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Superintelligence is related to three categories of suffering risk: suffering subroutines (Tomasik 2017), mind crime (Bostrom 2014) and flawed realization (Bostrom 2013). Humans have evolved to be capable of suffering, and while the question of which other animals are conscious or capable of suffering is controversial, pain analogues are present in a wide variety of animals. The U.S. National Research Council’s Committee on Recognition and Alleviation of Pain in Laboratory Animals (2004) argues that, based on the state of existing evidence, at least all vertebrates should be considered capable of experiencing pain. Pain seems to have evolved because it has a functional purpose in guiding behavior: evolution having found it suggests that pain might be the simplest solution for achieving its purpose.

A superintelligence which was building subagents, such as worker robots or disembodied cognitive agents, might then also construct them in such a way that they were capable of feeling pain - and thus possibly suffering (Metzinger 2015) - if that was the most efficient way of making them behave in a way that achieved the superintelligence’s goals. Humans have also evolved to experience empathy towards each other, but the evolutionary reasons which cause humans to have empathy (Singer 1981) may not be relevant for a superintelligent singleton which had no game-theoretical reason to empathize with others. In such a case, a superintelligence which had no disincentive to create suffering but did have an incentive to create whatever furthered its goals, could create vast populations of agents which sometimes suffered while carrying out the superintelligence’s goals. Because of the ruling superintelligence’s indifference towards suffering, the amount of suffering experienced by this population could be vastly higher than it would be in e.g. an advanced human civilization, where humans had an interest in helping out their fellow humans. Depending on the functional purpose of positive mental states such as happiness, the subagents might or might not be built to experience them. For example, Fredrickson (1998) suggests that positive and negative emotions have differing functions.

The existential risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) are now widely recognized.

After hundreds of industry and science leaders warned that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the U.N. Secretary-General recently echoed their concern. So did the prime minister of the U.K., who is also investing 100 million pounds into AI safety research that is mostly meant to prevent existential risk. Other leaders are likely to follow in recognizing AI’s ultimate threat.

Many experts believe that alongside global opportunities, AI poses global risks, which will be greater than, say, the risks of nuclear technology - which in any case have historically been underestimated. Furthermore, scientific risk analysis suggests that high potential damages should be taken very seriously even if the probability of their occurrence were low.

While the risks from domain-specific AIs appear limited in the near future, there are long-term developments to take into consideration: in the not-so-distant future, artificial intelligence could in principle pose an existential threat, similar in scope to the pandemic risks associated with biotechnology [4, 6, 17].

After years of easy money, the AI industry is facing a reckoning.

A new report from Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), which studies AI trends, found that global investment in AI fell for the second year in a row in 2023.

Every year, Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence releases a big report about the status of the artificial intelligence industry. This year’s report, published this week, is a whopping 502 pages and includes a wealth of insights on the trendy technology. Tucked into its section on the economics of the AI industry is the surprising revelation that global corporate investment in AI actually dropped last year for the second straight year in a row. This might come as a surprise to some since 2023 was largely considered to be a period of peak AI hype. New chatbots and companies spawned aplenty, as top executives spread hyperbolic rhetoric about the technology’s potential. And yet, the new HAI report notes that in 2023, total investment in AI…

…dropped to $189.2 billion, a decrease of approximately 20% from 2022. Despite a slight reduction in private investment, the most significant downturn occurred in mergers and acquisitions, which fell by 31.2% from the previous year. However, over the past decade, AI-related investments have increased thirteenfold.

Department of Psychology, York University) 2023. “Artificial General Intelligence, Existential Risk, and Human Risk Perception” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.08698 // ZX

As with any modern technology, contemporaneous societal and civilizational pressures and scientific breakthroughs continue to shape the evolution of AI. Its effects, much like those of nuclear technology, can and likely will change substantially over time. For instance, the perceived necessity of securing a decisive military advantage over the Axis powers during the Second World War motivated the US’s development of nuclear weapons, but this gave way to a military arms race once the US and Soviet Union were locked into the decades-long Cold War. Since then, there has been an expansion of nuclear-armed states and the pressures for expansion continue. While the threat of mutually-assured destruction serves as a potent first-use deterrent, there have been several close calls that raise the question of how long humans can avoid a global nuclear catastrophe (i.e., a nuclear winter) given that there appears to be no harmonious “end of history” in sight (Barrett et al., 2013; Baum, 2015). Attention to existential risk posed by AI invariably concerns possible future AI rather than the current state of AI. Although current AI carries significant risk—for example, algorithmic processes may be unexplainable (Angelov et al., 2021; Vilone & Longo, 2021) or biased and possibly unfair (Fazelpour & Danks, 2021)—and possibly biased for inexplicable reasons (Bostrom & Yudkowsky, 2018)—this is not what most experts regard as existential risk from AI. Current AI does not pose an existential threat because its development has not reached the stage where machines have parity with human intelligence across a wide range of tasks and domains.

Most AI systems today are designed to perform specific tasks, such as recognizing images or processing natural language. These models are not designed to be flexible or adaptable in the way that a human brain is and it is known as narrow AI, which is the primary type of AI that we currently have.

AI systems should be able to learn and generalize across different domains to achieve the desired form of AGI. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to a theoretical form of intelligence that can understand or learn or perform any intellectual task exactly as human beings do. It is a primary goal of some AI research.Need Breakthrough research in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision

Generative AI tools can do all sorts of things, such as write blog posts like this one, albeit partially and with a lot of edits by a human writer. This post uses three text-to-text AI writers (anonymized for obvious reasons) to write articles about the limitations of generative AI.

What Generative AI can and can't do, according to AI writer #1

This kind of politics then challenges the notions of “safe space” often prevalent in many activist circles in the United States. The concept of safe space flows naturally from the logics of privilege. That is, once we have confessed our gender/race/settler/class privileges, we can then create a safe space where others will not be negatively impacted by these privileges. Of course because we have not dismantled heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism or capitalism, these confessed privileges never actually disappear in “safe spaces.” Consequently, when a person is found guilty of his/her privilege in these spaces, s/he is accused of making the space “unsafe.” This rhetorical strategy presumes that only certain privileged subjects can make the space “unsafe” as if everyone isn’t implicated in heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism and capitalism. Our focus is shifted from the larger systems that make the entire world unsafe, to interpersonal conduct. In addition, the accusation of “unsafe” is also levied against people of color who express anger about racism, only to find themselves accused of making the space “unsafe” because of their raised voices. The problem with safe space is the presumption that a safe space is even possible. By contrast, instead of thinking of safe spaces as a refuge from colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, Ruthie Gilmore suggests that safe space is not an escape from the real, but a place to practice the real we want to bring into being. “Making power” models follow this suggestion in that they do not purport to be free of oppression, only that they are trying to create the world they would like to live in now. To give one smaller example, when Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, organized, we questioned the assumption that “women of color” space is a safe space. In fact, participants began to articulate that women of color space may in fact be a very dangerous space. We realized that we could not assume alliances with each other, but we would actually have to create these alliances. One strategy that was helpful was rather than presume that we were acting “non-oppressively,” we built a structure that would presume that we were complicit in the structures of white supremacy/settler colonialism/heteropatriarchy etc. We then structured this presumption into our organizing by creating spaces where we would educate ourselves on issues in which our politics and praxis were particularly problematic. The issues we have covered include: disability, anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Arab racism, transphobia, and many others. However, in this space, while we did not ignore our individual complicity in oppression, we developed action plans for how we would collectively try to transform our politics and praxis. Thus, this space did not create the dynamic of the confessor and the hearer of the confession. Instead, we presumed we are all implicated in these structures of oppression and that we would need to work together to undo them. Consequently, in my experience, this kind of space facilitated our ability to integrate personal and social transformation because no one had to anxiously worry about whether they were going to be targeted as a bad person with undue privilege who would need to publicly confess. The space became one that was based on principles of loving rather than punitive accountability. Conclusion The politics of privilege have made the important contribution of signaling how the structures of oppression constitute who we are as persons. However, as the rituals of confessing privilege have evolved, they have shifted our focus from building social movements for global transformation to individual self-improvement. Furthermore, they rest on a white supremacist/colonialist notion of a subject that can constitute itself over and against others through self-reflexivity. While trying to keep the key insight made in activist/academic circles that personal and social transformation are interconnected, alternative projects have developed that focus less on privilege and more the structures that create privilege. These new models do not hold the “answer,” because the genealogy of the politics of privilege also demonstrates that our activist/intellectual projects of liberation must be constantly changing. Our imaginations are limited by white supremacy, settler colonialism, etc., so all ideas we have will not be “perfect.” The ideas we develop today also do not have to be based on the complete disavowal of what we did yesterday because what we did yesterday teaches what we might do tomorrow. Thus, as we think not only beyond privilege, but beyond the sense of self that claims privilege, we open ourselves to new possibilities that we cannot imagine now for the future.

What I have been describing as the awareness model of consciousness pervades common sense diagnoses of ongoing racial injustice. These diagnoses implicitly assume that “at the heart of these patterns of racial injustice is a structure of social relations that is ideologically sustained in spite of legislative, judicial and individual efforts to change it” (Haslanger 2017, 152; emphasis mine). The idea that our “collective epistemic failings” are sufficiently explanatory for why an unjust social order remains in place suggests that what inhibits our coordinating to transform our arrangements is that “individuals in the grip of an ideology fail to appreciate what they are doing or what’s wrong with it, and so are unmotivated, if not resistant, to change” (152). Without denying that this does in fact happen, we should still ask what we should expect from agents once they are no longer in the grip of ideology. Do they feel differently? Think differently? Speak to others differently? Or act differently? One can imagine an agent thinking differently and still engaging in similar behaviors as before. I may be aware that air travel contributes to climate change, but that does not mean that I will hop on a bus to visit my mother who lives two thousand miles away.

It is for the following reason that I find the awareness model of consciousness limited: it would have to explain why it seems possible for a social order to remain in place even as the doxastic beliefs of agents within said order have shifted markedly. One explanation that could be offered is that extracognitive interests in the maintenance of the status quo tend to overwhelm moral awareness and thus we have a problem of akrasia or weakness of the will. Another explanation might suggest that the cognitive awareness was not thoroughgoing enough and so did not produce a “true” conversion of consciousness. Either explanation risks admitting that awareness is not a very effective lever for transforming a social order and therefore raises the question of why to make it central to a theory of social transformation.9

Orientalism is a term that Edward Said excavates and retools in books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. He labels Orientalist Western discourse that, by constructing and imagining the non-Western; world in prejudicial or violent modes, generates and affirms Western hegemony. Orientalism deals with the way a particular First World, Western subject, in its representations of peoples and sites of the Third World, establishes itself as the universal subject. The critique of Orientalism, which I shall call de-orientalism (not to be confused with Occidentalism or the reversal of Orientalism), tries to dismantle this Orientalist discourse. It veils the misconceptions and biases that Orientalisim itself both and conceals. De-orientalism also attempts to restore the wronged or violated discourses. For if Orientalism abjects other worlds, it only makes sense that the critique of Orientalisrn would attempt to recover that excluded domain, to recuperate a subjectivity of difference. One cannot be at all sure, however, that this critical response to Orientalism actually avoids participating in the very discourse that it contests, especially when one considers the project in terms of its overall teleology. Before pursuing this last point, a word on this study’s use of the term Other is necessary. Said’s critique of Orientalism does not intend to define the Third World Other. Rather Said demonstrates how vertain cultures and races have been Othered. Orientalism is not about the devaluation of the Other, as many seem to believe; it is about Othering as devaluation. Indeed non-Western sites are abjected the moment they are Othered. Said’s Third World Other is not an ontological but an existential category. It emerges when, in a particular historical, cultural, or political situation, a Western discourse objectifies the foreign or the unfamiliar. In this structure, any person, group, class, or site can potentially occupy the place of the Other or that of the Same. Therefore much Latin American scholarship that seems faithful to Said’s project actually betrays it (although it must be noted that Said too at times betrays his own undertaking). This scholarship assumes Latin America to be A priori Other, reveals how this Otherness has been violated, and then tries to recover that alterity. It presupposes an authentic Other who preexists an inauthentic Othering, whereas Said’s critique succeeds insofar as it does not make such presuppositions. This (perhaps inevitable) slippage in Latin American and postcolonial studies between the ontological and the cultural, the essential and the existential-between a reading that posits Third World inhabitants as Other (an ontological statement) and one that studies the way that, at a specific historical moment, particular discourses and peoples have fabricated this Otherness (a cultural statement)-is of course of enormous interest. However, critics striving to expose the radical aspects of Said’s work should not forget that the Saidian Other is not a given but a construct: a product of the West, racism, metaphysics, and global Capi-tal. Thus when I implement the word Other in this study, l am referring to those figures who have been named and posited as Other by Western discourses, not to peoples or sites supposed to be really (ontologically) Other. At the same time, my analysis is attentive to de-orientalism's (and Said's) tendency to slide from the cultural to the ontological, for this is precisely my point: Latin American de-orientalism repeats Orientalism rather than critiquing it, because it ontologizes alterity and cultural difference.

By the time I started organizing so much that it felt like a full-time job, it was the spring of 2016, and I had plenty of company. Around the country there were high-profile efforts to organize magazines, fast-food places, and nursing homes. Erstwhile Occupiers became involved in the Bernie Sanders campaign and joined the exploding Democratic Socialists of America, whose members receive shabby business cards proclaiming them an “official socialist organizer.” Today’s organizers — not activists, thank you — make clear that they are not black bloc participants brawling with police or hippies plotting a love-in. They are inspired by a tradition of professional revolutionaries, by Lenin’s exhortation that “unless the masses are organized, the proletariat is nothing. Organized — it is everything.” Organizing, in other words, is unembarrassed about power. It recognizes that to wield it you need to persuade untold numbers of people to join a cause, and to begin organizing themselves. Organizing means being in it to win.

But how do you win? Historical materialism holds that crises of capitalism spark revolts, perhaps even revolutions, as witnessed in the eruption of Occupy and Black Lives Matter; uprisings in Spain, Greece, and Egypt; and the British student movement against tuition fees. But there’s no guide for what happens in the long aftermath, as the left has often learned the hard way.

Is war becoming obsolete? There is wide agreement among scholars that war has been in sharp decline since the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, even as there is little agreement as to its cause.1 Realists reject the idea that this trend will continue, citing states' concerns with the “security dilemma”: that is, in anarchy states must assume that any state that can attack will; therefore, power equals threat, and changes in relative power result in conflict and war.2 Discussing the rise of China, Graham Allison calls this condition “Thucydides's Trap,” a reference to the ancient Greek's claim that Sparta's fear of Athens' growing power led to the Peloponnesian War.3

This article argues that there is no Thucydides Trap in international politics. Rather, the world is moving rapidly toward permanent peace, possibly in our lifetime. Drawing on economic norms theory,4 I show that what sometimes appears to be a Thucydides Trap may instead be a function of factors strictly internal to states and that these factors vary among them. In brief, leaders of states with advanced market-oriented economies have foremost interests in the principle of self-determination for all states, large and small, as the foundation for a robust global marketplace. War among these states, even making preparations for war, is not possible, because they are in a natural alliance to preserve and protect the global order. In contrast, leaders of states with weak internal markets have little interest in the global marketplace; they pursue wealth not through commerce, but through wars of expansion and demands for tribute. For these states, power equals threat, and therefore they tend to balance against the power of all states. Fearing stronger states, however, minor powers with weak internal markets tend to constrain their expansionist inclinations and, for security reasons, bandwagon with the relatively benign market-oriented powers.

I have been puzzled for many months by the appearance of the phrase “racial capitalism” in the left press (see, for example, the article by K. Sabeel Rahman in the Summer 2020 issue of Dissent). What does it mean?

Perhaps the adjective “racial” is simply an ordinary qualifying adjective. Racial capitalism is one kind of capitalism, and then there must be other kinds, requiring other adjectives. Here in the United States we have a kind of capitalism where the majority of exploited workers or a majority of the most exploited workers are people of color. The underclass and the reserve army are defined both racially and economically. Of course, no leftist writer would be indifferent to the exploitation of white workers, who might still make up the majority of the American workforce—and who are certainly the majority of exploited workers in Europe. The point of the adjective, then, is simply to focus our attention, for good reasons, on non-white workers. But is the exploitation of these workers a necessary feature of American capitalism?

***Can also be a TvA centered around social security/guaranteeing certain workplace protections and securities

The boldest vision of Asian American politics is that our true arrival, our accomplishment, is defined not by rivalry in a stratified labor market, not by a contest over racial supremacy, but by our ability to build collective power – power with, not power over. This is the core teaching of Black feminism, the theoretical core of Black Lives Matter. To paraphrase the legendary Barbara Smith, Black feminism is simply about creating a place on this globe that is fit for human life. We cannot do that alone. We can only do that together.

Political ecology is integral to a counter-hegemonic reform agenda because it offers a substantive set of directions for a post-capitalist, ecologically sustainable model of development. Returning to the brief discussion of resource sector workers, above, and to Raymond Williams's insistence that people need to be able to believe that “practical alternatives” are available, it is clear that political ecologists must build coalitions to develop and negotiate transitional plans as well as new institutions. The starting points for such coalitions may be municipal or regional; the ways in which national and global institutions (treaties, trade and investment agreements, WTO rules, jurisdictional division of powers, etc.) constrain, obstruct (or occasionally enable) changes at the local level will become clear soon enough, and will point the way toward the coalitions and reforms needed at other scales. What is important, as Williams observed, is that: “while certain principles can be established, all actual policies have to depend on new and difficult audits of resources, which must by definition be specific. We can look first at the principles, but their full practical bearings cannot be set down except in this place and that, by [END PAGE 109] this enquiry and that, in a sustained and necessarily negotiated process” (1983: 256). This conclusion directs our attention to what are, in my view, the critical tasks of the organic intellectuals of counter-hegemonic politics. There is, of course, the need to root political discourse in shared values and a common agenda of democratic reforms. Research must construct a solid account of the political, economic, cultural and ecological relationships operative within a given frame of action, including the ways in which these relationships cross multiple scales (from the local to the global). This foundation is essential to identifying the agency of change and the resources needed to strengthen civil society, and to develop a program and strategy for change. All of the social movements, including the unions, have important, necessary roles to play in such planning and negotiation.

Williams argued further that criticism of capitalism or enumeration of the many horrors of the times (salient then, the fear of nuclear war) would, alone, do little to mobilize people to undertake collective action for a better world. When he wrote these words, climate change and peak oil were hardly on our radar, nor the risks of genetically modified organisms, nor imminent mass extinctions of other species due to human demands on the planet's carrying capacity. Chernobyl hadn't happened yet. Today, more than ever, counter-hegemonic politics must be about “making hope practical, rather than despair convincing” (Williams, 1983: 240). Political ecology offers many of the tools we need to build a world in which humans and all of nature are no longer treated, as Williams put it, as “raw material for production,” but in which there is a “new orientation of livelihood: of practical, self-managing, self-renewing societies, in which people care first for each other, in a living world” (1983: 262, 266).

The neural processes underlying empathy are a subject of intense interest within the social neurosciences1-3. However, very little is known about how brain empathic responses are modulated by the affective link between individuals. We show here that empathic responses are modulated by learned preferences, a result consistent with economic models of social preferences 4-7. We engaged male and female volunteers in an economic game, in which two confederates played fairly or unfairly, and then measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while these same volunteers observed the confederates receiving pain. Both sexes exhibited empathy-related activation in pain-related brain areas (fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortices) towards fair players. However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain. This effect was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge. We conclude that in men (at least) empathic responses are shaped by valuation of other people's social behaviour, such that they empathize with fair opponents while favouring the physical punishment of unfair opponents, a finding that echoes recent evidence for altruistic punishment.

The fiction of social change through debate abuses the win–loss structure of debate and permits debaters to otherize, demonize, dehumanize, and exclude opponents. The win–loss structure of debate rounds requires a judge to vote for one side or the other, as judges generally cannot give a double win. This precludes the possibility of compromise on any major position in the debate when the resolution of the position would determine the ultimate issue of “which team did the better debating.” Thus, the fiction of social change through debate encourages debaters to construct narratives of good versus evil in which the other team is representative of some evil that threatens to bring about our destruction if it is endorsed (e.g. capitalism). The team relying on the fiction of social change through debate then paints themselves as agents of the good, and gives the judge a George W. Bush-like “option”: “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” The fiction of social change through debate—like Bush’s rhetorical fear tactics and creation of a false, polarizing, and exclusionary dichotomy to justify all parts of the War on Terror—enables the otherization, demonization, dehumanization, and exclusion of the opposing team. When the unfairness of this tactic is brought to light—particularly in egregious situations when a team is arguing that the other team should lose because of their skin color—all can see that the debate centers on personal attacks against opposing debaters. This causes tensions between debaters that frequently result in debaters losing interest or quitting. By alienating and excluding members of the competitive interscholastic debate community for the purpose of winning a debate, it also makes the reaching of any compromise outside of the debate—the only place where compromise is possible—much less likely. By bringing the social issue into a debate round, debaters impede out-of round progress on the resolution of social issues within and outside the debate community by prompting backlash.

For the white subject to enter into the possibilities of language and judgement, blackness thus has to be discarded, thrown away. If lalangue is the result of a struggle between language and representation, and whiteness a struggle between logic and sophism, then what appears to link them is the advent into a decisionism that consists in the conclusion of a white community. First, the unconcealing-appearing of whiteness must be different from what is concealed as black to the point that the concealment consists in this difference and is a direct consequence of it. In section 3 of the logical time essay, “Discussion of the sophism,” Lacan distinguishes the imaginary mastery of knowledge from what the subject is led to deduce therefrom: that which is outside of the logical order of hesitation and revelation. Nevertheless, it seems to me that such a difference is posited only when the originary truth of analysis—not as a technique of decipherment but as an art of interpreting—is understood to no longer doubt itself in the world of signifiers. Second, because the very exclusion of blackness is what passes into the service of whiteness, what is unveiled as the judgement of exception is the discovery of a generalized logic of distrust that has race as its condition. Monstration reappears here but always in the form of a knowing in its relation to a non- me, and a black “is not” (n’est pas) that is the inseparable consequence of an in-difference to blackness in the freedom not to choose it. Sovereign mastery is thus inseparable from the ability of dispensing the value of judgement indifferently upon every blackened being—it is only the subject that is black “that gives their hesitation its definite import.”²⁸ Third, the definiteness of the appearance of the subject to the others who see [them] him as white refers to a still more decisive situation: to the incapacity of blackness to posit the subjection uncovered in, or by, it. From the instructions given by the prison warden, we readily deduce a choice based on equivalence. But in the subsequent narration no one has the option to choose the black disc, because the choice of the black disc consequently gives no one the authority or right to judgement. All authority belongs to the one who rightly chooses the white disc, for now he has the right to interpret, to exercise judgement; on the other hand, those who possess the black disc by right have no power of judgement. The equivalence of thought and negation in relation to blackness is here formulated by Lacan in a direct manner. This incapacity, according to Lacan’s explicit assertion, does not create this definiteness; it is limited to unconcealing it (the hesitation—which is more than a hesitation—by which being unconceals itself qua whiteness). It is impossible not to see here a paradox that strikes at the heart of psychoanalysis’s very principle: that it is psychoanalysis which provides definiteness to black non-being in its contingency, by which I mean the psychic import of not being black. By analyzing, and only in as much as the unconscious is shown to appear, is that import susceptible to being. And yet, here it has been conceded that what appears owes its existence not to the power of witnessing, since the power of witnessing is limited to recovering a phenomenality that preexists its seeing and that would not be able, therefore, to go beyond perception in a genuine ontological sense. No, here (and throughout Lacan’s corpus) it is the destiny of the signifier to both open and foreclose the very possibility of destination as judgement and/or meaning. Now, these three characteristics of the destining of the signifier—here briefly sketched but obviously decisive—are precisely those of the language that is founded upon the white concluding of the signifier and that, for this reason, we will call from now on the white logic of the unconscious. First, each word constitutive of this logic is different from the negative reality—different from the being (l’étoff e)—of the signifier each time it is invoked. Therefore, just as the defining conclusion- appearance reveals itself as indifferent to all that hesitates precisely because it differs from representation, this difference that separates itself from all that it designates (or sees itself as) black is the reason why each word of the language of the white world turns out to be hurrying on from this hesitant black referent. In an astonishing conclusion (to this essay on the necessity of a white conclusion), Lacan denounces classical syllogistic logic when he says that “it posits itself as assimilative of a barbarism” even in its universality.²⁹ In fact, by means of its hesitation to the sophism so designated, the logic of the signifier could just as well name something else, the word “white” being applied in this way to a confusing logic of difference that nothing (besides a racial convention, a racial nominalism) is able to dispel. Conversely, and always by virtue of the hesitation that is established between logic (signifier) and being (white), two different hesitations- conclusions are able to qualify such negativity. This is the situation that Lacan denounces as the universal barbarism of the syllogism by which man is assumed to know who he is and who he is not (i.e., not man, not white). But why, we must ask, does this knowledge and the image conserving it have to take on the form of an assurance to defend itself against the anguish and precariousness of not knowing—which Lacan refers to as the danger of being exposed as black? Solely because language cannot decide that which is not me—the black and he who is not human—solely because the signifier cannot itself penetrate into what each subject claims to say and about which—decisively or indecisively—it can only slander, imprison, delude, judge; accordingly language does not contain within itself the reality of which it speaks. Difference and conclusion are here only the consequence of this primary ontological insufficiency. But then, does not this third characteristic of the language of the unconscious obviously carry within itself the characteristic of the logic of the world—that is, the original and definitive incapacity of blackness to posit the reality that the unconscious unconceals but never creates? The most decisive characteristic of the language of the unconscious that humans speak, and that defines the not- all that cannot be said and is contained in this impotence, is also seemingly the sign of the impotence of lalangue (on which language depends).

Yet Sedgwick’s analysis neglects the fact that in the war on effemi nate boys some racialized communities are indeed produced precisely as feminized, homosexualized, queer. In “The Shoyu Kid,” the hetero sexual stability of the patriotic white American male icon emerges only in contrast to the resolute linking of queerness with Japaneseness. In this manner, normative masculine self-representation con stitutively de pends upon the sexual “perversion” and pathologizing of the racialized masculine subject. The solution to such warfare on a racialized and ef feminized Japanese American childhood, however, cannot be to reify or aspire toward those normative masculinized images underwritten by mainstream society—a version of Frank Chin and his Auiieeeee! group’s political prescription. We cannot place our psychic hopes in this type of so-called limited, positive imagery; we cannot place our political hopes in the extension of masculine, patriarchal privileges to these Japanese American youngsters. In the final analysis, we must not conserve but proliferate the idealized images of the screen. The struggle to recompose the psychic and material body of the racialized masculine subject can often result in the ascribing of conservative norms to emancipatory political projects. For instance, Fanon—in re constructing the black male body that lias “burst apart”—has often been criticized by feminist and queer commentators for building his incisive critique of French colonialism on the reassertion of woman as lack and on the linking of racism with homosexuality rather than homophobia.31 Countering stereotypes of Asian American male subjectivity as the conflation of “Asian” and “anus” by valorizing whiteness and heterosexuality would not only serve to reinforce the racist and homophobic logic that produces these limited and debilitating roles from the onset but also sanction the racist and homophobic logic that understands Japanese American internment as having been both legitimate and necessary in the first place. Psychic salvation for the Asian American male cannot be the monopoly of a masculinist compulsory heterosexuality. To accept this racial and (hetero) sexual logic— to aspire to the presumed material rewards it offers—amounts to what Angela Y. Davis calls “accepting a bribe”— an illusory compensation for powerlessness.56 Redeeming Japa nese American queer childhood does not require, then, material and psychic strategies to maintaîn the dominant order of things. On the contrary. it requires renewed material and psychic challenges to the structures of domination altogether. For some time now, critics in gender, ethnic, queer, and cultural studies have stressed the importance of giving disenfranchised subjects — women, people of color, gays, and lesbians—”voices,” full subjectivities, visibilities in the face of invisibilities.’ In my discussion of photography and national history in China Men and Donald Duk, I noted the great psychic and material difficulties encountered by marginal Asian American male subjects who attempt to emerge from a domain of silence and in visibility into an order of speech and visibility. However, this emergence into history, as it were, is only one part of a larger cultural politics of difference. My analysis of the hypervisibility of the young Japanese Ameri can male during wartime internment in “The Shoyu Kid” expands my critique of the discursive mechanisms by means of which Asian Americans continue to be rendered speechless and invisible despite their appearance in the visual field. Chapter two takes into consideration the particular historical conditions of World War lito explore the psychic constraints under which Japanese American male subjectivity is allowed to emerge within the realm of the visible. Chapter two concludes with a caveat on the false promises of investing in a dominant ideology of heterosexuality and whiteness, the psychic costs of valorizing this hege monic pairing instead of making a concerted attempt to contest and dis- mantle it. The present chapter extends the critique of heterosexuality and whiteness from yet another perspective. Reading M. Butterfly allows us to discover the costs of heterosexuality and whiteness not just from the Asian American male’s point of view but from that of the putatively normative, straight white male. Kobena Mercer provides an initial entry point for this investigation by insisting that we initiate a critical examination of whiteness and its strategic occlusion from the visible domain. for “all our rhetoric about ‘making ourselves visible; “he asserts, “the real challenge in the new cul tural politics of difference is to make ‘whiteness’ visible for the first time, as a culturally constructed ethnic identity historically contingent upon the disavowal and violent denial of difference.”1 Mercer’s intervention is significant. Whiteness—in its refusal to be named and its refusal to be seen — represents itself as the universal and unmarked standard, a ubiq uitous norm from which all else and all others are viewed as a regrettable deviation. I would like to take up Mercer’s challenge to make whiteness visible, then, by investigating not only its conditions of possibility but its mo ments of failure. Consider the remarkable closing scene of David Henry Hwang’s Tony-Award-winning drama M. Butterfly, which takes place mo ments before the demise of the French diplomat. Donning the robes of the forsaken Japanese geisha Cio-Cio-San (memorialized in Puccini’s 1904 opera Madama Butterfly and its numerous antecedents),3 René Gallimard commits seppuku, but only after uttering these final words: “There is a vision of the Orient that I have. Of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. Who are born and raised to be the perfect women. Who take whatever pun ishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, uncondi tionally. It is a vision that has become my i4 I read this final scene of the drama in contrast to the unveiling of opera diva Song Liling’s penis at the opening of act Ill. Gallimard is so committed to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly fantasy of “the submissive Oriental woman and the cruel whîte man” (17) that it is impossible for him to imagine an alternative outcome to this dreary story of heterosexual domination and white supremacy. Indeed, because he cannot relinquish his colonial fantasy of “slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils,” the diplomat must “turn somersaults” (60) in order to protect the psychic integrity of his farce. Vigilant in his desire to maintain this particular vision of a submissive Orient, Gallimard is forced to counter the disrobed diva with a trans vesting act of his own: now that Song is publicly the man, Gallimard must publicly become the woman. “Get away from me!” he orders Song petulantly. “Tonight, I’ve finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy” (go). Rejecting the psychoana lytic axiom that posits a constitutive relationship between fantasy and reality—that what is most real to the subject is fantasy—the diplomat re- frises to face the real world effects of his geisha dream. He assumes the sartorial role of Cio-Cio-San and thus recedes into the imagined realm of his Mactuna Butterfly fantasy by “straightening” his relationship to the exposed Chinese man. He returns it once again, in the realm of his imagination and in the domain of the vîsible, to a normative hetero sexual union. This concluding scene is of course an ironic rendering of Puccini’s dictum that “death with honor is better than life . . . life with dishonor” (92; Hwang’s ellipsis), for the price of Gallimard’s phantas matic sartorial conversion — the death of the white man — is materially high. Gallimard commits suicide, bitt he dies with his orientalist fantasy intact and, most importantly, as a nominal member of the acceptably heterosexual community. I would like to isolate a striking visual detail emphasízed in this concluding scene both in Hwang’s stage version and in David Cronen berg’s film adaptation of the drama. Before Gallimard dons his wig and kimono, lie careftilly—even methodically—applies a thick layer of white makeup to his face, appearing literally in whiteface (figs. 8 and 9). Sev eral commentators have read this cosmetic transformation as a faithful rendering of the aesthetic protocols of Japanese theater, relating G allí mard’s application of whiteface to the traditional makeup of the orino- gata in Kabuki theater.3 Majorie Garber, however, expands the possible interpretations of this critical moment by analyzing the diplomat’s bad makeup job in the confluence of various ethnic channels: The whiteness of the makeup is traditíonal in Japanese theater as a sign of the ideal white complexion of the noble, who can afford to keep out of the sun, and the pallor of the protected young woman (or trained geisha) even today. We might note that in Chinese opera face-painting participates in an entirely different sign system, in which white on an actor’s face symbolized treachery, as red does loyalty, yellow, piety, and gold, the supernatural. In this story of spies and treason the Chinese and Japanese significations are at odds with one another, and Song has already warned Gallimard not to conflate the two.6 Although Garber’s analysis of this scene largely focuses on Gallimard’s egregious misreading of disparate East Asian cultural aesthetics — the conflation of Chinese chong sams and Japanese kimonos—she sub sequently appends a final and provocative interpretation: “The white makeup has yet another significance, since [Gallimard] is continually described as a ‘white man’ throughout the play, even in France, where ‘There’re white men all around” (244)7 Garber proffers a triple reading of Gallimard’s bad makeup job through this condensed cuihiral survey, but I would like to elaborate on her final point: Gallimard is continually described by Song as a white man; the visible face underscoring Galli mard’s failures, demise, and swan song appears to its literally as a white face; the Orientalist and heterosexist fantasy for which Gallimard ulti mately dies is achieved only in the face of whiteness. Judith Butler insists that we must begin to theorize the compulsory regimes of the symbolic order — the numerous interpellations and coercive prohibitions by which individuals are rendered legible as subjects— through the lens not only of (hetero)sexual but also racial difference. “The symbolic — that register of regulatory ideality—is also and always a racial industry, indeed, the reiterated practice of racializíng interpella tions.” She continues: Rejecting those models of power which would reduce racial dif ferences to the derivative effects of sexual difference (as if sexual diffèrence were not only autonomous in relation to racial articula tion but somehow more prim; in a temporal or ontological sense), it seems crucial to rethink the scenes of reproduction and, hence, of sexing practices not only as ones through which a heterosexual imperative is inculcated, but as ones through which boundaries of racial distinction are secured as well as contested. Especially at those junctures in which a compulsory heterosexuality works in the service of maintaining hegemonic forms of racial purity, the “threat” of homosexuality takes on a distinctive complexity.8 p. 230s As we have witnessed in the works of Kingston, Chin, Kaneko, Hwang, Chu, and Louie issues of home for Asian Americans are particularly vexed. Historically configured as either unassimilable aliens or perversely assimilated and thus ‘‘whiter than white’’ (the sojourner/yellow peril thesis versus the model minority myth), Asian Americans have at best a dubious claim to citizenship and a place within the U.S. nation- state.1 A sense of membership within the larger national collective has traditionally followed the political, economic, and cultural incorporation of a Western European ethnic group under the banner of immigration and assimilation as well as through the spatial metaphorics of the United States as a point of arrival and melting pot. However, recent debates in Asian American studies about diaspora—its focus on point of departure and displacement from origin—insist that we (re)think the problematics of home in this field.2 Suspended between departure and arrival, Asian Americans remain permanently disenfranchised from home, relegated to a nostalgic sense of its loss or to an optative sense of its unattainability. p. 240s In order to trace the increasingly important relationship between queer- ness and diaspora in Asian American studies in the late 1990s, it is useful first to consider a brief history of the Asian American studies movement as it originally formed around the domestic imperative of claiming the U.S. nation-state.13 In the shadow of 1950s and 1960s civil rights struggles, the emerging Asian American studies movement focused much of its political energy and theoretical attention on domestically based race relations within the geographical boundaries of the U.S. nation-state. Modeled on the cultural nationalism of the Black Power movement, the Yellow Power movement during this period largely endorsed a political platform of identity-based politics, racial separatism, and a Marxist-inspired class critique of American capitalism. The Asian American cultural nationalist project, perhaps best exemplified in the academy by Frank Chin’s Aiiieeeee! group, centered its attentions on local Asian American communities as sites of resistance for the mobilizing of political action, the building of alternative economic institutions, and the creation of an oppositional nativist culture.14 In the 1975 prefatory manifesto to their now-classic collection of Asian American writings, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, the editors contend that ‘‘legislative racism and euphemized white racist love’’ have consigned Asian Americans to a state of ‘‘self- contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.’’15 A remedy, the Aiiieeeee! group insists, demands the assertion of an Asian American identity with its own unique political as well as recognizable cultural parameters. Rejecting the dominant either/or conception of Asian American identity as forever divided—split between the Asian and the American and between Asia and America—the editors insist on claiming the domestic sphere as their own. Hence, they link entitlement to the public sphere of the nation-state with the private prerogatives of home.16 Seizing upon their self-definition of Asian American, they emphatically state that the myth of being either/or and the equally goofy concept of the dual personality haunted our lobes while our rejection by both Asia and white America proved we were neither one nor the other. Nor were we half and half or more one than the other. Neither Asian cul- ture nor American culture was equipped to define us except in the most superficial terms. However, American culture, equipped to deny us the legitimacy of our uniqueness as American minorities, did so, and in the process contributed to the effect of stunting self- contempt on the development and expression of our sensibility that in turn has contributed to a mass rejection of Chinese and Japanese America by Chinese- and Japanese-Americans.17 In delineating an integrally and a psychically ‘‘whole’’ Asian American subject against this model of either/or split subjectivity, cultural nationalism’s political project was centered squarely on Asian American claims to the space of the U.S. nation-state as enfranchised citizen-subjects. The Aiiieeeee! model worked to configure Asian Americans as a racialized minority group with inviolable political needs, economic concerns, and cultural contours.18 Rejecting the mainstream stereotype of Asian Americans as anomalous ethnic novelties ill fitted to the general socio-political landscape of the U.S. nation-state, cultural nationalism’s energies focused on not merely defining but prescribing who a recogniz- able and recognizably legitimate Asian American racial subject should ideally be: male, heterosexual, working class, American born, and English speaking.