Malabou, Morphing Intelligence, first selection

The notes below pertain to our group discussion of Catherine Malabou's, Morphing Intelligence, specifically the introduction and chapter one.  Additional notes to follow on later chapters in later weeks.  

We began, as is our custom in CGC, with questions:

• What is the central argument of the text?
• What is intelligence as "method"? (pp. 11-12)
• What is intelligence if it is situated between transcendental and empirical? (p. 11)
  
• What are the broader stakes of the book?  What are the stakes in the movement from Bergson to Dewey & Piaget?  What does this set up with respect to the third metamorphosis? 
• What is the critical tack of the piece?
• Why can't critique be "reactive"?  (p. 9)
• What critical space is made available by an acceptance of the possibility of a connection (or even possibly symmetry) between artificial intelligence and human intellect?
• What are the possible new "logics of resistance" that CM has in view here? (p. 16)
  

We then moved, as remains our custom, to discussion (only portions of which are reproduced below):

The book presents its argument vis-a-vis a hundred-year critical perspective first occupied by Bergson (pp. 4-8).  Bergson's argument, as presented by CM, is:

• Bergson expresses a mistrust towards intelligence, or at least Binet's conception of intelligence:
• Intelligence unable to account for its own origin (p. 5).
• Importance of intuition for "grant[ing] intelligence the spirit--that is, the being--it lacks" (p. 6).
• Bergson sets up a border between intelligence and intellect (the latter informed by or inflected by intuition), and this is the "protective shield" (p. 8)

The argument against Bergson is not so much that he's wrong, but that the view is "obsolete" (p. 9) and outdated" (p. 40).

The book then posits or offers a new position, taken up through Dewey and Piaget (p. 10). To begin to understand this new position we have to understand where it comes from:

• It comes from the critique of the Bergsonian protective shield as outdated.
  
• The three metaphorses are, then, crucial for shifting from Bergson to Malabou/Dewey (pp. 14-16): intelligence as measurable, intelligence as epigenetic, intelligence as "automatic"
• The second metamorphosis (epigenetics) leads to the third metamorphosis, which is to come, (artificial intelligence).
• The challenge of the argument is this: how can we endorse the second shift without embracing the third?
• Throughout all this there is, it seems, an important distinction between distinction and dichotomy. CM is hoping to maintain a distinction without collapsing it, yet without also propping it up as a dichotomy.
  
• The automaticity of intelligence is going to be crucial to the argument (in Chap. 3)
  

The intelligence that CM looks toward:

• Inteliigence as method
• Intelligence as middle ground
• Intelligence between means and ends
• Intelligence between transcendental and empirical
  

The question that is crucial for this argument concerns how to maintain critical space (regarding, say, AI) without the "protective shield" or "testudo".

The history of the metamorphosis recounted in Chapter One (pp. 17-39) focuses on the measurability of intelligence. Characterizing the historiographical method here, we would say (tentatively):

• The historiographical objects of study here are ideas (e.g., measurable intelligence, genetic drivers of intelligence as a phenotype), as well as state institutions and power (p. 25)
  
• The actors are the 'great scientists' (Binet, Terman, Spearman)
• The style can be described as epistemological paradigms
  

The history culminates in the "outdated" testudo of Bergson and those who reiterate his critique of that whose history is here recounted:

• Anti-measure in Bergson (40-42)
• Anti-psychology in Canguilhem (42-46)
• Anti-police in Foucault & Agamben (46-49)
• Anti-cybernetics in Heidegger (49-51)
• Anti-stupidity in Derrida (51-54)