Those who read Amor Mundi because they approve of my commitments to p2p democratization and permaculture advocacy may be perplexed by my interest in non-normativizing prostheses and therapies. Let me just say, very briefly, that I am especially fascinated by a few broad concurrent openings or agon, in terms of which I tend to articulate my sense of the politics of ongoing and proximately upcoming transformative technoscientific change, and that non-normativing "therapeutic" prostheses are among these, and in ways that seem to me especially salient precisely in relation to my preoccupations with p2p-democratization a2k-consensualization and permaculture practices.
One quick way to see what I mean by this salience is for me to note again that I regard the prosthetic as co-extensive with the cultural, and hence prosthetic proliferation is for me of a piece with the multi-cultural, which in turn connects to sustainable permaculture through its repudiation of industrial monoculture and embrace of experimental polyculture (agroforestry, companion planting, integrated pest management, and so on). Indeed, I personally like to use the word polyculture to denote this provocative, promising, perplexing convergence-site of convivial consensual multicultural, permacultural, and pro-choice politics.
Before I elaborate these preoccupations further, I do want to digress a bit, and say what I am especially trying to resist in offering up any technodevelopmental mapping of this kind. When I refer to inter-implicated technodevelopmental "openings" like this, part of what I am trying insistently to circumvent is the futurological terminology of the "trend," the "trend-spotter," the "trend-surfer," the "trend-speculator." I believe that like the debased and debasing term "meme" and the related reduction of discourse to the "viral," the "circulatory," the indifferently aggregative or repetitive (which is not to deny the empirical relevance of such descriptions to many network-dynamisms so much as what is analytically and critically available in them) framing technodevelopmental social struggles in terms of "trends" disastrously drains them of their substantial history, the contestatory/collaboratory agon of an ineradicable plurality of differently situated, enabled, aspiring stakeholders to a shared present-world futurally opening onto next-presence.
This de-historicizing disaster seems to me very much the point, especially to the extent that the language of "trends" "memes" and "evolutions" is opportunistically taken up in the justificatory and forecasting discourses of the elite-incumbent corporate-militarist Futurological Congress, who like to assume the guise of priests, gurus, whiz-kid elites channeling the otherwise unavailable voice of god, the whirlwind, the bleeding edge to the faithful rather than participants engaging in deliberation about relative values, costs, risks, benefits of historical and developmental vicissitudes, peer to peer.
Closely connected to the effort to circumvent the futurological "trend" I also struggle to resist complementary futurological insinuations of technological determinism (as if certain techniques or artifacts, once available, assure emancipatory or exploitative outcomes) by referring instead to "articulations," futurological insinuations of autonomous technology (as if progress were a matter of an indifferent accumulation of a technical toypile, rather than an equitable distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of the toys in the toypile and in the processes through which they are piled) by referring instead to "prosthetic cultures" and technology as "technodevelopmental social struggle," and futurological delineations of historical drivers (as if there were no discourse in history, only brute force) as collective agon and citational (including subversive citation) and appropriative practices, and so on.
All that said, the Technodevelopmental Quartet names four broad, promisingly threateningly inter-implicated technodevelopmental openings/agon surveying landmarks of most versions of the historical terrain on which I expect technodevelopmental social struggle to play out in what remains of my own lifetime.
The first of these openings/agon is Resource Descent, which encompasses "Peak Oil" as well as the diminishing returns of input-infrastructure intensive extractive-petrochemical industrialism more generally, including input-intensive industrial agriculture (the mirage of the Green Revolution and Biotechnology hype), soil depletion (connected to industrial agriculture), fresh water depletion (aquifer depletion and irrigation diversion associated with over-urbanization and industrial agriculture, but also problems of pollution and salinization associated with these), the over-application and diminishing effectiveness of anti-biotics, and also, of course, global warming which is, in my view, best conceived as a problem of atmospheric pollution yielding the depletion of the resource of a life-sustaining atmosphere. Opportunistic anti-democratizing corporate-militarist frames and strategies like greenwashing PR, massive under-accountable geo-engineering proposals, militarizations and profiteering in the face of climate catastrophes and their concomitant social instabilities are, of course, important facets of this technodevelopmental opening/agon.
The second opening/agon is p2p [peer-to-peer] Democratization, which encompasses the fraught transformation from industrial/central/elite/broadcast formations to the more digital/participatory/distributed forms of what Bauwens, Benkler, Boyle, and Lessig call creative-commons, peer-production, and peer-credentializing formations, as well as a2k [access to knowledge] Consensualization politics which encompass anti-secrecy struggles (against both corporatist proprietary and militarist state secrets), transparency struggles (against secrecy and corruption in authoritative institutions like governments, corporations, universities), and ever greater network-mediated participation, education, agitation, and organization in public life.
I should add that p2p-Democratization and a2k-Consensualization also encompass extensive commitments to general welfare provision and the democratization -- rather than any anarchic "smashing" of the state form -- inasmuch as the scene of legible legitimate consent demands that those who legibly consent do so in proportion to the extent that they are neither under duress (which includes the threat of violence but in my view also the threat of ruin by blackmail, insecurity of status, refusal of treatable dis-ease, or dire poverty) nor unreasonably ignorant nor mis-informed (which includes the threat of fraud, but also the lack of access to reliable knowledge, educational resources, availability of processes of criticism, actually accountable authorities, and equal recourse to the law). Without commitments to the democratically-accountable state form and the legible scene of informed nonduressed consent, p2p and a2k politics always amount to facile spontaneisms and anti-democratic politics. These anti-democratizing framings and forces are, of course, an important facet of this technodevelopmental opening/agon.
The third opening/agon is Prosthetic Proliferation, which encompasses struggles to achieve universal single-payer basic healthcare here in the United States but also provide healthcare, available treatments for neglected diseases, nutritious food, clean water, contraception, shelter in the overexploited regions of the world, as well as the as-yet scarcely defined "pro-choice" politics of prosthetic self-determination, or the informed, nonduressed consensualization and universalization of recourse to non-normalizing genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modifications and treatments, from planetary planned parenthood and access to ARTS, to morphological body-modification rights, to ending the racist war on drugs and embracing objective harm-reduction policies, to disability/differently-enabled rights struggles, to struggles against trafficking in human bodies and body-parts, to struggles for the public regulation, funding, and fair distribution of medical research and development, and also struggles against corporate-militarist strategies of control through the unequal and duressed planetary distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of medical and monitoring techniques and their development, which risk in the worst case, re-making inequity and injustice at the level of literal speciation.
And the fourth opening/agonis Arms Proliferation, which encompasses obscene and short-sighted state-sponsored trafficking in arms but also illicit global arms trading, the breakdown of multilateral arms treaties, the proliferation of nuclear states, the proliferation of conventional weapons and mines, weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological), and also what Lessig has called insanely destructive devices -- that is to say cheaper, more destructive, more accessible, easier to hide and deploy networked WMDs -- the militarization of space and of environmental catastrophe, and the ever-disavowed but indispensable neoconservative militarist muscular imperialism undergirding neoliberal corporatist "free market" developmentalism: war-profittering, militarization of welfare and public services, a surfeit of surveillance, and the radical demarcation of global space by means of architectural and coded walls and channels.
It seems to me that the first and second of these openings/agon might facilitate together the emergence of an extraordinarily promising (however threatening) planetary political consciousness, one providing a shared set of urgent problems demanding shared efforts and the other providing the material means to collaborate in their solution while at once undermining the politics of incumbent interests that stand as the greatest present hurdle to such solutions.
The third and fourth openings/agon exhibit a comparable complementarity in my view, one amplifying the destructive stakes of ongoing refusals to distribute technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits fairly by the lights of the actual diversity of stakeholders to those developments, the other functioning as a kind of magnificent bribe (the facilitation of informed, nonduressed consensual prosthetic/cultural lifeway self-determination in the service of private perfections in a still-shared still responsible responsive world, convivial civitas) eliciting ever wider participation in the project of a sustainable consensual secular democratic planetary polyculture.
I also think the first and third openings/agon exhibit a kind of stick and carrot complementarity for planetary politics, while the second and fourth represent countervailing structural inducements, one possibly facilitating democratization the other probably facilitating anti-democratization.
Of course, all these inter-implications represent just the immediate throat-clearing gestures of any serious critique or programmatic offer taking up these terms, and are propose just a few among many other plausible technodevelopmental relations susceptible to figuration and narrativization at this level of generality, all of them easily capable of provoking who knows what stabilizations, de-stabilizations, campaigns, counter-movements, provisional democratizations, backlashes, and so on. Certainly, there are no guarantees here, just as there is no time to waste on superlative idealizations and distractions or parochial (incumbent, technocratic, sub(cult)ural) techno-political agendas.
Although each of these practical-discursive sites might inspire endless concrete campaigns (progressive and reactionary), it seems to me that whatever the outcomes that elicit my own commitments in these particular campaigns there is nothing more important here than the struggle to democratize technodevelopmental struggle itself, to keep futurity open whatever the futures for which one fights. Whatever one's concrete aspirations for particular technodevelopmental outcomes (about which there will always be plenty to argue about as to which outcome is fairest, safest, most emancipatory), it seems to me that a technoscientifically literate and progressively legible vantage will always also, or even first of all, direct its attention to the dangers to and opportunities for democratization and open futurity that present themselves in each of the technoscientific vicissitudes technodevelopmental social struggle grapples with from moment to moment.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Amor Mundi and Technoprogressive Advocacy
I. WHO AM I?
My name is Dale Carrico. I grew up in a town called Floyds Knobs, Indiana, which was pretty much what you are imagining a place called Floyds Knobs, Indiana, would be like. I made money as a kid acting professionally in musicals in the weird archipelago of dinner theaters across Kentuckiana, a region wild for such entertainments you may know, and for about fifteen years now I have been a precarious sort of itinerant, troubadour adjunct lecturer in university settings, which is not so very different from dinner theater when it comes to it. I am presently a member of the visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley from which I received my PhD in 2005. I suppose I am a rhetorician, then. I am trained in philosophy, critical theory, and literary and cultural criticism. I live in a rented apartment overstuffed with books in a sprawling warren of mid-century mousetraps on top of a hill in a bucolic neighborhood of Oakland, California, with my partner of many years, Eric, and our unusually dim-witted cat, Sarah. We're all getting old.
My work tends to focus on the politics of science and technology, especially peer-to-peer formations and global development discourse and is informed by my commitment to democratic socialism (or social democracy, if that freaks you out less), environmental justice critique, and queer theory.
I criticize futurological discourses a lot, especially here on the blog. I critique futurology both in its mainstream corporate-militarist forms as a sort of fraudulent, hyperbolic advertising, promotional, justificatory discourse disastrously suffusing our public life today, as well as in its more extreme and clarifying (also: often hi-larious) forms, variations that tend take on the kooky theological coloration of promises of techno-transcendence and which tend to have sub(cult)ural organizations in tow.
The thinker to whom I am probably most indebted is Hannah Arendt (from whose personal motto the name of this blog is taken) and also Judith Butler, who I came to California to study with and under whose direction I wrote my dissertation.
I am a registered Democrat in the United States of America in the brutal and debasing years of its imperial consummation, and I am still a believer with Michael Harrington that "the best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but... I want to be on the left wing of the possible." I was an activist trained in nonviolence at the King Center with Queer Nation Atlanta in the early nineties, I have been an ethical vegetarian and a cheerful atheist for well over half my life, I am a liberal theoryhead academic of the elite effete aesthete sort, am a big fag and an even bigger geek.
Eric and I possess no car, no laptop, no cellphone, no clothes dryer, no marriage license (though we fight to make gay marriage legal so that when we disdain it we do so by choice and not by necessity) and we disapprove of them and also of you, at least a little bit, in a friendly sort of way, for thinking you can't live without them yourself despite the fact that they are destroying the planet, diminishing your liberty, giving you cancer, and confusing you into mistaking possession for love. We are cantankerous and judgmental and are enjoying ourselves immensely.
II. WHAT IS THIS?
The motto that defines the project of Amor Mundi appears at the top of the page, as well as appearing as the first line in most of the profiles I have written that would direct people here: "Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All."
For me, both the words "Technology" and "Democracy" in the motto are much more like verbs than the nouns they appear to be. They are words that denote ongoing collective struggles -- collective in a sense that contains both collaborations and contestations -- and these struggles, these verbs that we stabilize for a time sometimes into nouns become in those moments like hand-holds across the sheer cliff face of social struggle in history.
I'd say that "technology" is the ongoing collective prosthetic re-elaboration of personal and inter-personal agency, while "democracy" is the ongoing collective implementation of the idea that all people should have a real say in the public decisions that affect them.
The thing is, for nearly a century by now we have lived in an epoch for which the seductive, empowering, disruptive, devastating intensity and ubiquity of our technique is such that whatever we mean by "democracy" now or next -- unless it truly understands, actively takes up, responds through, and manages to direct the energies released by that technique -- will surely fail in its emancipatory aspirations, will fail utterly in the face of technocratic tyranny or the mad insensitivity of reductive idealism. And at the same time, for the same reasons, whatever we mean by "technology" now or next -- unless the distribution of its costs, its risks, and its benefits are made to express the aspirations of the actual diversity of stakeholders to its impacts -- will surely destroy the world.
Expressing one another, befuddling one another, enabling one another, inter-implicated in one another, technology and democracy are now caught up in the circuit of interminable technodevelopmental social struggle, and now constitute the ongoing conversation in which humanity continually redetermines the meanings and the movements available to it, and rededicates itself to that futurity the openness of which is itself the space in which humanity knows itself becoming itself.
"Amor Mundi" is the love of the world. It is the love of the worldly. It is the worldly love of that becoming that becomes us. It is the love of the collective struggle of which that becoming consists, and on which that becoming depends for its force, for its serendipities, for its pleasures, and for its dangers.
My project here on Amor Mundi is to understand and to articulate ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle from my own absolutely and fortunately limited perspective and to connect it from here to my aspirations as a person of the emerging sustainable peer-to-peer planetary polycultural democratic convivial consensualist left, as an opponent of corporate-militarism, as a queergeek all the way down, as an intellectual in an anti-intellectual society, as an angry person these days, as a person moved by idiosyncratic efforts to create beauty and reconcile differences.
I can't think of anybody who agrees with everything that I say, thank heavens, and I would never presume to speak for anybody but myself. I do like to figure things out for myself, to provoke thought, to facilitate creative and democratizing projects, to make people laugh, to stop idiocy in its tracks occasionally, to raise hell, to direct people's attention to things I judge to be worthy of it, and so on.
What better place than a blog to do all these sorts of things at once?
That's Amor Mundi.
For a more concrete, more "positive" (for all you naysayers), or at any rate more pragmatic, indication of my present preoccupations, let me describe some of the areas of technoprogressive advocacy that seem to me to matter most at the moment, and then to offer up a few comments about how they hang together (or not) in my view:
III. PREOCCUPATIONS
1. Advocating permaculture (resilient sustainability) -- we should be subsidizing research and practices of agroforestry, polyculture, organic and local agricultures, defending seed saving and seed sharing as basic human rights, regulating nonselective pesticide and high-energy-input, especially petrochemical fertilizer use, encouraging vegetarian, organic, local-food lifeways through accurate nutrition labeling, special taxes on food-corpses and highly salty, fatty, sugary processed foods, incentivizing climate-appropriate and edible landscaping, supporting organic, heirloom, and superorganic cultivation, vastly expanding research and development and infrastructure investment into p2p renewable energy-provision like decentralized solar grids and co-op windmill farms, energy-efficient appliances, desalination techniques, sustainable irrigation practices and biomimetic urban sewage treatment techniques, as well as passenger rail infrastructure across the world and facilitating non-automobile transportation in cities (free or small-fee distributed bike co-ops, for example, and transforming more urban car-lanes into pedestrian malls) -- increasing public awareness of and encouraging collective problem solving in the face of energy descent, overurbanization, species loss, extractive industrial depletion of topsoil and aquifers, toxicity of materials and industrial processes, waste/pollution, catastrophic human-caused climate change, and so on.
2. Advocating p2p (peer-to-peer formations) and a2k (access to knowledge) -- we should be strongly supporting net neutrality, institutionalizing creative commons, subsidizing personal blogging and peer credentialization/production practices, radically restricting global copyright scope and terms, expanding fair use provisions, providing public grants for noncommercial nonproprietary scientific research and access to creative expressivity and public performances, opening access to research and debate in science and the humanities, experimenting with science and public policy juries and networked townhalls, facilitating accessibility of information for differently enabled people (blind, partially blind, deaf, etc.), securing open knowledge transfer to people of the overexploited regions of the world, demanding transparency from authoritative institutions, especially governments, limited liability corporations, public universities, organizations funded by public resources or engaged in public services, strongly opposing institutional secrecy, especially corporatist proprietary secrets or militarist state secrets, ensuring universal free access to networked media, free reliable wifi, supporting community and minority-run radio, demanding corporate media disaggregation, facilitating small campaign donor aggregation and restricting other forms of patronage/lobbying/conflict-of-interest for elected representatives and professional appointees to public service, making access to education universal and free from pre-kindergarten through college, enacting strong whistleblower protections for public officials and corporate employees, introducing labeling standards to distinguish advertising, advocacy, journalism, and strengthening protections for consumers from fraudulent claims, and so on.
3. Advocating prosthetic self-determination (Pro Choice) -- we should be defending absolutely every woman's right to choose safe, free, accessible abortion techniques to end unwanted pregnancies, as well as facilitating wanted pregnancies with alternate reproductive techniques, legalizing and then taxing all informed, nonduressed consensual recreational drug use, redirecting public resources to policing actually dangerous or disorderly public conduct, regulating controlled substances for unnecessary harm, and expanding public education and drug rehabilitation programs, vastly expanding public research into genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine, defending individuals and communities with atypical capacities and morphologies, expanding access (while prohibiting compulsory recourse) both to consensual medical and modification therapies as well as to reliable information about them, providing universal single-payer basic healthcare, planet-wide provision of safe water and nutritious food, and subsidizing access to all wanted therapies that meet basic threshold safety and transparency standards with a stakeholder grant for non-normalizing modifications in exchange for open access to clinical trial data associated with all experimental procedures.
4. Advocating BIG (basic income guarantees) -- we should be providing a universal, non means-tested basic guaranteed income to every person on earth as a foundational right of human civilization -- or at any rate a substantial increase in welfare and public services to bring us closer to BIG or its equivalent, yielding as we approach BIG ever more of its wholesome, emancipatory, consensualizing, and democratizing effects -- not only to complete the traditional progressive project of ending slavery (including still existing wage slavery) and ending military conscription (including still existing conscription through the duress of the vulnerable, through poverty, illiteracy, stigmatized lifeways, and precarious legal status), and supporting collective bargaining (by providing a permanent strike fund for all workers) -- but also to combat contemporary and emerging and conspicuously amplifying forms of technodevelopmental abjection in particular: for example, current confiscatory wealth concentration through automation, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing; protecting vulnerable populations from duress to ensure all experimental medical decisions are truly consensual; and to champion p2p democracy by subsidizing the practices of true citizen participation, peer production of appropriate and appropriable technologies, and free open secular multiculture.
5. Advocating the democratization of global governance (democratic world federalism) -- the institutions of global governance already exists, of course, but in catastrophically non-democratic corporate-militarist forms that are destroying the world, and so the fight for democratic world federalist governance is not properly dismissed as a fanciful or dreadful desire for some ex nihilo planetary state, but in reality the fight to smash the corporate-militarist world state that actually exists and to democratize it as and for the people, peer-to-peer (in democracies, properly so-called, government is the people, and so to express hatred of government is to express hatred of the people and such slogans should be understood with that in mind), all in the face of unprecedented planetary problems and the unprecedented planetary consciousness created by global networked participation and in the light of our emerging awareness of global ecologic and economic interdependence -- and it doesn't matter to me whether this "smashing of the states" and democratization of global governance is implemented through the expansion and democratic reform of the United Nations, or through the creation of alternate or supplementary planetary institutions, or through the proliferation and ramification of multilateral treaties and monitoring and institutions, or what have you, since many pathways are and will continue to present themselves to do this work -- but it will likely eventuate in a federal form, encompassing already existing formations, a form emphasizing subsidiarity (which is a principle directing governance always to the most local layer adequate to a shared problem), and protecting planetary secular multiculture, and directed to the tasks of monitoring global storms, pandemics, weapons, enforcing global environmental, labor, police/military conduct standards, providing institutional recourse for the nonviolent resolution of interpersonal and intergovernmental disputes, and facilitating the universal scene of legible, that is to say, truly informed, nonduressed consent.
IV. ELABORATIONS
1. These five preoccupations look distressingly like a Program, and so I want to begin by pointing out that they are incomplete, that they are a point of departure and not a settlement, and that they are most interesting to me in the provocative and as yet underelaborated connections that obtain among them. How do the politics of p2p democratization change Green politics or the politics of Choice, for example? How do these connections renew or replace old utopian socialist and world government politics? And so, given this incompleteness, this openness, this idiosyncratic partiality, this promising inadequacy it seems to me that anybody who wants to find in these preoccupations the seed for a philosophy to follow, a party platform, an organizational manifesto has really, truly lost their way here. One scarcely glimpses in this delineation even my own preoccupation with anti-racist work, all my feminist commitments, the full scope of my anti-militarism (my insistence that we should make war literally unprofitable, for example), my animal rights work, my interest in all sorts of questions peculiar to my training in rhetoric, in American pragmatist philosophy, or in critical theory, my worries both about judeochrislamic fundamentalisms and the reductive scientisms and militant atheist counter-reactions they have incubated, my ongoing hostility to the Bush Administration, Movement Republicanism in general, Neoliberalism even more generally, and much more. I have just sought in the delineation of these five advocacy areas to provide a sense of what I think technoprogressive advocacy looks like, what sorts of connections and campaigns a technocentric democratic left political perspective like mine might illuminate and contribute to. Other technoprogressive people will surely emphasize things differently, connect issues and campaigns differently, focus their work on just one project or another, and so on. That is exactly as it should be.
2. My point is that technoprogressivisms will never properly crystallize into a tribal designation, an identity movement, a political party machine, a subcultural movement, an army marching in lockstep toward "the future," or any such thing. The future is not a place or a "goal": futurity is the political condition of plurality, democracy, freedom... and it is open, unpredictable, collective, promising, unforgivable or it is nothing at all, whatever it calls itself. Democratic and progressive movements are inherently anti-monolithicizing, inherently pluralizing. It is true that emancipatory politics is forever discovering the connections between oppressions as a way of overcoming them, but finding and untangling these connections is an interminable process, it is not the building of a new Pyramid to survey the scene from, it is not the delusive discovery of the One True Way yet again. Democratic organizing directs itself to proximate, ongoing, and emerging sites of struggle, it is not a matter of the creation of the Truth that Says the Way the World Is, it is not a matter of evangelizing for that Truth that Holds the Keys to History, it is not a matter of becoming part of the Movement that will Sweep the World. These are fundamentalist perspectives, and always utterly anti-democratizing (even when they appropriate the terms and superficial forms of democracy in their public relations).
3. I just want to point out that one doesn't have to join a Robot Cult to devote oneself to any of the campaigns delineated above, and, as I have been explaining here in the aftermath, one can have a tantalizing glimpse of the connections between many of these technoprogressive struggles without imagining thereby that one has become a particular kind of person different from or superior to other people with whom you share the world here and now, however much you may disagree with them on particular questions, or differ from them in your aspirations. I don't think that all progressives are technoprogressives, inasmuch as not all progressives would agree with me or have necessarily given a lot of thought to the specific inter-implication of contemporary democratic struggles and technoscientific change that preoccupies my own attention. But I do think that all technoprogressives are just progressives, and people of the legible democratic left. I think technocentric analyses can provide interesting perspectives, analytic tools, strategic recommendations, creative provocations, and novel sources for solidaity for progressive democratic-left politics in its more conventional guises. But I think all five of my technoprogressive advocacy areas are completely legible in terms of those more conventionally progressive perspective -- permaculture, p2p, a2k, Pro-Choice, basic income, and planetary democracy. There is nothing Superlative to be found here, no promises of transcendence, no One True Heaven to die for (or to live for, and in so living die in one's life).
4. I am often accused of trying to stamp out imagination when I offer up my critiques of Superlative technology discourses and movements, but it is clear that imagination suffuses my moral, aesthetic, and political perspective. It's just that I know that True Belief is not imagination, delusion is not imagination, evangelism is not imagination, anti-democracy is not imagination, finding in "the future" always only a mirror of your heart's desire or secret dread is not imagination. The Superlative super-predicated aspirations to technoscientific superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance that define so much technocentric discourse -- functioning as the disavowed regulative ideals articulating prevailing neoliberal "Developmental" and "Progressive" discourses but explicitly avowed in their clearer, more marginal and extreme sub(cult)ural "futurist" variations -- are, as much anything else, symptoms of the fears and fantasies of precarious agency in an era of unprecedented disruptive technodevelopmental change as well as expressions of opportunistic, usually anti-democratizing, will-to-power in the face of that change. Technoprogressive perspectives, to the contrary, seek to democratize ongoing and interminable technodevelopmental social struggle so that the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change better respond to the aspirations of the actual diversity of stakeholders to that change.
5. I am also often accused of excessive "negativity" and I have tried in this post to offer up something conspicuously "positive" instead. But what should emerge from this delineation of what Amor Mundi is for is a sense of the perspective in which my "negative" critiques are lodged as well, a sense of what I am positively defending when I am negatively decrying formulations, tendencies, and attitudes I regard as pernicious. Amor Mundi is love of the world, and the Yes of that worldly love reverberates in the No with which I confront the would-be destroyers of the world, both those who would destroy the living world through reckless extractive industrialism and corporate-militarist competitiveness, as well as those who would destroy the open world of plurality through reactionary politics, technocratic elitism, fundamentalism and True Belief, or moralizing, evangelical movement anti-politics.
My name is Dale Carrico. I grew up in a town called Floyds Knobs, Indiana, which was pretty much what you are imagining a place called Floyds Knobs, Indiana, would be like. I made money as a kid acting professionally in musicals in the weird archipelago of dinner theaters across Kentuckiana, a region wild for such entertainments you may know, and for about fifteen years now I have been a precarious sort of itinerant, troubadour adjunct lecturer in university settings, which is not so very different from dinner theater when it comes to it. I am presently a member of the visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley from which I received my PhD in 2005. I suppose I am a rhetorician, then. I am trained in philosophy, critical theory, and literary and cultural criticism. I live in a rented apartment overstuffed with books in a sprawling warren of mid-century mousetraps on top of a hill in a bucolic neighborhood of Oakland, California, with my partner of many years, Eric, and our unusually dim-witted cat, Sarah. We're all getting old.
My work tends to focus on the politics of science and technology, especially peer-to-peer formations and global development discourse and is informed by my commitment to democratic socialism (or social democracy, if that freaks you out less), environmental justice critique, and queer theory.
I criticize futurological discourses a lot, especially here on the blog. I critique futurology both in its mainstream corporate-militarist forms as a sort of fraudulent, hyperbolic advertising, promotional, justificatory discourse disastrously suffusing our public life today, as well as in its more extreme and clarifying (also: often hi-larious) forms, variations that tend take on the kooky theological coloration of promises of techno-transcendence and which tend to have sub(cult)ural organizations in tow.
The thinker to whom I am probably most indebted is Hannah Arendt (from whose personal motto the name of this blog is taken) and also Judith Butler, who I came to California to study with and under whose direction I wrote my dissertation.
I am a registered Democrat in the United States of America in the brutal and debasing years of its imperial consummation, and I am still a believer with Michael Harrington that "the best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but... I want to be on the left wing of the possible." I was an activist trained in nonviolence at the King Center with Queer Nation Atlanta in the early nineties, I have been an ethical vegetarian and a cheerful atheist for well over half my life, I am a liberal theoryhead academic of the elite effete aesthete sort, am a big fag and an even bigger geek.
Eric and I possess no car, no laptop, no cellphone, no clothes dryer, no marriage license (though we fight to make gay marriage legal so that when we disdain it we do so by choice and not by necessity) and we disapprove of them and also of you, at least a little bit, in a friendly sort of way, for thinking you can't live without them yourself despite the fact that they are destroying the planet, diminishing your liberty, giving you cancer, and confusing you into mistaking possession for love. We are cantankerous and judgmental and are enjoying ourselves immensely.
II. WHAT IS THIS?
The motto that defines the project of Amor Mundi appears at the top of the page, as well as appearing as the first line in most of the profiles I have written that would direct people here: "Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All."
For me, both the words "Technology" and "Democracy" in the motto are much more like verbs than the nouns they appear to be. They are words that denote ongoing collective struggles -- collective in a sense that contains both collaborations and contestations -- and these struggles, these verbs that we stabilize for a time sometimes into nouns become in those moments like hand-holds across the sheer cliff face of social struggle in history.
I'd say that "technology" is the ongoing collective prosthetic re-elaboration of personal and inter-personal agency, while "democracy" is the ongoing collective implementation of the idea that all people should have a real say in the public decisions that affect them.
The thing is, for nearly a century by now we have lived in an epoch for which the seductive, empowering, disruptive, devastating intensity and ubiquity of our technique is such that whatever we mean by "democracy" now or next -- unless it truly understands, actively takes up, responds through, and manages to direct the energies released by that technique -- will surely fail in its emancipatory aspirations, will fail utterly in the face of technocratic tyranny or the mad insensitivity of reductive idealism. And at the same time, for the same reasons, whatever we mean by "technology" now or next -- unless the distribution of its costs, its risks, and its benefits are made to express the aspirations of the actual diversity of stakeholders to its impacts -- will surely destroy the world.
Expressing one another, befuddling one another, enabling one another, inter-implicated in one another, technology and democracy are now caught up in the circuit of interminable technodevelopmental social struggle, and now constitute the ongoing conversation in which humanity continually redetermines the meanings and the movements available to it, and rededicates itself to that futurity the openness of which is itself the space in which humanity knows itself becoming itself.
"Amor Mundi" is the love of the world. It is the love of the worldly. It is the worldly love of that becoming that becomes us. It is the love of the collective struggle of which that becoming consists, and on which that becoming depends for its force, for its serendipities, for its pleasures, and for its dangers.
My project here on Amor Mundi is to understand and to articulate ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle from my own absolutely and fortunately limited perspective and to connect it from here to my aspirations as a person of the emerging sustainable peer-to-peer planetary polycultural democratic convivial consensualist left, as an opponent of corporate-militarism, as a queergeek all the way down, as an intellectual in an anti-intellectual society, as an angry person these days, as a person moved by idiosyncratic efforts to create beauty and reconcile differences.
I can't think of anybody who agrees with everything that I say, thank heavens, and I would never presume to speak for anybody but myself. I do like to figure things out for myself, to provoke thought, to facilitate creative and democratizing projects, to make people laugh, to stop idiocy in its tracks occasionally, to raise hell, to direct people's attention to things I judge to be worthy of it, and so on.
What better place than a blog to do all these sorts of things at once?
That's Amor Mundi.
For a more concrete, more "positive" (for all you naysayers), or at any rate more pragmatic, indication of my present preoccupations, let me describe some of the areas of technoprogressive advocacy that seem to me to matter most at the moment, and then to offer up a few comments about how they hang together (or not) in my view:
III. PREOCCUPATIONS
1. Advocating permaculture (resilient sustainability) -- we should be subsidizing research and practices of agroforestry, polyculture, organic and local agricultures, defending seed saving and seed sharing as basic human rights, regulating nonselective pesticide and high-energy-input, especially petrochemical fertilizer use, encouraging vegetarian, organic, local-food lifeways through accurate nutrition labeling, special taxes on food-corpses and highly salty, fatty, sugary processed foods, incentivizing climate-appropriate and edible landscaping, supporting organic, heirloom, and superorganic cultivation, vastly expanding research and development and infrastructure investment into p2p renewable energy-provision like decentralized solar grids and co-op windmill farms, energy-efficient appliances, desalination techniques, sustainable irrigation practices and biomimetic urban sewage treatment techniques, as well as passenger rail infrastructure across the world and facilitating non-automobile transportation in cities (free or small-fee distributed bike co-ops, for example, and transforming more urban car-lanes into pedestrian malls) -- increasing public awareness of and encouraging collective problem solving in the face of energy descent, overurbanization, species loss, extractive industrial depletion of topsoil and aquifers, toxicity of materials and industrial processes, waste/pollution, catastrophic human-caused climate change, and so on.
2. Advocating p2p (peer-to-peer formations) and a2k (access to knowledge) -- we should be strongly supporting net neutrality, institutionalizing creative commons, subsidizing personal blogging and peer credentialization/production practices, radically restricting global copyright scope and terms, expanding fair use provisions, providing public grants for noncommercial nonproprietary scientific research and access to creative expressivity and public performances, opening access to research and debate in science and the humanities, experimenting with science and public policy juries and networked townhalls, facilitating accessibility of information for differently enabled people (blind, partially blind, deaf, etc.), securing open knowledge transfer to people of the overexploited regions of the world, demanding transparency from authoritative institutions, especially governments, limited liability corporations, public universities, organizations funded by public resources or engaged in public services, strongly opposing institutional secrecy, especially corporatist proprietary secrets or militarist state secrets, ensuring universal free access to networked media, free reliable wifi, supporting community and minority-run radio, demanding corporate media disaggregation, facilitating small campaign donor aggregation and restricting other forms of patronage/lobbying/conflict-of-interest for elected representatives and professional appointees to public service, making access to education universal and free from pre-kindergarten through college, enacting strong whistleblower protections for public officials and corporate employees, introducing labeling standards to distinguish advertising, advocacy, journalism, and strengthening protections for consumers from fraudulent claims, and so on.
3. Advocating prosthetic self-determination (Pro Choice) -- we should be defending absolutely every woman's right to choose safe, free, accessible abortion techniques to end unwanted pregnancies, as well as facilitating wanted pregnancies with alternate reproductive techniques, legalizing and then taxing all informed, nonduressed consensual recreational drug use, redirecting public resources to policing actually dangerous or disorderly public conduct, regulating controlled substances for unnecessary harm, and expanding public education and drug rehabilitation programs, vastly expanding public research into genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine, defending individuals and communities with atypical capacities and morphologies, expanding access (while prohibiting compulsory recourse) both to consensual medical and modification therapies as well as to reliable information about them, providing universal single-payer basic healthcare, planet-wide provision of safe water and nutritious food, and subsidizing access to all wanted therapies that meet basic threshold safety and transparency standards with a stakeholder grant for non-normalizing modifications in exchange for open access to clinical trial data associated with all experimental procedures.
4. Advocating BIG (basic income guarantees) -- we should be providing a universal, non means-tested basic guaranteed income to every person on earth as a foundational right of human civilization -- or at any rate a substantial increase in welfare and public services to bring us closer to BIG or its equivalent, yielding as we approach BIG ever more of its wholesome, emancipatory, consensualizing, and democratizing effects -- not only to complete the traditional progressive project of ending slavery (including still existing wage slavery) and ending military conscription (including still existing conscription through the duress of the vulnerable, through poverty, illiteracy, stigmatized lifeways, and precarious legal status), and supporting collective bargaining (by providing a permanent strike fund for all workers) -- but also to combat contemporary and emerging and conspicuously amplifying forms of technodevelopmental abjection in particular: for example, current confiscatory wealth concentration through automation, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing; protecting vulnerable populations from duress to ensure all experimental medical decisions are truly consensual; and to champion p2p democracy by subsidizing the practices of true citizen participation, peer production of appropriate and appropriable technologies, and free open secular multiculture.
5. Advocating the democratization of global governance (democratic world federalism) -- the institutions of global governance already exists, of course, but in catastrophically non-democratic corporate-militarist forms that are destroying the world, and so the fight for democratic world federalist governance is not properly dismissed as a fanciful or dreadful desire for some ex nihilo planetary state, but in reality the fight to smash the corporate-militarist world state that actually exists and to democratize it as and for the people, peer-to-peer (in democracies, properly so-called, government is the people, and so to express hatred of government is to express hatred of the people and such slogans should be understood with that in mind), all in the face of unprecedented planetary problems and the unprecedented planetary consciousness created by global networked participation and in the light of our emerging awareness of global ecologic and economic interdependence -- and it doesn't matter to me whether this "smashing of the states" and democratization of global governance is implemented through the expansion and democratic reform of the United Nations, or through the creation of alternate or supplementary planetary institutions, or through the proliferation and ramification of multilateral treaties and monitoring and institutions, or what have you, since many pathways are and will continue to present themselves to do this work -- but it will likely eventuate in a federal form, encompassing already existing formations, a form emphasizing subsidiarity (which is a principle directing governance always to the most local layer adequate to a shared problem), and protecting planetary secular multiculture, and directed to the tasks of monitoring global storms, pandemics, weapons, enforcing global environmental, labor, police/military conduct standards, providing institutional recourse for the nonviolent resolution of interpersonal and intergovernmental disputes, and facilitating the universal scene of legible, that is to say, truly informed, nonduressed consent.
IV. ELABORATIONS
1. These five preoccupations look distressingly like a Program, and so I want to begin by pointing out that they are incomplete, that they are a point of departure and not a settlement, and that they are most interesting to me in the provocative and as yet underelaborated connections that obtain among them. How do the politics of p2p democratization change Green politics or the politics of Choice, for example? How do these connections renew or replace old utopian socialist and world government politics? And so, given this incompleteness, this openness, this idiosyncratic partiality, this promising inadequacy it seems to me that anybody who wants to find in these preoccupations the seed for a philosophy to follow, a party platform, an organizational manifesto has really, truly lost their way here. One scarcely glimpses in this delineation even my own preoccupation with anti-racist work, all my feminist commitments, the full scope of my anti-militarism (my insistence that we should make war literally unprofitable, for example), my animal rights work, my interest in all sorts of questions peculiar to my training in rhetoric, in American pragmatist philosophy, or in critical theory, my worries both about judeochrislamic fundamentalisms and the reductive scientisms and militant atheist counter-reactions they have incubated, my ongoing hostility to the Bush Administration, Movement Republicanism in general, Neoliberalism even more generally, and much more. I have just sought in the delineation of these five advocacy areas to provide a sense of what I think technoprogressive advocacy looks like, what sorts of connections and campaigns a technocentric democratic left political perspective like mine might illuminate and contribute to. Other technoprogressive people will surely emphasize things differently, connect issues and campaigns differently, focus their work on just one project or another, and so on. That is exactly as it should be.
2. My point is that technoprogressivisms will never properly crystallize into a tribal designation, an identity movement, a political party machine, a subcultural movement, an army marching in lockstep toward "the future," or any such thing. The future is not a place or a "goal": futurity is the political condition of plurality, democracy, freedom... and it is open, unpredictable, collective, promising, unforgivable or it is nothing at all, whatever it calls itself. Democratic and progressive movements are inherently anti-monolithicizing, inherently pluralizing. It is true that emancipatory politics is forever discovering the connections between oppressions as a way of overcoming them, but finding and untangling these connections is an interminable process, it is not the building of a new Pyramid to survey the scene from, it is not the delusive discovery of the One True Way yet again. Democratic organizing directs itself to proximate, ongoing, and emerging sites of struggle, it is not a matter of the creation of the Truth that Says the Way the World Is, it is not a matter of evangelizing for that Truth that Holds the Keys to History, it is not a matter of becoming part of the Movement that will Sweep the World. These are fundamentalist perspectives, and always utterly anti-democratizing (even when they appropriate the terms and superficial forms of democracy in their public relations).
3. I just want to point out that one doesn't have to join a Robot Cult to devote oneself to any of the campaigns delineated above, and, as I have been explaining here in the aftermath, one can have a tantalizing glimpse of the connections between many of these technoprogressive struggles without imagining thereby that one has become a particular kind of person different from or superior to other people with whom you share the world here and now, however much you may disagree with them on particular questions, or differ from them in your aspirations. I don't think that all progressives are technoprogressives, inasmuch as not all progressives would agree with me or have necessarily given a lot of thought to the specific inter-implication of contemporary democratic struggles and technoscientific change that preoccupies my own attention. But I do think that all technoprogressives are just progressives, and people of the legible democratic left. I think technocentric analyses can provide interesting perspectives, analytic tools, strategic recommendations, creative provocations, and novel sources for solidaity for progressive democratic-left politics in its more conventional guises. But I think all five of my technoprogressive advocacy areas are completely legible in terms of those more conventionally progressive perspective -- permaculture, p2p, a2k, Pro-Choice, basic income, and planetary democracy. There is nothing Superlative to be found here, no promises of transcendence, no One True Heaven to die for (or to live for, and in so living die in one's life).
4. I am often accused of trying to stamp out imagination when I offer up my critiques of Superlative technology discourses and movements, but it is clear that imagination suffuses my moral, aesthetic, and political perspective. It's just that I know that True Belief is not imagination, delusion is not imagination, evangelism is not imagination, anti-democracy is not imagination, finding in "the future" always only a mirror of your heart's desire or secret dread is not imagination. The Superlative super-predicated aspirations to technoscientific superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance that define so much technocentric discourse -- functioning as the disavowed regulative ideals articulating prevailing neoliberal "Developmental" and "Progressive" discourses but explicitly avowed in their clearer, more marginal and extreme sub(cult)ural "futurist" variations -- are, as much anything else, symptoms of the fears and fantasies of precarious agency in an era of unprecedented disruptive technodevelopmental change as well as expressions of opportunistic, usually anti-democratizing, will-to-power in the face of that change. Technoprogressive perspectives, to the contrary, seek to democratize ongoing and interminable technodevelopmental social struggle so that the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change better respond to the aspirations of the actual diversity of stakeholders to that change.
5. I am also often accused of excessive "negativity" and I have tried in this post to offer up something conspicuously "positive" instead. But what should emerge from this delineation of what Amor Mundi is for is a sense of the perspective in which my "negative" critiques are lodged as well, a sense of what I am positively defending when I am negatively decrying formulations, tendencies, and attitudes I regard as pernicious. Amor Mundi is love of the world, and the Yes of that worldly love reverberates in the No with which I confront the would-be destroyers of the world, both those who would destroy the living world through reckless extractive industrialism and corporate-militarist competitiveness, as well as those who would destroy the open world of plurality through reactionary politics, technocratic elitism, fundamentalism and True Belief, or moralizing, evangelical movement anti-politics.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
More on My Apparent "Deathism"
Transhumanist Giulio Prisco continues to perplex me utterly, writing: "Dale DOES think this [death] is a good thing. Read again the Eganesque ““we people are all of us finite beings, forever prone to disease, accident, violence, betrayal, novelty, and fantasies about shiny robot bodies or angelic digital ones and so on rest on deep confusions about the actually embodied status of mind.”
Maybe there is a language issue here, because it is utterly mystifying to me that anybody would see this as a statement of exaltation on my part.
I honestly don’t know anybody who thinks death is a particularly enticing prospect, and to the extent that so-called "Technological Immortalists" seem to have convinced themselves that the primary barrier standing in the way of their achievement of imperishable techno-bodies or whatever is some prevailing “Deathism” in mainstream culture I must say this seems to me a rather flabbergasting (not to mention ultimately rather elitist) misreading of the world.
Obviously, I don’t think death is a “good thing” so much as, you know, a factual thing... like our social interdependence and the inherent vulnerability of that interdependence is a factual thing, like finitude is a factual thing.
I definitely think consensual healthcare is a good thing in general and I think such healthcare is a matter of providing people longer healthier lives. I have stated this truism so often by now (honestly, this seems to me to be the sort of utter commonplace that should go without saying in the first place, but clearly with Superlative technocentrics certain things must be said over and over and over again) I will admit it has become a bit befuddling at this point to confront stubborn incomprehension about my position at such a basic level still happening even with people with whom I have painstakingly and joylessly danced endless turns of this particular dance already.
I will say that denialism about death is a bad thing, like all forms of irrational denial tend to be. And there is no way for me to sugarcoat my honest judgment that there is a widespread denialism about mortality in much of the techno-immortalist sub(cult)ure or “movement.” My various commenters may indignantly insist that they do not personally suffer from such deranging and diminishing attitudes, and I'll have to just take their words on it, I have no interest in arguing about it at the moment. (These arguments tend to take the form "I know you are, but what am I," and are not necessarily very illuminating after all.)
Prisco says that living 120 years is good but 121 years is better. (No one ever has lived so long and so this is a matter of speculation, as it happens, but we'll just bracket such niceties for the moment.) Be all that as it may, I must admit that I don’t see things quite the way he seems to do. And perhaps this attitude is the one that is getting decried as "deathism" by my critics.
You see, it seems to me that a year well lived is worth a dozen lived in bitterness or regret. It seems to me there are far worse things in the world than dying, chief among which for me would be killing (but there are others). The rather brute organismic prolongation of lifespan that preoccupies no small amount of techno-immortalist discourse ultimately seems to me a rather shallow and fearful business.
No doubt I will be passionately assured by commenters that there are richer variations of techno-immortalist robot cultism available and for all I know these commenters may indeed have found their various ways to such perspectives. Come what may, I do think it is simply weird to attribute a dastardly “deathism” to me simply for my relatively cheerful reconciliation to the fact of my mortality, to the meaningfulness of actually lived mortal lives, and to my judgment that many things are worse than mortality, and so on.
Finally, about the phrases “immortality,” “living forever,” “killing death,” and so on. Giulio Prisco insists that he means by these terms something he is calling "indefinite lifespan." All I will say is that if you don’t actually mean "immortality," "living forever," "killing death," and the rest, then I honestly recommend you stop using those words to say whatever it is that you do mean. If “indefinite lifespan” isn’t supposed to mean immortality (even possibly on the sly) then it is actually utterly bewildering that you would use a word so freighted with transcendental religiosity and irrational passion to describe what you take to be a proximate practically achievable engineering outcome. (An assessment that puts you at odds with scientific consensus.)
I think techno-immortalists should take a hard look at what work their terminological choices are really doing for them psychologically, culturally, and from a promotional standpoint. Believe me, I have taken such a long look, and (obviously!) I don’t like what I see.
Maybe there is a language issue here, because it is utterly mystifying to me that anybody would see this as a statement of exaltation on my part.
I honestly don’t know anybody who thinks death is a particularly enticing prospect, and to the extent that so-called "Technological Immortalists" seem to have convinced themselves that the primary barrier standing in the way of their achievement of imperishable techno-bodies or whatever is some prevailing “Deathism” in mainstream culture I must say this seems to me a rather flabbergasting (not to mention ultimately rather elitist) misreading of the world.
Obviously, I don’t think death is a “good thing” so much as, you know, a factual thing... like our social interdependence and the inherent vulnerability of that interdependence is a factual thing, like finitude is a factual thing.
I definitely think consensual healthcare is a good thing in general and I think such healthcare is a matter of providing people longer healthier lives. I have stated this truism so often by now (honestly, this seems to me to be the sort of utter commonplace that should go without saying in the first place, but clearly with Superlative technocentrics certain things must be said over and over and over again) I will admit it has become a bit befuddling at this point to confront stubborn incomprehension about my position at such a basic level still happening even with people with whom I have painstakingly and joylessly danced endless turns of this particular dance already.
I will say that denialism about death is a bad thing, like all forms of irrational denial tend to be. And there is no way for me to sugarcoat my honest judgment that there is a widespread denialism about mortality in much of the techno-immortalist sub(cult)ure or “movement.” My various commenters may indignantly insist that they do not personally suffer from such deranging and diminishing attitudes, and I'll have to just take their words on it, I have no interest in arguing about it at the moment. (These arguments tend to take the form "I know you are, but what am I," and are not necessarily very illuminating after all.)
Prisco says that living 120 years is good but 121 years is better. (No one ever has lived so long and so this is a matter of speculation, as it happens, but we'll just bracket such niceties for the moment.) Be all that as it may, I must admit that I don’t see things quite the way he seems to do. And perhaps this attitude is the one that is getting decried as "deathism" by my critics.
You see, it seems to me that a year well lived is worth a dozen lived in bitterness or regret. It seems to me there are far worse things in the world than dying, chief among which for me would be killing (but there are others). The rather brute organismic prolongation of lifespan that preoccupies no small amount of techno-immortalist discourse ultimately seems to me a rather shallow and fearful business.
No doubt I will be passionately assured by commenters that there are richer variations of techno-immortalist robot cultism available and for all I know these commenters may indeed have found their various ways to such perspectives. Come what may, I do think it is simply weird to attribute a dastardly “deathism” to me simply for my relatively cheerful reconciliation to the fact of my mortality, to the meaningfulness of actually lived mortal lives, and to my judgment that many things are worse than mortality, and so on.
Finally, about the phrases “immortality,” “living forever,” “killing death,” and so on. Giulio Prisco insists that he means by these terms something he is calling "indefinite lifespan." All I will say is that if you don’t actually mean "immortality," "living forever," "killing death," and the rest, then I honestly recommend you stop using those words to say whatever it is that you do mean. If “indefinite lifespan” isn’t supposed to mean immortality (even possibly on the sly) then it is actually utterly bewildering that you would use a word so freighted with transcendental religiosity and irrational passion to describe what you take to be a proximate practically achievable engineering outcome. (An assessment that puts you at odds with scientific consensus.)
I think techno-immortalists should take a hard look at what work their terminological choices are really doing for them psychologically, culturally, and from a promotional standpoint. Believe me, I have taken such a long look, and (obviously!) I don’t like what I see.
A Question Is Posed
A commenter over at the blog Transumanar has posed a question: I always wonder why those who think Transhumanist technologies are impossible bother to oppose our (clearly impossible) aims.
Well, if one really wants to know (I suspect the question was meant to be read as rhetorical), I can offer up a few reasons why I bother with this sort of thing, right off the top of my head:
[1] Because emerging technoscientific quandaries actually are urgent and dangerous.
[2] Because super-predicated hyperbole activates irrational passions driven by the fears of fantasies of agency customarily associated with technology-talk already, irrational manias for omnipotence and irrational panics at impotence, all to the cost of sense.
[3] Because the last thing an overexploited, militarized, p2p networked and environmentally conscious planetized world needs are more fundamentalisms.
[4] Because uncritical “Development” discourse that comports well with Superlative formulations is the neoliberal point of the spear for so much confiscatory wealth concentration and perilous militarization in the world.
[5] Because Superlative discourse provokes an inappropriate technodevelopmental politics of identification (and, crucially, dis-identification) around idealized outcomes rather than an open ongoing stakeholder politics among a diversity of prostheticized peers who share the world.
[6] Because such identity politics lend themselves to defensive marginal subcultural postures and cult-like organizations that stifle the flourishing of their members and sensationalize public deliberation.
[7] Because in its tendency to endorse technocratic, reductionist, hyperbolic attitudes Superlativity lends itself to the politics of incumbent interests (sometimes unintentionally) and the stifling of desirable planetary secular multiculture.
[8] Because consensual, democratized, and actually accountable ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle truly could be emancipatory for all, and that is what progressive people should be devoting themselves to.
Well, if one really wants to know (I suspect the question was meant to be read as rhetorical), I can offer up a few reasons why I bother with this sort of thing, right off the top of my head:
[1] Because emerging technoscientific quandaries actually are urgent and dangerous.
[2] Because super-predicated hyperbole activates irrational passions driven by the fears of fantasies of agency customarily associated with technology-talk already, irrational manias for omnipotence and irrational panics at impotence, all to the cost of sense.
[3] Because the last thing an overexploited, militarized, p2p networked and environmentally conscious planetized world needs are more fundamentalisms.
[4] Because uncritical “Development” discourse that comports well with Superlative formulations is the neoliberal point of the spear for so much confiscatory wealth concentration and perilous militarization in the world.
[5] Because Superlative discourse provokes an inappropriate technodevelopmental politics of identification (and, crucially, dis-identification) around idealized outcomes rather than an open ongoing stakeholder politics among a diversity of prostheticized peers who share the world.
[6] Because such identity politics lend themselves to defensive marginal subcultural postures and cult-like organizations that stifle the flourishing of their members and sensationalize public deliberation.
[7] Because in its tendency to endorse technocratic, reductionist, hyperbolic attitudes Superlativity lends itself to the politics of incumbent interests (sometimes unintentionally) and the stifling of desirable planetary secular multiculture.
[8] Because consensual, democratized, and actually accountable ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle truly could be emancipatory for all, and that is what progressive people should be devoting themselves to.
My "Deathist" Zealotry
Giulio Prisco alerts his readers to my "narrow minded" views of technology, to my "well known condemnation of imagination," and, of all things, to my "Deathism."
The broad-minded visionaries with whom he would contrast me here are, mind you, the coterie of Superlative technocentrics who think the imminent arrival of a post-biological superintelligent Robot God is a matter of grave concern for all, who think programmable self-replicating nanoscale robots are about to deliver superabundance for all (or, possibly, you know, reduce the world to goo), and who think genetic and prosthetic medicine (or, failing that, "uploading" their disembodied consciousnesses into apparently imperishable digital formats or robot bodies) may deliver superlongevity to some lucky people now living.
My critique of these sorts of flabbergasting Superlative aspirations -- and more to the point, of the prevailing hyperbolic, reductive, elitist techno-utopian discourses for which they provide, in their stark extremity, a particularly clarifying example and symptom -- Prisco derides as a matter on my part of "abstractness" and "vacuity" (one would almost think mortality were some zany fanciful notion I had invented), as "bullshit" and also "chickenshit" (Prisco entertainingly has much to say about my rudeness elsewhere in his piece), as "political correctness" (I have no idea what that one is all about), and, of course, as an expression of my "Deathism."
This "Deathism" seems to involve the fact that I expect to die like everybody else and don't lose sleep over this particularly, even though, again like pretty much everybody else on earth I'm not exactly thrilled at the prospect and think things like universal healthcare is a good thing because longer healthier lives are a good thing. The evidence Prisco offers up of my "Deathism" consists of this comment of mine: "[W]e people are all of us finite beings, forever prone to disease, accident, violence, betrayal, novelty. [A]nd fantasies about shiny robot bodies or angelic digital ones and so on rest on deep confusions about the actually embodied status of mind."
I quite cheerfully stand behind every word there.
I will also cheerfully admit that my “PC zealot thought policing” along these lines also extends to ridiculing self-proclaimed inventors of perpetual motion machines and folks who have convinced themselves they have squared the circle.
Against my "Deathist memes," so-called, the broad minded Guilio Prisco, well-known champion of Imagination against the likes of me, offers up as his contrasting vision: "Aging is like farting, and dying is like diarrhea. Both are unchosen biological accidents waiting for a good engineer with a good screwdriver. The sooner we can live without shitting our pants, the better. This is transhumanism in a nutshell, as I see it." One may as well take his word for it (Prisco until very recently was Director of the World Transhumanist Association, after all).
But I'm here to tell you, anybody who comes at me with a screwdriver claiming to have a miracle cure for diarrhea, I'm calling 9-1-1.
Prisco also quotes this passage of mine:
In that passage I tried to make clear that I do indeed grasp and take enormously seriously the potentially unprecedented nature of modification medicine, and tried to capture in just a few words the difference between superlative as opposed to technoprogressive responses to such techniques. I realize that the sentence is a bit dense -- but it was off the cuff, just a stab at some kind of substance amidst all the snark. To spell out the point a bit:
Already contemporary medicine has called into question a number of conventional expectations concerning when lives can properly be said to begin and to end, the quality of life we can expect as we cope with various medical conditions (among them conditions that were once too simply subsumed under headings like "aging" or "disability"), and so on. Under such circumstances it becomes crucial in my view for democratically minded people to offer up formulations that facilitate values like equity, diversity, and informed, nonduressed consent in the face of these emerging medical interventions rather than hyperbolic formulations that skew our sense of the actual problems and stakes of the technodevelopmental terrain with which we are coping, fraudulent misinformation playing on people's fears and fantasies in the service of profit or political advantage, "well meaning" eugenic impositions of parochial visions of healthy optimality, maldistributions of the costs, risks, and benefits of therapy as an expression and exacerbation of global injustice, and so on. Superlative talk about "living forever" or "uploading selves into computers" fails to contribute to that necessary work and functions instead as a direct barrier to it, no less than does bioconservative fearmongering about "clone armies" and "human-animal hybrids" when the questions at hand actually involve increasing budgets for medical research and providing access to cures for treatable diseases.
Prisco responds: "I am not going to waste too much time trying to understand what all these elegant and big words mean…. I believe I must have said a few times what I think of this nonsense." Quite apart from the patent anti-intellectualism of this response (I feel as though I'm about to be decried as a Hollyweird Leebrul), it is hard to understand how one can dismiss as "nonsense" what one refuses to understand in the first place. I waded through a whole hell of a lot of Superlative Technology discourse before I felt qualified to delineate its tendencies and assess them. Although I am sure that Superlative technocentrics (being, True Believers after all) would insist that the very fact that I have failed to find their vision compelling is proof enough that I have failed to understand their vision in the first place. Is it any wonder that, under such circumstances, I make recourse instead to ridiculing the ridiculous?
The broad-minded visionaries with whom he would contrast me here are, mind you, the coterie of Superlative technocentrics who think the imminent arrival of a post-biological superintelligent Robot God is a matter of grave concern for all, who think programmable self-replicating nanoscale robots are about to deliver superabundance for all (or, possibly, you know, reduce the world to goo), and who think genetic and prosthetic medicine (or, failing that, "uploading" their disembodied consciousnesses into apparently imperishable digital formats or robot bodies) may deliver superlongevity to some lucky people now living.
My critique of these sorts of flabbergasting Superlative aspirations -- and more to the point, of the prevailing hyperbolic, reductive, elitist techno-utopian discourses for which they provide, in their stark extremity, a particularly clarifying example and symptom -- Prisco derides as a matter on my part of "abstractness" and "vacuity" (one would almost think mortality were some zany fanciful notion I had invented), as "bullshit" and also "chickenshit" (Prisco entertainingly has much to say about my rudeness elsewhere in his piece), as "political correctness" (I have no idea what that one is all about), and, of course, as an expression of my "Deathism."
This "Deathism" seems to involve the fact that I expect to die like everybody else and don't lose sleep over this particularly, even though, again like pretty much everybody else on earth I'm not exactly thrilled at the prospect and think things like universal healthcare is a good thing because longer healthier lives are a good thing. The evidence Prisco offers up of my "Deathism" consists of this comment of mine: "[W]e people are all of us finite beings, forever prone to disease, accident, violence, betrayal, novelty. [A]nd fantasies about shiny robot bodies or angelic digital ones and so on rest on deep confusions about the actually embodied status of mind."
I quite cheerfully stand behind every word there.
I will also cheerfully admit that my “PC zealot thought policing” along these lines also extends to ridiculing self-proclaimed inventors of perpetual motion machines and folks who have convinced themselves they have squared the circle.
Against my "Deathist memes," so-called, the broad minded Guilio Prisco, well-known champion of Imagination against the likes of me, offers up as his contrasting vision: "Aging is like farting, and dying is like diarrhea. Both are unchosen biological accidents waiting for a good engineer with a good screwdriver. The sooner we can live without shitting our pants, the better. This is transhumanism in a nutshell, as I see it." One may as well take his word for it (Prisco until very recently was Director of the World Transhumanist Association, after all).
But I'm here to tell you, anybody who comes at me with a screwdriver claiming to have a miracle cure for diarrhea, I'm calling 9-1-1.
Prisco also quotes this passage of mine:
It is crucial to disarticulate the basic irrationality of The Denial of Death for embodied sociable narratively coherent beings in a finite universe from things like informed, non-duressed, non-norma[l]izing consensual healthcare in an era of unprecedented emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapy.
In that passage I tried to make clear that I do indeed grasp and take enormously seriously the potentially unprecedented nature of modification medicine, and tried to capture in just a few words the difference between superlative as opposed to technoprogressive responses to such techniques. I realize that the sentence is a bit dense -- but it was off the cuff, just a stab at some kind of substance amidst all the snark. To spell out the point a bit:
Already contemporary medicine has called into question a number of conventional expectations concerning when lives can properly be said to begin and to end, the quality of life we can expect as we cope with various medical conditions (among them conditions that were once too simply subsumed under headings like "aging" or "disability"), and so on. Under such circumstances it becomes crucial in my view for democratically minded people to offer up formulations that facilitate values like equity, diversity, and informed, nonduressed consent in the face of these emerging medical interventions rather than hyperbolic formulations that skew our sense of the actual problems and stakes of the technodevelopmental terrain with which we are coping, fraudulent misinformation playing on people's fears and fantasies in the service of profit or political advantage, "well meaning" eugenic impositions of parochial visions of healthy optimality, maldistributions of the costs, risks, and benefits of therapy as an expression and exacerbation of global injustice, and so on. Superlative talk about "living forever" or "uploading selves into computers" fails to contribute to that necessary work and functions instead as a direct barrier to it, no less than does bioconservative fearmongering about "clone armies" and "human-animal hybrids" when the questions at hand actually involve increasing budgets for medical research and providing access to cures for treatable diseases.
Prisco responds: "I am not going to waste too much time trying to understand what all these elegant and big words mean…. I believe I must have said a few times what I think of this nonsense." Quite apart from the patent anti-intellectualism of this response (I feel as though I'm about to be decried as a Hollyweird Leebrul), it is hard to understand how one can dismiss as "nonsense" what one refuses to understand in the first place. I waded through a whole hell of a lot of Superlative Technology discourse before I felt qualified to delineate its tendencies and assess them. Although I am sure that Superlative technocentrics (being, True Believers after all) would insist that the very fact that I have failed to find their vision compelling is proof enough that I have failed to understand their vision in the first place. Is it any wonder that, under such circumstances, I make recourse instead to ridiculing the ridiculous?
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Is Rationality Always Instrumental?
Subcultures notoriously like to cast themselves in the role of exemplars of rationality and outsiders as cast out by their "irrationality" -- as the murderous machineries of racism daily attest -- and technocentric subcultures (engineers, coders, geeks, whatever) are surely not much less prone to this sort of thing than anybody else is, as perhaps Snow's "Two Cultures" reminds us best.
Given the amount of guff I receive from some of my commentors about my fashionable nonsensicality, my effeteness, eliteness, and aestheteness, and so on, it is weird to admit that I actually think of myself as something of a hokey defender of rationality. And so, when I teach critical thinking, close reading, and argument to undergraduates I actually have in mind that I am helping my students become better democratic citizens, helping them to protect themselves against the marketing misinformation of corporations and politicians, providing them with tools to help them adjudicate difficult disputes and so on.
But it does seem to me that people practice rationality in multiple dimensions or modes in their lives -- in my own account instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes (and I'm sure even more multivalent accounts are available) -- and that no one mode is more dispensable than the others, no one mode more supreme than the others, except on a case by case basis. On this account, rationality consists not only of affirming beliefs only when the conditions for warranted assertability for the relevant mode are met, but also recognizing just which mode of rationality is the apt one given one's context.
When some technocentrics seem to decide in advance that science is the one and only paradigmatic practice of rationality, and that a truly rational person will manage to shoehorn every proper belief-ascription into something that at any rate superficially passes for proper scientific form, it becomes enormously difficult to direct their attention to any detail at all that can't be reduced to conventionally instrumental terms (as the sacrifices we make for the legibility of belonging often cannot be, as an idiosyncratic assertion that a thing is beautiful often cannot be, as the faith that we will risk disadvantage in an effort at reconciliation with those to whom we seem irreconcilable for now often cannot be, and so on), and one finds oneself accused of emotionalism, irrationality, relativism, and who knows what else when one makes the effort at all.
Of course, from my own perspective, it is exactly as irrational and exactly as destructive to the proper practice and status of science to try to tear and stretch it to accommodate dimensions of human experience to which it is not well suited, as it would be to deny its indispensability in matters of prediction and control. What is curious to me is that those who would make of science a kind of godly summit, end-all, be-all (with themselves as its Priestly mouthpieces more often than not) are precisely the ones who claim their clumsy hyperbole amounts to a Championing of Science, while even technoscientifically literate advocates for a more modest accounting of science's role in the practical fabric of rationality and sociability are often pilloried by such Champions for their irrationality.
What it is key to understand here is that this does not look to me like an equivalent exchange: It is not just that the Scientist decries the Humanist's irrationality (think of logical positivism pooh-poohing the lack of philosophical "progress" -- as if this category necessarily applies to the project of philosophy as a valuable enterprise -- or distinguishing the content of fact from the "emotivism" of value), then the Humanist turns about and decries the Scientist's irrationality for good measure (pointing out that science lacks the conceptual resources to answer the question should an experiment be done? should an outcome be pursued among others? and so on).
The reason this is not as equivalent an exchange of charges as it might initially seem is because it seems to me that scientific rationality is easily affirmed and championed by those who might affirm and champion nonetheless other available modes of rationality as more apt to our circumstances. If I am right to say that we rationally affirm instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political beliefs; and if I am right to say that these beliefs are warranted according to different practices and yield different edifications; then there is a great difference between the position of one who would deny the existence of all but one of these modes or denigrate all but one of these modes or subsume all these modes under just one of them in the name of rationality, and the position of one who would affirm the different value and dignity of them all in their proper measure in the name of rationality, including the mode valorized by the reductionist position.
The one who demands exclusion and reduction in the name of purity and optimality is making a radically different sort of argument than the one who pleas for inclusion and expansion in the name of diversity and consent. It is profoundly misleading to equate these two positions, whatever their superficial symmetry.
Let me be clear, I am not just claiming that there is a place for morals, aesthetics, ethics, and politics, in a world that properly respects scientific rationality, I am saying that all of these are modes of rationality -- if the warrants that differently govern the assertability of moral or aesthetic beliefs are not matters of rationality (if they are matters of, say, propriety, instead), then exactly the same thing applies in my view to the warrants that govern assertability in matters of instrumental belief. And let me be even clearer still, I do absolutely agree that the criteria for warranted assertability hacked out over centuries of scientific practice -- falsifiability, testing, publication, coherence, saving the phenomena, elegance, and so on -- do indeed provide a marvelous, incomparable institutional recourse for acquiring good beliefs concerning matters of prediction and control.
Looking to the Scientist to provide guidance in matters for which she is no more qualified than anybody else, one citizen among citizens, one peer among peers, one organism among organisms, has nothing to do with science. Going from there to invest the idealized figure of the Scientist or of his Works with hyperbolic or even transcendental significances has nothing to do with science either.
Given the amount of guff I receive from some of my commentors about my fashionable nonsensicality, my effeteness, eliteness, and aestheteness, and so on, it is weird to admit that I actually think of myself as something of a hokey defender of rationality. And so, when I teach critical thinking, close reading, and argument to undergraduates I actually have in mind that I am helping my students become better democratic citizens, helping them to protect themselves against the marketing misinformation of corporations and politicians, providing them with tools to help them adjudicate difficult disputes and so on.
But it does seem to me that people practice rationality in multiple dimensions or modes in their lives -- in my own account instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes (and I'm sure even more multivalent accounts are available) -- and that no one mode is more dispensable than the others, no one mode more supreme than the others, except on a case by case basis. On this account, rationality consists not only of affirming beliefs only when the conditions for warranted assertability for the relevant mode are met, but also recognizing just which mode of rationality is the apt one given one's context.
When some technocentrics seem to decide in advance that science is the one and only paradigmatic practice of rationality, and that a truly rational person will manage to shoehorn every proper belief-ascription into something that at any rate superficially passes for proper scientific form, it becomes enormously difficult to direct their attention to any detail at all that can't be reduced to conventionally instrumental terms (as the sacrifices we make for the legibility of belonging often cannot be, as an idiosyncratic assertion that a thing is beautiful often cannot be, as the faith that we will risk disadvantage in an effort at reconciliation with those to whom we seem irreconcilable for now often cannot be, and so on), and one finds oneself accused of emotionalism, irrationality, relativism, and who knows what else when one makes the effort at all.
Of course, from my own perspective, it is exactly as irrational and exactly as destructive to the proper practice and status of science to try to tear and stretch it to accommodate dimensions of human experience to which it is not well suited, as it would be to deny its indispensability in matters of prediction and control. What is curious to me is that those who would make of science a kind of godly summit, end-all, be-all (with themselves as its Priestly mouthpieces more often than not) are precisely the ones who claim their clumsy hyperbole amounts to a Championing of Science, while even technoscientifically literate advocates for a more modest accounting of science's role in the practical fabric of rationality and sociability are often pilloried by such Champions for their irrationality.
What it is key to understand here is that this does not look to me like an equivalent exchange: It is not just that the Scientist decries the Humanist's irrationality (think of logical positivism pooh-poohing the lack of philosophical "progress" -- as if this category necessarily applies to the project of philosophy as a valuable enterprise -- or distinguishing the content of fact from the "emotivism" of value), then the Humanist turns about and decries the Scientist's irrationality for good measure (pointing out that science lacks the conceptual resources to answer the question should an experiment be done? should an outcome be pursued among others? and so on).
The reason this is not as equivalent an exchange of charges as it might initially seem is because it seems to me that scientific rationality is easily affirmed and championed by those who might affirm and champion nonetheless other available modes of rationality as more apt to our circumstances. If I am right to say that we rationally affirm instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political beliefs; and if I am right to say that these beliefs are warranted according to different practices and yield different edifications; then there is a great difference between the position of one who would deny the existence of all but one of these modes or denigrate all but one of these modes or subsume all these modes under just one of them in the name of rationality, and the position of one who would affirm the different value and dignity of them all in their proper measure in the name of rationality, including the mode valorized by the reductionist position.
The one who demands exclusion and reduction in the name of purity and optimality is making a radically different sort of argument than the one who pleas for inclusion and expansion in the name of diversity and consent. It is profoundly misleading to equate these two positions, whatever their superficial symmetry.
Let me be clear, I am not just claiming that there is a place for morals, aesthetics, ethics, and politics, in a world that properly respects scientific rationality, I am saying that all of these are modes of rationality -- if the warrants that differently govern the assertability of moral or aesthetic beliefs are not matters of rationality (if they are matters of, say, propriety, instead), then exactly the same thing applies in my view to the warrants that govern assertability in matters of instrumental belief. And let me be even clearer still, I do absolutely agree that the criteria for warranted assertability hacked out over centuries of scientific practice -- falsifiability, testing, publication, coherence, saving the phenomena, elegance, and so on -- do indeed provide a marvelous, incomparable institutional recourse for acquiring good beliefs concerning matters of prediction and control.
Looking to the Scientist to provide guidance in matters for which she is no more qualified than anybody else, one citizen among citizens, one peer among peers, one organism among organisms, has nothing to do with science. Going from there to invest the idealized figure of the Scientist or of his Works with hyperbolic or even transcendental significances has nothing to do with science either.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
On the Posthuman
Few can have failed to notice that, historically speaking, the so-called universal accomplishments celebrated under the banner of humanism from the Renaissance to the present day have rarely been enjoyed by more than a privileged group of men, and occasionally a few women, within strictly limited socioeconomic positions.
And even at its most capacious and inclusive, it is hard to shake the worry that any purely humanist and hence anthropocentric and hence human-racist grounding of ethics will likely stand perplexed in the face of the demand of Great Apes, dolphins, and other nonhuman animals (let alone trees, or for that matter biospheres) for some measure standing and respect.
Honestly, the celebrated category of "humanity" seems rarely to have provided much protective cover for even fully sane, mature, "exemplary" human beings caught up in the sometimes genocidal technoscientific dislocations of the modern era.
A number of "post-humanist" discourses have emerged to register these dissatisfactions with the limitations of the traditional humanist project.
It is important to recognize that the "post-human" does not have to conjure up the frightening or tragic spectacle of a posthumous humanity, an end to the best aspirations of human civilization, or even a repudiation of humanism itself, so much as a new effort emerging out of humanism, a moving on from humanism as a point of departure, a demanding of something new from humanism, perhaps a demand that humanism actually live up to its ethical and democratizing self-image for once.
To be sure, the “post-human” is not one kind of imaginary or idealized prostheticized person of the future, soliciting our identification in the present and facilitating our dis-identification with our peers. Nor is “post-humanism” a singular response to a particular current of prostheticized personhood -- whether involving digital network immersion, peer-to-peer Netroots democracy, post-Pill feminism, transsexual queerness, non-normalized post-"disabled" prosthetic different-enablements, open source biopunks and copyfighters, or what have you -- nor certainly is it a matter properly of the more fantastic identifications with robots, or eugenicized superhumans, or artificial intelligences, or aliens that seem to come up so often when “post-humanism” is discussed as a topic in hyperbolic popular futurism or sub(cult)ural technophilic discourses.
"Post-humanism," properly so-called, names the ethical encounters of humanism with itself, the confrontations of a universalism with its historical and practical limits and contradictions. And the ethical visions that emerge either out of ("post" in the sense of "after") or in resistance to ("post" in the sense of "over") that confrontation are themselves ethical terms.
This post was adapted from material excerpted from two longer pieces, one of them my Technoprogressivisms essay, the other Posthuman Terrains, in answer to a request from Vladimir de Thezier for a brief statement on Posthumanism as a keyword in contemporary critical theory.
And even at its most capacious and inclusive, it is hard to shake the worry that any purely humanist and hence anthropocentric and hence human-racist grounding of ethics will likely stand perplexed in the face of the demand of Great Apes, dolphins, and other nonhuman animals (let alone trees, or for that matter biospheres) for some measure standing and respect.
Honestly, the celebrated category of "humanity" seems rarely to have provided much protective cover for even fully sane, mature, "exemplary" human beings caught up in the sometimes genocidal technoscientific dislocations of the modern era.
A number of "post-humanist" discourses have emerged to register these dissatisfactions with the limitations of the traditional humanist project.
It is important to recognize that the "post-human" does not have to conjure up the frightening or tragic spectacle of a posthumous humanity, an end to the best aspirations of human civilization, or even a repudiation of humanism itself, so much as a new effort emerging out of humanism, a moving on from humanism as a point of departure, a demanding of something new from humanism, perhaps a demand that humanism actually live up to its ethical and democratizing self-image for once.
To be sure, the “post-human” is not one kind of imaginary or idealized prostheticized person of the future, soliciting our identification in the present and facilitating our dis-identification with our peers. Nor is “post-humanism” a singular response to a particular current of prostheticized personhood -- whether involving digital network immersion, peer-to-peer Netroots democracy, post-Pill feminism, transsexual queerness, non-normalized post-"disabled" prosthetic different-enablements, open source biopunks and copyfighters, or what have you -- nor certainly is it a matter properly of the more fantastic identifications with robots, or eugenicized superhumans, or artificial intelligences, or aliens that seem to come up so often when “post-humanism” is discussed as a topic in hyperbolic popular futurism or sub(cult)ural technophilic discourses.
"Post-humanism," properly so-called, names the ethical encounters of humanism with itself, the confrontations of a universalism with its historical and practical limits and contradictions. And the ethical visions that emerge either out of ("post" in the sense of "after") or in resistance to ("post" in the sense of "over") that confrontation are themselves ethical terms.
This post was adapted from material excerpted from two longer pieces, one of them my Technoprogressivisms essay, the other Posthuman Terrains, in answer to a request from Vladimir de Thezier for a brief statement on Posthumanism as a keyword in contemporary critical theory.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Depoliticized Technology, Repoliticizing Technology
"Technology" is a verb masquerading as a noun.
Behind every conjuration of a technological thing, always there are the vicissitudes of complex, fraught, unpredictable processes: of invention, of investment, of research, of testing, of publication, of education, of marketing, of application, of distribution, of appropriation.
"Technology" is always a shorthand, and it is crucial to translate that shorthand back into longhand before we affirm or resist particular claims or aspirations that depend on this term for their force. "Technology" as an idea has come to be radically depoliticized, so much so that even when people sometimes speak of politics and technology they will speak in terms of "the politics surrounding technology" or of a dangerous "politicizing of technology" as if politics were an invasive alien organism impinging on something that is inherently non-political.
When we use the word "technology" we need to speak of it and to mean by it something like the collaborative recourse to technique in the effort to solve shared problems and facilitate shared aspirations.
Too often people use the word "technology" to mean instead something like the use of implements by some (sometimes a small minority) to disregard, control, marginalize, oppress, exploit others (sometimes a large majority). This is what people often really mean when they claim to be "anti-technology" in a general way.
Too often people use the word "technology" to mean instead something like the use of technique to circumvent the difficult, contentious, time-consuming process of doing justice to the diversity of needs, perspectives, and aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders to shared concerns (through elite decision making by nonaccountable professionals, or through the mass-mediated manufacture of consent, and so on). People who "oppose technology" in a general way often mean by this opposition to decry this kind of elitism or conservatism. But it is interesting to note that this is also what many people often really seem to mean when they claim to be "pro-technology" in general way, usually because they think certain questions of general concern are too complicated or happening too quickly to be addressed by all of their actual stakeholders or sometimes simply because they are temperamentally averse to stakeholder politics and seek out what they imagine to be less contentious spheres governed by "facts" rather than "values."
In both of these cases, "technology" marks an effort at depoliticization: whether outright anti-political or assertively apolitical, "technology" discussions have come to function too often to direct our attention to the particularity of technique while removing the complexity of dissent from consideration, function too often to focus on the generality of promises while distracting us from the specificity of consequences, wider, longer-term, unintended impacts, or from actual distributions of cost, risk, and benefit.
We need to confront this depoliticization through the discourse of "technology" with an insistent repoliticization of "technology."
While it is not enough simply to repoliticize it to achieve a desired democratization of "technology," you can be sure that a depoliticized "technology" will never be a democratic one. Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, and depoliticization always functions to remove decisions made by some from contestation by the many who have a stake in them.
Behind every conjuration of a technological thing, remember, are the vicissitudes of complex, fraught, unpredictable processes: And always decisions, always decisions are being made. Who are the decision makers? What considerations preoccupy them? Who is impacted by these decisions?
Never permit the discourse of "technology" to lodge itself in the salesman's pitch, in the fetishized delineation of technical capacities or the promissory evocation of desired outcomes. Citizens do not settle for the status of customers when there are decisions being made on matters of concern that affect them.
Once again, when we use the word "technology" we really need to mean by the term something like collaborative recourse to technique in the effort to solve shared problems and facilitate shared aspirations.
Behind every conjuration of a technological thing, always there are the vicissitudes of complex, fraught, unpredictable processes: of invention, of investment, of research, of testing, of publication, of education, of marketing, of application, of distribution, of appropriation.
"Technology" is always a shorthand, and it is crucial to translate that shorthand back into longhand before we affirm or resist particular claims or aspirations that depend on this term for their force. "Technology" as an idea has come to be radically depoliticized, so much so that even when people sometimes speak of politics and technology they will speak in terms of "the politics surrounding technology" or of a dangerous "politicizing of technology" as if politics were an invasive alien organism impinging on something that is inherently non-political.
When we use the word "technology" we need to speak of it and to mean by it something like the collaborative recourse to technique in the effort to solve shared problems and facilitate shared aspirations.
Too often people use the word "technology" to mean instead something like the use of implements by some (sometimes a small minority) to disregard, control, marginalize, oppress, exploit others (sometimes a large majority). This is what people often really mean when they claim to be "anti-technology" in a general way.
Too often people use the word "technology" to mean instead something like the use of technique to circumvent the difficult, contentious, time-consuming process of doing justice to the diversity of needs, perspectives, and aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders to shared concerns (through elite decision making by nonaccountable professionals, or through the mass-mediated manufacture of consent, and so on). People who "oppose technology" in a general way often mean by this opposition to decry this kind of elitism or conservatism. But it is interesting to note that this is also what many people often really seem to mean when they claim to be "pro-technology" in general way, usually because they think certain questions of general concern are too complicated or happening too quickly to be addressed by all of their actual stakeholders or sometimes simply because they are temperamentally averse to stakeholder politics and seek out what they imagine to be less contentious spheres governed by "facts" rather than "values."
In both of these cases, "technology" marks an effort at depoliticization: whether outright anti-political or assertively apolitical, "technology" discussions have come to function too often to direct our attention to the particularity of technique while removing the complexity of dissent from consideration, function too often to focus on the generality of promises while distracting us from the specificity of consequences, wider, longer-term, unintended impacts, or from actual distributions of cost, risk, and benefit.
We need to confront this depoliticization through the discourse of "technology" with an insistent repoliticization of "technology."
While it is not enough simply to repoliticize it to achieve a desired democratization of "technology," you can be sure that a depoliticized "technology" will never be a democratic one. Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, and depoliticization always functions to remove decisions made by some from contestation by the many who have a stake in them.
Behind every conjuration of a technological thing, remember, are the vicissitudes of complex, fraught, unpredictable processes: And always decisions, always decisions are being made. Who are the decision makers? What considerations preoccupy them? Who is impacted by these decisions?
Never permit the discourse of "technology" to lodge itself in the salesman's pitch, in the fetishized delineation of technical capacities or the promissory evocation of desired outcomes. Citizens do not settle for the status of customers when there are decisions being made on matters of concern that affect them.
Once again, when we use the word "technology" we really need to mean by the term something like collaborative recourse to technique in the effort to solve shared problems and facilitate shared aspirations.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
"Technological Immortalism" As Superlativity Discourse
The two strands of Superlative Technology Discourse that have preoccupied my attention on Amor Mundi over the last few weeks have been connected primarily with claims about the Drexlerian vision of nanotechnology and the Singularitarian vision of Strong AI. These two strands amount in more sociocultural terms to visions of the reductively "technological" accomplishment of, on the one hand, a post-political superabundance and, on the other hand, a post-historical superintelligence.
The third strand of Superlativity Discourse that repays such analysis in my view is connected with the claims of so-called Technological Immortalism, which involve the vision of the reductively "technological" accomplishment of post-human superlongevity -- via unprecedented as yet imaginary radically efficacious genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies or, more "radically" still, via the conceptually confused notion and even more imaginary "technique" of a "translation" of embodied selves into presumably eternal informational forms.
In a recent post over on Existence Is Wonderful, Friend of Blog Anne Corwin makes the following observations:
These observations are, of course, completely banal, and Corwin means for them to be. These are all completely mainstream attitudes that derive from a basic everyday commitment to the notion that healthcare is desirable in general, that longer, healthier lives are desirable in general, that relieving unnecessary suffering and supporting capacity where possible are desirable in general.
Corwin is restating these commonplace intuitions because she is making a political argument here for a less conventional aspiration, and wants to rely on the mainstream force of these familiar attitudes to lend comparable force to an unfamiliar one: "we already have longevity medicine to some extent." She expands the point here: "[W]hile some people squirm and balk at the notion of "radical life extension," practically nobody thinks that it would be a bad thing to have effective treatments for heart disease, Alzheimer's, etc. "
It seems to me that Corwin's point that most healthcare is already a matter of "life extension" if one really wants to apply a neologism where none is needed functions as the key intervention that punctures the Technological Immortalist varation of Superlative Technology Discourse. It is, in fact, precisely analogous to the sort of intervention that punctures the pretensions of Superlativity's other variations as well:
For example, Nanosantalogical "advocates" for an idealized technical "Drexlerian" accomplishment of superabundance will bemoan the failure of vision of "luddites" like me who would focus instead on the struggle for universal rights, international labor and welfare standards, subsidizing peer-to-peer formations, opening access to the archive of knowledge to all, and implementing steeply progressive income and property taxes to distribute technodevelopmental benefits, costs, and risks more fairly the better to facilitate the actually possible this-worldly abundance of commonwealth (a focus that is perfectly compatible with a concern with questions of funding useful research and regulating harmful impacts of technological interventions at the nanoscale). What matters to me here is that it is the latter focus that reveals the practical substance that the super-predicated notion of superabundance at once depends on and disavows for its force, a disavowal that in turn enables the super-predicated term to connect up with the far older omni-predicated term of transcendental discourse -- in this case, omnibenevolence, which has always strived to reconcile the fact of (God's) agency with the persistence of evil, a problem that translates under Superlativity into the anti-politics of a desired technical circumvention of the actual diversity of stakeholder aspirations in a finite world -- and so do the deeper work of psychic reassurance and sub(cult)ural cohesion that has always been the task of such pre-democratic discourse.
For another example, Singularitarian "advocates" for an idealized technical accomplishment of superintelligence via Strong Artificial Intelligence or self-"optimizing" software or human cognitive "enhancement" or what have you will likewise bemoan the failure of vision of "luddites" like me who would focus instead on providing lifelong education and desired retraining for all, encouraging a free and truly independent diverse media and press landscape, securing universal access to information via shortened copyright terms, liberalization of fair use provisions, limiting the propertization of public-funded research, demanding state, corporate, and academic transparency in matters of budgets and research results, subsidizing peer-to-peer formations and practices of peer production, the better to facilitate the actually possible this-worldly collaboration and contestation of multicultural commons (a focus that is perfectly compatible with a concern with questions of funding useful research and regulating harmful impacts of therapeutic modifications of mood and memory, monitoring and regulating automated weapons systems, asymmetrical surveillance and panoptic sorts, networked malware, infowar utilities, and so on). What matters to me here is that it is the latter focus that reveals the practical substance that the super-predicated notion of superintelligence at once depends on and disavows for its force, a disavowal that in turn enables the super-predicated term to connect up with the far older omni-predicated term of transcendental discourse -- in this case, omniscience, duly domesticated into an instrumental rationality sufficiently comparable and precedented to seem familiar but in fact invested with sufficient scope, speed, and efficacy to promise and threaten the incomparable, the unprecedented, the unspecifyable in the cadences of Priestly authority -- and so do the deeper work of psychic reassurance and sub(cult)ural cohesion that has always been the task of such pre-democratic discourse.
As I commented to Corwin in the Comments section of her post (a comment with which Anne seemed sympathetic, quite as I expected her to be):
The lesson one should draw from the banal realization that most healthcare is describable as longevity medicine and that, hence, almost everybody on earth supports a kind of longevity medicine is not that everybody therefore is some kind of confused or closeted Technological Immortalist, but that the discourse of Technological Immortalism has commandeered and deranged conventional intuitions about the desirability of healthcare providing longer, healthier lives. Superlativity opportunistically depends on (and as usual disavows) this substantial content in an effort to turn these intuitions to the service of more conventionally transcendental tasks to which they are finally ill-suited: mostly magical thinking and wish-fulfillment fantasies involving the individual acquisition of superhuman capacities and the denial of the fact of human mortality.
These Superlative derangements of healthcare discourse contribute to the pernicious pathologization of urgent technodevelopmental discourse concerning the obscene inequities in the treatment and neglect of already treatable diseases, the provision of basic services, the maintenance of basic infrastructure, sanitation, and nutrition, budgetary priorities in matters of research and development and distribution of promising emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies, sound scientific information about such emerging therapies, questions concerning consensual recourse to medical modification to facilitate or maintain non-normative morphologies and capacities (and the emerging tension between equally progressive intuitions about universal basic healthcare provision devoted to an "optimality" standard that both imposes and protects general standards in the service of the democratic value of equity and a "consensual' standard that risks becoming an alibi for exploitation and neglect but in the service of the democratic value of diversity), and so on.
Now, let me be as clear as possible about my sense of the terrain with which this technodevelopmental discourse is coping in fact. Already, today, the unprecedented susceptibility of organisms to medical intervention has transformed the status of "viability," "therapy," "normality," as stable measures of just when lives can properly be said to begin or to end, or as measures of the proper scope of healthcare practice. Meanwhile, neuroceutical interventions into memory, mood, and motivation (not to mention research into the impact of mass mediation, marketing, propaganda, and surveillance) deeply trouble our received intuitions about what enables and constitutes proper consent in the first place.
Consider the most conservatively therapeutic understanding of the "ultimate goals" or "regulative ideals" of medical science and treatment: Let's say that these would involve a kind of Hayfleckian utopia in which everybody on earth enjoys the robust health and intellectual capacity of the healthiest among us today as we presently perceive them, as well as lifespans prolonged for all to the extent of the century or so available only to the luckiest among us so far. It is crucial to grasp that the therapeutic accomplishment of this still intelligibly "conservative" therapeutic ideal would almost certainly set in motion a trajectory of scientific and technological development that would provoke at one and the same time unimaginable perplexities into the status of profound biological experiences such as pregnancy, sexual maturation, illness, aging and death.
In other words, even the most modest provision of basic and decent health care according to the terms and capacities of emerging and proximately upcoming genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive techniques -- and ever more so according to just how universally this basic healthcare is provided -- will transform, quite possibly beyond recognition, what will count as “basic,” “decent,” and “normal” in the way of our expectations about what bodies properly are and what they are capable of. It is this sort of profound quandary that activates the irrational transcendentalizing passions of Superlativity, the ancient (as old as recorded civilization) hankering after immortality, invulnerability, superpowers, and so on.
I have repeatedly pointed to the pernicious pathologization of technodevelopmental deliberation perpetrated by bioconservatives discourses that incessantly and hyperbolically conjure up spectacles of monstrous chimeras, clone armies, commodified super-babies, "perverse" sexual indulgences, imposed prostheticized monoculture and so on all as a way of combating modest, very widely desired therapeutic research and access to cure diseases, treat avoidable suffering, end unwanted pregnancies, facilitate wanted pregnancies, support diverse non-normative lifeways. Usually they do so out of a reactionary politics of social conservatism that recognizes the threat to incumbent interests of appropriate and appropriated technologies in the hands of the people. (For examples: read this and this and this and this and this.)
But it seems to me that Superlative discourses offer up precisely analogous hyperbolic spectacles (indeed, sometimes they offer up exactly the same spectacles as the bioconservatives, but in tonalities of desire rather than dread), producing precisely the same pernicious derangements of deliberation, often -- curiously enough given the militant atheism prevalent among the partisans of Superlativite Technology Discourses, especially in its Sub(cult)ural Formations -- to satisfy precisely the same sorts of religious aspirations, the consolations of faith in an often tragic universe, the quest for connection with a meaning greater than oneself, reassurance in the face of life's mortality and many betrayals, the ritual bonds of shared identification and dis-identification in moral and interpretative communities of affiliation, and so on.
The third strand of Superlativity Discourse that repays such analysis in my view is connected with the claims of so-called Technological Immortalism, which involve the vision of the reductively "technological" accomplishment of post-human superlongevity -- via unprecedented as yet imaginary radically efficacious genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies or, more "radically" still, via the conceptually confused notion and even more imaginary "technique" of a "translation" of embodied selves into presumably eternal informational forms.
In a recent post over on Existence Is Wonderful, Friend of Blog Anne Corwin makes the following observations:
If a person has hypertension and manages to get it properly treated, it is quite likely that he or she will remain in better health longer than otherwise, because his or her body will not be experiencing as much in the way of accumulated damage.
If testing for (and treating) treating hypertension is basic health care for people in middle-age and beyond, there should be nothing too difficult about imagining eventually testing for (and treating) issues pertaining to cancer vulnerability, critical cell loss and atrophy, mitochondrial mutation, etc.
While the ongoing quest to achieve better health care for all persons is, and will ever remain, broadly applied and global in scope, it is well worth acknowledging that people get old everywhere in the world. This makes the drive to develop effective basic health care for older people of universal importance. Hypertension, cancer, atherosclerosis, etc., do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, national origin, or economic status. And if we're going to consider hypertension treatment part of basic health care, why not other forms of maintenance care?
These observations are, of course, completely banal, and Corwin means for them to be. These are all completely mainstream attitudes that derive from a basic everyday commitment to the notion that healthcare is desirable in general, that longer, healthier lives are desirable in general, that relieving unnecessary suffering and supporting capacity where possible are desirable in general.
Corwin is restating these commonplace intuitions because she is making a political argument here for a less conventional aspiration, and wants to rely on the mainstream force of these familiar attitudes to lend comparable force to an unfamiliar one: "we already have longevity medicine to some extent." She expands the point here: "[W]hile some people squirm and balk at the notion of "radical life extension," practically nobody thinks that it would be a bad thing to have effective treatments for heart disease, Alzheimer's, etc. "
It seems to me that Corwin's point that most healthcare is already a matter of "life extension" if one really wants to apply a neologism where none is needed functions as the key intervention that punctures the Technological Immortalist varation of Superlative Technology Discourse. It is, in fact, precisely analogous to the sort of intervention that punctures the pretensions of Superlativity's other variations as well:
For example, Nanosantalogical "advocates" for an idealized technical "Drexlerian" accomplishment of superabundance will bemoan the failure of vision of "luddites" like me who would focus instead on the struggle for universal rights, international labor and welfare standards, subsidizing peer-to-peer formations, opening access to the archive of knowledge to all, and implementing steeply progressive income and property taxes to distribute technodevelopmental benefits, costs, and risks more fairly the better to facilitate the actually possible this-worldly abundance of commonwealth (a focus that is perfectly compatible with a concern with questions of funding useful research and regulating harmful impacts of technological interventions at the nanoscale). What matters to me here is that it is the latter focus that reveals the practical substance that the super-predicated notion of superabundance at once depends on and disavows for its force, a disavowal that in turn enables the super-predicated term to connect up with the far older omni-predicated term of transcendental discourse -- in this case, omnibenevolence, which has always strived to reconcile the fact of (God's) agency with the persistence of evil, a problem that translates under Superlativity into the anti-politics of a desired technical circumvention of the actual diversity of stakeholder aspirations in a finite world -- and so do the deeper work of psychic reassurance and sub(cult)ural cohesion that has always been the task of such pre-democratic discourse.
For another example, Singularitarian "advocates" for an idealized technical accomplishment of superintelligence via Strong Artificial Intelligence or self-"optimizing" software or human cognitive "enhancement" or what have you will likewise bemoan the failure of vision of "luddites" like me who would focus instead on providing lifelong education and desired retraining for all, encouraging a free and truly independent diverse media and press landscape, securing universal access to information via shortened copyright terms, liberalization of fair use provisions, limiting the propertization of public-funded research, demanding state, corporate, and academic transparency in matters of budgets and research results, subsidizing peer-to-peer formations and practices of peer production, the better to facilitate the actually possible this-worldly collaboration and contestation of multicultural commons (a focus that is perfectly compatible with a concern with questions of funding useful research and regulating harmful impacts of therapeutic modifications of mood and memory, monitoring and regulating automated weapons systems, asymmetrical surveillance and panoptic sorts, networked malware, infowar utilities, and so on). What matters to me here is that it is the latter focus that reveals the practical substance that the super-predicated notion of superintelligence at once depends on and disavows for its force, a disavowal that in turn enables the super-predicated term to connect up with the far older omni-predicated term of transcendental discourse -- in this case, omniscience, duly domesticated into an instrumental rationality sufficiently comparable and precedented to seem familiar but in fact invested with sufficient scope, speed, and efficacy to promise and threaten the incomparable, the unprecedented, the unspecifyable in the cadences of Priestly authority -- and so do the deeper work of psychic reassurance and sub(cult)ural cohesion that has always been the task of such pre-democratic discourse.
As I commented to Corwin in the Comments section of her post (a comment with which Anne seemed sympathetic, quite as I expected her to be):
It is important to stress to your readership that the conclusion one draws from this insight is not that somehow it is clarifying to redescribe the treatment of hypertension and such as part of an effort to "defeat aging," but that advocates for research and funding for longevity and rejuvenation medicine (or, heaven help us, "technological immortality") should instead be redescribing most of the things they presently associate with "defeating aging" as, simply, "healthcare" -- very much including the Seven Deadly Things at the heart of the SENS research program, and comparable formulations from research programs to come.
The lesson one should draw from the banal realization that most healthcare is describable as longevity medicine and that, hence, almost everybody on earth supports a kind of longevity medicine is not that everybody therefore is some kind of confused or closeted Technological Immortalist, but that the discourse of Technological Immortalism has commandeered and deranged conventional intuitions about the desirability of healthcare providing longer, healthier lives. Superlativity opportunistically depends on (and as usual disavows) this substantial content in an effort to turn these intuitions to the service of more conventionally transcendental tasks to which they are finally ill-suited: mostly magical thinking and wish-fulfillment fantasies involving the individual acquisition of superhuman capacities and the denial of the fact of human mortality.
These Superlative derangements of healthcare discourse contribute to the pernicious pathologization of urgent technodevelopmental discourse concerning the obscene inequities in the treatment and neglect of already treatable diseases, the provision of basic services, the maintenance of basic infrastructure, sanitation, and nutrition, budgetary priorities in matters of research and development and distribution of promising emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies, sound scientific information about such emerging therapies, questions concerning consensual recourse to medical modification to facilitate or maintain non-normative morphologies and capacities (and the emerging tension between equally progressive intuitions about universal basic healthcare provision devoted to an "optimality" standard that both imposes and protects general standards in the service of the democratic value of equity and a "consensual' standard that risks becoming an alibi for exploitation and neglect but in the service of the democratic value of diversity), and so on.
Now, let me be as clear as possible about my sense of the terrain with which this technodevelopmental discourse is coping in fact. Already, today, the unprecedented susceptibility of organisms to medical intervention has transformed the status of "viability," "therapy," "normality," as stable measures of just when lives can properly be said to begin or to end, or as measures of the proper scope of healthcare practice. Meanwhile, neuroceutical interventions into memory, mood, and motivation (not to mention research into the impact of mass mediation, marketing, propaganda, and surveillance) deeply trouble our received intuitions about what enables and constitutes proper consent in the first place.
Consider the most conservatively therapeutic understanding of the "ultimate goals" or "regulative ideals" of medical science and treatment: Let's say that these would involve a kind of Hayfleckian utopia in which everybody on earth enjoys the robust health and intellectual capacity of the healthiest among us today as we presently perceive them, as well as lifespans prolonged for all to the extent of the century or so available only to the luckiest among us so far. It is crucial to grasp that the therapeutic accomplishment of this still intelligibly "conservative" therapeutic ideal would almost certainly set in motion a trajectory of scientific and technological development that would provoke at one and the same time unimaginable perplexities into the status of profound biological experiences such as pregnancy, sexual maturation, illness, aging and death.
In other words, even the most modest provision of basic and decent health care according to the terms and capacities of emerging and proximately upcoming genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive techniques -- and ever more so according to just how universally this basic healthcare is provided -- will transform, quite possibly beyond recognition, what will count as “basic,” “decent,” and “normal” in the way of our expectations about what bodies properly are and what they are capable of. It is this sort of profound quandary that activates the irrational transcendentalizing passions of Superlativity, the ancient (as old as recorded civilization) hankering after immortality, invulnerability, superpowers, and so on.
I have repeatedly pointed to the pernicious pathologization of technodevelopmental deliberation perpetrated by bioconservatives discourses that incessantly and hyperbolically conjure up spectacles of monstrous chimeras, clone armies, commodified super-babies, "perverse" sexual indulgences, imposed prostheticized monoculture and so on all as a way of combating modest, very widely desired therapeutic research and access to cure diseases, treat avoidable suffering, end unwanted pregnancies, facilitate wanted pregnancies, support diverse non-normative lifeways. Usually they do so out of a reactionary politics of social conservatism that recognizes the threat to incumbent interests of appropriate and appropriated technologies in the hands of the people. (For examples: read this and this and this and this and this.)
But it seems to me that Superlative discourses offer up precisely analogous hyperbolic spectacles (indeed, sometimes they offer up exactly the same spectacles as the bioconservatives, but in tonalities of desire rather than dread), producing precisely the same pernicious derangements of deliberation, often -- curiously enough given the militant atheism prevalent among the partisans of Superlativite Technology Discourses, especially in its Sub(cult)ural Formations -- to satisfy precisely the same sorts of religious aspirations, the consolations of faith in an often tragic universe, the quest for connection with a meaning greater than oneself, reassurance in the face of life's mortality and many betrayals, the ritual bonds of shared identification and dis-identification in moral and interpretative communities of affiliation, and so on.
Friday, November 02, 2007
"I Am Fact Guy"
Oh, those wacky Singularitarians! A fellow named Brian Wang has taken special umbrage at some of the comments I have directed at Superlative and Sub(cult)ural Technocentrics in a long ongoing discussion taking place over at Michael Anissimov's place "Accelerating Future." For the substance of the actual critique that has so exercised poor Brian I recommend people nibble at the texts available in my Superlative Summary. For those who already have the substance down, but find themselves still craving something more, I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Brian Wang:
Just so we're all on the same page now, by "transhumanism" here, I assume Brian means to indicate his faith in the looming arrival within the lifetimes of many now living of superlative technologies delivering techno-utopian free market superabundance, medical or even "digitized" Immortality and a Singularitarian "End of History" via the appearance of an artificial superintelligent Robot God. I am not joking, I think he probably really literally does believe something along these lines. And it this set of Superlative outcomes that he is assessing as more "likely" than the re-instatement of more progressive taxes and the implementation of universal healthcare (or "taxes as slavery" and "socialized medicine" for those among you of the reactionary wingnut set who like to rub elbows among the transhumanists).
I like the part where Brian suggests my advocacy of progressive taxes makes me sound crazy and then follows with a long deep dose of sane, Brian Wang style.
In a past exchange in which Brian was smugly explaining to me why nuclear proliferation was an issue overblown by lefty literary types who lack his own command of the relevant facts of the matter I found myself so disgusted I told him he really ought to be posting elsewhere than here. Given my description of Amor Mundi as "scattered technoprogressive speculations from a social democratic secular feminist vegetarian post-natural green anti-militarist cyborg queer academic" it is rather difficult to imagine that such a reaction would seem surprising to Brian.
But I admit it would be unfair of me to spotlight Brian's intemperate remarks in this way and forbid him space to respond…
So I have changed my mind: Do feel welcome to go right ahead and comment to your heart's content, Brian Wang, should you want to do so.
Honestly. Let it out, guy.
I might even upgrade especially choice bits for the front page.
I know many things are incomprehensible to you. You are not very smart.
Why don’t you jettison your focus on high progressive taxes, guaranteed income and socialized medicine Dale? It is too long term and even more unlikely to happen in the United States than transhumanism.
Just so we're all on the same page now, by "transhumanism" here, I assume Brian means to indicate his faith in the looming arrival within the lifetimes of many now living of superlative technologies delivering techno-utopian free market superabundance, medical or even "digitized" Immortality and a Singularitarian "End of History" via the appearance of an artificial superintelligent Robot God. I am not joking, I think he probably really literally does believe something along these lines. And it this set of Superlative outcomes that he is assessing as more "likely" than the re-instatement of more progressive taxes and the implementation of universal healthcare (or "taxes as slavery" and "socialized medicine" for those among you of the reactionary wingnut set who like to rub elbows among the transhumanists).
Your relabeled extreme socialism makes you sound crazy.
Did you enjoy it when I freaked you out ? I know you did not. You told me yourself. Yet you did not learn anything from it. You are not a villain, but you are a pathetic immoral worm. A moral person who knows that it is bad for them to do something would stop doing it even if they enjoyed doing it. I enjoy rubbing your face in it. The reason it it is moral for me to do so is because you are not a moral person as you have shown and stated. I get to bully the bully. I own you.
I am fact guy who is immune to your manipulation. So if you want to have a survey of your explicitly offered reasons then you can dig them up and present them yourself.
I like the part where Brian suggests my advocacy of progressive taxes makes me sound crazy and then follows with a long deep dose of sane, Brian Wang style.
In a past exchange in which Brian was smugly explaining to me why nuclear proliferation was an issue overblown by lefty literary types who lack his own command of the relevant facts of the matter I found myself so disgusted I told him he really ought to be posting elsewhere than here. Given my description of Amor Mundi as "scattered technoprogressive speculations from a social democratic secular feminist vegetarian post-natural green anti-militarist cyborg queer academic" it is rather difficult to imagine that such a reaction would seem surprising to Brian.
But I admit it would be unfair of me to spotlight Brian's intemperate remarks in this way and forbid him space to respond…
So I have changed my mind: Do feel welcome to go right ahead and comment to your heart's content, Brian Wang, should you want to do so.
Honestly. Let it out, guy.
I might even upgrade especially choice bits for the front page.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)