IEP 426: Contested Natures
AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University
Week 10. POST HUMAN NATURE
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Introduction
This concluding lecture addresses recent attempts to reformulate the relationship between nature and society through theoretical work aimed at blurring the boundaries between humans and non-humans. This is examined through Haraway's notion of ‘cyborg culture' and ‘machinic complexes', Ansell Pearson's notion of the ‘transhuman', and Latour's ‘actant'. Conceptualisations which in different ways combine and ‘dematerialise' what has historically been thought of as separate and physical. Such theoretical conceptions, which decentre the human in contemporary thinking, resonate with the drive toward technological ubiquity and artificiality. Notions of human enhancement, artificial life, and trans-humanism operate simultaneously as the ultimate goal of technological endeavour and a frightening post-modern dystopia.
The End of Nature
To paraphrase an REM song this week we are thinking about the ‘end of nature (as we know it)'. Bill McKibben, whose work we have read earlier, has a thesis of the End of Nature. For McKibben, natural systems have been so altered by human kind that we have reached a kind of end –point. For McKibben nature is no longer knowable as ‘nature' but as some kind of human creation:
Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, and our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly, if at all, is the result of a subtly warped perspective. Changes in our world can happen in our lifetime – not just changes like wars, but bigger and more total event. I believe that, without recognising it, we have stepped over the threshold of such a change: that we are at the end of nature (p. 7)
Take, for example, McKibben's description of the atmosphere:
We have done all this by ourselves – by driving our cars, building our factories, cutting down our forests, turning on our air-conditioners. The exact physical effects of our alterations – even whether or not they will be for the worse – are for the moment beside the point. … For now, simply recognise the magnitude of what we have done. In the years since the American Civil War, and especially in the years since the Second World War, we have changed the atmosphere – changed it so much that the climate will be dramatically altered. Most of the major events in human history have gradually lost their meaning: wars that seemed at the time all-important are now a series of dates which school children can't remember, great feats of engineering now crumble in the desert. Man's efforts, even at their mightiest, used to be tiny compared to the size of the planet – the Roman Empire meant nothing to the Artic or the Amazon. But now the way of life of one part of the world is one half-century is altering every inch and every hour of the globe. (p. 42)
McKibben's notion of the end of nature is a kind of diagnosis about the state of the modern world. He suggests that human action has so changed natural systems that nature, as we know it is, has ended.
McKibben's thesis, about human interfereance with nature, is intended as a challenge to the way in which we conceive nature. However for others, this notion of the end of nature, and the possibilities for what is termed a ‘post-human future' is the stuff of expectation and promise.
Last week we saw how some of this thinking has already infused the way that nanotechnology, and its possible convergences with biotech, info-tech and cognitive science, is framed as offering the radical potential for human enhancement. This sense of the possibility of human enhancement operates as a vision of both the possibilities of such technologies and as the ultimate goal. Take for example the influential report Beyond Therapy , by the President's Council on Bioethics in the US :
The healthy body declines and its parts wear out. The sound mind slows down and has trouble remembering things. The soul has aspirations beyond what even a healthy body can realize, and it becomes weary from frustration. Even at its fittest, the fatigable and limited human body rarely carries out flawlessly even the ordinary desires of the soul. For this reason (among others), the desires of many human beings—for more, for better, for the unlimited, or even for the merely different—will not be satisfied with the average, nor will they take their bearings from the distinction between normal and abnormal, or even between the healthy and the better-than-healthy. (President's Council on Bioethics, 2003)
What is remarkable about this report is the way that it naturalises the drive toward ‘aspirations beyond what a healthy human body can realise'. Though not explicit, the report seems to signal a tacit acceptance that the drive toward using advanced and emerging technologies to improve (rather than repair) human performance and faculties is a legitimate goal for the 21 st Century. In such a discourse McKibben's thesis of the End of Nature is more positively spun. Indeed the end of nature is seen as a rhetorical goal, under the primary assumption that human capabilities can, and need to be, improved.
It is here that we get into the murky and quasi-religious territory of the post-humanist movement. Part science-fiction, part cult, part scientific lobby, post-humanists and trans-humanists groups currently advocate the use of technology for all kinds of enhancements of human and natural faculties. Most trans-humanists and post-humanists imagine a two stage process of a transitional trans-human phase before a more complete post-humanists future. For example transhumanism is defined as:
Transhuman is a term that refers to an intermediary form between the human and the posthuman. The etymology of the term "transhuman" goes back to philosopher F. M. Esfandiary who, while teaching new concepts of the human at New School University in 1966, introduced it as shorthand for "transitional human." Calling transhumans the "earliest manifestation of new evolutionary beings," Esfandiary argued that signs of transhumanity included protheses, plastic surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilisation), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhuman )
And post-human is defined as:
A posthuman is a hypothetical future being whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer human by our current standards. "Posthuman" does not denote just anything that happens to come after the human era, nor does it have anything to do with the "posthumous". In particular, it does not imply that there are no humans anymore.
Posthumans could be artificial intelligences, or they could be uploaded consciousnesses, or they could be the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound augmentations to a biological human. The latter alternative would probably require either the redesign of the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or its radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, anti-aging therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable computer, and cognitive techniques. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthuman )
There are a number of web-based communities, lobby groups and organisations all organised around some variant of the post-or-transhumanism. These groups' explicit is to advocate for forms of human and natural enhancement and form the backdrop to developments in nanotechnology and biotechnology. For example, high-raking officials in the US National Nanotechnology Initiative are know to hold trans-humanist beliefs, and this in some way explains some of the more radical proposals for nanotechnology convergence.
In many ways the vision of the post-humanists is the reverse of McKibben's. They have an almost religious conviction in both the possibility and appropriatnes of such radical interventions.
Exercise 10.1: enter terms like ‘transhuman', ‘post-human', ‘singularity', ‘extropy' into Google and see what you get. You should find a list of websites such as:
http://transhumanism.org/index.php/th/
Check some of these web-sites out and think through who these groups are, what they are advocating and their notions of nature.
How then can we respond to such notions of the end of nature? For the remainder of this week we will consider three different responses: religious responses, notions of personal embodiment and nihilism.
Religion
For the neo-conservative commentator Francis Fukuyama cloning, designer babies and eugenics are almost inevitable consequences of what he terms Our Posthuman Future (2002) . In critiquing these developments he suggests that ‘religion provides the most clear-cut grounds for opposing certain types of biotechnology'. This sense of the religious objection to biotechnology has a deep resonance with cotemporary discussions of emerging technologies. Think, particularly of issues around the sanctity and meaning of life itself – cloning, stem-cell research and genetic screening. All of such questions have attracted a level of critique and opposition from religious groups.
Fukuyama is aware that the religious foundations of such critiques are not widely accepted. However, what is significant about his position is the sense that religious arguments enable one to maintain a strong sense of what is essentially natural and essentially human. He states:
In my view this turn away from notions of rights based on human nature is profoundly mistaken, both on philosophical grounds and as a matter of everyday moral reasoning. Human nature is what gives us moral sense, provides us with the social skills to live in society, and serves as a ground for more sophisticated philosophical discussions of rights, justice, and morality. (p. 101)
Please read chapter 5 & 6 of Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future , available on the MAVE discussion site.
Think through the way in which Fukuyama suggests that the only footing upon which to opposing biotechnology is by maintaining a strong notion of nature, based primarily in religious arguments. What do you think about this suggestion?
Nihilsm
Absolutely opposed to Fukuyama 's notion of Nature, as the foundation for the human subject, is the philosophical tradition of nihilism.
Nihilism is closely associated with much of the contemporary continental philosophers we have discussed in the previous weeks and is defined by the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy as:
As its name implies (from Latin nihil, 'nothing'), philosophical nihilism is a philosophy of negation, rejection, or denial of some or all aspects of thought or life. Moral nihilism, for example, rejects any possibility of justifying or criticizing moral judgments, on grounds such as that morality is a cloak for egoistic self-seeking, and therefore a sham; that only descriptive claims can be rationally adjudicated and that moral (prescriptive) claims cannot be logically derived from descriptive ones; or that moral principles are nothing more than expressions of subjective choices, preferences or feelings of people who endorse them.
Similarly, epistemological nihilism denies the possibility of justifying or criticizing claims to knowledge, because it assumes that a foundation of infallible, universal truths would be required for such assessments, and no such thing is available; because it views all claims to knowledge as entirely relative to historical epochs, cultural contexts or the vagaries of individual thought and experience, and therefore as ultimately arbitrary and incommensurable; because it sees all attempts at justification or criticism as useless, given centuries of unresolved disagreement about disputed basic beliefs even among the most intelligent thinkers; or because it notes that numerous widely accepted, unquestioned beliefs of the past are dismissed out of hand today and expects a similar fate in the future for many, if not all, of the most confident present beliefs. (www.rep.routledge.com/article/N037)
As is indicated Nihilsm is about ‘nothing', or ‘nothingness'. This often seen as either morbid or depressing, and whilst the Nihilst's contention that ‘everything is meaningless' is not the most joyous of pronouncements the basic contention of Nihilism is that there is no external meaning to life. For nihilists, there is no god, no pre-existent truth, no-absolute. In their place is nothing, and that ‘nothingness' is life-itself.
This school of thought is most commonly associated with Nietzsche. Nietzsche suggested that in the absence of any overarching moral principles or god the only response is to affirm life itself. Nietzsche's philosophy is a rigorously modern attempt to remove any conception of god or eternal truth from our thought and just to live. His notion of affirmation is perhaps the reason why he is popularly regarded as a forerunner of existentialism (Camus, 1951). The popular image of Nietzsche's notion of affirmation is of the active and positive acceptance of all that is . It is the affirmation of all that happens in the present without recourse to a past or future. ‘ Amor fati replaces what was an odium fati. ' (Camus, 1951, 64) in the sense that the present should not be subjected to any overarching notions of good and evil, to reminiscences of past and hopes for future ideal states. The only thing, for Nietzsche, is the positive affirmation of all that is, to love fate.
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati : that one wants nothing other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity. Still less to dissemble it—all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity—but to love it … (Nietzsche, 1908 [1976], 10)
Nietzsche derides all morality as ‘bad conscience' because of its subjection of fate to categories of good and evil, and due to the production of guilt.
For nihilists, then, developments in emerging technologies and the possibilities for radical human enhancement represent simply a symptom of a more general transhuman condition:
For Nietzsche we lack the right to posit consciousness as the aim and wherefore of the total phenomenon of life. Becoming conscious is simply one means by which the powers of life unfold and extend. It is no more than anthropocentric prejudice to posit spirituality or morality, or any other sphere of consciousness, as the highest value and seek to justify the world by means of this. (Ansell-Pearson, 1997, 162)
The transhuman condition, for nihilists, is neither positive nor negative. It just is the state of being itself. Nihilism is fundamentally anti-essentialist, and rejects Fukuyama 's notion of an essential human nature. Rather the human subject is not stable and is the product of multiple processes of subjectivity. In this sense the transhuman offers a sense of an anti-essentialist human subjectivity. Thus for example Donna Haraway, in her article A Manifesto for Cyborgs (available at: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html ), famously states:
Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
For Haraway the notion of the cyborg – the mixing of human and robotic capabilities, anything from wearing glasses to radical human machine interfaces – offers an intriguing anti-essentialist form of human subjectivity.
Please read Chapter 6 of Keith Ansell Pearson's Viroid Life a available on the MAVE discussion site. The reading is very dense and tangential in many ways, but think through how Ansell Pearson's notion of the transhuman is an anti-essentialist notion of human subjectivity.
Embodiment
In week 5 we discussed the notion of embodiment and its relations with conceptions of the natural. In some ways notions of embodiment are have also been used to think through a notion of post-human nature that is somewhere between the absolute opposites of Fukuyama and nihilism.
For example post-structuralist feminist scholarship has forged a thorough critique of Fukuyama 's notion of human nature. The force of this critique is most evident in contemporary debates regarding the formation of gender and the revalorisation of ‘the body'. These debates concern the place of the physical within the construction of subjective identities. For example, does the subject's sex—defined biologically and physically—have any a priori influence on the subjective appropriation of a masculine, feminine, or other gender? In this context the fundamental question is whether gender is a natural production of biological sex (male and female) or whether gender implies something beyond the basic natural contours. Constructionists took their lead on this question from Simone de Beauvoir who famously stated that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman' suggesting that gender is not an attribute of nature (and far less of physicality) but a social construction. Though sex is a biological attribute of each body, the meaning that this biology acquires is a product of social and cultural discipline. Whilst not necessarily challenging the existence of biological distinctions between the sexes, the postructuralist position denies that these may be known a priori. It is impossible to revert to a natural ‘sex' outside the social construction of gender. Gender is itself a product of power.
… the specular make-up of discourse, that is the self-reflecting (stratifiable) organisation of the subject in that discourse. An organisation that maintains, among other things, the break between what is perceptible and what is intelligible, and thus maintain the submission, subordination, and exploitation of the feminine. (Irigaray, 1985, 80, emphasis in original)
Gender is neither natural nor physical but is constructed through discourse. In this way constructionists refuse any recourse to natural divisions (such as male/female) as explanatory, a priori, material categories. This critique of the natural-ness of gender is also a critique of the metaphysical status of both the physical and the material. In one sense this critique suggests that the discursive construction of gender does not have a necessary relationship with the physical and bodily manifestation of the subject's sex. Both the constructionists and the post-structuralists propose similar notions of the material. Both refuse any ‘return' to matter as a pre-given natural, to any nature outside subjective knowledge. More profoundly, both refuse the separation between the objective and the subjective. Matter is positioned as malleable, an inscriptive surface upon which discursive meaning is written through the action of discipline, in the same way as the body is the surface upon which gender is written. The notion of inscription—drawn from Neitzsche—also instigates this relationship, confirming that it is matter upon which discourse is written.
What is important in this notion of inscription is that the inscription is never complete. Whilst gender is written ‘onto the body' there is ways some part of the body that persists. Similarly for technology. Technology's relationship with the human body is one of inscription, but that this inscription is never complete:
The first thing to note is that discoveries of the body in artificial intelligence and robotics inevitably locate its importance vis a vis the successful operations of mind, or at least of some form of instrumental cognition. The latter in this respect remains primary, however much mind may be formed in and through the workings of embodied action. The second consistent move is the positing of a ‘world' that pre-exists independent of the body. The body then acts as a kind of receiver for stimuli given by the world, and generator of appropriate responses to it, through which the body ‘grounds' the symbolic processes of mind. Just as mind remains primary to body, the world remains prior to and separate from perception and action, however much the latter may affect and be affected by it. And both body and world remain a naturalized foundation for the workings of mind.
(Suchman, http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/suchman-figuring-personhood.pdf )
Please read chapters 1 & 8 of Catherine Hayles' How we Became Posthuman.
How does Hayles use the body, and how does she suggest that some element of human embodiment suvives the inscription of technology?
References:
Camus, A., 1951: The Rebel . Penguin Books, London .
Irigarary, L., 1985: This Sex which is not One. Cornell University Press, Ithaca .
McKibben, B., 1990: The End of Nature. Penguin Books, London .
web notes by Mathew Kearnes 2005
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