Marc Kohlbry’s review of my The Eye of the Master (2023) for the journal Critical Inquirycharacterizes the book’s attempt to write a “socio-technical history of AI” from below as an impassive and uncaring research agenda. He claims that the “methodology is not geared toward elevating the voices of those immiserated by these technologies or their predecessors, nor is it ultimately interested in unpacking how AI may be formally modeled on capitalist labor or management.” This passage—excerpted and broadcast via Critical Inquiry’s social media—represents a blatant political reversal of the book’s research agenda. How is such an ideological reversal possible? How is it possible that a book that advocates for an emancipatory agenda is read in exactly the opposite way?
The Eye of the Master and its labor-form theory implicitly questions the value-form theory that has become dominant in critical theory and is also pursued by the reviewer in other works. In a diversionary move, rather than disclosing and addressing this postulate, the reviewer accuses the book of a lack of ethnographic research (which is neither the purpose nor the method of the book). In order to contextualize and understand the review, it is necessary to focus on the schism between value-form and labor-form theories that currently affects the humanities (a schism that will hopefully be repaired one day).
-
-
-
-
-
- Matteo Pasquinelli, “Beyond the Schism of Value Form and Labor Form in AI Studies and the Humanities: A Response to Critical Inquiry“, e-flux Notes, 13 June 2024.
-
-
-
-
