Speciation Beyond Species: Chen Chieh-jen and the Possibility of a Compassionate Exit from the Militarization of Life

Jon Solomon

Life is code and code is an unmediated, instant source of surplus value, such would be the dream of techno-capitalism.

As this dream becomes a reality, or rather, as reality is progressively engulfed by the hallucinations gushing forth from this nightmarish desire, life turns into surplus in both senses of the word, superfluous and superabundant at the same time. Valued and prized as never before, life in its emergent form as code has also never been so devalued and dispossessed. No longer the carbon-based life of The Many whose existence was grudgingly permitted only inasmuch as it contributed to its own slow demise through backbreaking toil to produce surplus value for The Few (Classic Capitalism), nor the carbon-based life slated for “necessary” culling inasmuch as a select, genetically “superior” part of the species required bio-political “living space” (Nazism), the emergent silicon-carbon hybrid will have appropriated not just the classic Marxist categories of labor time (Arbeitszeit) and species-being (Gattungswesen) but speciation itself. Let’s call it “bio-indemnity capitalism.”

Chen Chieh-jen’s Worn Away takes up where his Notes on the Twelve Karmas (1999—2000/re-edited 2018) leaves off. Whereas the silicon-carbon hybrid of the future dominates the underground world of Twelve Karmas, Worn Away focuses on the fate of carbon-based life once it has been superseded in the capitalist utopia of Very Natural Selection™ that will have replaced biological evolution. In what is effectively a dystopian scenario for carbon-based life, this latter will be thrown into the discard pile, like the fossilized HDDs in Worn Away, becoming an immobile rem(a)inder of “what may turn out,” as Naomi Klein succinctly puts it, to have been “the largest and most consequential theft in human history”:⁽¹⁾ the dispossession of the entirety of embodied human knowledge and endeavor by AIs that are the private property of corporations so large they control the future. Henceforth, the entire species is at risk of becoming what Marx called “surplus population” (relative Überbevölkerung).

In Worn Away, the invisibility of the “corporatocracy” said to dominate a system based on the dispossession of species faculties (knowledge and genetic code) contrasts with the concrete figures that bring to life the mechanisms of domination. Ultimately, the desire for agency is the fuel on which The System runs. The more that carbon-based surplus life in the holding pen aspires to acquire individual agency through some version of The One (individual freedom, collective sovereignty, etc.), the more efficiently the machine of species dispossession functions. Pitting desire against desire, The System relies on the hallucinations of bourgeois agency to achieve its aims. Yet, The System is prone to its own form of hallucination. Despite the self-sufficiency promised by the reduction of life to code, The System would not be able to function without the interventions of a professional managerial class (PMC), seen in the female voice on the loudspeaker or the cellphone app designed to manage surplus life, etc. This is the secret of The System, its spectral outside.

If Klein is quick to criticize the “utopian hallucinations about AI” promoted by real-life corporations and their avatars across platforms and domains, the question posed by Chen Chieh-jen’s work amounts to the following: can art help us to escape these hallucinations?

To get a glimpse of the formidable obstacles that a Taiwanese artist would have to overcome just to be able to pose that question without being instantly recuperated into the colonial—imperial bipolarity of the modern regime of translation, it may suffice to cite the controversy in Taiwan surrounding Chen’s decision to travel to China to receive in person the 2018 Award in Art China (AAC). In an atmosphere of moral panic, the Taiwanese traded accusations with each other while hotly contesting not just the politics of a Taiwanese artist receiving recognition from a civil society organization in Mordor (i.e. China), but also the politics of the body of Chen’s work, which has focused primarily on (a) the innovative kind of colonial governmentality under erasure exercised by the USA over Taiwan since the surrender of Imperial Japan in 1945, and (b) the global empire of capital, without dealing with (c) the so-called “Chinese mode” ⁽²⁾ of imperial conquest and hegemony that is regularly used as a pretext to justify a form of Pax Americana satellite dependency called, in the fashion of Orwellian doublespeak, “Taiwanese Independence.”

If the West is defined precisely as the form of a relation that organizes domination by providing rather than receiving recognition, should we not reflect first on the borders and mediations that make judgment into an overdetermined task? The fact that the Taiwanese controversy of 2018 remained off the radar of an international art world that has largely been restructured to extract value from virally globalized local controversies while preserving the asymmetrical bipolarity of the modern regime of translation is emblematic of what the Taiwanese theorist and curator Chien-hung Huang calls the “paracolonial” infrastructure of artistic production today. The Chinese award, the indifference of the West, and the Taiwanese moral panic are all symptoms of the same paracolonial condition. In response to the AAC award controversy, Huang draws our attention to the multiple layers of “embedded dispossession” that contrive to create and sustain the poles of the “global” and the “local” without which the “zombie governmentality” of the paracolonial could not function ⁽³⁾.

By contrast, consider now the media attention given to proposals from US politicians and military strategists to bomb Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (which accounts for approximately 60% of total global chip production and 90% of the supply of the most advanced chips) rather than allow Mordor to take possession in the event of a hot war in the Taiwan Strait. What would it take to devise a compromise solution that would address the global system of paracoloniality that Taiwanese—despite their disagreements—and so many others register in a particularly acute way? At a moment when a mind-boggling number of planetary resources are being mobilized to militarize the productive forces involved in the dispossession of surplus life, questions like this are regarded as evidence of betrayal by the very same forces that falsely promise to indemnify surplus life. As the TSMC bombing episode shows, it is not just that monopoly control over crucial common technology such as semiconductors is the object of militarization—what strategists have called the “silicon shield” supposedly protecting Taiwan—but rather that the process of militarization itself is becoming internal to the evolutionary development of the technical objects that are increasingly essential to the reproduction of the generic conditions of planetary life today.

Following an extended foray into the dystopian hallucinations of militarized speciation, Worn Away invites us at the end of the film to meditate on the borders and mediations that constitute the illusion of imperial judgment. If “all beings have forever been trapped by illusion,” it is only “by not grasping at absolute essence [that] one can be liberated from illusions.” This statement contains two lessons for us: (1) the Buddhist themes in Worn Away cannot be attributed to the empirical particularities of national culture without violating the spirit of those themes; (2) the prerequisite for liberation from the false promise of indemnity for surplus life lies in alien translations that recreate ourselves not as the proud combatants in a futile contest for species agency, but as the compassionate wanderers and humble caretakers of speciation on this unbounded Earth.

The term used for illusion is a standard one in the lexicon of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism. Composed of two sinograms, huàn (deception) and jìng (boundary or situation), huànjìng illusion seems to be a simple case of a bad situation whose remedy lies in a change of scene. But this is precisely what The System precludes by incorporating it into its model of governance. Hence, a new, alien translation is necessary. In Chinese Zen, the canonical use of the term jìng occurs in the Faith in Mind (verses traditionally attributed to Sengcan, the Third Patriarch of Chinese Zen). 境由能境，能由境能 jìng yóu néng jìng, néng yóu jìng néng. While conventionally translated as “the subject [jìng] is a subject for the object [néng]” and vice versa, the Chinese phrase makes no mention of the Cartesian opposition. Rather, it says that the boundary-situation (jìng) is situated (jìng) only for the agency (néng) that traverses (yóu) it. By the same token, agency (néng) is agential (néng) only in relation to the boundary-situation (jìng) that defines it. The Buddhist lesson here is dependent origination. Within the realm of illusions caused by dependent origination, “agency” is relative to the limit-situation. To think that one can escape the illusion by relocating to a different place or by re-forming an old species anew is part of the illusion itself. At a minimum, this means rethinking agency not in terms of autonomous individualized entities, or species, but in terms of trans-individual boundaries that mutually constitute opposing forces tentatively manifesting as “individuals” within the logic of species difference. One name for this agency is alien translation.

Caution is required lest “alien translation” simply become a new name for the colonial—imperial, i.e. modern, regime of translation. In Worn Away, surplus life is not fully deprived of autonomous mechanistic agency; rather, mechanistic agency has been superseded by decomposition—not just class decomposition, but a form of decomposition so profound that it extends across the field not just of one species but of speciation (or biological boundary-making) in its entirety. “Art” would be one of the synonyms for a cosmotechnics that hallucinates the recuperation of agency through an aesthetics of the universal and the particular. Arrogating to itself an aerial view such that the “choice” between different sides of a wall not only appears as a coherent whole, but is furthermore taken as empirical evidence of the arealized trap in which the subjects of that choice find themselves (the only causal relation over which surplus life can exercise agency “is,” as the narrative voice says, “whether we are on this side of the wall or on that side”), Art offers the compensatory catharsis of the Schmittian political.

Chen Chieh-jen accepts the wager of summoning this Art of The One the better to reject it. While the aerial/areal view, unavailable to those situated on the ground in relation to the wall, appears to offer a superior form of agency, the camera rejects that perspective in favor of detailed still life portraits of fragmentary parts of the inert bodies, blank faces, and glazed eyes of surplus life. Among the arresting images of arrested speciation that compose the minoritarian art of Worn Away, one image of agency stands out: the scribbled messages furtively relayed amongst surplus life. The circulation of these messages speaks of a com-passion that consists neither in the desire for a change of scene nor in the desire for a more technologically advanced Wall of Protection™, but in the shared passion of passage and passing. This is the com-passion of the spectral outside. What is important here is neither the informational content of the message (barely visible to the viewer, it appears, on closer inspection, to repeat the narrative voice-over) nor its transfer, but the act of becoming a “subject in transit.” ⁽⁴⁾ Unmediated by the universalism and particularism of the PMC, the alien translation enacted by subjects in transit is perhaps our only chance to move beyond the resentful agency of an ephemeral species increasingly invested in the futile militarization and false indemnity of intra- and inter-species boundaries. To move, in other words, beyond species to speciation, to become compassionately sensitive to the perilously unbounded nature of shared speciation as dependent origination, to let the illusion of “species” be worn away, so to speak, by speciation.

Note

1. Naomi Klein, “AI machines aren’t ’hallucinating.’ But their makers are.” The Guardian, May 8, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

2. This is the criticism of Chen Chieh-jen expressed by the art critic and theorist Tai-sang Chen. See Chen, Tai-sang, “Guanyu Chen Chieh-jen de ‘Diguo Bianjie’ kao huo buyi – zhuzhong, yumin, yu anaqi zhuyi,” November 5, 2018, https://artouch.com/art-views/content-19.html.
3. See in particular chapter 8 of Huang, Chien-hung, Qianzhi xuyu Fragments on Paracolonial, Taipei: 2019.
4. The term is taken from Naoki Sakai’s innovative theorization of the position of the translator. See Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, Minneapolis: 1997, p. 11 passim.