TV04 Talk: Vulgar Biocentrism Among the Technophiles

I'll be giving a talk, "Vulgar Biocentrism Among the Technophiles," Saturday, August 7, at the University of Toronto as part of a Conference, "Art and Life in the Posthuman Era."

In the talk I discuss the figurative content of biological science and technology, and the argumentative work these figures commonly do in the imagination and advocacy of radical technophiles.

Here's a longer description of what I'm up to in the talk:

"The first half of the twenty-first century is likely to be shaped most conspicuously by scientific interventions into biological processes, from ever more powerful genetic medical therapies and enhancements, bio-informatics, and bioengineered and superorganic foodstuffs, to the emergence of molecular manufacturing.

"The sweep and scope of biotechnological intervention already reverberates into the language and culture of the societies that are witness to them.

"Biology has a second life beyond its scientific content and technological applications. It is a rich field of metaphors and tropes to which thinkers and advocates and critics in diverse fields make separate recourse in their efforts to make sense of the world and anticipate and shape its futures.

"I argue that it is important for progressive technology advocates and critics to be conscious of our occasional reliance on this figurative dimension of biology, from our use of 'existence proofs' from biology to justify our faith in particular technological outcomes (for example, projected versions of molecular nanotechnologies the specific details of which would often be in fact different in key ways from existing biology) or the way we understand public life (for example, understanding culture through the problematic metaphor of the 'meme') or the way we justify or champion particular organizations of society or the economy (for example, the selective embrace of biology in the market naturalist formulations of 'bionomics').

"It is not my view that the embrace of a biological imaginary across culture is a negative or distortive development, and in fact I consider it practically inevitable and embrace aspects of it myself.

"But I recommend special care about the selective deployment of congenial aspects of biology to underwrite as objectively preferable what ultimately amount to subjective judgments of value. To the extent that 'transhumanism' is suspicious of the normative and ideological force of the 'natural' as a category, one would expect transhumanist discourse and criticism to resist the use of 'naturalizing' metaphors drawn from biology to underwrite its own judgments."