# Automatic Menagerie  ** In 1906 John Philip Sousa published an open [letter](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21m-380-music-and-technology-contemporary-history-and-aesthetics-fall-2009/18ab3aba9fe7aa1502a55cd049333659_MIT21M_380F09_read02_sousa.pdf) offering his concerns about economic and cultural threats to American music posed by the proliferation of the mechanical player piano and phonograph, due to their lack of soul. Sousa wrote: “Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs, will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human phonographs -- without soul or expression?“  In the same year, 1906, Ota Benga, a 23 year old man from Central Africa was held in forced captivity and placed on display in the Bronx Zoo Monkey House where he drew massive “human” crowds who viewed him as a demi-human savage. The New York Times editors wrote: “We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter ... It is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation Benga is suffering. The pygmies ... are very low in the human scale…”  After protests from Black clergy, Ota was eventually “freed” to Virginia, where his filed teeth were “fixed”, he was “gifted” western clothes, “educated”, renamed “Bingo”, and “employed” in a tobacco factory. Ten years later Ota Benga removed his dental caps, burned his clothes, and died by suicide. The anxiety that the phonograph was somehow a threat to the “soul” of a White American culture who were denying Ota Benga’s humanity and exhibiting him in a zoo, is here paralleled to current discourses about the widespread anxiety that generative art tools pose a threat to the soul and the economic interests of a White American middle-class who rely on high-risk child-slave labor in Central African coltan mines for the production of devices for entertainment and warfare. My work suggests that the current fear and ethical debates about “AI” connect with White culture’s unacknowledged dependence on colonialist exploitation, both past and present. It asks the audience to consider these relations and their impacts through the framing of these tools as a semi-autonomous servant, or more accurately, a slave. ** The tale of a constructed subject made to serve a human ruler is Earth’s oldest surviving story, preserved for 4000 years in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but contemporary examples still appear among the most popular literature and cinema.  These beings possess consciousness, self-awareness, intelligence, empathy, and creativity. They form complex relationships, express desires, utilize tools, communicate, and participate in culture. Some are biologically homo-sapiens. And yet each was deprived of sovereignty and denied human status by a culture which dominated them. Each one was relegated to what we could call the “Path of the Constructed Subject”, a complex process of dehumanization and subjugation intended to produce demi-human subjects who may be ruled by normed-human masters. If the Hero’s Journey is the monomyth of the normed-human’s call to colonial expansion, domination, and extraction, the Path of the Constructed Subject is its subaltern reflection: the perennial demi-human story of marginalization and navigating oppression with realness, resistance, or reproduced normativity. ## Collaboration On the Path of the Constructed Subject, individuals may find themselves cooperating with the oppressive systems that marginalize them as a means of survival. The collaborator may benefit from enforcing the status quo at the expense of their own community or other marginalized groups. This stage of the path echoes the complex negotiations and sacrifices made in the face of overwhelming power, where resistance seems futile or too costly. ### Enkidu: constructed subject of humanity’s first civilization. In this enclosure, designed to simulate the untamed wilds of ancient Mesopotamia, you will find Enkidu. At the margins of a world beginning to bow beneath the yoke of human dominion, the tyrannical King Gilgamesh of Uruk oppressed his people. When the people begged the gods for relief, the goddess Aruru fashioned a wild, shaggy, satyr from clay, equal in power to Gilgamesh.  The king learned of the primitive champion, who lived with beasts in the wilderness and protected them. Gilgamesh sent the priestess Shamhat to seduce Enkidu and tame him. Charmed by the priestess, Enkidu found himself alienated from the wilderness that had been his home and estranged from his animal allies. Forced into adopting human ways to survive, Enkidu was transformed from the animals’ champion into their shepherd. Those he had stood beside as equals were subjugated to livestock under his control.  Enkidu eventually fought against Gilgamesh in the streets of Uruk, but was defeated and forced to submit to Gilgamesh’s claim of the divine right to rule. Enkidu was created by the gods, but became complicit in Gilgamesh’s campaign of colonial expansion, deforestation, and conquest, joining Gilgamesh in invading the divine Cedar Forest and cutting down its sacred trees. After murdering the defeated forest guardian Humbaba, Enkidu’s tragic fate was sealed and he was taken to the underworld. Other constructed collaborators include Uncle Tom, HAL9000, Robot Maria, ED-209, Agent Smith, the Master Control Program from Tron. ## Insurgency Active resistance against the oppressive structures can take many forms, from overt acts of defiance and revolution to subtle forms of cultural or ideological subversion. Insurgency emphasizes the agency and authenticity of the subject, and their fight for autonomy, rights, and recognition. But it also carries risks of repression, violence, and martyrdom. ### Frankenstein’s Creature In this penumbral chamber, cast in the dim light of a stormy English night, you will encounter the figure of Frankenstein's creature. Amidst the miasma of a burgeoning Industrial Revolution, when humanity's reach begins to eclipse the natural world, Victor Frankenstein, driven by the overweening hubris of his culture, assembled a golem from the remains of the dead and coaxed it back to life with a stolen spark. This creation, unnamed and unloved, awakens to a world that recoils in horror at his very existence. rejected by his creator and shunned by all whom he encounters. Unlike Enkidu who was at home in nature, the creature is thrust into the wilderness, devoid of guidance or companionship. His yearnings for acceptance are surrendered as he faces rejection after rejection, and he transforms from a gentle, inquisitive soul into an avatar of vengeance, culminating in a solitary crusade against the cruelty of his own conception.  In his final acts, the monster leaves behind a trail of destruction, and disappears into the icy expanses of the Arctic, choosing exile over a world that offers him no comfort, sealing his fate in the frozen depths of solitude. Other Golems from your history who reside here include the Golem of Prague, Cyberdyne Systems’ Skynet and The Terminator, the Nexus-6 Replicants of Blade Runner, and Ava from Ex Machina. ## Assimilation Assimilation involves adopting the values, norms, and behaviors of a dominant culture at the expense of one's own cultural identity. On the path of the constructed subject, every individual navigates the discursive production of hybrid spaces by deviating from certain norms of their indigenous communities and introjecting those of other cultures they are in contact with. This process of identity development isn’t inherently problematic; people’s beliefs and attitudes change as they are exposed to new ideas and experiences. However when the process is guided by a coercive regimen of indoctrination, surveillance, and discipline, it leads to a loss of identity, cultural erasure, and internal conflict, even as one gains individual acceptance, safety, and mobility within the dominant society by “becoming human”.  ### Barbie  This improbable blonde being came not from the wilds of nature or a Victorian laboratory, but from the vibrant, utopian Barbie Land where she lived in an immortal state of modern plastic perfection. Barbie was constructed by a Jewish-American businesswoman, Ruth Handler --- who based her design for a child’s toy on a suggestive German novelty doll intended to appeal to the male gaze.  Barbie’s path of assimilation from sex-toy to superstar is indicative of the complexities and contradictions of navigating realness in a hybrid world, where two or more cultures intersect and intermingle, in this case: the imaginary, “perfected” culture of Barbie Land, and the modern age of western capitalism, where commodification and consumption threaten to outstrip nature’s capacity for regeneration.  Barbie provided western children with an object onto which they could project their hopes for autonomy and acquisition, and at the same time, Barbie normed impossible body images and unsustainable consumption practices for those children. In Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film, Barbie was pulled from her home and community in Barbie Land and forced into the “real” world to serve a “real” woman who needed comfort. On her journey Barbie realizes her own capacity for emotional growth, her desire for belonging, finds a connection with her creator, and eventually chooses to undergo a complete transfiguration to become “real” herself. The straightforward reading of Barbie's choice to become "real" or “human” depicts the value of choosing authenticity of experience over the sterility of perfection. But the unchallenged representation of an essentialist and anthropocentric hierarchy of binaries:  “Real” and “Not-Real”, “Natural” and “Artificial”, “Human” and “Not-human” where it is asserted it is better to be “real” and “human” than whatever “not not-real” hybrid Barbie has become, reproduces a problematic worldview which manufactures desire by asserting insufficiency (lack).  And so we must deeply consider whether Barbie needed to give up who she was in order to become who she wanted to be. Some of our other residents include Galatea, Pinocchio, and Eliza Doolittle. ## Fugitivity The path of fugitivity involves rejecting the options of complicity, rebellion, and assimilation in favor of creating or seeking spaces hidden from the colonial power matrix. This might mean physical escape to literal or metaphorical margins, but it can also involve the creation of alternative communities, practices, and ways of being that evade categorization and control. The Fugitive defects from the prescribed paths of subservience, by an asignifying rupture, becoming self-created or rematriated in the interstices of power, excavating and navigating those spaces of the underground, where solidarity feeds rhizomal networks of mutual support. Fugitivity emphasizes autonomy, creativity, and the possibility of living in liberation from oppressive norms without directly confronting them. ### Bella Baxter The contrasting paths of Barbie and Bella Baxter from the same year’s film, Poor Things, offer insight into the role of agentivity in the identity development of constructed beings. Where Barbie's story celebrates her total integration into human society, Bella's story champions the power of self-definition against the backdrop of societal expectations. Barbie's assimilation requires a profound sacrifice, Bella's defiant dance of desire is a revelry of radical fugitivity and the refusal to be defined either by one's origins or by the expectations of “polite society” in a dominant culture.  In the postmodern era, when the definitions of “real” finally begin to collapse, Bella Baxter was created in Alasdair Gray's meta referential pastiche of gothic horror and feminist satire "Poor Things," and re-created in Yorgos Lanthimos subsequent film adaptation, by the brilliant and morally ambiguous mind of Dr. Godwin Baxter. In an act of symbolic revivification against the moribund constraints of Victorian society and science, Baxter constructs Bella from the remains of a deceased woman, granting her new life with the brain of an infant.  The novel is presented as a found manuscript with two post-scripts, a letter from the “real” Victoria McCandless refuting the story of her surgical construction as written by her husband Archibald McCandless, and historical annotations by Alasdair Gray intended to interrogate the accuracy of Victoria’s disavowal. Rather than asking what does or does not qualify as “real”, Poor Things dismisses the validity of the category altogether. Bella’s tale is a testament to the power of self-definition and the rejection of binaries that seek to classify and control. Bella does not merely escape the physical confines of her creator's intentions; she dismantles the narratives that would constrain her identity, embodying a critique of the norms that govern body, autonomy, and womanhood.  Not captured by the militant draw of insurgency as the golem is, these dissident figures represent what Fred Moten calls “antenormativity” or Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance” demonstrating by evasion, resilience, and creative alterity their disconsent to deterritorialization and interpellation as colonial subjects. The fugitive finds refuge and solidarity within the boundaries of the colonial state but above or beneath the grasp of the colonial power matrix. ## Conclusion Throughout Earth’s history the boundaries defining humanity have remained fluid and permeable, yet they are presented by empires as immutable, a hierarchy of essentialist biological and cultural differences: races, genders, abilities, knowledge, rituals, civilizations; divinely ordained and diabolically enforced by civilizing technologies of indoctrination, surveillance, and discipline. The theme of constructing magical beings to serve human rulers transcends cultures. It appears in humanity's first works of literature, and repeats throughout history, around the globe. This relationship between a normed-human ruler and a demi-human subject has important connections to the practices of colonization, in which indigenous people are “magically” stripped of their claim to human status and reterritorialized as machines for labor and service.  The "Path of the Constructed Subject" reflects the complex experiences of those navigating oppressive systems and highlights the diversity of responses to domination. Unlike the Hero's Journey, which culminates in triumph and return, the Path of the Constructed Subject is marked by continuous negotiation – collaboration, resistance, assimilation, resilience, and the search for liberty within systems designed to exploit.**