ABSTRACT
The terms “artificial” and “intelligence” are loaded with genealogical references to colonialism, patriarchy, and ecological extractivism. As previous chapters of the volume argue, the segregation of artificial intelligence (AI) applications into organised and unambivalent (often binary) categories relies on modalities of knowledge production embedded in systemic power and mythological frameworks that rearticulate a heteronormative, liberal, and thus limited/limiting vision of what it means to be human. Taking a closer look at AI as reworking the human/machine dichotomy, this chapter engages with the 2014 novel Annihilation as a rearticulation of what these parameters might mean in relation to one another. The chapter excavates a vision of AI as a queer apparatus of mythmaking that navigates discourses on consciousness and subjectivity as masculinist phantasies of sequentiality, correlationism, and categorisation. Drawing on Jack Halberstam's theory of the wild as a place of queer desire, Annihilation becomes an aesthetic representation that queers notions of intelligence and artificiality by crossing through their binary divisions of nature/culture, subject/object, and the reductive liberal subject encoded into normative AI. Instead, read through wildness, Annihilation offers a dissolution of the liberal self, which nonetheless needs to be contextualised via the environmentalitarian situation of ubiquitous media technologies in racial (techno-)capitalism.
