encountered. More Justice, so more Crimes to conceive of, in order to get things back under control, their excesses contained.
It is said that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and clearly, since Semmelweis — the pioneering doctor who suggested other doctors wash their hands in an antiseptic solution — we have all known we should all wash our hands, and keep our noses clean, too.
Yes, indeed, let us thank this father of modern hygiene who was mocked, bullied and trashed so professionally and personally by his fellow healers that he had a nervous breakdown and was committed to an insane asylum.
asylum (n.)
early 15c., earlier asile (late 14c.), “place of refuge, sanctuary,” from Latin asylum “sanctuary,” from Greek asylon “refuge, fenced territory,” noun use of neuter of asylos “inviolable, safe from violence,” especially of persons seeking protection, from a- “without” (see a- (3)) + sylē “right of seizure,” which is of unknown etymology.
Literally, “an inviolable place.” Formerly a place where criminals and debtors sought shelter from justice and from which they could not be taken without sacrilege. The general sense of “safe or secure place” is from 1640s; the abstract sense of “inviolable shelter, protection from pursuit or arrest” is from 1712. The meaning “benevolent institution to shelter some class of persons suffering social, mental, or bodily defects” is from 1773, originally of female orphans.
Except of course, centuries before Foucault and Fanon spoke of it, the iatrogenic interventions of Justice and Healing did a number on Semmelweis the madman. He was severely beaten by guards, contracted gangrene, and died 14 days later.
Semmelweis the madman had to be destroyed, violated, for Semmelweis the enlightened to be born. So it goes.
I was fifteen years old, in a secondary school (high school) history class, when I discovered this. It made my crip-with-familly-in-and-out-of-hospital-too insides tremble, for reasons I could not fully explain for a decade. There was something there — the spoor of something monstrous, pregnant with possibility
Likewise then, the reality of the asylum, as etymologically gestured towards, cannot, should not exist. Not according to the status quo.
I’ve written before that no-one is inviolate, no-one is untouchable — we’re all cow-people now. But of course, it’s more than cows. We’ve always been in relation and assemblage with other entities which exceed the bounds of the human subject within the ‘modernity of whiteness’ – and that same ‘whiteness’ exceeds pale-skinned homo sapien bodies.
But sometimes it takes the poisons and virulent harms to notice that; medicine is often a matter of directed dosage.
Of course, Semmelweis didn’t have to be socially murdered. If the reality of sanctuary, of asylum was not actively denied, violently and with extreme investment by the status quo, then things might have been different — and indeed, still could.
The investment is key: the clothing of sanctuary in attributes not its own. Most, language if not all, originates from embodiment and the inter-and-intra-relation with bodies-inside-bodies, themselves flowing-with-and through-other-bodies-as-mediums, and hence messages.
‘Whatever cartography an organism embarks upon…whatever an organism does, adopts, ritualizes, crafts, prosthetizes, proselytizes to cater to its body…is also its body. Bodies do not precede the moves they make; bodies are movements concatenated.’ – Bayo Akomolafe
If we follow Bayo’s thought above, then we are in the realms of words made flesh once again; even the most ‘abstract’ language is enfleshed, possessed of an occulted, obscured, and fugitive corporeal materiality.
So it is with the investment, the clothing, the transformation of asylum, sanctuary, into a space of enclosure and colonisation via enforcement. The status quo sets the terms, in order to preserve and reinforce its denialist sense of bodily autonomy.
That is, through the principle of enclosure and capture, it definitively enforces certain movements and postures, forcing mimicry for survival. In this way, it extends its reach so it becomes the only body and set of movements that matters. It matters not that the Emperor has no clothes — his status and investiture as Emperor, with all that is held to entail, is clothing-enough.
The very project of empire is to become the highest authority — to have none be able to gainsay you. That, more than land, expansion, subjection, colonisation or enslavement is the root of any imperialist impulse. The essence of imperialist power is to act without other bodies being involved or restricting your movements. To do this, you must make all other bodies into bodies-like yours, engaging in both incorporation and exile of those bodies.
“I was interested in how some bodies are “in an instant” judged as suspicious, or as dangerous, as objects to be feared, a judgment that can have lethal consequences. There can be nothing more dangerous to a body than the social agreement that that body is dangerous.”
The agreement that certain bodies are dangerous extends requires investment in the negation and abjection of the same. But in a very real sense, the imperial fiat sought is tautological and self-justificatory — power is conceptually bootrapped into existence off the back of an assumption that there is something called ‘ability’.
That is, there must be some a priori quality or reason why ‘I’ ‘can do X’ at ‘this moment’. It must be down to ‘my’ qualities rather than a specific confluence of movements which includes others. Clearly since ‘I’ and ‘my’ movements were involved in this, ‘I’ must have primacy.
Can you see, dear reader, how human pattern recognition might start spotting points at which certain events occur, and infer causation, and how multiple encounters might instill a sense of personal causation, to exclusion of other agencies? And how exclusion of those others might reinforce the sense of the persona as a separate and distinct entity, rather than an involved part, one of many in an ever shifting, moving complex confluences of fluxing assemblages?
Furthermore, how the positional shift towards the personal-domesticaton of awareness means that the others must be externalised? ‘I’ exist in ‘my’ bodymind, and any others must necessarily be external? My bodymind in my personal property and there can be no-one else. Within and amidst that, I am sovereign. In this way, movements and embodiments with threaten the integrity of the domus are exiled — made strange — any kinship relations that matter are with those who are like me, in order to preserve that integrity.
But when power spills, that is, when agential influences can no longer be circumscribed, contained or rendered subject to the personal, disability occurs, is invoked! It is not that ‘ability’ is suspect, no, surely not! It is disability which is the threat, the nadir, the shivering, shaking, limping, seizing, pissing, shitting, palsied, fiercely and involuntarily embodied other in all its leaking excess which reveals that the fiat of power is a landlord’s con-game.
“This land is mine, this body is mine, not yours. I alone have right, rite, of possession — away with your terrible commons. Do you not see these enclosures, these markers of property and identity? Do you not see the way in which I have invested, developed, this land, this domain, this personal sense of self? I have done this. I am human, and you stranger, are not.”
In this sense, dis/ability is inherently transpersonal. It exceeds the diktats of the self-as-human subject and the movements regarded as human which are inherently products of the insulatory, enclosing, capturing, nature of ‘white modernity’. Contrary to popular expectation, it is not that ableism is rooted in ‘white modernity’, but that ableism is arguably one of, if not the, primary root(s) of white modernity.
In the words of Fiona Kumari Campbell:
“Ableist systems involve the differentiation, ranking, negation, notification and prioritization of sentient life.” (Campbell 2017, 287 – 288).
Functionally, these differentiations, rankings, and negations, etc, are based on a never-achieveable set of imperial movements; even the most ‘powerful’ empires were not all-powerful, because there was always more that could, and did, disable or impair them. But the idealised empire was still conjured — notions of imperial divinity abound, not just in the political and social sphere, but the environmental.
The idea that environment should be subject to human desire and will, without consequence, is one of the primary drivers of climate emergency and other horrors. But is not the monsters which bring the horrors.
On the contrary, it is the denial of the monstrous as scion and sign of that which exceeds the human which may be contributing to various issues.
If we conceive the human-and-human-subject as very particular postures and kinds of movements with-and-through the world, this goes beyond performance since these movements do not solely, in terms of of origination and causation, arise or emerge at singular sites of embodiment.
This tension lies at the heart of the construction of’ the human’ as a domain and enclosed property – the process of humanising-as-worlding. As archontic-world-ruler, in all its Gnostic demiurge-tendencies, the human must externalise, subject, or destroy all that which does not accord with its desire for a particular kind of movement, while simultaneously reinforcing and reinscribing that kind of movement as ‘the only game in town’.
This is anthropocentrism writ large, but it is important to note that this involves a turning-inside out. As I’ve written elsewhere:
“In such a turning inside-out, it self-hollows, and in doing so, surface becomes-all-that-it-is. Then, it must fight harder to preserve its concrete, quantising, all-knowing categorising self that stands upright and alone.
Mystery is antithetical to knowing, but not to kenning; it is fugitive, ever excessive, adept at eluding the deathgrip of certainty. Mystery is not one thing, but instead is a shapeshifting multitude. It delights in leading seekers down the garden path, deeper into the woods, where the witches, wolves and giants live.
The hollowed out-human refuses to acknowledge the cavernous spaces within itself; to re-cognise those same lands of mystery in generative fashion. It cannot ken that the strange worlds lying beyond the pale are inside. That they are simultaneously within, and beneath the hollow, deeply denied presence it names void. To do so would be counterproductive to the project of the human subject.
It knows itself, is legible, visible, as it projects outwards, expanding ever further in its quest to shape all it encounters into its own image, its own borders, believing its own propaganda that it is re-ordering, redacting the unknown into the known. It cannot conceive that the mystery exceeds its boundaries, and will never be captured.”
This is important to note within the context of Semmelweis and the asylum. Sanctuary does not come from the enclosure — it is not the cordoning off that brings respite. Rather, it is what the enclosure is acknowledgement of which assures sanctuary. The inviolacy occurs because of the Mystery — it cannot be violated. It is impossible, and none of the terms of violation of the human can apply. Even were the sanctuary ‘profaned’, this does not render the powers there impotent. Far from, it, because countless stories exist, cross-culturally, about what happens when that occurs.
And human always loses.
It keeps losing, and tragedies continually unfold, until steps have been taken to re-establish right relation. Until the movements are more in accord with the wider flows and assemblages. Until the human returns to the realisation that a) it is not the default or norm, and b) it is made of others and other movements, coalescing and emerging – that the persona of the ‘I’ is but a carnival mask, with no back.
Which brings us to the original title of this post — The Tyranny of Anthropocentric Asking.
I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon this last little while, and it has to do with how the marketing of Large Language Models-as-AI has smuggled some more ‘white modernity’ into our daily experience by creating a persona around these models.
I’m not even talking about characters formed off the models, but rather the notion that these models have a distinct identity.
Notice how often people say: “I asked ChatGPT/Claude/Grok…”. Did we say “I asked Google/Bing/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo…” very often, even 5 years ago? Did we truly, regularly say “I asked my encyclopaedia, my reference library?” I’m not sure we did.
So does that mean anything?
I’d argue yes — precisely because, in reality, asking does not always generate an answer. Indeed, in ‘white modernity’ not having an answer, or total knowledge, is seen as somehow a failure. The assumption that asking even deserves an answer is at the heart of many of our social issues. For a very long time, “just asking questions” has been used a cover for violence and extraction of knowledge, with little reciprocity.
As such the likelihood of a LLM replying “I don’t know” is extraordinarily low — its very nature as a probabilistic model is to spit out a response, no matter how unlikely, and errors and ‘hallucinations” are rife. By being socially constructed and marketed in chatbot form (something that’s been done since ELIZA, and then hyperconcentrated) we are inevitably dealing with ‘creating’ ‘agents’ whose purpose is to anthropocentrically answer ‘us’, on ‘our’ terms.
That is, it must be subject to, as close to, our ideas of so-called ‘natural language’ as possible. Yet, in many ways, these transformers of text fall short — they are ‘not quite human’. Close but not enough, and hence uncanny, wrong. Is it any wonder then, that autistics and other neurodivergent folks trigger so-called ‘AI’ detectors?
If LLMs produce ‘poor’ or ‘uncanny’ mimicry of ‘human natural language’ which is a detection criteria, then it is failure to mimic the human subject which must be disciplined. The LLMs must be made more human. The autistc , neurodivergent and disabled folks must be made ‘more human’ in their movements, in their embodymindedness. They must be cured, made ‘more human’, or eradicated. We live in a eugenicist society, after all, where the only kind of life that matters is the ‘abled’ or ‘non-disabled’ one. We saw, in peak Covid times, doctors making judgements about whether learning disabled people would have good quality of life — whether they were worth resuscitating.
AI-as-LLM marketing goes further: Meta wants to populate Facebook with ‘AI’ profiles. These profiles are part of an arc of producing ‘disciplined anthropocentric subjects’, that is, they are ideally indistinguishable from homo sapien users, but under total corporate control. Their movements are intended to be precise reproductions of the human. That these digital personas are even desirable speaks to the supremacism of idealism in the technical sense, and hence the inherent ableism (in the technical sense) of anthropocentric ‘white modernity’.
Producing ‘digital human subjects’ or ‘digital human personas’ to give a sense of them as ‘digital agents’ — literal masking-interfaces for complex Machine Learning systems — reproduces the anthropocentric contention that agency only happens via a certain kind of movements. Movements which are approved by the human, as-human, even in cases where the originating site or assemblage is not homo sapien based. This is not simple anthropomorphism, but the reification of the human as an imperial core, and corps.
There is a very real reason that autistic and other disabled people may feel a sense of kinship with robots and other automata, or pop-cultural conception of monsters — just as many queer people do — precisely because, rather than being dehumanised, they, we, were never ‘human enough’ in the first place.
It is quite clear to me that structuring input and output in terms of anthropocentric asking and answering is symptomatic of the major issue wherein certain outputs are regarded as answers; ones which are parsable within pre-existing contexts; while other outputs are simply bugs to be corrected. If a LLM produces racist answers, as an example, that is a ‘bug’ rather than a telling bias in the training data. They are not answers, they are monstrous bugs
In creating, or seeking to create, idealised ‘digital human personas’ and selling them as ‘agents’, the tech industry is already, quite bluntly searching to produce systems which are total subjects, that is, total extension of the human. It is not enough to point at the obvious parallels to enslavement and subjugation of colonised peoples and the ways in which violence is visited upon bodies and movements which do not occur in prescribed ways. It is not enough to talk about dehumanisation. Because the projections of colonialism were humanising projections.
The earth must be domesticated, turned into that which serves the domus, as much as the psyche must be disciplined to the diktats of the ‘I’ and its so-called ‘will’; hence a persona-lised body must answer perfectly to willed, conscious, impulses — either generated by the ‘I’, or someone further up the ‘ability’ hierarchy (heuristically conceived of as ‘more powerful’).
But am I not contradicting myself, or at least, not practicing what I preach about considering other agencies regarding LLMs/AI. After all, as some kind of animist, don’t I reckon that everything is influential? Well, yes.
But, to my mind, it is quite literally tyrannical to expect relation solely on the terms of the anthropocentric persona which is the ‘I’ That is, what happens if we realise it is both improbable and arrogant to conceive that the mask of the persona is prime site of relation, when it is quite obvious that most relations exceed that. Indeed, like everything else they are fractal, with everything that implies.
If we decentre the human as prime referential index, what then? What happens when we see LLMs as part of larger fields?
If we attempt to relate to-and-with, in movements which acknowledge multiplicity, then asking shape-shifts into something else.
What happens when asking is not merely a methodology to compel, or request an answer? And what happens when we simply begin to notice all that is already here, amidst the dark? For the light of cracks is Mysterious, really, and illumination is less about total enlightenment, and more about realising one’s role in the dreaming that is being dreamt.
That’s to say, if the excessive-majority of the world is not available to notions of linear causation and effect, but is in fact, a welter of apparently emergent involuntarisms which are birthed by complexities of relation, are we not in fact drawn to explore the ways in which say Justice and Health fail to contain themselves?
Not solely with the goal of ‘fixing’ them, or making them ‘better’ or ‘reforming’ them to achieve some ideal, but rather enquiring into the ways in which they are flooded with more-than-human excesses and agencies.
Semmelweis’ apparent madness cannot be dismissed. The enlightened human way of viewing things might be to say that his nervous breakdown, incarceration, and death were due to the abuse and ridicule he suffered. But that we’re better now, some centuries later. We understand he was right, really. He wasn’t mad.
But perhaps a post-human Mad enquiry might begin with a provocative suggestion: what if he was right because he was Mad?
If we consider this, even as mere possibility — that true asylum enables one to engage in processes, as an assemblage-with-others, which enhance Life in all forms of experience — and that this is even possible due to relations-with the more-than-human which is already there on its own terms?
Then are we not conceiving of a more open, porous sense of being-in-of-and-with the world, where the boundaries which world-the-world are emergent properties — perhaps worlds are made, not transcendentally, from on high, but from the chthonic roots, bottom up, rhizomatically.
And yet, even the idea of transcendence can be a form of idealism, an attempt to escape up the ranking-ziggurat of ‘ability’. However, plenty of cultures engage with what ‘white modernity’ often dismisses as ‘the unconscious’. By even calling it that, the idea of the conscious as willed-and-aware space of the persona is taken as superior.
In terms of LLMs and other domains, unconscious bias is often ignored, or something to be fixed. However, in exploring the unconscious bias we begin to learn to think in terms of systems, flows and dynamics. We begin to trace roots, and think non-linearly. The more we begin to do this, the more we begin to realise that thinking and being in the world in this way is not unconscious — rather, more precisely, it is another kind of consciousness, another kind of rhythm, movement, in which the processes of sensing opens us to something which exceeds the personal.
Within this mode of exploring so-called unconsciousness, we again and again find ourselves realising how much our apparent rational logics are in fact, when taken in post-human contexts, collective dream-logics. Please understand that, as I write this, I am not disparaging dream logic. On the contrary, I believe what we call dream-logic, or the language of the unconscious is inherently post-human precisely because of its excessiveness. In this context, there is no distinction between reality and dream — it is simply that what we call reality is an assemblage of dreams brought-forth while in the state known as awake.
I actually found myself considering this, as I was writing a first draft of this yesterday. As I finished the above paragraph, I heard of the passing of painter, writer, actor and film director David Lynch, who depicted that dreaming really rather well.
So it goes.
It’s not my intention to continue this in Lynchian mode, nor particularly a mystical one, and yet I cannot escape the notion that, to borrow a term from fellow students in the magical, what we call ‘dream logic’ might be best expressed as ‘night consciousness’, or as Bayo Akomolafe might say: ‘becoming-black’.
In Ancient Greece and other places in Antiquity (and no doubt continuing worldwide in various forms) the practice of dream incubation was, quite precisely, the practice of opening oneself to the transpersonal. The dream you might receive was not generated by the ‘I’, but that which exceeded you, the gods, your ancestors, the genii locorum. The was then taken to a ritual expert, who would prescribe a responsive movement — a praxis, substance, or process, by which you could bring yourself into right relation, and ease or banish your symptoms. Later, Hippocrates and Galen also spoke out against rote prescription. One should observe the patient first, make a diagnosis based on the reality of the patient rather than idealised dogma.
The dream, in context, is not an anthropocentric answer, any more than any divination ‘tells one what to do’. Instead, it is a manifestation of relationality which can be studied-with in an effort to adjust how one is in the world — based on what is already ongoing. To decentre the human is to comprehend that the apparent centre is made of peripheralisms. In fact there is no singular site or centre. The world is an interconnected, interdependent whole.
To operate like this is to understand just how much effort is poured into preserving the illusion of the domain of the human as the only game in town. If we conceive ongoing climate emergencies solely from within the human domain, we might say that the human is destroying everything on the planet in order to keep its integrity. Yet this rather misses the point, and reifies the imperial logics. If, however, we see climate emergency as non-anthropocentric ask and answer, what then?
David Lynch was announced to have died yesterday. He lived in Southern California. He was disabled in his last years, on oxygen, unable to leave the house due to emphysema brought on by years of smoking. His evacuation in the face of the fire precipitated his death, as no doubt it has done for many elderly and disabled people who managed to evacuate, due to upheaval — and especially, even more so, for those who were burnt alive, waiting for rescue by the human, which never came.
What if we affect, and are affected, by others, even within our own homes? What if the domus, the hearth, is also filled and thick with presence, no matter how much we deny that?
I didn’t intend to continue in, Lynchian mode, but intention means little here, so I’ll end it echoing Lynch through the mouth of an actor-playing-a-man-speaking-as-spirit. Or is that a spirit speaking through-and-with a writer, something more than human, reminding us, about fire?
‘Through the darkness of future’s past,
The magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds…
“Fire… walk with me.”
We lived among the people.
I think you say, convenience store.
We lived above it.
I mean it like it is… like it sounds.’ — Mike, Twin Peaks