My interest in the posthuman provokes a variety of
responses, but more often than not I get questioned on what exactly the
posthuman is, and how exactly it is useful
(i.e. practical). The posthuman, of
course, is not simply a study of what might come after humanity; in fact, it
more specifically signals an interest in what exactly the human is. Taking a posthuman
stance means not taking the human, and anything we associate with the human,
for granted. It means making no
assumptions on what human beings are or do, even on a general level. It means trying to assess every situation
from not only the human perspective, but from (potentially) all
perspectives. Ultimately, we are all entrenched
in our own method of thought and knowing, our own observational strategies and
informational paradigms – down to the very way in which our senses perceive the
world, we are embodied in a way that conditions our interaction with external
reality, what Immanuel Kant labeled the noumenal. A skeptic of posthuman irrationality (which
is what it can often appear as) will likely say: Yes, and that embodiment is as a human body.
But what really is this body that we so presumptuously
call “human”? What do we really know
about it? Perhaps the assumptions we
make about the body are not indicative of the way the body really is, but are only
our perceptions of the body. But then,
our perceptions are certainly part of the body since they are generated (to an
extent) by it; that is, our perceptivity would not be possible without a body
to act as a perceiving agent. We arrive
here at the notion of reflexivity, and it is defined in the following way by N.
Katherine Hayles in the first chapter of her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics: “Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used
to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of
the system it generates” (Hayles 8). Our
own sensory perceptions allow us to generate a system of the body – to systematize
the body, to organize it according to a field of knowledge; but those same
perceptions are also a part of the system
of the body that they have allowed us to create. Pursuing this tangent, we can lose ourselves
down the proverbial rabbit hole, continually halving our frame of reference,
only asymptotically nearing zero-level – Zeno’s Achilles chasing the tortoise. As Hayles puts it less than a page later: “Reflexivity
tends notoriously toward infinite regress” (9).
The impracticality of this conundrum rings too loud for
some. Humans do in fact engage with their world, often successfully, and they do in fact interact with their
surroundings in certain ways. Can we not
then admit that it is practical to make certain assumptions about what the
human is and about how it behaves? For
the sake of survival and immediate action, I would agree with the previous
rhetorical question. The danger arrives
when we expand our assumptions into universalizations; when we become so
entrenched in our assumptions that they become absolute. I call attention to the posthuman, and to its
concerns, because I want to remain vigilant on an expansive, general
level. I want to protect us from
ourselves – the selves we take to be so human. It may be practical, at our moment in
history, to view ourselves in a constitutive way, to accept as given the manifest image of humanity, in Wilfred
Sellars’s terms. But practicality can
change with the wind, and it can be extremely difficult to alter our cultural
attitude toward ourselves and our environment when what conditions this attitude
becomes universal.
In this post, I want to cite Hayles’s opening assumptions
regarding the posthuman, and offer
them (with some explication) as a kind of posthuman manifesto. There are four total:
1.
“First,
the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material
instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident
of history rather than an inevitability of life” (2).
This first assumption
is a bit misleading considering Hayles goes on to challenge the subordination
of material embodiment: “It is this materiality/information separation that I want
to contest […] My strategy is to complicate the leap from embodied reality to
abstract information” (12). We must
understand Hayles to be constructing a heuristic relationship between
information and materiality, rather than allowing information to subsist in an
idealistic fashion. Hayles specifies
what she means later in the text, in the chapter titled “The Materiality of
Informatics”: “Since the body and embodiment, inscription and incorporation,
are in constant interaction, the distinctions forming these polarities are
heuristic rather than absolute. They
nevertheless play an important role in understanding the connections between an
ideology of immateriality and the material conditions that produce the ideology”
(193). An emphasis on immateriality and
information is only possible through specific material conditions, including
the instantiation of information in a material body. Thus, rather than pursue information as a
kind of Platonic form subsisting beyond materiality, Hayles seeks to ground the
ideal within the material.
2.
“Second,
the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human
identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind
thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that
it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow” (2-3).
As some of my readers
may know, this is a topic that has been on my radar for a while now. As usual, I turn to my homeboy Peter Watts: “Do
you want to know what consciousness is for?
Do you want to know the only real
purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can’t see both aspects of the Necker cube
at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse
reality” (Watts 302). Watts, of course,
is a flagrant anti-humanist. I don’t get
quite the same impression from Hayles, or from most literary critics for that
matter. Despite the dawning revelation
that we’re little more than chemicals and electricity (Watts’s own
description), there still remains the undeniable fact that something rather
miraculous happens when we truly try and think about our consciousness. Even if it is a minor sideshow, it’s a pretty impressive one. When we begin to consider the historical
implications of consciousness – its contingency, its reflexivity – which is
also what Hayles is interested in, tangentially (that is, how consciousness can
arise from matter), we begin to notice how splendidly incredible it is. If in my writings I seem to sideline
consciousness, to subordinate it to matter, then I apologize, for I am being
misunderstood. I’m more interested in
reveling in the utter unlikelihood of consciousness. From inside the Cartesian theater, it appears
as though consciousness must have been preordained, as though life had to
evolve this way. But Watts reminds us
that evolution “has no foresight” (303).
It didn’t have to happen. It was
an evolutionary accident. Whether or not
one believes in a divine being, a creator, or not, we can’t deny the truth of
the matter: that consciousness as an accident
is the true miracle. This is what, if we’re
going to adopt a posthumanist position, we have to come to terms with. This doesn’t necessitate an anti-humanist position,
although there are some (including Watts) who tend in that direction. Rather, we simply have to consider that
consciousness is not the only way for life – even intelligent life – to exist.
3.
“Third,
the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn
to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses
becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born” (Hayles 3).
I am always struck when
people lament or condemn the prospect of technological implants, the use of
enhancing drugs, or the swelling of urbanization while at the same time
praising artificial limbs or organs, medical marijuana, or the building of a
well in Africa. Hayles’s third
assumption allows us to see how part of what the posthuman view allows us to do
is to see how “the human” is never exactly what we think it is. The divide between the natural and the
artificial is more prevalent than ever, and one only needs to look as far as
advertising to find countless products purporting to be more “natural.” This divide, however, can be placed right
back into the system itself, per Hayles’s invocation of reflexivity: the divide
between natural and artificial takes place within the external
environment. Put more explicitly: the
division between the natural and the artificial is itself artificial, and must be done away with.
Life arose from natural inorganic matter, and human
beings evolved naturally. It makes
little sense to draw an arbitrary, artificial line in the sand that marks where
humanity suddenly started becoming artificial.
Everything we do and make – our earpiece phones, our ADHD medication,
our skyscrapers, as well as our prosthetic limbs, life-saving drugs, and water
distribution facilities – is just as natural as the first humans that transported
wood on a wheel, or struck fire from stone, or used language to
communicate. In this very important sense,
we have always been posthuman. The human is not something static, something
that stays the same; it evolves, it reacts, and it absorbs. John Gray has evocatively written that “considering
our bodies as natural and of our technologies as artificial gives too much
importance to the accident of our origins,” and that if “we are replaced by
machines, it will be in an evolutionary shift no different from that when
bacteria combined to create our earliest ancestors” (Gray 16). What we might think of as the posthuman
imaginary – cyborgs, cyberspace, and technological singularities – is little
more than the natural development of what we call “the human.” This is what I take Hayles to mean when she
claims that the bodily absorption or replacement of new prostheses, according
to the posthuman view, is part of a process that has been going on not simply
before we were born, but even before the advent of civilized humanity.
4.
“Fourth,
and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures
human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent
machines. In the posthuman, there are no
essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and
computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot
teleology and human goals” (Hayles 3).
In the work of Nick
Land – which must be some of the most intriguing of recent decades, something
between poetry and prose, fiction and philosophy, speculative exploration at
its best – we get a glimpse of what machinic posthumanity might look like:
The story goes like this: Earth is
captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and
oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic
interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine
runaway. As markets learn to manufacture
intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.
The body count climbs through a series
of globe-wars. Emergent Planetary
Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System,
the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world
disorder through compressing phases.
Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. (“Meltdown”
441)
Land’s apocalyptic writings
are at times enticing and attractive, and at times terrifying, but always
riveting. What readers find in his texts
are elements of a posthuman technocracy where the act of authorial creation
itself becomes absorbed into the system it describes, thus following the theme
of reflexivity. Land purports to compose
what he calls hyperstitions: “semiotic productions that make themselves real” (“Origins”
579). One of the important aspects of
hyperstitions is that their creators do not know they are hyperstitions at the
moment of their creation; they appear as merely fictions. Only in retrospect can they be revealed as
hyperstitions. It is important to note
that the term is coined in one of Land’s most obviously fictional texts; that
is, the term is coined as a fictional term.
Reflexivity works here in the most convoluted way; a fictional term,
coined in a fictional text, but describing fictions that become reality. In a purely representational way, the term –
and the text – merely describes a certain system. Only through a retrospective feedback loop
can the term and text appear as part of the system they purport to
describe. We have to view Land’s work as
fiction. No rational person would claim
that his texts accurately describe reality.
But we find within them the description of the system by which they
become real. So now we wait.
In the aftermath, we will not be able to accurately draw
the line between fiction and hyperstition.
There is no telling when the fictional becomes real, or when the text is
absorbed into the system that it describes.
In much the same way, there can be no final division between the organic
and the cybernetic, or between the human and the artificial – a conflation that
appears as the subject matter of Land’s own speculative work. Humanity, which has striven for so long to
distance itself from its technologies, to keep them at arm’s length, to claim
control and dominance over them, reorients itself in the posthuman. It no longer sees its technologies and
informatics as something separate, but as something at once constituted and
constitutive: we, our environment and historical conditions, constitute the
technologies that we create, but these technologies in turn constitute what we
are as humans, and what it means to be human.
If we do control them, then they control us just as much.
We can claim that there is something objective about the
way human beings are born into the world.
We do not emerge with prosthetic limbs, or cell phones, or computers, or
hammers, or even language. We absorb and
take up these things as we develop. This
we can be most certain of; but we can also be certain that this “state of
nature,” in a Hobbesian sense, which we so often privilege and take to be pure,
is not better or more valuable than any other later developed state. If our bodies become poisoned (and this word
should conjure an intense ambiguity for those familiar with Derrida’s fantastic
long essay, “Plato’s Pharmacy”), or less pure as they mature and develop, this
is no less natural than the entirely insufficient and helpless child that exits
the womb.
We are slowly embracing the posthuman, even if while
doing so we continue to comfort ourselves with hymns to the ideology of the
eternal human soul. We are slowly embracing
the posthuman not because a majority of us are actively pursuing this line of
thought, but because the continual development of technology is forcing us to
do so of its own accord. Apocalyptic narratives that envision evil
robots or technology run amok are merely examples of the popular imagination
attempting to reinforce the bastions of the myth of Man (drenched in all its Western,
white, European male self-glory) against the inevitable reality that we are
just as contingent as the things we create, the things which create us. It may be that, right up until the end
(whatever this “end” may be), we continue to rebel against the tyranny of
technology, to scream against the onslaught of an evolutionary motion that does
not care about us, mistakenly believing that we had a destined right to soil,
planet, and universe.
Or, it may be that we come to see ourselves not as the
creators of technology, but as its inheritors.
It may be that, through enough willing, reconsideration, and
repositioning, we can see ourselves as creature and creator, not as part of a
destiny that was designed, but as part of a process that is contingent. The posthuman is not a philosophy of the end
of humanity, or a politics that seeks an end of humanity; it is a way of
thinking that allows us to understand ourselves in new ways, that allows us to
coexist with the impure and the artificial, and that dethrones us from the
pinnacle of evolution not to replace us with something more valuable, but to
expose the reality that nothing is more or less valuable. Perhaps, once we come to see ourselves this
way, once we shed the rigid and ridiculous notion of the survival of that
reified thing we call “the human,” we may actually find that we can continue to
survive in new ways, in different ways, and, perhaps, even in more efficient
ways.
Works
Cited
Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other
Animals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2003. Print.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.
Land, Nick. “Meltdown.”
Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings
1987-2007. Eds. Robin MacKay and
Ray Brassier. New York: Sequence Press, 2011. 441-459. Print.
-. “Origins of the
Cthulhu Club.” Fanged Noumena: Collected
Writings 1987-2007. Robin MacKay
and Ray Brassier. New York: Sequence Press, 2011. 573-581. Print.
Watts, Peter. Blindsight. New York: Tor Books, 2006.
Print.
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