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Paper short abstract

Drawing on E. A. Povinelli’s work, this paper proposes a notion of “procedural animism”, investigating how boundaries between Life and Non-Life are strategically mobilised within contemporary infrastructures of governance, allowing AI agents participate in the reorganisation of agency and authority.

Paper long abstract

This paper develops the concept of techno-animist relationality through Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s distinction between Life and Non-Life and her concept of geontologies (Povinelli 2016). This paper asks how algorithmic systems can be understood within the ontological and political boundary that separates Life from Non-Life in late neoliberal governance. I argue that AI systems, while clearly belonging to the domain of Non-Life (as material infrastructures, code, and computational processes), are inevitably figured and encountered as relational agents. AI agents are aesthetically presented and sold as “digital humans”, assistants, customer service, romantic partners, grief bots and other parasocial relationships.

This tension produces what the paper terms procedural animism: a mode of sociotechnical relation in which computational systems, deliberately animated and bestowed with economic agency, reproduce sociotechnical imaginaries of labour, affect, productivity and humanness within AI agents, where capacity for efficient action-taking in the digital infrastructure becomes more significant than personhood itself. I want to analyse this condition through imagining the impoverished and reduced late neoliberalist Life where AI agents appear as more capable and preferable to humans in workforce, and where relationships with such agents become increasingly offered as substitution to originals in humans’ affective lives online. Acknowledging techno-animist relationality, but also understanding AI through the lens of Non-Life raises questions about how technological systems participate in the reorganisation of responsibility, agency and authority, and how the boundaries between Life and Non-Life are strategically mobilised within contemporary infrastructures of governance.