Epistemology of the Black Box: On Opacity and Visual Knowledge

• In Event: Media Studies Interruptions of STS - I

Abstract

This paper is broadly concerned with the persistence of the black box as both a theoretical concept and an object of knowledge in the field of science and technology studies (STS). Originally conceived by cyberneticists as a privileged framework to model systems for which little was known (Ashby 1956), the black box has since then become indistinguishable from Bruno Latour’s call to “open the black box” (1987), an approach aimed at reconstituting how scientific discourses and instruments produce truth claims and sustain larger narratives.

By applying media studies’ disciplinary engagement with both technological specificity and representation (Chun 2005, Hu 2015) to the study of the black box, this paper will explore how the call to “open the black box” confuses the non-visual nature of ‘black boxed’ systems for an opacity that can be problematized and accounted for in visual terms. To do so, it will investigate the persistence of visual knowledge in the study of opaque systems by reviewing Kate Crawford’s visual mapping of an AI (Crawford and Koler 2018) and other recent applications of the black box in the STS literature (Ananny et al. 2018, Noble 2018). Media studies however share STS’ tendency to posit seeing as the privileged mode of knowing, thus perpetuating the visual bias underpinning how technological systems are studied by both fields. To overcome this limit, this paper will then turn to postcolonial thinker Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity (1990) in order to displace 'vision' by 'relation' as the privileged mode of knowing opaque systems.

Author

• Théo Lepage-Richer, Brown University