Trigger warning: SA, skip first 2 paragraphs
Can I tell you something crazy about Francis Bacon? He’s known as a philosopher, statesman, advisor to King James I and ‘father of empiricism’ or empirical science. And he also said this about scientific discovery:
Nature must be taken by the forelock…lay hold of her and capture her…conquer and subdue her…neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating these holes and corners”
We can’t label that anything other than an explicitly gendered rape fantasy, expressed by a man who laid the foundation for empirical science today. When I first saw that quote in lecture I remember my face screwed up in disgust because the language was just absolutely vile. Now I think about the words ‘penetrating these holes and corners’ every time I think about science.
We’ve come a long way since Francis Bacon, for sure. But I think there is still this dualism of masculinized science and feminized nature today. And I see it in the way we speak of the tech industry and ‘cyberspace’ and the way we articulate our goals or ideals about it. There are three dualisms by my count, all superimposed on top of each other: masculine/feminine, science/nature, rationality/embodiment.
Bordo’s Cartesian Masculinization
In feminist scholar Susan Bordo’s “The Flight of Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism & Culture (1987)”, she describes an aggressive intellectual flight from the female cosmos and “feminine” orientation towards the world, initiated by Descartes’ splitting-away of the natural world from the masculinized realm of human and human objectivity.
Philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) is the source of “I think; therefore I am” and “mind over matter”. He is also the source of Cartesian geometry, the idea that objects were located on planes, and their location could be described by coordinates on those planes. Bordo locates Descartes’ development of thought within a larger historical context, of people coming to terms with being individual, discrete entities, separated from each other and the world. To put it into perspective, the idea of the infinite cosmos was new — the learned people of the time were trying to come to terms with the idea of infinity, and humans just being minuscule specks on a floating rock in the middle of space. It was a shift from a heliocentric to an acentric system, that offered no intelligible system at all, no center of orientation (whether that was the sun or humanity itself). This was a world-shifting change from the medieval idea of the universe. (Bordo, The Flight of Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism & Culture (1987) Chapter 4: “Individuation and Locatedness: A Cultural Drama of Parturition” (pp. 59-73))
Bordo argues that Descartes and the scholars of his time reacted with what she calls the ‘masculinization of thought’. Its founding tenet is detachment and separation: mind from the body, humanity from nature/the world. It’s a defensive move in response to the above changes, something like “Looks like I don’t matter to the world, but it’s okay because I’m going to change my perspective so it looks like I never cared about you in the first place”. That’s probably the most casual way to phrase it.
What this ends up looking like is a cool, impersonal, distanced cognitive relation to the world — the classic aloof, objective gaze we’re so familiar with in science today. Descartes sets this off against a nature he re-envisions as ‘mechanical’, merely mechanically interacting matter. This is a significant change from older ways of looking at the world as living and breathing alongside humanity: Plato, for example, wrote that the world had a female soul, one that animated the corporeal body of the world and the universe around humanity. Instead, for Descartes and those after him, nature and the world became ‘it’ instead of ‘she’.
Even as the world was stripped of a generative femininity, it was given instead a commodifiable, exploitable feminization, to the extent that the world could be referred to as a ‘she’, but only in the way Francis Bacon used it above. It became the overarching mission of rationalism and empirical science to make ‘she’ into ‘it’, to turn the mysterious workings of a female world into inert matter via understanding and ‘penetrating those holes and corners’. For Bacon and his ilk, Bordo writes that the image of the wilful, wanton witch was projected onto nature. As such, scientific exploration of nature became a witch trial: (p 109)
The “secrets” of nature are imagined as deliberately and slyly “concealed” from the scientist (Easlea, 214). Matter, which in the Timeaus is passively receptive to the ordering and shaping masculine forms, now becomes, for Bacon, a “common harlot” with “an appetite and inclination to dissolve the world and fall back into the old chaos” and who must therefore be “restrained and kept in order” (Merchant 171). The womb of nature, too, (and this is striking, in connection with Melanie Klein) is no longer the beneficent mother but rather the hoarder of precious metals and minerals, which must be “searched” and “spied out” (Merchant, 169-70).
Here, we see those three dualisms: Masculinity associated with rationality and objective empirical science, asserting superiority over the feminine nature and irrational body. Mind over the body and the universe, to make it into matter.
Techno-transcendence
What is the legacy of that today, when we have code and digital worlds and the actual possibility of being disembodied?
From Elaine Graham’s summarization on techno-transcendence: (p. 429)
Historians of science such as Noble have argued that much of the contemporary fascination with digital and biogenetic technologies is fuelled by a patriarchal, dualistic drive to escape – literally, to ‘transcend’ – the contingent world of embodied finitude and continuity with non-human nature in favour of a scientific, quasi-religious ‘quest’ for the impermeability and total invulnerability seemingly promised by advanced technologies.
She points to binary code, in reducing messy realities into stacks of 1/0 or yes/no records, as giving that techno-transcendence the possible realization of a lofty, perfect, absolute form. I see this in VR, the Metaverse, the Apple Vision Pro.
But we know from Bordo and other scholars that techno-transcendence is patriarchal. We know that women have been traditionally associated with the body, the affective and nature. And the techno-transcendent rejection of embodiment within cyberculture thus becomes another attempt to exclude women and their messy corporeality from a separate virtual world.
Disembodied Data
As a student of data science, I argue that it isn’t always explicitly gendered, nor as violent as the rape fantasies of Bacon’s time, but I see this rejection of embodiment as a huge and current problem in the datafication of bodies today. I pull, again, on Joanna Radin’s work Digital Natives, on the Pima Indian Diabetes Dataset (which you can find publicly available on Kaggle, by the way). Note how the Kaggle page gives no background on who or where the Pima Indians are, or why their data was provided (or why only data from women was collected), even when it contains personal information like BMI, insulin level, age, etc.
That background doesn’t matter to the average machine learning engineer or data scientists, at least for the purpose of plugging and chugging. What matters is that the dataset has been freely available on the UCI Machine Learning Repository since 1990, and is well-known and widely-used. It was even used to test the ability of an early neural network algorithm called ADAP, to predict diabetes, explicitly because it was a “well-validated” resource. And because of that, PIDD went on to be used as a standard dataset for testing algorithms beyond health/diabetes, to refine these algorithms to make better observations of abstract data. It was even used to refine algorithms made to predict manhole fires, something that is so far removed from indigenous bodily data and so random that I couldn’t make it up if I tried.
The fact that this data is also considered to be naturally occurring—a neutral product of the contingent circumstances of its acquisition—is seen as one of its additional advantageous qualities, even if the data itself is—as in the case of the PIDD—a product of settler colonialism, economic struggle, and biosocial suffering. While it may be tempting to consider the PIDD—the data set itself—as a kind of model organism for machine learning, doing so closes off access to the shadow work of people, Akimel O’odham, who continue to live and die on the reservation and to circulate as disembodied data, stored on the servers of universities and corporations. (radin p. 58)
The members of the ‘Pima’ refer to themselves as the Akimel O’odham. The study that collected their biometric data was a longitudinal one, lasting from 1965 to the 1990s. In 1990, their reservation was recorded as having the highest prevalence of non-insulin-dependent diabetes of any geographic population in the US. They were on a reservation, supposedly making the population sample more genetically homogenous, and making the geographic space a ‘natural’ laboratory for the study of diabetes. Note, here, the use of the term ‘natural’, evoking both an closeness for nature in the way indigenous peoples are often stereotyped, but also the sense that the prevalence of diabetes came about naturally. It wasn’t natural. The Akimel O’odham made it clear that the rise of obesity and Type 2 diabetes in their community came after government-provided canned and processed food assistance, responding to mass famine and starvation. Why were they starving? Because they were unable to productively farm their land, because non-Native farmers, settling in the area during the California gold rush, diverted and dammed the Gila River that fed Akimel O’odham agriculture, cutting them off from the water — because they were indigenous people on a reservation.
For their biometric data tracking a disease linked to settler colonialism, the Akimel O’odham women were given 50 dollars, medical care and a meal for every diagnostic they participated in. Let me be clear: I don’t think 50 bucks was in any way enough for the amount of work the PIDD has been put through. But I also don’t think that monetary compensation can make up for that.
This was never about buying data like it’s a commodity — I think that perhaps the first issue was allowing PIDD to become so separated from the indigenous bodies it came from in the first place.
Coming back to techno-transcendence, I think that that separation is the result of calcifying the inherent, messy (corpo)realities of bodies traditionally associated with the feminine and nature, into data that seems to float above the physical world in some Platonic absolute perfectionism.
In the PIDD example, we see the fallout of the dualisms tracing back to Descartes: That same detached rationality now takes its place in data, and the turning of ‘she’ into ‘it’ is done now by the collection of biometric data from bodies, and the putting of the data (and those bodies) to work. Bodies become not inert matter, but inert data, and called ‘natural’ to obscure the histories of settler colonialism that have made the data worth collecting.
All this is to say: I think that there are huge harms resulting from enforcing a divide between bodies and data, just as there are harms from a division between bodies and virtual/digital worlds, between the masculine and the feminine, or science and nature or rationality and embodiment. I think it’s important to notice that the production of knowledge and (supposedly objective) truth isn’t only located in well-funded corporate R&D or the clinical, brightly-lit laboratories of state scientific institutions, but also in the lived bodily experiences of the ordinary person (data subject or not).
That’s what I think. And as for what I want: I want to be absolutely rooted in my body and my own personal experiences. I want transcendence, but not in the way techno-transcendence describes a removal or splitting-away. I want instead what Graham points to at the end of her paper, as a possible solution: Luce Irigaray’s notion of the body as a “threshold of transcendence”, a sensible transcendental that comes into being through embodiment.
Cross-posted on Substack here