Is It Naive to Side With Democracy?

A friend worries that my support of the politics of consent over the politics of imposing general standards may make me hopelessly utopian. He analogizes my position to that of someone who might say, "I want to create a world where there is no homophobia so that we don't have to ban biotechnologies that could be used in a homophobic manner." To such a sentiment he proposes the intervention: [S]ince it is impossible to create such a world, isn't it more pragmatic to ban some potentially homophobic uses of technologies?"

Now, while I agree that it is naive to fantasize that one will altogether eliminate racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and so on, I do think it is far from utopian to prefer democratic to authoritarian responses to these pernicious attitudes. But given this, it seems rather foolish to me to attempt to ban technologies to circumvent anti-democratic uses. Rather, one charts anti-democratic attitudes as they articulate actually existing developmental trajectories, and then one struggles with one's fellow citizens to resist anti-democratic outcomes while encouraging democratic ones.

To focus in on the specific example of homophobia my interlocutor mentions, it seems to me, frankly, that hostility to biotechnology often functions as a stealthy surrogate discourse for homophobia -- note the hysterical worries about nontraditional reproduction, the highlighting of the threat to traditional roles, the endless citation of an imperiled "dignity" that amounts to incumbent privileges threatened by "difference," all of which recur in bioconservative discourses in this vein (even sometimes superficially "progressive" bioconservatisms that have the nerve to pretend to champion the rights of nicely assimilationist gay people) and so on. In short, bioconservative discourse regularly seems to me to function unambiguously as anti-queer discourse (see my blog-posts "Chimera," "Technology Is Making Queers of Us All," "Bigotry's New Frontier," among others).

Personally, I am content to struggle to expose homophobia in developmental discourse where it occurs (as certainly it does), to document and resist specific homophobic developmental policy prescriptions as anti-democratic, to engage generally in a multicultural politics supporting diversity and insisting on the self-defeating irrationality of stigmatizing phobias, and otherwise working to ensure that those who remain phobic privatize their parochial attitudes and pay the price of constrained horizons for their intolerance. Beyond that, I fear, one risks an authoritarian policing of differences with which one disagrees, where what is wanted and all that is needed is democratic contestation and the ongoing nonviolent reconciliation of dissensus among peers.

Otherwise, it seems to me that the interests of marginal minorities whose vulnerability and the terms of whose exploitation is variously threatened and exacerbated by particular technodevelopmental outcomes are more to struggle to take up the new powers arriving on the scene and to turn them opportunistically to our own uses in the name of democracy, rather than to struggle quixotically to ban technologies that always inevitably have both good and bad applications, all from fear of the bad ones. Relinquishment seems to me to be a strategy of self-marginalization, a strategy that provokes the hostility of those who desire the actually empowering applications inhering in technodevelopments while simultaneously displacing development onto unscrupulous actors (in places that will ignore bans of popular and profitable developments come what may) likely to be all the more indifferent to the concerns of the Prohibitionists in the first place and hence likely to encourage worst case outcomes even from their own perspectives.

Look, I am the farthest thing in the world from a facile technophile expecting technology to "enlighten humanity" of its own accord or to facilitate emancipatory outcomes through the "natural" crystallization of some kind of "spontaneous order." But there is no getting around it, I do side with democracy rather than aristocracy where these are the alternatives on hand. If the point of this objection is to accuse me of silly idealism for the choice of democratic over elitist politics, then I accept it happily and note that my critic has taken sides as well as an apologist for elitism. (Don't worry, there is of course an ongoing amnesty for gadflies like my friend who take on positions of devil's advocacy to usefully interrogate assumptions and clarify formulations!)

And, of course, once one has taken sides in this larger, older, deeper struggle of aristocracy against democracy, certainly it remains true that there are more and less realistic ways of going about struggling experimentally and responsibly to implement that ideal in the vicissitudes of history.

But I don't think hysterical and futile calls for blanket bans of complex technoscientific developments -- which are almost always, after all, susceptible of both emancipatory and exploitative applications -- is a particularly practical or realistic strategy in general.

Given the breathtaking breadth and deranging depth of ongoing and palpably upcoming technodevelopmental churn confronting us all, it is easy to understand the allure of such Prohibitionist calls from time to time. But it simply seems to me that democracy must do better than that.

Precarity and Experimental Subjection

Precarity is a word that is coming to be used by more and more people to designate key continuities in the conditions, experiences, and implications of a growing majority of the human population to the characteristic mode of exploitation in the contemporary world.

More specifically, precarity indicates an ongoing casualization of the terms of employment under which ever more people labor to survive in today's world, usually conjoined to an ongoing informalization of the terms under which ever more people struggle to secure the basic conditions of housing, healthcare, access to knowledge, and legitimate legal recourse under which they live.

Precarity or precarization sometimes denotes the dismantlement of established entitlements in relatively democratic North Atlantic societies arising out of the market fundamentalist gospel of an endlessly elaborated and augmented "personal responsibility." Even more often, precarity or precarization denotes the erection of barriers to the achievement of entitlements in the first place for people in the overexploited regions of the so-called "developing world" through the terms of neoliberal corporate-militarist globalization euphemized as "free trade." In both cases precarity or precarization describes a social and cultural inculcation of human insecurity as well as the opportunistic mobilization of that insecurity to maintain and consolidate the complicity, obedience, or at any rate the acquiescence, of the overabundant majority of people on earth to the terms of their own exploitation and to the disproportionate benefit of incumbent elites.

"Casualization" is a term that describes the ever increasing number of people who labor in temporary, part-time, intermittent, "flexible" forms of employment, typically with diminished entitlements, security, occasions for advancement or provision for the future, or institutional recourse in matters of grievance. Usually this tendency is described as a shift away from the expectations of especially the citizens in relatively democratic North Atlantic societies that desirable employment will be permanent or at any rate stable, full-time, skilled, characterized by relatively secure benefits, pensions, underwritten in some cases by professional traditions like tenure but more broadly by the provision of more or less extensive welfare entitlements.

"Informalization" is a term that is often used interchangeably with casualization to describe the same trends in prevailing conditions of employment, but also describes the contemporary proliferation of insecure, "unconventional" (though ever more customary) "off the books" social transactions more broadly: bribery, black-markets, influence peddling, kickbacks, barter, payment in kind, blackmail, unpaid labor, squatting, peer-to-peer production, and so on.

Jacob Hacker's recent book The Great Risk Shift captures this dimension of the casualization thesis very well. In the book, Hacker tells the story of the consolidation of the (mostly white) American middle class in the aftermath of the New Deal. During this era, a majority of Americans grew both steadily richer and steadily more secure as a consequence of health and retirement benefits they received from employers, and welfare entitlements they received from new public programs like Social Security and Medicare, which provided benefits when employers would or could not. But Hacker points out that this framework has been dismantled over the course of the last generation, exposing the majority of Americans to the unprecedented risks of a turbulent market economy. "Increasingly," Hacker suggests, in a fairly typical expression of a precarity thesis, "Americans find themselves on a financial tightrope, without a safety net if they slip." Hacker's narrative of the intensifying precarization of the American lower and middle-classes emphasizes rising bankruptcy rates, falling rates of the insured, growing job insecurity as automation and outsourcing render workers less valuable or altogether dispensable, and a growing volatility of individual fortunes, as family incomes fluctuate in ways that are comparable to the swings of stock values in volatile global markets, but in ways that uniquely threaten the capacity of individuals to survive from day to day or make reasonable plans for the future.


Most accounts of precarity, however, take pains to emphasize the special vulnerability of women, youths, immigrants (legal and especially "illegal"), and refugees (both political and, increasingly, environmental) to the casualization of employment and informalization of general welfare they mean to describe as the current catastrophic precarization of life, especially as these arise from confiscatory neoliberal "development" policies of predatory lending and debt restructuring, corporate deregulation and privatization, and the imposition of "market discipline" and "austerity regimes" always only for the most vulnerable populations. Nevertheless, it is important to grasp that precarity characterizes the social conditions under which an ever growing majority of humanity lives, even those comparatively privileged people (for now) who confront diminished expectations and increased existential volatility. Indeed, part of the special force of the various accounts of the Precarity Thesis will be their facility at connecting up these disparate experiences of increasing insecurity and hence their capacity to provide new grounds for planetary solidarity and efficacious political organizing. Meanwhile, at one and the same time, part of the special vulnerability of many accounts of the Precarity Thesis will be their inadequate sensitivity to the differences between, say, the anxieties of a well-educated white middle-class temp-worker in a North Atlantic suburban enclave, on the one hand, and the imperiled existence of an illiterate undocumented itinerate laborer squatting in a toxic floodplain in some mega-slum in the overexploited South, on the other. The Planetary Precariat, such as it is, remains a complex multiculture, articulated by inter-implicated histories of exploitation, collaboration, and contestation.

According to the International Labor Organization, fully half the workers in the world -- approximately one and a half billion people -- live in families that survive on less than US$2 a day per person. Half a billion working poor live on US$1 or less per day. The overabundant majority of these people work in the sprawling informal workforce, without welfare benefits, secure housing, basic healthcare, or reliable recourse to the law, farming, fishing and otherwise scrambling for subsistence in poor villages and alleys or rooftop garden plots. Outright unemployment rates continue to rise globally, while approximately half of the total of unemployed or underemployed people in the world are young adults, aged 15 to 24.

In his chilling and urgent recent book, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis writes of the plight of this planetary Precariat, of the billions of people living under the precarious conditions of "informal" employment, housing, legality, living out a threatened and precarious personhood. Opening with the description of the historical watershed moment when the urban population outnumbers the rural (an event that has very likely already taken place), he goes on to delineate the monstrous new urbanity of the megacities in which this population dwells: in squalid toxic violent slums without proper services or reliable infrastructure. It is a new planetary polis that better bespeaks the morphology of the refugee camp than that of the splendid historical cynosures of the City, London in the eighteenth century, Paris in the nineteenth, New York in the twentieth.

The vast "surplus populations" driven into cities by the brutal urgencies of neoliberal austerity regimes, by the reorganization of the countryside by agribusiness, by war, by genocide, or by climate change are concentrated into segmented, surveilled, and unsupported spaces, incubators for pandemic disease, disorganized rage, and organized crime. In a ghoulish mimicry of the leisurely volunteerism that produces open source software and peer-to-peer collaborations like Wikipedia and the user-generated promotional verbiage Amazon.com uses to sell books, wherever the informal Precariat manages to sculpt from the dangerously unstable toxic geographies to which they are typically consigned something like a minimally liveable and hence rentable place, they are, you can be sure, unceremoniously displaced as quick as may be, and so function as a kind of unpaid, dispensable collaborative developmental force of last resort. Low-lying and coastal as these megacities usually are, one can scarcely contemplate what is going to happen to some of these "surplus populations" as Greenhouse waters continue to rise.

It is in Chapter 25 of Capital, that Karl Marx argued "capitalistic accumulation itself... constantly produces... a relatively redundant population of workers... a surplus-population." The long-valorized former Chairman of the Federal Reserve (and former inner-circle acolyte of the breathtakingly bad market fundamentalist guru cum crappy romance novelist Ayn Rand), Alan Greenspan provided ample confirmation of Marx's prediction, as throughout his garlanded and prolonged bipartisan tenure he repeatedly expressed the attitude that it was part of his job to keep the economy "healthy" by ensuring that a goodly proportion of people remained unemployed, inasmuch as the job insecurity maintained by an abiding reserve labor force restrains demands for higher pay and benefits, keeps costs down and hence "global competitiveness" up. Here, as elsewhere, public figures paid by public moneys to work in the public interest diligently work in fact to immiserate some substantial portion of that public to the conspicuous benefit of another portion.

For Marx, this is all quite elementary: "It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of labourers, if the cost is about the same." Given the incomparable complexity of the functional division of labor which renders it difficult for anyone to gauge in an objective way just what their indispensable contribution to ongoing production really is and hence demand appropriate compensation for it (call this "alienation"), and given the way our primary focus on the price at which a commodity is available for exchange distracts our attention away from questions of its objective utility or considerations of the conditions under which it is made or concerns about the longer-term impacts it makes on the environment (call this "commodity fetishism"), and given the current globalization of "free trade" under the regime of the multinational corporate form backed by corporate-friendly national militaries (call this "neoliberalism") it is ominous to register Marx's insistence that "[t]he more extended the scale of production, the stronger this motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital."

In a usefully complementary formulation, Michel Foucault proposes in his Discipline and Punish, that it is no accident that centuries of reformers have demonstrated through recourse to generations of unchanging evidence of prevailing crime rates and, more to the point, rates of recidivism, that "prison fails to eliminate crime." And hence, against the typical assumption that it is the task of the liberal prison to effect such an elimination, Foucault proposes the substitute hypothesis that the prison is an institution that "has succeeded very well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically... usable[,] form of illegality." (p. 277) The prison, and especially (famously) the exemplary prison architecture of the Benthamite Panopticon, becomes a figure that condenses the "discourses and architectures, coercive regulations and scientific propositions, real social effects and invinciple utopias, programmes for correcting delinquents and mechanisms that reinforce delinquency" (p. 271) all of which have their share in the "carceral system" or operation of "disciplinarity" that Foucault finds operating "around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those [who are] punished -- and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized [!], over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives." (p. 29)

"[I]n producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal but in fact centrally supervised milieu," the prison -- as one exemplary institution among others in "a carceral archipelago" of supervisory locations including schools, asylums, hospitals, workplaces, and so on -- produces "a pathologized subject" (back to p. 277), one that solicits massive normalizing administration at a moment's notice should the "need" arise, one that is "legitimately" exploitable as a resource should this come to seem desirable, and one that functions as a palpable example of the frightening costs of abnormality for the not-as-yet marginal and, hence, exhibiting through conspicuous contrast, while at once prompting, the exemplary workings of the normative practices that produce "normal," self-regulating, properly economizing subjects in the first place.

Precarity discourses typically take such canonical accounts of modern subjection as a point of departure, but then go on to propose that new institutional conditions, cultural machineries, and normative urgencies have lately been set in motion that need to be taken into account to grapple with novel contemporary circumstances of exploitation and duress. These tend in an altogether unique and unprecedented way [1] to be staged on a self-consciously planetary terrain, [2] to be articulated through rhetorics of corporate-militarist "competitiveness" that bespeak neoliberal globalization as much or more than they do customary (inter)nationalism, and [3] to take the form primarily of technodevelopmental social struggle (and, as I shall elaborate a bit at the end, soon enough, biomedical developments in particular) among a diversity of contending, differently authorized, stakeholders.

Although it is undeniable that an insecure workforce has always existed in industrial societies, it is significant that the demands of so-called "Fordist" production models for stable and skilled workers long ensured that this casual or "flexible" labor-force remained structurally peripheral in North Atlantic industrial societies to a more secure labor-force. Whereas, at the heart of precarity discourse, one will find a special emphasis on the rise and recent hegemony of the contemporary multinational corporate form -- which is structurally compelled to increase shareholder profit, whatever the consequences otherwise, while being simultaneously structurally incapable of distinguishing profits garnered relatively effortlessly through the endless externalization of risks and costs from profits achieved through the difficult enterprise of genuine innovation and superior production -- and the concomitant rise of postwar neoliberal globalization models that systematically prioritize the demands of investors over the needs of individual welfare, and emphasize "deregulation" for incumbent interests while imposing debt, "market discipline," and excessive "personal responsibility" on vulnerable majorities.

(This shift from classical Marxist and Foucauldian formulations is announced already, I would say, in the shift in the work of the later Foucault to extended accounts -- many of them finding their way to publication in English only recently -- of the rise of "biopolitics" and the operations of a "governmentality" through which autonomous and "enterprising" selves enlist themselves in projects of self-control that complement the controlling interests of social incumbents as these are indicated in the operations of formal governance.)

By way of a conclusion of this extended meditation on the promising, if problematic, idea of precarity, I want to propose that there are interesting connections for me between precarity and two other topics with which I am preoccupied here at Amor Mundi. The first connection is to the politics of environmentalism, which, like precarity discourse is at once a source of planetary political consciousness and solidarity (as of course it has to be, inasmuch as the biosphere has no borders) and one that focuses its critical energies very particularly in the direction of neoliberal corporate-militarist globalization (inasmuch as the profit-maximizing corporate form is insensitive to environmental costs and benefits as a matter of law and so inevitably produces such damage, inasmuch as the ethos of endless corporate growth is dangerously oblivious to the actually existing limits of the environment on which it depends for its own maintenance, inasmuch as the abstraction and globality of capital flows objectively derange the integrity of local ecosystems, and so on).

The emergence of planetary consciousness connected with the rise of organized environmentalist political movement promsies (threatens) to displace the internationalist consciousness of corporate-militarist competitiveness. (And, as an aside, it does seem to me that no small part of the energy that drives the so-called Global War on Terror in the present day is that it functions as a direct counterweight to this emerging planetary consciousness: a counterweight that bolsters incumbent interests precisely as environmentalist movement instead threatens them; and which formally mimes environmentalism as it parasitically drains environmentalism's radical force, offering up, ostensively, a response to a global "existential" threat, and one that can displace awareness of a more urgent with the spectacularization of a comparably less threatening one.) An environmentalist discourse of precarity would register (as the work of Mike Davis and Vandana Shiva, among many others, models) the disproportionate distribution of risks and costs associated with climate change, biodiversity diminishment, material toxicities, soil erosion, and so on, while at once testifying to the interdependence of human beings with the planet's dynamic biosphere as well as the human interdependence that both threatens and seeks to remediate the damage of extractive petrochemical industrialization on that biosphere.

There is a second connection, I think, to the politics of prosthetic self-determination, morphological and lifeway diversity, topics about which I talk quite a lot here on Amor Mundi. It seems to me that precarity discourse should address itself to certain so-called "bioethical" quandaries, especially concerning the scene of informed, nonduressed consent, especially as the techno-utopian mode of neoliberal "development" discourse becomes ever more preoccupied in coming years with research, development, marketing, and dsitribution of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive "enhancement" techniques in a global frame.

I have proposed the phrase experimental subjection to describe the ongoing and upcoming transformation of the historical frame through which agency is coming to be articulated in human societies now under the unprecedented pressures of rapid and radical technodevelopmental changes and social struggles.

So long as you don't push the analogy too hard, it can be helpful to think of this frame shift into experimental subjection as roughly comparable to the classical North Atlantic shift from royal subjection to citizen subjection. Broadly speaking, that involved a shift from an understanding of proper selfhood deriving from one's sense of their location within a "natural order" overseen by god's representatives on earth to a conscientious selfhood invested with "natural rights" and overseen by the exigencies of market exchange.

Under the terms of experimental subjection, to the contrary, proper selfhood derives from one's sense of their location within an intelligible narrative of ongoing self-creation, and this within the larger context not of "natural order" but of a conspicuous and proliferating lifeway diversity. Further, experimental selfhood is not so much conscientious as consensual. Needless to say, the scene of consent will differ radically in its actual force and significance according to the institutional terms that articulate it, and can be either vacuous or substantial depending on the consensual subject's relative access to knowledge, relative security in her healthy personhood, and relative recourse to the equal protections of the law. That said, the experimental self engages in an ongoing negotiation between desire and risk. Her every assertion and self-assertion is an assumption of personal risk and cost as well as an assumption of social responsibilities. This is because, for one thing, the experimental and self-creative subject is a figure in danger as much as in bliss, and bears both the personal scars and skills that testify to the costliness of experimentation for finite, vulnerable beings under conditions of uncertainty.

Precarization is an inextricable dimension in the emergence of experimental from conscientious subjection as it plays out in all its devastating differences in the world. And an emphasis on this precarity undermines the facile voluntarism that will tend to overtake accounts (especially technocentric ones) of self-creation narrated from positions of privilege: So long as prosthetic self-determination is figured through the precarious scene of an expression that is as apt to misfire, provoke, confound, embarrass, or fall on deaf ears as it is to be felicitous, it is less likely to take up instead the commonplace figure, and manic fantasy, of a prosthetic encrustation of the fragile organism in a cyborg shell rendering him immune from harm, from time, from dependency, the man in his castle, an atom in the void.

Biomedicine may well be arriving at a state of something like constant revolution, throwing off so many promising and threatening therapies from moment to moment that one often cannot calculate with ease the impact to one's risk or benefit in embarking on a course of therapy at just what point along the developmental state of the art one happens to be. Nor can one know in advance what the combinatorial effects of proliferating therapies will be. Under such conditions it is difficult to know just what it will mean to say of an act of consent that it is a properly "informed" one. These difficulties become all the more vexed when we turn from the scene of consent to the scene of decision in which parents and guardians embark upon or refrain from therapeutic courses that will articulate (and quite often, you know, irrevocably) the capacities of preconsensual subjects.

Quite as important, and still more relevant to a discourse of precarity, it is especially difficult to think through the ways in which one might be variously positioned as "competent," "knowledgeable," "authorized," or as already "abject," "imperiled," "hopeless," and so on, from the perspective of those likely to profit most from the release of novel medical therapies into the world, and all in ways that will definitively skew the address of therapeutic claims of promise or threat in the first place. It goes without saying that the Marxian accounts of the production of especially vulnerable "surplus populations" are of special concern in the face of biomedical projects that promise such exquisite outcomes (the radical "enhancement" of desired human capacities or the extension of healthy lifespan) that risks and costs imposed or cajoled onto abject populations might acquire a certain allure, especially to those who are likely to profit doubly (to spell it out: both monetarily as well as therapeutically) by them. So, too, Foucauldian accounts of the production of "pathologized subjects," seem especially in point in the face of biomedical projects that would police human bodies into a conformity denoted as "optimal health" for fear of otherwise imposing "unfair costs" on existing citizens or "disadvantaging" future ones.

The emergence of global bioremedial networks, integrating burgeoning clinical trial data, always-on biometric sensing and tracing, complex private and/or public networked medical administration, assessment, disbursal, and record keeping, and all of this supplementing the still ongoing disruptive transformation from a mass-mediated to a peer-to-peer digital networked public sphere, seems to me to be producing a novel and provocative political consciousness -- very much like the impact of accumulating evidence of climate change on a humanity that has recently seen the earth from the perspective of orbit and understands for the first time that the world is indeed a planet likewise has done. We are becoming experimental subjects, inducted in interminable technodevelopmental social struggles, acting on a planetary rather than a national, international, or even global terrain.

The political imagination of medicine is presently transforming under pressure of a collision between a normalizing model of liberal healthcare administration and this “experimental subjection” model of consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification. The liberal model is defined by an ideal of universal “basic” healthcare provision (an ideal at which we never, of course, really arrived in fact, especially in the United States), while the experimental subjection model is defined instead by an ideal of perfect morphological control and of the widest possible lifeway diversity compatible with a perfectly intelligible scene of informed, nonduressed consent (an ideal at which we will just as surely never arrive, either, especially so long as the scene of consent tolerates accepts the duress of precarization and the derangement of misinformation). What remains is likely, as ever, to be a shifting politics of risk, profit, and stress management, but one which will be differently articulated depending on the ideal that drives it, and one that, to be sure, will manage to be more democratic and more fair the more we manage to ensure the scene of consent is as informed and nonduressed as possible by keeping access to knowledge open and poverty at bay for all.

By all means we will want to ensure that just as we must resist the elite insistence that casualization, informalization, and precarization constitute some kind of emancipatory flexibility and loosening of onerous constraint (as indeed it might be were, say, a universal basic income and lifelong basic healthcare and access to education and re-training guaranteed to all as a birthright), so too we must resist the elite insistence that our universal induction into planetary bioremedial networked clinical trials constitute some kind of carefree shopping for elective enhancements when in fact we will be exposed to unprecedented scrutiny and danger (as well, no doubt, as opportunity), and when the distribution of technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits is not the least bit likely to be safe, fair, or deliberative unless we make it so.

There are, to be sure, resources for both pernicious mystification as well as for practical hope in the ways these new discourses of precarity variously connect up to the deep awareness -- or, likewise, to the all-too-potent, all-too-common disavowal of awareness -- of the ineradicable finitude or precariousness that definitively articulates the human condition in its environmental vulnerability to suffering and death and in its social vulnerability to misunderstanding, humiliation, and abuse. As Judith Butler has commended to our attention in an important recent essay, this attention to (or disavowal of) our existential precariousness can be mobilized in the service of democratizing projects of empathy, conversation, and solidarity or just as easily to mobilize moral panics, hysterical censorship, or punitive wars without end. It can inspire the necessary planetary consciousness of environmentalist movement or just as easily the crazy rage fueling "our" interminable racist militarist "War on Global Terror." It can drive the consignment of "surplus populations" to deaths-in-life that live only in their trace in the life of privilege, or it can drive the emergence of an era of universal consent and, hence, emancipation.

Four Pillars of Brand Republicanism

Tom Schaller writes today in the Baltimore Sun:

According to the latest Gallup survey, Republican self-identification has declined nationally and in almost every American state. Why? The short answer is that President Bush's war of choice in Iraq has destroyed the partisan brand Republicans spent the past four decades building.

That brand was based upon four pillars: that Republicans are more trustworthy on defense and military issues; that they know when and where markets can replace or improve government; that they are more competent administrators of those functions government can't privatize; and, finally, that their public philosophy is imbued with moral authority. The war demolished all four claims.

I agree with the thrust of this, but I think the word "demolish" is far too strong. I think the catastrophes of the Bush Administration (and the unspeakably callous, incompetent treatment of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina easily ranks right up there with the lying catastrophically costly war of choice in Iraq) have created an opening for genuine democratization here in the United States.

But the sad truth is that for these catastrophes indeed to be enough of a reality-check to demolish the post-Goldwater Republican brand we would have to suppose that the social, cultural, and political force of that brand had more to do with an objective assessment of reality than it ever really did. Again, to be clear, I do agree that the object lessons of the Killer Clown Administration have rendered the religious and market fundamentalist coalition of the contemporary Republican brand more vulnerable than they have been in years, but I think rumors of its (well-deserved) demise are highly exaggerated.

This is because I believe that four pillars on which that brand is truly "based" are different from the four Schaller delineates, and that these actual four pillars (there are very likely more, I'm offering up just these four as a euphonious correlate to Schaller's) are ugly and intractable attitudes largely fueling the sorts of public claims Schaller talks about but rarely finding their way into the public sphere themselves except as weird occasional symptoms that provoke equally weird symptomatic scandalous freakouts that rarely resolve anything or ecourage useful dialogue.

In any case, My Own Four Pillars of Brand Republicanism recall:

[1] that American society is deeply racist (and the depth of this racism is consolidated by America's hysterical ritual denials about the brutal fact of it);

[2] that Americans are still, for now, pampered beneficiaries of a bloodyminded, reckless, wasteful corporate-military global order that insulates them too much from the actual immediate consequences of their practices of consumption to motivate much in the way of reasonable assessments of actual costs or of their own personal responsibilities in matters of social justice, environmental damage, or international violence;

[3] that the same men who still own incomparably more than everybody else and have incomparably more say over contemporary affairs than most anybody else nevertheless both feel and fear the precariousness of their hold on this elite position (and the aggressive politics arising out of this recognition will nonetheless fall often to people who benefit at best only marginally or even only imaginarily from patriarchy in fact, that is to say, to men otherwise marginalized by the machineries of race, class, or homophobia, for example, or, of course, to many women who mistake their own stake in the maintenance of patriarchy);

[4] that global technodevelopmental change is and will continue to be deeply destabilizing and, hence, anxiety provoking, and that far too many people will look for a post-parental figure to hold their hands or order them around in the face of such radical change rather than undertake the more difficult work of organizing with their peers in struggle and collaboration to ensure best outcomes.

These four pillars are deeper and more stubborn than Schaller's, I fear, and decent, pragmatic, democracy-minded folks are setting themselves up for heartbreak (and worse) if we foolishly imagine that such underpinnings are readily dislodged by mere facts of the matter -- even when the facts include a mile-high pile of drowned and tortured corpses with the Republican brand stamped on every face. There are deep psychic subterranean currents of fear and greed and resentment and aggression and denial propping up the Republican brand, and the democratic politics of openness (with all its very real vulnerabilities) and respect for others (with all its very real burdens) will always be a fragile attainment, even in days that are not quite so dark as our own sometimes seem.

But, yes, Bush has failed spectacularly enough that there is a real opening to demand we do things better before all is lost altogether. But discerning the demolition of the Republican brand in all this is wishful thinking, a matter of mistaking the starting for the finishing line.

Mass Mediated Hand Holding: Depressive Bioconservative Cinema and Its Manic Technophiliac Twin

"Over the past 100 years, films have simultaneously mistrusted and marveled in the possibility of genomic improvement," comments David Kirby in an intriguing recent article in The Scientist.

Kirby begins his piece with the conjuration of a scene from one of my personal guilty pleasures, the truly (inspired?) kookoo bananas 1996 re-make of The Island of Dr. Moreau, starring Marlon Brando.

"The very essence of the devil is no more than a tiresome collection of genes." Now imagine Marlon Brando's voice saying this. Now imagine, as Kirby sketches the scene, in aptly purple prose: "With his white muumuu, rosemary-like beaded necklace and domed 'Pope-mobile'... Brando's Moreau suggests the image of a secular priest worshipping at a genetic alter [sic]."

But consider the bitter ambivalence of Brando's actual line here: a devil (and, one suspects, too, a God) that is "no more" than a scattering of genes. It is surely only because this is the declaration of a loss of faith in a divinity that promised to be incomparably more than any such crude scattering, that Brando's Moreau finds the actual revelation of mundane reality so "tiresome" in its details. Given this, isn't it a bit hasty to propose that this Moreau "suggests" a priestly tableau of "worship" at the "genetic altar"? Is worship the right word at all to denote this attitude?

Kirby goes on: "Despite recent scientific advances, science fiction films from most decades... have surprisingly utilized the same themes and visual motifs in their representations of human heredity and genomic modification[.]" The article surveys this scene with nice pithy vividness, taking us from "[t]he animalistic 'human ape'... from early comedies such as Reversing Darwin's Theory (1908) to post-Scopes trial mad evolutionist films like Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), all the way to the zombies infected with 'rage' genes in 28 Days Later (2003)."

But Kirby's genial summary of the attitude presumably shared in common along this long trail of popular genomic meditations on film is that "[o]ur genes encode both the dark and delightful sides of human nature, and any steps towards genomic improvement should inspire both wonder and wariness." As with his curiously bland undercomplication of Brando's Moreau, nothing could be clearer from even his short survey that these films foreground the dark over the delightful and wariness over wonder in a way that is the furthest imaginable thing from the overscrupulous balancing act of his own summarizing assessment.

Even when he tries to qualify the impression of unrelenting anxiety and gloom that so overabundantly characterizes the genre he's sampling, Kirby's examples seem always only to re-iterate the same nervous negativity as before, but just from different directions. And so, when he proposes that "[n]ot every film depicts our genome as defective; many science fiction films instead find the human genome to be serviceable but harboring untapped 'evolutionary potential,'" his example, Spider-Man (2002), which "feature[s]" the transformation of "ordinary Homo sapiens into the highly evolved Homo superior" is hard to distinguish from what he has already described as the "change from man to monster" we confront in the Hulk (2003).

In another effort to complicate this cinematic doomsaying, he proposes a subgenre which "depict[s] a different kind of monster: physically and intellectually perfect individuals[.]" But inasmuch as this "perfection robs them of their connection to the rest of humanity" (his example? 1997's dystopic GATTACA, natch) it isn't exactly clear how this is anything more than a restaging of the very same bioconservative themes he's discerned elsewhere.

Clearly Kirby is really on to something in this piece, but it seems to me he undercuts the force of his observations a bit in soft-pedaling them in false, presumably consoling, formulations of even-handedness. Kirby asks the question: "Why do science fiction films simultaneously acknowledge the possibility of genomic improvement but consider it morally problematic?" His survey suggests the stronger question, why do science fiction films endlessly restage an appalled fascination with the moral problem of the status of humanity in an era of irresistible biological discovery and biomedical intervention?

Kirby takes up a suggestion from, Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, "that geneticists often endow DNA with a nearly spiritual importance." He claims that "[t]his spiritual language about the human genome helps fuel the anti-technology aspects of human gene manipulation in science fiction cinema," because it confronts us with a metaphysical quandary: "How can scientists consider our genome humanity's 'soul,' and then commit sacrilege by manipulating a 'holy object?'"

But isn't it quite easy to turn the tables on such a suggestion, even on its own terms, and insist that science and medicine are expressing their ritual devotions to the "sacred book of life," facilitating its ongoing revelation through their ministrations? This isn't a line of hype that exerts much pull on a crusty atheist like me particularly, but its ready availability certainly suggests that there is more afoot here than straightforward spiritualization to nudge films so relentlessly into bioconservatism.

Of course, successful films will often need to generate suspense to hold an audience's attention, and so there is a tendency to focus on disaster over normalcy, threat over hope, extraordinary individual courage over ordinary collective conscientiousness, and all of this will skew "Hollywood" representations in hyperbolic directions. But it isn't enough to show that things can go wrong, that we should be careful when we play with fire, to nudge us into a conservative hostility to new knowledge.

And hence the key passage in Kirby's piece for me is when he proposes such an explanation, but freights it with deeper significance in order to render more plausible his suggestion that a precautionary impulse might bear the weight of the monologic bioconservatism of the genre he has been surveying. "Ultimately," he writes, "society, as reflected in science fiction cinema, retains the conviction that our fate is in our DNA -- and, as movies often show us, messing with fate can have disastrous consequences." What matters here is not the quotidian observation that we should take care around dangerous things, but that Kirby wants to frame this observation unnecessarily with the paraphernalia of fate.

Although it may have become a commonplace conviction to assert, as Kirby does, that "our fate is in our DNA," it seems to me much more apt to say that the very idea of "fate" cannot long retain its allure once we understand the complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors articulating actually-existing human lifeways in all their diversity. Nor can the idea of a "destiny" written in advance in the "natural order" long retain its relevance once we understand the extent to which human capacities are susceptible of biomedical intervention. While I do not deny that scientists truly seem to invest the genome with the aura of the sacred -- Kirby reminds us just how often the human genome is glibly described as the "Book of Man," the "essence of life" or the "Holy Grail" -- it seems to me this rhetoric is less a seamless translation of the holy into the language of science as it is a mark of the hole where the holy once was, and at the site of the science that brought the authority of the holy into crisis.

Although the films Kirby discusses are preoccupied with the fantastic and the futuristic, it seems to me that this is always a kind of conjuring trick, and that while these films seem to provide a space for a troubled meditation on possible threats and losses of individual agency and readily-intelligible meaning, this scene of "trouble" is better understood as providing in fact a reassuring and even anesthetizing distraction from the deep realization on the part of the audience that something like this loss has already occurred.

Let me be clear about this: To be able to understand in the first place how genetic science could threaten to undermine one's moral vocabulary is always already to have undermined that moral vocabulary, and fatally so. If knowledge could threaten to lose one their soul then that "soul," in the very moment of grasping the nature of the threat it could face, is already lost, then and there. If genetic intervention could rob a future baby of its sense of autonomy, then that autonomy is lost already in education; if doping could rob athleticism of its beauty, then that beauty is lost already in training; if therapy could rob the individual of liberty, then that liberty was lost already in the life that brought one to therapy.

It's not that I am insensitive to the shades of difference that obtain in these differing scenarios, it's that I think the priestly formalisms, whether religious or naturalist, which are threatened by the powers of technique cannot assimilate these shades without evaporating themselves. To understand how genetic intervention might rob a future baby of its sense of autonomy is to fatally threaten that conception of autonomy as it confronts a changed understanding of the work of education. To understand how doping could rob athleticism of its sense of beauty and integrity is to fatally threaten those conceptions of beauty and integrity as they confront a changed understanding of the work of training. To understand how medical therapy could rob an individual of their sense of liberty is to fatally threaten that conception of the underpinning and constituents of liberty as it confronts a changed understanding of the impact on an individual life of its vicissitudes.

Neither is it true that I personally tremble much at the tender wound that is the loss of the sacred, since it seems to me this loss is the site on which humanity erects an alternate and, for me, incomparably more appealing architecture of meaning and significance and hope: in exchange for the authoritarian palace of the priests and the humiliating quest for connection with the voice of the cosmos we can plan and work together to build the road to a deeper democracy and engage in the error-prone but serendipitous conversation with our peers. It is certainly a fraught and weighty moment when one realizes that one is in fact vulnerable to error, to misunderstanding, to betrayal, to psychic and bodily pain, to both catastrophic and emancipatory accidents that acquire their meaning only retroactively in the stories we come to tell of them, and so on.

The confrontation of the pleasure principle with the reality principle, as Freud put the point a century ago, names the moment when a person grows up, the moment of enlightenment, in Kantian parlance. It is the moment when we realize that we only have each other to build a life worth living with.

Now, biomedical therapies are among the tools we have on hand in our own era to engage in such life-building projects of personal self-creation. And because they are new and because they are risky and because they promise to proliferate a humanity already confounded by the demands of its plurality, they have become a ready synecdoche for the quandaries of a self-creative materially experimentalist humanity without a godly hand to hold as we grope along, sometimes together and sometimes in one another's way. These are the conditions which seem to me to better account for the curious bioconservatism of the genre of speculative genomic cinema that preoccupies Kirby's attention.

I'll note in conclusion, that there is in fact a mass-mediated genre that offers up an actual counterpoint to Kirby's technophobic sf, but it isn't to be found in the cinema where Kirby scouts for it:

Bathed in pastels and reflective surfaces, lithe models wearing predatory expressions ooze into and out of seamless vehicles and pop empowering pills, caressing smooth eerily organic metal enameled hand-held devices like adolescents lovingly handling their genitals into song. In an era when technological discourse is overbearingly defined by the twin urgencies of multinational corporate competitiveness and international military competitiveness, it takes less than a minute to provide the ecstatic satisfactions of technophilia, where it often takes nearly three hours to craft the subtler satisfactions of technophobia. Hence, while film remains for now the primary arena for the latter, there is little question that for the former we turn instead primarily to the 30-second commercial spot.

It seems to me that the crass cheers of technophiles interminably hawking their unwelcome wares at indecent hours of the night and day, or declaiming an impending end to all limits altogether, despite the logical impossibility of any such total overcoming for actually finite beings, represents exactly as unhelpful and hysterical a fixation on the loss of the sacred as is the technophobic one with which I have been preoccupied through most of this discussion. Granting that technophiles are often just cynically or at any rate uncritically peddling a line of hype -- that is to say, the steroidal declaration, "There Are No Limits!" more often than not simply expresses the ugly assumption, I fear, that there will always be other people around to clean up after one's messes -- it seems to me that even in its earnest variations the substitution of scientific progress for religious faith as a bolster to the need of the queasy and quiescent for reassuring post-parental handholding in the face of life's deep dangers and contingencies constitute little more than manic and depressive varations on the same hyperbolic responsiveness to the same difficult reality, and neither have much to recommend them as far as I can see. They remain, however, quite fun to watch.

Decaying Meat: Pretty in Pink

Jim Hightower excoriates the ever more common meat industry practice of gassing slaughtered bodies so that they retain an "enticing" pinkish hue long after they are truly fresh.

I applaud Hightower's expose, certainly, and am reminded of a suggestion made by feminist vegetarian Carol Adams over a decade ago. In a comparable spirit of health-conscious consciousness-raising Adams proposed that food-corpses be helpfully labeled for their prospective consumers, rather as cigarette packages are today.

No doubt her suggested wording could use a little tinkering if it were to be slapped on the "food"-corpses in question by government agents rather than by vegetarian activists, say, but, come what may, she conveys the key insights clearly enough:

WARNING: This is a dead body. The decaying process has already begun. You do not need to eat dead animals to stay healthy. Reduce your risk of getting six out of ten diseases that cripple and kill Americans: Boycott this product and choose vegetarianism.

Now doesn't that just make your mouth water?

Those of you who are not yet ready to take such a vertiginous plunge away from the ubiquitous "commonsense" of our corpse-cuisine culture can take a fine first baby step in the right direction for now and hear what Hightower has to say about America's meat-is-murder merchants:

Two Faces of Progress

Technoprogressive analyses and campaigns take on wide-ranging (and not necessarily comfortably compatible) forms, but they all assume two definitive ideas about progress. First, they characterize progress as an historical process, a process of ongoing heterogeneous technodevelopmental social struggles, rather than as some autonomous expression of an evolutionary or innovative "impulse," or as a linear or socially indifferent accumulation of useful techniques. Second, they insist that progressive technodevelopmental outcomes must always satisfy two emancipatory dimensions at once, a technoscientific dimension and a sociopolitical one.

By the technoscientific dimension of progress I mean to describe the ongoing increase of warranted descriptions of the world that emerge out of the protocols and institutions of consensus-science, and the consequent increase of the capacities of human beings to manipulate the environment and anticipate experience in the service of shared ends. By the sociopolitical dimension of progress I mean to describe the ongoing democratization of societies, in which ever more persons and peers have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them and are ever more empowered to articulate the terms which define their morphologies and lifeways, through self-creative practices of informed, nonduressed consent.

Granting the interdependence of these two dimensions of progress and granting their equal indispensability as registers of progress for technoprogressives, there still remain questions of whether either dimension has a priority over the other for technoprogressives, in any sense, under particular circumstances.

I will propose that this question of technoprogressive priority has a somewhat paradoxical conclusion (and that its paradoxical quality helps explain some vulnerabilities that technoprogressives have to contend with in their thinking, in their organizing, and in their rhetoric):

On the one hand, there should always be for technoprogressives what I will call a structural priority of the sociopolitical dimension of progress over its technoscientific dimension but, on the other hand, there will often be what I will call a conspicuous strategic priority of the technoscientific dimension of progress over its sociopolitical dimension.

When I say that there is a structural priority of the sociopolitical dimension over the technoscientific dimension in technoprogressive accounts of proper progress a large part of that claim derives from the belief that technoscientific outcomes depend on sociopolitical outcomes in a significant sense. That is a claim, in turn, with multiple dimensions:

It reminds us, for one thing, that the protocols and institutions of consensus scientific practice (and, hence, technoscientific progress) always deeply benefit from, and usually even depend on, the nourishment provided by the context of stable, prosperous, informed, critical-minded, accountable social orders (and, hence, sociopolitical progress).

More urgently, perhaps, the claim also highlights some idiosyncrasies of the global technodevelopmental terrain with which we are contending in this specific historical moment. That is to say, technoprogressives will usually insist that it pays to remember to what extent technodevelopmental forces are at present overabundantly articulated by the urgencies of multinational corporate competitiveness and international military competitiveness.

This has the consequence that what often passes for "neutral" or "apolitical" technodevelopmental policy discourse will simply take these conditions of corporate-militarism as a point of departure and, hence, will functionally and stealthily endorse what are in fact the highly problematic politics of their maintenance and, even, their consolidation.

Developmental policy discourse in its "neutral," "technical," "problem-solving" guises drifts almost irresistibly into the mode of apologia for the status quo: Whether by uncritically foregrounding the value of "innovation," pretending that this term names a commitment to creativity or free expression when it regularly functions more concretely to underwrite commitments to specific contingent intellectual property regimes that preferentially benefit incumbents; -- Or by incessantly emphasizing questions of risk, security, and threat rather than of possibility, democracy, and freedom, pretending that this is the mark of seriousness and professionalism when it regularly functions more concretely to shore up authoritarian and militarist organizational responses to radical change and social instability rather than popular and indigenous responses.

All of this is, needless to say, profoundly political even when (or most when) these discourses disavow their politics, and so it is important to recognize how often sociopolitical critiques of particular technodevelopmental outcomes that are accused of pointlessly or perniciously politicizing technoscience are often instead responding to a pernicious politics already well in play.

If I may be forgiven a lapse into even more abstruse considerations, I will add that the claim about the technoprogressive priority of the sociopolitical over the technoscientific also indicates the interdependence of normativity with factuality, inasmuch as even objective claims have as their tests their facilitation of prediction and control of shared ends.

This matters, because the palpable and widespread discomfort and even hostility of so many people (and not only incumbent interests) to the confusing contingencies and demands of normative interpersonal affairs very often inspires widely compelling but ultimately reactionary projects to circumvent the political by making recourse to a "scientificity" construed as apolitical.

I don't deny that there is a key difference between scientific beliefs whose protocols of warrant solicit consensus, and political beliefs whose protocols of warrant register an ineradicable dissensus of legitimate ends (and because I grasp and grant this point, I fear those who would want to dismiss me as a "fashionably nonsensical" "postmodern relativist" or whatever will rightly have a hard time of it, indeed), but I do deny that this is a difference that can successfully bear the weight of foundationalist dreams of circumventing the painful exactions of normative life under actually-existing conditions of personal plurality.

Now, let me shift things a bit. Even if I strongly prioritize the sociopolitical over the technnoscientific with an eye to all of these structural considerations, despite all of the foregoing, I still agree that there are usually very good read practical reasons nonetheless to distinguish concrete political efforts to achieve technoprogressive ends like securing more public funding to facilitate medical research, biotechnology(/nanotechnology), renewable energy technologies, techniques of sustainable polyculture, a2k and p2p for networks and immersive media, proliferating cognitive and morphological prostheses, space elevators, and so on (the sorts of things one might well want to place under the heading of technoscientific progress), as opposed to political efforts -- most of them deeply appealing to technoprogressives, even foundational for them -- to implement the provisions in the United Nations "Universal Declaration of Rights," to support international and multilateral efforts to police global crime, terrorism, and human trafficking, to insist on the diplomatic circumvention of warfare, the end of war profiteering, the radical diminishment of arms, to implement universal basic health care, treat neglected diseases around the world, to provide a global basic income guarantee, to achieve universal literacy and numeracy education, and encourage the emergence of democratic world federalism from the current international (dis)order (the sorts of things one might well want to place under the heading of sociopolitical progress).

I happen to think that there are plenty of already-existing ands well-established organizations doing good work toward sociopolitical progress in the latter characterization and that to the extent that such progress is one's more proximate concern it is probably a good idea to help them out (you know, give to Oxfam, join the ACLU, read up on BIG [basic income guarantees] online, or some such thing).

However, this does not mean in the least that I think technoprogressives should focus instead "solely" on concrete technoscientific campaigns, for the three reasons I discussed at length a moment ago. I personally think that the primary contribution of technoprogressive efforts at education, agitation, and organizing should be to foreground the actual promises and dangers inhering in concrete ongoing and upcoming technoscientific change, but always particularly for and against the accomplishment of the ends characterized as sociopolitical progress. That is to say, I advocate the apparently paradoxical position that technoprogressives are usually most useful whenever we foreground our distinctive insights about the concrete threats and tactical opportunities inhering in radical technoscientific developments, but never in a way that denigrates, seeks to circumvent, or forgets the actual priority of sociopolitical progress: democracy, equity, peace, and consent.

Again, the key thing for me is understanding that the structural priority of sociopolitical to technoscientific progress for technoprogressives (in all their diversity) is still a different question from understanding that the site for the most conspicuous analytic and organization contributions from technoprogressives is likely to focus more often on concrete technoscientific change than on general sociopolitical questions. All this in turn simply implies that technoprogressives should take care always to keep track of sociopolitical questions of democracy, justice, peace, and rights -- even when these issues are sources of difficult and painful contention within organizations and campaigns, even when the specific and urgent contributions of organizations and campaigns are apparently less contentious questions of concrete technoscientific outcomes -- simply because without a firm grasp of and attention to the sociopolitical dimensions of progress the forms technoprogressive advocacy will take will too likely come to undermine the sociopolitical underpinning of technoscientific progress, whether we like it or not, whether we mean for it to happen or not.

I will mention, by way of conclusion, that the present discussion is a crucially different one from my very regular jeremiads against the confusion of properly outcomes-oriented technoprogressive politics from the subcultural politics of self-celebration and membership-outreach -- a confusion that I believe overwhelms, to their cost, some of the "transhumanist" and "futurist" folks with whom I often find myself in very useful and provocative conversation. I do think that the concerns I am talking about here today do sometimes contribute to the confusions I talk about in my critiques of technocentric subcultural politics qua practical politics. I do think that technocentric subcultural identities often arise very particularly as a response to the deranging depth of contemporary technodevelopmental change, and that responses of generalized affirmation of or hostility to such change are the engines of affinity from which "transhumanist" and "luddite" interpretive communities are substantiated and invigorated.

Too often members within such technocentric subcultures substitute for what I have been calling the structurally prior sociopolitical dimension of progress what is in fact the generalized and often uncritical technocentric attitude that fuels their particular practice of identification and disidentification (the curious conjuration of "pro" verses "anti" technology "forces" in some impossible ideal generality). Meanwhile, what I have been calling the strategically prior technoscientific dimension of progress tends to become a fetishized spectacle of technological detailing functioning primarily to interminably re-confirm the plausibility of the ever deferred futures that ideally exemplify either the daydream or nightmare of "technology" that binds technocentric communities together and enables them to provide the uniquely subcultural satisfactions of mutual recognition, support, belonging, meaning-making, and so on.

Obviously, my point is not to denigrate such subcultural satisfactions. I rely on my own moral memberships quite as much as anybody else, and even if I do not personally garner my subcultural satisfactions from technocentric identification I certainly don't believe my own idiosyncratic sources for visibility and support are qualitatively different or superior to that of the common or garden variety technocentric. My point is, of course, to insist that the pleasures of identification and disidentification are crucially separable from the exigencies of practical stakeholder politics and to warn about the confusions that arise when the one becomes a stealthy surrogate discourse for the other. The complexities with which I have been grappling in this post today make it easy to understand the allure of such discursive surrogacies, but provide no reason at all that I can see to succumb to them and every reason for technoprogressives to keep their priorities and their premises as clear as may be.

Faith in Technology?

I am an atheist myself and have been for nearly a quarter of a century now, at any rate since my first year of college, when I thought it through and determined I was quite content to do without god ("a-theist") as a personal preoccupation -- especially among so many others I was discovering at the time.

As a pretty conspicuous queer I have had more than my share of personal abuse at the hands of Christian and other kinds of fundamentalists. And certainly it has often seemed to me that, here in America at any rate, loud out-proud self-appointed "people of faith" have stood in the front ranks of social and political struggles that have been among the most catastrophic in my lifetime. They have been conspicuous among the sneering hatemongers picketing people suffering with AIDS through the 80s and early 90s. They have been among the saucer-eyed know-nothings cheering the dismantlement of science education, deriding evolution, disputing safer sex education and family planning, disdaining needle-exchange, decrying stem-cell research, and declaiming endlessly about a phantasmagoria of clone armies, frankenfoods, human-animal hybrids, and designer babies as a way of elaborating reasonable fears that should have driven reasonable regulation into irrational panics that have blocked the road to inquiry and turned us aside from the application of human ingenuity to solve human problems. They have thronged the ranks of the so-called lovers of the fetus who are so often one and the same as the haters of the child, the ones who refuse women the right to end unwanted pregnancies but then yawn with indifference or what even looks like smug pleasure as the ranks of poor, uninsured, ill-educated children exposed to deregulated toxic substances, rising Greenhouse waters, and drowning in debts to pay for tax-cuts for the already rich swell insanely beyond measure or misery. They have stood shoulder to shoulder among unrepentant racist mobs cheering on a "White Christian America," endlessly at war with the poor within its borders (all in the name of the champion of the poor) and eternally aggressively picking fights in a "War of Civilizations" everywhere else (all in the name of the Prince of Peace).

All of this is just to point out that it is easy for me to understand where the stridency of atheist activists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and others is coming from these days.

But to be honest, despite all of this and despite my own atheism, I have to admit that I personally find it quite easy to sympathize with the lifeways of many people of faith. I find that I cannot agree with "militant" atheists who would claim that there is anything inevitably dangerous or deranging or degrading about the beliefs and practices of the variously faithful.

Too many atheists seem to me to be oblivious to the vicissitudes in the history of human belief to which they are themselves indebted, the traditions of experimentalism, skepticism, heresy, estheticism, ecstasy, doctrinal conflict, and utopian organization that have risen from within communities of the variously faithful. This sort of ignorance or even indifference to historical context among some of the conspicuous spokespeople of "organized irreligion" is a troublesome development among freethinkers, inasmuch as the stubborn repudiation of history is quite as central to the religious fundamentalist mindset as is its authoritarian politics.

Indeed, I would suggest that the inability of the faithful fundamentalist to question the authority of their leaders or the literality of their doctrine derives first of all from their insensitivity and even hostility to the transformative forces and effects of history. I think this is the insight that some critics of the current crop of activist atheists are struggling to express when they decry a worrisome similarity between the militancies of both the faithful and the faithless (and clearly I see their point, even if I think it is a bit belabored right about now when the clash of militant theisms is so overabundantly more catastrophic than any militant atheism could foster at a time like this).

Be that as it may, I'll go so far as to say I sympathize especially with those people of faith who have found their way into the practices of various esoteric mysticisms (some traditions of which were key incubators of protoscientific practice), inasmuch as my own personal practices of lifeway experimentation -- sexual, pharmacological, therapeutic, poetical, political, pedagogical, and so on -- seem to me to have more in common than not, both in their values and their dangers, with some projects of exploratory religiosity.

What seems crucial to me is that we have all of us come to live together now in diverse interdependent technoconstituted societies, and hence whatever paths of personal perfection people find their way to as individuals it is necessary that they take what I will call The Secular Turn. This Turn is hardly a leap into faithlessness as fundamentalists often seem to presume, neither do the demands of the Turn neglect some of the cherished ambitions of science in its more priestly guises (of which it has plenty, despite its pretensions to the contrary). The Secular Turn requires that we are all of us able to distinguish in our aspirations and in our conduct our responsibilities, on the one hand, to the political project of peaceful public co-existence together with a diversity of peers from our responsibilities, on the other hand, to the moral or esthetic projects of private perfection by means of consensual practices of self-creation.

This brings me to the heart of my topic today. I think it is fair to say that I am a "technocentric" thinker; that is to say, my work and my thinking and even quite a lot of my activism these days is focused very directly on questions of technodevelopmental social struggle, thinking through technoethical dilemmas, and charting various technocultural practices. Nevertheless, I find that my attitude toward "technology" differs from that of many of the peers with whom I am conversing and organizing in the trenches.

You see, just as it is true that I think there is no such thing as God to believe in, I think there is no such thing as technology either.

More specifically, I think there is no such thing as a "technology in general" about which a person can or should properly be expected to profess an attitude of "pro" or "con." There are, on the contrary, always only innumerable concrete practices of research, invention, regulation, distribution, appropriation, and use which will be emancipatory or exploitative largely according to their cultural and political positioning.

While I scarcely think that all technocentric sociopolitical views are essentially faithful, it seems to me some such views very palpably are so. This seems especially true of those commonplace professions, especially among many popular futurists and technophiles, of a "belief in technology" that has as its primary force that it impels them into community with those who share their particular affirmation of this generalized technology while simultaneously it arrays them against enemies who presumably are "against" technology in a comparably generalized conception, conjuring up a fantastic battlefield on which clashing visions of something called "the future" (of which there seems to be only one, and the business of which seems to be either to fail or prevail) contest, through them, for supremacy.

And so, yes, I do think an analogy obtains between some professions of a belief in God and some professions of a belief in a "technology" toward which one can be "faithful" or "faithless" in some general sense. To be clear, this is not to deny the social, political, or cultural stakes of technodevelopmental outcomes, but a statement of my preference for assessments of the value of technodevelopmental outcomes as they arise out of the contingencies of ongoing democratic contestation among the diverse actual stakeholders to these outcomes acting within the flow of history.

And I do think this attitude toward "technology" in a broader construal, freighted with fears and fantasies of power, enlightenment, good, and evil, is often (not always) shared both by many who call themselves "transhumanists" or "technophiles" as well as by many who get called "bioconservatives" or "luddites" -- with the main difference among them that some take on a "pro" orientation to this dubious generality while others take on a "con" orientation toward "it."

My attitude toward the formations arising from these stances are exactly the same as they are toward others I would regard as religious. That is to say, I do not doubt that some of them generate viable and valuable pathways to private perfection for those who find their way to them. Indeed, I think none of us should be surprised to discover such practices of identification and disidentification arising out of the breathtaking, threatening, promising, deranging dynamism, stresses, violations, and emancipations of ongoing and upcoming technodevelopmental churn. Even if these practices of subcultural identification and disidentification with a hyperbolized "technology" tend not to be paths of meaning-making and interpersonal-support that personally edify me so much I am nonetheless quite happy to tolerate them as expressions of the multicultural diversity that bespeaks a thriving democratic polity so long as they, like comparable creative professions of faithfulness, take The Secular Turn.

That is to say, I still do insist that there is a difference between a celebration of consensual lifeways and the work to maintain the democratic scene of informed, nonduressed consent on which such lifeways depend. That is to say, there remains the difference between the private and the public, and as always there is a danger from the perspective within particular moral/esthetic communities of affinity to mistake their palpable and parochial satisfactions for ethical/political adequacy. All moral/esthetic formations are vulnerable to fundamentalism, including technocentric ones.

Here we circle back through a different route to questions about which I write very regularly. The politics of subcultural identity will tend to be different in key respects from the politics of advocacy for progressive technodevelopmental outcomes. To insist on this difference is not to be intolerant, but precisely to be tolerant. It is to be tolerant but without succumbing to the fundamentalist faith that morals trump ethics, or that morals should police diversity into conformity through authority rather than politics reconciling diversity on an ongoing basis through democracy. This will play out among variously technoprogressive positions as, among other things, the difference between various commitments to "the future" as against commitments to an "open future" or to a "futurity" that is one and the same thing as freedom.