The Telling of Things: Imagining Through, With and About Machines

Machines are as much imagined as they are technical propositions. Several authors, not least Giles Deleuze have noted that ‘machines are social before being technical’ (Deleuze, 1988, p.39) and as social objects machines are bound up in the social imaginaries we create for, through, with and about them.

The nexus of the imaginary, the technical and the non-human have always been complicated and ever-shifting, riddled with apparent paradoxes. James C. Scott, David Graeber and others have written extensively on the way that machines reproduce human-centric reductionism; attempting to reduce and simulate natural phenomenon to technical processes and then reinscribing these simulations on the non-machine world. (Graeber, 2016; Scott, 1998) Conversely, many others show how machines create reflexive opportunities to reconsider the relationship of the human and non-human through almost transcendental machine experiences. (Pohflepp, 2016; Levitt, 2018) We imagine them to be simple tools of ‘innovation,’ testament to human skills of exploiting natural phenomenon (Singleton, 2014) while simultaneously being rhetorical partners and meaning makers. (Losh, 2016; Hayles 2019).

These complexities demand a novel perspective on humans, non-humans and machines which we aim to explore here. However, in seeking to briefly describe some relationships with imaginary machines and how we imagine our relationships with machines and how machines shape our imaginations and how machines imagine us and how we mechanise imagination, we will eschew the never-ending project of rationalising complexity into technical categories. Instead we turn to the Argentinian surrealist author Jorge Luis Borges, who, in his his own satire of the absurdity of formal classification wrote (or, claimed to have discovered) the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, a non-western categorisation system for animals:

In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. (Borges, 1952)

Our brief review takes these categories as a starting point for problemetising and poeticising positions and differences so that we might easier demystify or dispel the assumed prehistoric relationship of humans, machines and imagination and see them in novel ways. Each categorisation may be used as short-hand for particular forms of relationship in future work. This essay as a whole functions as a thing to think with.