I wrote a couple days ago about the popular contest between the guiding ideas of a championing of Good Government as against a vilification of Big Government, being staged in the present as a contest of affection for FDR as against Ronald Reagan as Presidential exemplars. One of the problems with this formulation is that the phrases on which it depends are not equally dependable themselves.
Of course, the idea of championing Good Government is not -- as some facile reactionaries would have it -- anything like a blanket celebration of all government as good, so much as the conviction that government can serve the people well whatever its vulnerabilities to do otherwise and that we must all be dedicated as citizens, then, to ensuring that it does do good.
Now, the idea of vilifying Big Government is a far more confused affair. Given the tendency of so many ideologues most loudly opposed to Big Government to enlarge governmental budgets, debts, employees, legislation, and authority the moment they are in a position to do so it is easy to wonder whether they mean or even remember or understand what they say when they repudiate Big Government. Of course, many claim to oppose the very idea of Government as such (which Reagan himself described as "the problem"), in which case what is Bad about Big Government is just that it is more of what is bad in any case, but this surely exacerbates the initial perplexity of those of us who wonder whether those who speak this way truly mean or understand what they say. It seems curious on the face of it that a person who denounces the criminality and corruption and incompetence of the very idea of public service would then strive so diligently to assume the position of such criminality, corruption, and incompetence (although I suppose it does help us make sense of the fact that so many who achieve public office through recourse to such rhetoric go on to be criminal, corrupt, and incompetent). And given that all public figures in the United States declare themselves dedicated to our democracy it seems especially curious that some would denounce government in a system of government of by and for the people, since this would seem to imply that they denounce not only all of their constituents but themselves as well as members of that people.
But it seems to me that the substantial reality underlying the rhetoric of the vilification of Big Government is really rather more straightforward than all this. Not to put too fine a point on it, Big Government tends to be code for "welfare" and for those who respond to this code it typically seems to mean even more specifically any empowerment of non-whites (which of course makes no sense at all since more white people are beneficiaries of welfare than not, but racism is irrational by nature and it is foolish to expect sense from it). That is to say, when you hear the vilification of Big Government it is crucial to understand just how often this vilification amounts to hostility to any Government so Big as to be Big Enough to be of benefit to anybody but well-off straight (or closeted) white guys. No, I do not think this is a facile or sanctimonious oversimplification. The Southern Strategy is real, and its mobilization by Reagan and others throughout the Movement Republican epoch consummated in Bush II is perfectly well understood.
Slavery was an incomparable crime in the foundation of this nation, a crime exacerbated by the native American genocide through which the United States constituted itself as a continental power through internal imperialism, a crime reproduced in the aftermath of the Civil War through racist Reconstruction and an Apartheid South, a crime consolidated by the exclusion of migrant farmers and domestic workers (many of whom were people of color) from the New Deal that created a white American middle class and then the subsequent failure of the New Deal to achieve a National healthcare system and hence a viable social democracy in the twentieth century because racists were appalled at the prospect of caring equitably for African American citizens, a crime re-invigorated right up to the present day in the racist war on drugs.
It is important to rehearse all this, because it is important that we recall forcefully to mind the ugly substance behind what might otherwise seem the merely stupid and self-defeating hostility to "Big Government" that presumably drives Movement Republicanism. It is important to grasp that their embrace of big authoritarian government in practice does not give the lie to their vilifications of Big Government so much as remind us that these vilifications are often profoundly misleading, functioning as cover for what is more substantially their racist hostility to the notion of equitable treatment for the diversity of their fellow citizens of color. And, finally, all this is important, because unless we attend to all this we are apt to forget or misunderstand the extraordinary force and promise (far from a guarantee, but promise indeed) of the historical moment when the Southern Strategy fails and Barack Obama assumes the Presidency of the United States.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Did the Cold War Happen?
It's interesting to re-read the Cold War as a planetary system rather than a planetary conflict, as a kind of meta-stable postcolonial hegemony that mistook itself as the stalemate between two diametrically opposed ideologies when in fact it constituted more a lumpy but continuous ideological system expressing the values of extractive- centralizing- authoritarian industrialism.
The "End of the Cold War," then, would represent less the victory of one antagonist ("capitalism," so-called) over the other ("communism," so-called), so much as the exhibition of systemic contradictions at both poles in an industrial planetary hegemony that eventually convulsed the whole, first at one pole and very soon after (what wishful thinking, "the end of history," indeed!) at the other.
Few readers of this blog will be surprised to hear that I regard the proper successor to the failed planetary system of extractive-industrialism as polyculture: sustainable planetary peer-to-peer consensual multiculture.
Darker possibilities are certainly also possible: warlordism in the midst of climate catastrophe and planetary pandemics, militarist extinction events, corporatist feudalism presiding over genocidal precarization of "surplus humanity" among others. But it does seem to me that history in this moment is rather up for grabs, and more promising than not, especially given the vitality of global resistance movements against neoliberalism (and its neoconservative underside), the corporate-militarist consummation of global extractive-industrialism, the emergence of environmental consciousness and the proliferation of disruptive peer-to-peer formations.
The "End of the Cold War," then, would represent less the victory of one antagonist ("capitalism," so-called) over the other ("communism," so-called), so much as the exhibition of systemic contradictions at both poles in an industrial planetary hegemony that eventually convulsed the whole, first at one pole and very soon after (what wishful thinking, "the end of history," indeed!) at the other.
Few readers of this blog will be surprised to hear that I regard the proper successor to the failed planetary system of extractive-industrialism as polyculture: sustainable planetary peer-to-peer consensual multiculture.
Darker possibilities are certainly also possible: warlordism in the midst of climate catastrophe and planetary pandemics, militarist extinction events, corporatist feudalism presiding over genocidal precarization of "surplus humanity" among others. But it does seem to me that history in this moment is rather up for grabs, and more promising than not, especially given the vitality of global resistance movements against neoliberalism (and its neoconservative underside), the corporate-militarist consummation of global extractive-industrialism, the emergence of environmental consciousness and the proliferation of disruptive peer-to-peer formations.
Friday, December 26, 2008
The Structural Asymmetry Faced By Good Government as Against Anti-Government Politics
One cannot stress this point Krugman made in his Christmas column often enough:
This isn't just a question of the hypocrisy and inertia of elite institutions favoring incumbent and moneyed interests above all. All that was depressingly in evidence often enough, but now that the tables have turned somewhat we are in a better position to understand the different stakes and conditions that structurally confront good government as against anti-government types more generally.
There is a special difficulty for good-government types (who closely but do not perfectly track Democratic as against Republican partisan politics, so one should be a little careful around this) in an era in which it is relatively easy opportunistically to deploy righteous dissatisfaction with organized corruption and incompetence into a popular anti-governmentality that actually benefits most who also benefit most from the corruption and incompetence itself.
(It has been largely the mass-broadcast media formations of the late modern era that facilitated this ease opportunistically taken up by the successive 20C waves of the Right, from the rise of fascism through to the bloody postcolonial global implementation of the corporate-militarist Washington Consensus comsummated in the killer clown college of the Bush II administration. Meanwhile, the ongoing -- but more vulnerable than you might think -- eclipse of mass-broadcast media by peer-to-peer formations has created the conditions, well, together with the emergence of post-nationalist environmental concerns, for a genuinely revolutionary recasting of the planetary political terrain to which radical democracy and social justice movements would do well to avail themselves while the getting's good. This is actually a topic for a separate post, but the politics that are roughly indicated through the shorthand of "good government types" are actually indispensable to this democratizing consensualizing planetary moment in my view -- without them, radical democracy is all too likely to be appropriated by the usual rhetoric of "spontaneism" and "negative liberty" that always eventually buttresses the politics of incumbency over the politics of resistence.)
It is crucial for "goo-goos" (advocates of good government) to resist their temperamental attraction to "moving on" in the name of problem solving here and now. They need to rethink their apparently endless capacity to "forgive and forget" those whose skills seem scarce and wasted should accountability for failure and corruption shunt them aside. And they must explicitly discredit all those who proffer blanket condemnations of government as such -- when good government is literally indispensable to the maintenance of legitimate, democratic, equitable, diverse, consensual social order. They must condemn those who would condemn public service in general as corrupt, incompetent, or ridiculous -- rather than excoriating corrupt and incompetent public servants in particular together with praise of the heroism, service, and sacrifice of public service in general. They must expose the self-serving pretense of those who like to insinuate that there something foolish or impractical or self-marginalizing in a dedication to integrity, fairness, long-term thinking, empathy, waiting for one's turn, achieving competence, right modesty, critical thinking, and taking responsibility for one's mistakes and even for the unintended harms one has had a hand in making -- when these are the public values that help make the world a place worth living in for all, peer to peer.
The anti-government types are all too eager to eat the world they did nothing to make and little to maintain, to howl that there "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" even as they feast themselves on a crumbling infrastructure (not only the physical infrastructure of roads and pipes and professionalisms and legal precedents, but a psychical infrastructure of goodwill and trust and decency and commonwealth eroded by self-promotion and looting and snide short-sighted opportunism) they refuse to pay for, eating it and thinking or pretending they can have it, too. Their carnival of looting and cruelty has been a vicious circle that swallowed a whole generation, their bad behavior feeding failure after failure and ensuring always only that those who were the most vulnerable or who actually sought to save the world from these predations would be the first to fail themselves, the first to burn out, the first to be squeezed, the first to be criticized for any misstep, the most vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy if they succeeded in accomplishing anything at all, however momentary, under these impossible conditions, and so on.
Good government types must install virtuous circles to overcome these vicious ones always at the ready to undermine the harder work of common sense and common wealth. They must ensure that those who benefit from the equitable administration of society and law understand very well their absolute interdependence with their fellows for their continued security, prosperity, and expressivity and are devoted to maintaining the institutions and standards without which that security, prosperity, and expressivity are hopelessly fraught and fragile: imperiled by the short-sightedness, self-rationalization, and parochialism all human beings are susceptible to, but on which incumbent authority and privilege especially tend to depend for their long maintenance in a dynamic world.
Good government is fragile, and the task of good government types is far more difficult than that of anti-government types (except in rare moments of devastating reckoning like the one we are likely in for at present when the costs and stakes become flabbergastingly stark). Just as anti-governmentality succeeds with every failure, at least until these many failures accumulate into a failure too sweeping and too deep to hide or mistake or bear, good governmentality must ensure that its every success is indeed experienced as the success it is, as an accomplishment of common sense and common wealth for which we can all of us be proud and grateful and which should find us newly dedicated to the common work, peer to peer, without which every creative achievement, every collaboration, every reconciliation, every secure comfort would all too likely have been stillborn or stolen or smashed by the frailties we are all of us heir to otherwise.
[T]he Bushies didn’t have to worry about governing well and honestly. Even when they failed on the job (as they so often did), they could claim that very failure as vindication of their anti-government ideology, a demonstration that the public sector can’t do anything right.
This isn't just a question of the hypocrisy and inertia of elite institutions favoring incumbent and moneyed interests above all. All that was depressingly in evidence often enough, but now that the tables have turned somewhat we are in a better position to understand the different stakes and conditions that structurally confront good government as against anti-government types more generally.
There is a special difficulty for good-government types (who closely but do not perfectly track Democratic as against Republican partisan politics, so one should be a little careful around this) in an era in which it is relatively easy opportunistically to deploy righteous dissatisfaction with organized corruption and incompetence into a popular anti-governmentality that actually benefits most who also benefit most from the corruption and incompetence itself.
(It has been largely the mass-broadcast media formations of the late modern era that facilitated this ease opportunistically taken up by the successive 20C waves of the Right, from the rise of fascism through to the bloody postcolonial global implementation of the corporate-militarist Washington Consensus comsummated in the killer clown college of the Bush II administration. Meanwhile, the ongoing -- but more vulnerable than you might think -- eclipse of mass-broadcast media by peer-to-peer formations has created the conditions, well, together with the emergence of post-nationalist environmental concerns, for a genuinely revolutionary recasting of the planetary political terrain to which radical democracy and social justice movements would do well to avail themselves while the getting's good. This is actually a topic for a separate post, but the politics that are roughly indicated through the shorthand of "good government types" are actually indispensable to this democratizing consensualizing planetary moment in my view -- without them, radical democracy is all too likely to be appropriated by the usual rhetoric of "spontaneism" and "negative liberty" that always eventually buttresses the politics of incumbency over the politics of resistence.)
It is crucial for "goo-goos" (advocates of good government) to resist their temperamental attraction to "moving on" in the name of problem solving here and now. They need to rethink their apparently endless capacity to "forgive and forget" those whose skills seem scarce and wasted should accountability for failure and corruption shunt them aside. And they must explicitly discredit all those who proffer blanket condemnations of government as such -- when good government is literally indispensable to the maintenance of legitimate, democratic, equitable, diverse, consensual social order. They must condemn those who would condemn public service in general as corrupt, incompetent, or ridiculous -- rather than excoriating corrupt and incompetent public servants in particular together with praise of the heroism, service, and sacrifice of public service in general. They must expose the self-serving pretense of those who like to insinuate that there something foolish or impractical or self-marginalizing in a dedication to integrity, fairness, long-term thinking, empathy, waiting for one's turn, achieving competence, right modesty, critical thinking, and taking responsibility for one's mistakes and even for the unintended harms one has had a hand in making -- when these are the public values that help make the world a place worth living in for all, peer to peer.
The anti-government types are all too eager to eat the world they did nothing to make and little to maintain, to howl that there "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" even as they feast themselves on a crumbling infrastructure (not only the physical infrastructure of roads and pipes and professionalisms and legal precedents, but a psychical infrastructure of goodwill and trust and decency and commonwealth eroded by self-promotion and looting and snide short-sighted opportunism) they refuse to pay for, eating it and thinking or pretending they can have it, too. Their carnival of looting and cruelty has been a vicious circle that swallowed a whole generation, their bad behavior feeding failure after failure and ensuring always only that those who were the most vulnerable or who actually sought to save the world from these predations would be the first to fail themselves, the first to burn out, the first to be squeezed, the first to be criticized for any misstep, the most vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy if they succeeded in accomplishing anything at all, however momentary, under these impossible conditions, and so on.
Good government types must install virtuous circles to overcome these vicious ones always at the ready to undermine the harder work of common sense and common wealth. They must ensure that those who benefit from the equitable administration of society and law understand very well their absolute interdependence with their fellows for their continued security, prosperity, and expressivity and are devoted to maintaining the institutions and standards without which that security, prosperity, and expressivity are hopelessly fraught and fragile: imperiled by the short-sightedness, self-rationalization, and parochialism all human beings are susceptible to, but on which incumbent authority and privilege especially tend to depend for their long maintenance in a dynamic world.
Good government is fragile, and the task of good government types is far more difficult than that of anti-government types (except in rare moments of devastating reckoning like the one we are likely in for at present when the costs and stakes become flabbergastingly stark). Just as anti-governmentality succeeds with every failure, at least until these many failures accumulate into a failure too sweeping and too deep to hide or mistake or bear, good governmentality must ensure that its every success is indeed experienced as the success it is, as an accomplishment of common sense and common wealth for which we can all of us be proud and grateful and which should find us newly dedicated to the common work, peer to peer, without which every creative achievement, every collaboration, every reconciliation, every secure comfort would all too likely have been stillborn or stolen or smashed by the frailties we are all of us heir to otherwise.
Marriage? No, Thanks. The Right to Marry? You Better Believe I'll Fight for It!
I am not personally interested in assimilating into a heteronormative frame in which I become a "good gay," nicely bourgeois, logo-ized, lobotomized, married, buried, kids, all eagerness to kill my nation's "foes" of the moment on some foreign field as an openly gay patriot or what have you.
I am personally much more ferociously identified with promiscuous, punk, and pacifist variations of queerness, nicely crunchy, pinko, pervy, and effete-aesthete. I can't say as such that I am pleased particularly by the appalling but customary tradeoff that would now offer up legal standing and cultural legibility to queer people but at the price of the demand for our assimilation into the mainstreaming machineries of corporate-military monoculture.
I do agree, then, that a crucial dimension of queer critique and political struggle must be to resist this false tradeoff, to direct attention to the ways in which it marginalizes and denigrates intersex, bisex, trasnsex, asex, polyamorous, and otherwise deviant/defiant gender-atypical persons and lifeways.
But I have no trouble at all reconciling this queer agenda with my awareness that the refusal of equitable access to the institutions of marriage, adoption, public and military service for queers who aspire to them is conspicuously unjust and must be fought as such. Not only that, but it is plain to me that these exclusions function as a primary mechanism through which the ongoing stigmatization and abuse of less-assimilable queers takes place anyway:
If even boring white guys who want nothing more than to get married and shop for crap with their kids are rendered not-quite-human not-quite-citizens just because they couple homosexually, you can be sure that more radical modalities of queerness are earmarked for an even surer destruction in such a society.
And, anyway, if I want to celebrate the free expressivity of promiscuous punks and poets, this scarcely entitles me to denigrate all those whose queerness includes forms of long-term commitment, monogamy, child-rearing, public service, and so on that may be less pervy or poetical to my own parochial eyes. My imagination isn't so limited that I cannot conceive of worthy lives lived otherwise than mine nor are my values so insecure that I imagine them imperiled just because they jostle in the public square together with different ones.
So long as equity and diversity and consent are secure (or more to the point: only to the extent that they are so secured) I am usually happiest in the marginal minority, immersed in the bracing and provocative spectacle of difference. I think this is an attitude that is perfectly facilitative of the politics of queer lifeways, however assimilated or deviant they might be, as it happens.
None of this is to deny that assimilationist lgbtq politics cheerfully do produce exclusionary and abjective effects on lifeways I would celebrate as indispensable to lgbtq politics properly so-called, but, hey, nobody promised me civil rights struggle would be a rose garden -- one has, as it were, to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And certainly we should be wary of simplistic either-or divide-and-conquer formulations that would support institutional homophobia under the guise of a celebration of homosex in only some one particular parochially preferred mode (even if the preference happens to be our own). The support and celebration of a more capacious atypical queerness is hardly helped along by the stigmatization and precarity of queers rendered second-class citizens in their own societies by law.
I am personally much more ferociously identified with promiscuous, punk, and pacifist variations of queerness, nicely crunchy, pinko, pervy, and effete-aesthete. I can't say as such that I am pleased particularly by the appalling but customary tradeoff that would now offer up legal standing and cultural legibility to queer people but at the price of the demand for our assimilation into the mainstreaming machineries of corporate-military monoculture.
I do agree, then, that a crucial dimension of queer critique and political struggle must be to resist this false tradeoff, to direct attention to the ways in which it marginalizes and denigrates intersex, bisex, trasnsex, asex, polyamorous, and otherwise deviant/defiant gender-atypical persons and lifeways.
But I have no trouble at all reconciling this queer agenda with my awareness that the refusal of equitable access to the institutions of marriage, adoption, public and military service for queers who aspire to them is conspicuously unjust and must be fought as such. Not only that, but it is plain to me that these exclusions function as a primary mechanism through which the ongoing stigmatization and abuse of less-assimilable queers takes place anyway:
If even boring white guys who want nothing more than to get married and shop for crap with their kids are rendered not-quite-human not-quite-citizens just because they couple homosexually, you can be sure that more radical modalities of queerness are earmarked for an even surer destruction in such a society.
And, anyway, if I want to celebrate the free expressivity of promiscuous punks and poets, this scarcely entitles me to denigrate all those whose queerness includes forms of long-term commitment, monogamy, child-rearing, public service, and so on that may be less pervy or poetical to my own parochial eyes. My imagination isn't so limited that I cannot conceive of worthy lives lived otherwise than mine nor are my values so insecure that I imagine them imperiled just because they jostle in the public square together with different ones.
So long as equity and diversity and consent are secure (or more to the point: only to the extent that they are so secured) I am usually happiest in the marginal minority, immersed in the bracing and provocative spectacle of difference. I think this is an attitude that is perfectly facilitative of the politics of queer lifeways, however assimilated or deviant they might be, as it happens.
None of this is to deny that assimilationist lgbtq politics cheerfully do produce exclusionary and abjective effects on lifeways I would celebrate as indispensable to lgbtq politics properly so-called, but, hey, nobody promised me civil rights struggle would be a rose garden -- one has, as it were, to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And certainly we should be wary of simplistic either-or divide-and-conquer formulations that would support institutional homophobia under the guise of a celebration of homosex in only some one particular parochially preferred mode (even if the preference happens to be our own). The support and celebration of a more capacious atypical queerness is hardly helped along by the stigmatization and precarity of queers rendered second-class citizens in their own societies by law.
Transhumanism = Gay Marriage? Oh... Kay, Then
Just because I couldn't resist, Expanded and Updated from the Moot, here is bioconservative John Howard explaining why I am indeed a transhumanist (secretly!) despite my relentless critique of the transhumanists, all because of my stance on gay marriage of all things:
There is a clear logical line that all people are on one side or the other: should we ban genetic engineering of people? All Transhumanists are on your side, all Bioconservatives are on my side. And I don't see the point of saying that some people on your side are not Transhumanists, or some people on my side are not Bioconservatives.
Probably most transhumanist-identified people will agree with me that the earth isn't flat, but that hardly makes it irrelevant to point out that only a vanishingly small minority of the people who do agree with me on that score are transhumanist-identified and that it may be jumping the gun a bit to go from our shared denial of a flat-earth to corralling me together with transhumanists who actually are more noted for extreme techno-utopian and crypto-eugenicist views which I actually endlessly explicitly excoriate hereabouts.
The mere fact that some people are crazier than you are doesn't make you sane.
This is one of those man in the mirror moments for you, John, if you're up to it.
You still want to allow people to create people basically however they want,
Do you think people are creating golems from clay and magic spells? Do you think sentient suffering robot sex-slaves are appearing on assembly-lines somewhere? What the hell are you even talking about?
Are you proposing a blanket ban on actually-existing IVF techniques or all practices of surrogacy? As it happens I am enormously concerned about the abuses and problems that freight actually-existing ARTS -- the fraud of duressed and misinformed donors and surrogate mothers, the real health-risks and complications associated with the multiple births eventuating from many currently over-utilized fertility treatments, and so on.
But, you know, all of this is real world stuff, unconnected to and unclarified by sweeping declamations against "The Unnatural" or fearmongering fantasies (not to mention corporatist hype usually from the opposite direction) involving designer babies or clone armies or the like.
yet you refuse to stop them if their education doesn't result in the cautious prudence you were needing for your own PR purposes. Maybe that's when you'll decide we need some rules?
Again, I'm not quite sure what I'm presumably refusing to stop here -- golems? androids? cloned Hitlers? bioengineered centaurs? actually existing IVF kids menacing the natural order somehow while fingerpainting in their kindergarten classrooms? It would be absurd in the extreme for you to cast me in the role of some libertopian anything-goes corporatist just because I "merely" advocate strong regulation and public oversight of healthcare provision based on informed nonduressed consent and consensus-science based assessments of risk rather than blanket prohibitions of even not-yet existing or possibly never-to-exist techniques that might some day violate what you have personally come to fetishize here and now as "The Natural" state of affairs where human beings and their sexual and reproductive practices are concerned.
[I]f you can't see that banning genetic engineering means limiting conception to a man and a woman, and prohibiting people from attempting to conceive with someone of the same sex, then you just are willfully refusing to see, I think.
Well, sure, of course I see that this is the case. Unless Jeebus sees fit to bless buttfuckers like me with a miracle butt-baby (I'd abort it, by the way), it doesn't seem likely that homosex is going to yield much in the way of reprosex any time soon without the aid of some as yet only hypothetical medical technique.
But, then, I don't advocate "banning genetic engineering," I advocate actual harm reduction and health facilitation through equitable consensual healthcare provision (in case you want to know how this cashes out at political ground-level: I am an advocate for universal single payer healthcare and a scene of consent that is truly informed and nonduressed, which for me leads to an advocacy of a universal basic income guarantee and access-to-knowledge politics), whether this means banning some techniques you would call "genetic engineering" or making access universal and safe to other techniques you would call "genetic engineering."
If a technique emerges through which samesex couples can conceive a healthy wanted child with actually negligible risk to their health then you can be sure I will advocate that those who actually desire to make recourse to such a procedure can do so, even if this scares some conservatives who happen to believe for the moment that this would amount to "playing god" or "violating nature" -- as such people once said with the same idiotic fervor of anaesthesia and vaccination and so on as well.
You can be sure that it won't only be weird transhumanist-identified Robot Cultists who would be on my side in championing such access. Indeed, I wouldn't much welcome transhumanist allies in championing this access personally, since I daresay one can expect the transhumanists to remain in such a case very much as they are now, a vanishingly marginal minority of superlative technocentrics riding a more mainstream technoscientifically-literate progressive bandwagon but hyperbolized with a little worse-than-useless techno-transcendentalizing handwaving in the hopes of conning a few more impressionable naifs into ponying up membership dues for their membership organizations to munch on.
Any one that doesn't want a law to keep reproduction natural, between a man and a woman, is a Transhumanist
If you truly believe this, then I must question your sanity a bit.
It is a pretty neat strategy to pursue gay marriage and Transhumanism separately, as if they were unrelated, but it's pretty clear they are one and the same thing.
Well, there you have it.
There is a clear logical line that all people are on one side or the other: should we ban genetic engineering of people? All Transhumanists are on your side, all Bioconservatives are on my side. And I don't see the point of saying that some people on your side are not Transhumanists, or some people on my side are not Bioconservatives.
Probably most transhumanist-identified people will agree with me that the earth isn't flat, but that hardly makes it irrelevant to point out that only a vanishingly small minority of the people who do agree with me on that score are transhumanist-identified and that it may be jumping the gun a bit to go from our shared denial of a flat-earth to corralling me together with transhumanists who actually are more noted for extreme techno-utopian and crypto-eugenicist views which I actually endlessly explicitly excoriate hereabouts.
The mere fact that some people are crazier than you are doesn't make you sane.
This is one of those man in the mirror moments for you, John, if you're up to it.
You still want to allow people to create people basically however they want,
Do you think people are creating golems from clay and magic spells? Do you think sentient suffering robot sex-slaves are appearing on assembly-lines somewhere? What the hell are you even talking about?
Are you proposing a blanket ban on actually-existing IVF techniques or all practices of surrogacy? As it happens I am enormously concerned about the abuses and problems that freight actually-existing ARTS -- the fraud of duressed and misinformed donors and surrogate mothers, the real health-risks and complications associated with the multiple births eventuating from many currently over-utilized fertility treatments, and so on.
But, you know, all of this is real world stuff, unconnected to and unclarified by sweeping declamations against "The Unnatural" or fearmongering fantasies (not to mention corporatist hype usually from the opposite direction) involving designer babies or clone armies or the like.
yet you refuse to stop them if their education doesn't result in the cautious prudence you were needing for your own PR purposes. Maybe that's when you'll decide we need some rules?
Again, I'm not quite sure what I'm presumably refusing to stop here -- golems? androids? cloned Hitlers? bioengineered centaurs? actually existing IVF kids menacing the natural order somehow while fingerpainting in their kindergarten classrooms? It would be absurd in the extreme for you to cast me in the role of some libertopian anything-goes corporatist just because I "merely" advocate strong regulation and public oversight of healthcare provision based on informed nonduressed consent and consensus-science based assessments of risk rather than blanket prohibitions of even not-yet existing or possibly never-to-exist techniques that might some day violate what you have personally come to fetishize here and now as "The Natural" state of affairs where human beings and their sexual and reproductive practices are concerned.
[I]f you can't see that banning genetic engineering means limiting conception to a man and a woman, and prohibiting people from attempting to conceive with someone of the same sex, then you just are willfully refusing to see, I think.
Well, sure, of course I see that this is the case. Unless Jeebus sees fit to bless buttfuckers like me with a miracle butt-baby (I'd abort it, by the way), it doesn't seem likely that homosex is going to yield much in the way of reprosex any time soon without the aid of some as yet only hypothetical medical technique.
But, then, I don't advocate "banning genetic engineering," I advocate actual harm reduction and health facilitation through equitable consensual healthcare provision (in case you want to know how this cashes out at political ground-level: I am an advocate for universal single payer healthcare and a scene of consent that is truly informed and nonduressed, which for me leads to an advocacy of a universal basic income guarantee and access-to-knowledge politics), whether this means banning some techniques you would call "genetic engineering" or making access universal and safe to other techniques you would call "genetic engineering."
If a technique emerges through which samesex couples can conceive a healthy wanted child with actually negligible risk to their health then you can be sure I will advocate that those who actually desire to make recourse to such a procedure can do so, even if this scares some conservatives who happen to believe for the moment that this would amount to "playing god" or "violating nature" -- as such people once said with the same idiotic fervor of anaesthesia and vaccination and so on as well.
You can be sure that it won't only be weird transhumanist-identified Robot Cultists who would be on my side in championing such access. Indeed, I wouldn't much welcome transhumanist allies in championing this access personally, since I daresay one can expect the transhumanists to remain in such a case very much as they are now, a vanishingly marginal minority of superlative technocentrics riding a more mainstream technoscientifically-literate progressive bandwagon but hyperbolized with a little worse-than-useless techno-transcendentalizing handwaving in the hopes of conning a few more impressionable naifs into ponying up membership dues for their membership organizations to munch on.
Any one that doesn't want a law to keep reproduction natural, between a man and a woman, is a Transhumanist
If you truly believe this, then I must question your sanity a bit.
It is a pretty neat strategy to pursue gay marriage and Transhumanism separately, as if they were unrelated, but it's pretty clear they are one and the same thing.
Well, there you have it.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
A Transhumanist Files a Complaint in the Hurt Feelings Department
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot. My "Anonymous" HumanityPlusTronic interlocutor soldiers on (I suspect she or he is approaching critical mass now, soon to set this sillyness aside for good or, to the contrary, to leap for a time into full-on saucer-eyed True Belief):
Look, I'm not going to delve too deep into your personal life, it's not really my business.
You say "it is a gross over-simplification to say that all, or nearly all, transhumanists are somehow robot-cult members." I honestly think you are missing the force of my point altogether. Nobody who does describably foolish or damaging things is exhaustively describable as a fool or a danger as a result. As witness, the dictator who is kind to puppies or the neglectful parent who is a fine teacher blah blah blah. I daresay we can all accept as a given that people are multifaceted beings, their identifications are always at once multiple and partial and (as a result) dynamic. And so on.
There is certainly nothing wrong with being a space enthusiast, some of my best friends are space enthusiasts, some of my best fucks were with space enthusiasts, it's cool, everything's gonna be all right. Now, I am an "enthusiast," I suppose, for ranked or instant runoff voting reform, but I do worry that narrating my selfhood through too deep an identification with colleagues in a club devoted to an educational and organizational campaign on the subject would serve no useful purpose while at once possibly signalling that my life had gone awry in a "get a life" way that wanted tending to.
When you call yourself a "transhumanist," though, you are in some mighty odd company, my friend, to put the point kindly, and it probably isn't a bad idea for you to understand that there are many other people who publicly so identify who see that declaration as an indication of participation in a "movement," a "subculture," a world-historical force, of membership or affiliation in organizations with published "principles" and programmatic manifestos that explain the world and offer their Believers the Keys to History and so on.
Most of these principles and formulations are the most arrant nonsense imaginable (I have earned that glib assertion through too many words of close analysis, most of which you can read, if you care to do, by clicking the topic anthologies that cap my blogroll), and since these "transhumanists" (and so on) are actually making arguments, well, I read them as such and expose what seem to me to be their mistaken assumptions, their problematic historical contexts, and their anti-democratizing implications wherever I see them.
Taking these readings personally doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I don't doubt it is rather an inevitable result when people become less critical about certain beliefs of theirs as the price for organizing a defensive marginal identity out of them. Many of the champions of these ideas say truly ridiculous things over the course of championing them and I am not ashamed to admit that I do not hesitate to expose the ridiculous to ridicule where pretending it serious gives it a power it doesn't deserve and with which it can do real damage in the world.
As I have pointed out many times, "transhumanists" and "singularitarians" are, when all is said and done, a rather marginal sub(cult)ure that never seems to expand beyond a few thousand members or so and are quite self-marginaling in their discourse in a way that suggests this will remain the case for good.
It is mostly because they illustrate and symptomize in their extremity particularly clarifying expressions of characteristically reactionary tendencies to reductionism, scientism, millenialism, fetishism, elite technocratic anti-politicism, and (crypto-) eugenicism prevalent in technoscientific discourses more generally that I have devoted energy to analyzing them.
Also, it must be said, at the practical-institutional level of the Robot Cult archipelago of diffusely inter-related organizations, I believe that it pays to devote close attention to some of their corporate-militarist funders and allies and to the curiously disproportionate impact their published intellectuals have had in framing certain quandaries of disruptive technodevelopment -- for example, describing parochial biomedical preferences as neutral "enhancements," farcically modeling technoscientific change as the acceleration of the acceleration of "growth," providing a rhetorical afterlife in popular discourse and public policy to long dead facile reductionist and "cybernetic totalist" notions of intelligence, life, and public life, suggesting a social priority of terrorizing existential threats over more proximate and local ones, likewise an industrial-elite geoengineering priority over distributed-p2p alternatives for solutions to environmental problems, fostering a relentless dismissiveness about critical technoscientific perspectives arising out of the humanities, and so on and on and on. All of these themes unvaryingly unspool in ways that (whatever the professed politics of the writers themselves) have proved congenial in their overgenerality, in their technocratic elitism, in their fear-mongering and hype-notizing emotionalism, in their budgetary priorities, in their reductionism, sometimes (shockingly often given current disasters) in their explicit adherence to market libertarian formulations, and so on to neoliberal and neoconservative agendas I personally abhor, as should you if you ask me.
At the end of your comment you made what looked to me like a promising claim: "Getting back to what it actually means to be a transhumanist..." I was expecting or at any rate hoping an actual address of the questions I posed at the end of our last exchange would be forthcoming, an effort on your part to actually characterize this "transhumanism" you would adhere to despite being so appalled, it seems, by so many of its perfectly representative published figures.
You'll recall the questions, I'm sure? [One] Tell me anything at all that is clarified about a presumably desirable technodevelopmental outcome by adding to it the designation "transhumanist." [Two] Name one quality about an artifact that can only be clarified by describing that quality as "transhumanist." [Three] Name one not crackpot belief common to most self-identified "transhumanists" that is not held by far more people who do not so self-identify.
I still think you would benefit enormously in coming to terms with these questions. Instead of doing anything of the kind, though, you follow your declaration about what it means to be a "transhumanist" by pouting that I have painted a picture with broad brushstrokes that hurt your feelings. Look, the world is full of nice people, full of bright, complicated people, full of people who do as many splendid and harmless things as dangerously idiotic ones. We're not in the nursery here, you can assume that everybody participating in this conversation is well aware of such vacuities already. You're talking about an ideological system with published formulations and funded organizations with published agendas. If what is wanted is a critique of these notions and their impacts it is simply neither here nor there that their adherents were sensible enough to vote for Obama or are likable at cocktail parties or are kind to their pets. Keep your eye on the ball.
You’re right that the word “transhumanism” does have some very odd, and very frequently negative connotations. However, I have only truly realized this fact over the past 2 months or so, when I started to meet other transhumanists (and see how much they and I truly differ). But after about two years of calling yourself something, it can be somewhat difficult to stop thinking of yourself in that way. So I guess that I call myself a transhumanist simply as a relic of my own stubbornness
Despite all of the above, even though I am a not a tremendous fan of the title “transhumanist,” it can still, however, be somewhat useful to call oneself something that has values somewhat similar to your own. For me, I have found it helpful to compartmentalize my beliefs, so using a word like transhumanist to describe myself is appealing. For instance, I would really hate to call myself a “space exploration enthusiast/powered exoskeleton junkie/life-extension hopeful/etc…” That’s just far too long for my tastes. It really is much easier to sum up all of that into one connotation-filled, four syllable word, even if it doesn’t quite fit the bill.
Getting back to what it actually means to be a transhumanist, I still think that it is a gross over-simplification to say that all, or nearly all, transhumanists are somehow robot-cult members. If I had to guess, the vast majority of them are somewhat like me, in that their views are quite non-extremist, and they’re just interested in the possible paths that technology will lead the human race down in both the near and distant future. I am, of course, excluding some people like Michael Anissimov (whose blog I still can’t seem to stop reading, even though many of his views are in stark contrast to mine) and Ray Kurzweil, whose views are quite decidedly extremist at best, and, put bluntly, scary at worst. I know that this is a cliché, but it is easy to make generalizations about an entire group of people based solely on its most vocal members, even though this will result in a skewed view of what the group actually believes. If it were up to me, I would shut up the vast majority of those people, since they have the ability to make people like me seem like disgusting eugenics-lovin’ people just because they might like to compartmentalize their views in a similar fashion to myself.
Look, I'm not going to delve too deep into your personal life, it's not really my business.
You say "it is a gross over-simplification to say that all, or nearly all, transhumanists are somehow robot-cult members." I honestly think you are missing the force of my point altogether. Nobody who does describably foolish or damaging things is exhaustively describable as a fool or a danger as a result. As witness, the dictator who is kind to puppies or the neglectful parent who is a fine teacher blah blah blah. I daresay we can all accept as a given that people are multifaceted beings, their identifications are always at once multiple and partial and (as a result) dynamic. And so on.
There is certainly nothing wrong with being a space enthusiast, some of my best friends are space enthusiasts, some of my best fucks were with space enthusiasts, it's cool, everything's gonna be all right. Now, I am an "enthusiast," I suppose, for ranked or instant runoff voting reform, but I do worry that narrating my selfhood through too deep an identification with colleagues in a club devoted to an educational and organizational campaign on the subject would serve no useful purpose while at once possibly signalling that my life had gone awry in a "get a life" way that wanted tending to.
When you call yourself a "transhumanist," though, you are in some mighty odd company, my friend, to put the point kindly, and it probably isn't a bad idea for you to understand that there are many other people who publicly so identify who see that declaration as an indication of participation in a "movement," a "subculture," a world-historical force, of membership or affiliation in organizations with published "principles" and programmatic manifestos that explain the world and offer their Believers the Keys to History and so on.
Most of these principles and formulations are the most arrant nonsense imaginable (I have earned that glib assertion through too many words of close analysis, most of which you can read, if you care to do, by clicking the topic anthologies that cap my blogroll), and since these "transhumanists" (and so on) are actually making arguments, well, I read them as such and expose what seem to me to be their mistaken assumptions, their problematic historical contexts, and their anti-democratizing implications wherever I see them.
Taking these readings personally doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I don't doubt it is rather an inevitable result when people become less critical about certain beliefs of theirs as the price for organizing a defensive marginal identity out of them. Many of the champions of these ideas say truly ridiculous things over the course of championing them and I am not ashamed to admit that I do not hesitate to expose the ridiculous to ridicule where pretending it serious gives it a power it doesn't deserve and with which it can do real damage in the world.
As I have pointed out many times, "transhumanists" and "singularitarians" are, when all is said and done, a rather marginal sub(cult)ure that never seems to expand beyond a few thousand members or so and are quite self-marginaling in their discourse in a way that suggests this will remain the case for good.
It is mostly because they illustrate and symptomize in their extremity particularly clarifying expressions of characteristically reactionary tendencies to reductionism, scientism, millenialism, fetishism, elite technocratic anti-politicism, and (crypto-) eugenicism prevalent in technoscientific discourses more generally that I have devoted energy to analyzing them.
Also, it must be said, at the practical-institutional level of the Robot Cult archipelago of diffusely inter-related organizations, I believe that it pays to devote close attention to some of their corporate-militarist funders and allies and to the curiously disproportionate impact their published intellectuals have had in framing certain quandaries of disruptive technodevelopment -- for example, describing parochial biomedical preferences as neutral "enhancements," farcically modeling technoscientific change as the acceleration of the acceleration of "growth," providing a rhetorical afterlife in popular discourse and public policy to long dead facile reductionist and "cybernetic totalist" notions of intelligence, life, and public life, suggesting a social priority of terrorizing existential threats over more proximate and local ones, likewise an industrial-elite geoengineering priority over distributed-p2p alternatives for solutions to environmental problems, fostering a relentless dismissiveness about critical technoscientific perspectives arising out of the humanities, and so on and on and on. All of these themes unvaryingly unspool in ways that (whatever the professed politics of the writers themselves) have proved congenial in their overgenerality, in their technocratic elitism, in their fear-mongering and hype-notizing emotionalism, in their budgetary priorities, in their reductionism, sometimes (shockingly often given current disasters) in their explicit adherence to market libertarian formulations, and so on to neoliberal and neoconservative agendas I personally abhor, as should you if you ask me.
At the end of your comment you made what looked to me like a promising claim: "Getting back to what it actually means to be a transhumanist..." I was expecting or at any rate hoping an actual address of the questions I posed at the end of our last exchange would be forthcoming, an effort on your part to actually characterize this "transhumanism" you would adhere to despite being so appalled, it seems, by so many of its perfectly representative published figures.
You'll recall the questions, I'm sure? [One] Tell me anything at all that is clarified about a presumably desirable technodevelopmental outcome by adding to it the designation "transhumanist." [Two] Name one quality about an artifact that can only be clarified by describing that quality as "transhumanist." [Three] Name one not crackpot belief common to most self-identified "transhumanists" that is not held by far more people who do not so self-identify.
I still think you would benefit enormously in coming to terms with these questions. Instead of doing anything of the kind, though, you follow your declaration about what it means to be a "transhumanist" by pouting that I have painted a picture with broad brushstrokes that hurt your feelings. Look, the world is full of nice people, full of bright, complicated people, full of people who do as many splendid and harmless things as dangerously idiotic ones. We're not in the nursery here, you can assume that everybody participating in this conversation is well aware of such vacuities already. You're talking about an ideological system with published formulations and funded organizations with published agendas. If what is wanted is a critique of these notions and their impacts it is simply neither here nor there that their adherents were sensible enough to vote for Obama or are likable at cocktail parties or are kind to their pets. Keep your eye on the ball.
Friday, November 14, 2008
A Member of the HumanityPlusTron Caucus of the Reasonable Makes a Plea
Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot, an Anonymous reader makes a comment and a request:
I can say with confidence that any truly reasonable "transhumanist" will abandon that idiotic self-designation soon enough that it isn't a particular worry of mine that all three of them will be annoyed by their inclusion in my blanket dismissal between now and then.
But let me be a tad more generous with you for a moment, thou Anonymous but Reasonable HumanityPlusTron.
Are you sure you aren't just a common or garden variety geek or, you know, a nice sf fan? We love geeks and sf fans here at Amor Mundi!
And if you are just a reasonably techno-scientifically literate person interested in facilitating concrete progressive technodevelopmental outcomes, well, there simply isn't really any reason for you to join a Robot Cult to participate in such struggles.
When you say you believe that "most of this future crap is possible" and "likely in the near future" I have to ask you to hit the pause button, though, because if by "this future crap" you mean the usual constellation of nanoscale santa-robotic swarms making you immortal and rich beyond the dreams of avarice, or you worry about the coming of the Singularitarian Robot God, or you think uploading your "self" into cyberspace is a coherent proposition, then, I'm afraid, I have to question your ascription to yourself of a "reasonableness" lacking in other HumanityPlusTrons you have been heeby-geebied by at HumanityPlusTron gatherings.
Becoming invested in highly particular visions of "the future" -- or worse, actually forming self-marginalizing identities with their attendant defensive identity politics or, even worse still, getting caught up in curiously cult-like membership organizations formed around shared identification with such particular visions -- is not at all the same thing as foresight, it is certainly not the same thing as policy making (though selling cults as think tanks seems to be something of a fashionable racket at the moment), nor is it even really what it most resembles, the kind of enjoyable speculative blue-skying about logically possible mega-engineering implementations and their imagined impacts one comes across in any good bookclub for sf fans.
I think you wildly over-estimate the actual number of serious people who self-identify as "transhumanists," or "singulariatiarians," or "techno-immortalists," or whatever other identity-formations are bubbling up at the moment, mostly online, around Ayn Raelian modalities of superlative technocentricity, though I have no doubt at all that many people you might be tempted to describe in these terms do indeed exhibit the more familiar reductionisms, scientisms, technocratic antipoliticisms, eerie near-eugenicisms of which "transhumanist" sub(cult)ures seem to represent the most noisy and photogenic extremities presently in play.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I feel sure that if you really think this business through you will discover there has been nothing reasonable at all about whatever it is that brings you to the odd choice of "identifying" as a "transhumanist," of all things.
Here, let me help you along a bit.
Tell me anything at all that is clarified about a presumably desirable technodevelopmental outcome by adding to it the designation "transhumanist."
Name one quality about an artifact that can only be clarified by describing that quality as "transhumanist."
Name one not crackpot belief common to most self-identified "transhumanists" that is not held by far more people who do not so self-identify.
Now think it through.
No need to thank me. I'm here to help.
Even though I would consider myself a "transhumanist," I find myself in almost complete agreement with you, Mr. Carrico, when it comes to the dumbass robot cultists out there. They all, in their minds, live in this pie-in-the-sky future, with all of the gadgets that you already mentioned, but are, in the real world, truly angry because we aren't yet immortal, etc.
I have met some of these people at local transhumanist events, seeking like-minded people, but have only found some of the most deplorable people imaginable. From what I can tell, these people share virtually no similarities to me, except that they use the same clichéd term to describe themselves as I. I consider myself a transhumanist simply because I believe (key word: believe) that most of this future crap is possible, and the development of which might even be likely in the relatively near future.
However, I am under the impression that you should be more careful when describing all, or most, futurists as robot cultists, since there certainly are exceptions to the rule. And just as a side note: there are a fair number of futurist scientists, such as myself (though I'm involved in pure mathematics, so it's not too relevant) and some physics and astronomy professors, who would describe themselves as transhumanists.
I can say with confidence that any truly reasonable "transhumanist" will abandon that idiotic self-designation soon enough that it isn't a particular worry of mine that all three of them will be annoyed by their inclusion in my blanket dismissal between now and then.
But let me be a tad more generous with you for a moment, thou Anonymous but Reasonable HumanityPlusTron.
Are you sure you aren't just a common or garden variety geek or, you know, a nice sf fan? We love geeks and sf fans here at Amor Mundi!
And if you are just a reasonably techno-scientifically literate person interested in facilitating concrete progressive technodevelopmental outcomes, well, there simply isn't really any reason for you to join a Robot Cult to participate in such struggles.
When you say you believe that "most of this future crap is possible" and "likely in the near future" I have to ask you to hit the pause button, though, because if by "this future crap" you mean the usual constellation of nanoscale santa-robotic swarms making you immortal and rich beyond the dreams of avarice, or you worry about the coming of the Singularitarian Robot God, or you think uploading your "self" into cyberspace is a coherent proposition, then, I'm afraid, I have to question your ascription to yourself of a "reasonableness" lacking in other HumanityPlusTrons you have been heeby-geebied by at HumanityPlusTron gatherings.
Becoming invested in highly particular visions of "the future" -- or worse, actually forming self-marginalizing identities with their attendant defensive identity politics or, even worse still, getting caught up in curiously cult-like membership organizations formed around shared identification with such particular visions -- is not at all the same thing as foresight, it is certainly not the same thing as policy making (though selling cults as think tanks seems to be something of a fashionable racket at the moment), nor is it even really what it most resembles, the kind of enjoyable speculative blue-skying about logically possible mega-engineering implementations and their imagined impacts one comes across in any good bookclub for sf fans.
I think you wildly over-estimate the actual number of serious people who self-identify as "transhumanists," or "singulariatiarians," or "techno-immortalists," or whatever other identity-formations are bubbling up at the moment, mostly online, around Ayn Raelian modalities of superlative technocentricity, though I have no doubt at all that many people you might be tempted to describe in these terms do indeed exhibit the more familiar reductionisms, scientisms, technocratic antipoliticisms, eerie near-eugenicisms of which "transhumanist" sub(cult)ures seem to represent the most noisy and photogenic extremities presently in play.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I feel sure that if you really think this business through you will discover there has been nothing reasonable at all about whatever it is that brings you to the odd choice of "identifying" as a "transhumanist," of all things.
Here, let me help you along a bit.
Tell me anything at all that is clarified about a presumably desirable technodevelopmental outcome by adding to it the designation "transhumanist."
Name one quality about an artifact that can only be clarified by describing that quality as "transhumanist."
Name one not crackpot belief common to most self-identified "transhumanists" that is not held by far more people who do not so self-identify.
Now think it through.
No need to thank me. I'm here to help.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Honoring Service, Because Freedom Isn't Free
Veterans Day differs from Memorial Day in that it honors all veterans, living and dead, for their service to our country and to the ongoing project of our greater freedom.
Given the awful neglect of so many of the wounded and suffering veterans of our many disastrously ill-conceived wars it is especially important in my view to set aside a day to honor them in this way, to viscerally remind Americans, if nothing else, that honoring their service and sacrifice, all too often under orders that were tragically misguided, cannot after all properly be confined to a single day's ritual devotions if we are to be honest with ourselves about it.
It is especially remarkable to note how often those who seem most eager to drive our nation into ruinous avoidable conflicts in the name of patriotism seem to be the very same ones who accuse those of us who would direct our collective attention to the shattering costs of these conflicts as unpatriotic for doing so. On Veterans Day, of all days, one would like to think this ugly and nonsensical gambit would be more likely to fail than at other times, as we all turn to face those very costs written on the bodies and expressions of those who have paid them most palpably.
And since on this day we are meant to honor the service of those who have devoted their energies and even their lives to the struggle to preserve and enlarge the space of our freedom I will add, by way of conclusion, that it is very fitting that we remember in our thoughts today not only those soldiers who fought and died on battlefields in our names, even when in the service of enterprises many of us disapproved and protested, but all those who struggled and suffered no less courageously for our freedom across the fraught span of our history in our streets and in our minds, the freethinkers, the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor organizers, the socialists, the pacifists, the New Dealers, the Beats, the nonviolent protestors for civil rights, the Panthers, the hippies, the radical feminists, the environmentalists, the queer nationals and riot grrrls, the card carrying members of the ACLU, the multiculturalist theoryheads, the anti-globalizers, the netroots bloggers and citizen documentarians, and, oh yeah, all those community organizers, too.
On this day we honor you all, or at any rate we certainly should, all of you veterans, living and dead, for your service and for your struggle and for your sacrifice, and we will think of you all and draw on your accomplishments as we work in our own modest measure to build a bit more of the road we are progressing along as we go, together, peer-to-peer.
Given the awful neglect of so many of the wounded and suffering veterans of our many disastrously ill-conceived wars it is especially important in my view to set aside a day to honor them in this way, to viscerally remind Americans, if nothing else, that honoring their service and sacrifice, all too often under orders that were tragically misguided, cannot after all properly be confined to a single day's ritual devotions if we are to be honest with ourselves about it.
It is especially remarkable to note how often those who seem most eager to drive our nation into ruinous avoidable conflicts in the name of patriotism seem to be the very same ones who accuse those of us who would direct our collective attention to the shattering costs of these conflicts as unpatriotic for doing so. On Veterans Day, of all days, one would like to think this ugly and nonsensical gambit would be more likely to fail than at other times, as we all turn to face those very costs written on the bodies and expressions of those who have paid them most palpably.
And since on this day we are meant to honor the service of those who have devoted their energies and even their lives to the struggle to preserve and enlarge the space of our freedom I will add, by way of conclusion, that it is very fitting that we remember in our thoughts today not only those soldiers who fought and died on battlefields in our names, even when in the service of enterprises many of us disapproved and protested, but all those who struggled and suffered no less courageously for our freedom across the fraught span of our history in our streets and in our minds, the freethinkers, the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor organizers, the socialists, the pacifists, the New Dealers, the Beats, the nonviolent protestors for civil rights, the Panthers, the hippies, the radical feminists, the environmentalists, the queer nationals and riot grrrls, the card carrying members of the ACLU, the multiculturalist theoryheads, the anti-globalizers, the netroots bloggers and citizen documentarians, and, oh yeah, all those community organizers, too.
On this day we honor you all, or at any rate we certainly should, all of you veterans, living and dead, for your service and for your struggle and for your sacrifice, and we will think of you all and draw on your accomplishments as we work in our own modest measure to build a bit more of the road we are progressing along as we go, together, peer-to-peer.
Friday, September 19, 2008
The Question On All Sensible Lips
Over at EuroTrib, the ever reasonable Jerome a Paris has a question:
My own answers: tax the living daylights out of the richest of the rich else they'll crystallize into a pernicious aristocracy every time, regulate conflicts of interest else corruption and fraud will happen every time, break up any for-profit enterprises that are too big to fail else they will crystallize into oligarchy every time, never allow anybody to profit from defense spending else militarism will eventually abolish democracy every time, and use the money you get from progressive taxation to provide basic guaranteed health, education, and income to enable everyday citizens to consent in an informed nonduressed way to the terms of their lives, and then just see to it that everybody everywhere truly has the vote and a chance at public office if they want it.
I suppose this means I think we probably will NEVER STOP LISTENING TO THESE PEOPLE EVER.
After years of deregulation, of promotion of greed and assertion of the superiority of the market, and in particular of financial ma[rk]ets to decide how to run the economy, it appears -- nay, make that: it is now blatantly, in your face, obvious -- that none of this worked. Worse, the people [who] have mocked government throughout as wasteful, inefficient and incompetent are now counting on the very same government to bail them out from the hole they have dug.
What do we need to do to ensure that we NEVER EVER LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE AGAIN?
My own answers: tax the living daylights out of the richest of the rich else they'll crystallize into a pernicious aristocracy every time, regulate conflicts of interest else corruption and fraud will happen every time, break up any for-profit enterprises that are too big to fail else they will crystallize into oligarchy every time, never allow anybody to profit from defense spending else militarism will eventually abolish democracy every time, and use the money you get from progressive taxation to provide basic guaranteed health, education, and income to enable everyday citizens to consent in an informed nonduressed way to the terms of their lives, and then just see to it that everybody everywhere truly has the vote and a chance at public office if they want it.
I suppose this means I think we probably will NEVER STOP LISTENING TO THESE PEOPLE EVER.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Democracy, Consent, and Enterprise (and Their Contraries, Aristocracy, Duress, and Exploitation)
Contrary to the abstract assurances of their ideologues, the systems we denominate as "capitalist" are not in fact direct emanations from eternal, natural, tidal forces of "supply" and "demand," but are instituted through historically specific and contingent treaties, laws, protocols, expectations, norms that articulate these flows of desire and exchange, such as they are. What counts as "free trade" and what registers as a legible "market outcome" has often been radically otherwise than it is today at the level of concrete specificity, could be different in indefinitely many ways here and now, and most assuredly will be endlessly different in epochs to come. These differences will have relative beneficiaries and losers as will the vicissitudes that articulate their many historical changes over time. And so, much of what I decry as cronyism in what currently passes for capitalism is not an aberration from some more "unknown ideal" capitalist eidos, but is ineradicable to it, very much built in from the get-go.
By the way, democratic governance is no less beholden to such parochialisms, of course. Democracy, too, is better understood as an ongoing institutional experimentation rather than some kind of blueprint to which "democrats" are committed in advance and in the abstract.
Democracy really is better thought of as an ongoing process of democratization through which ever more people are enabled to have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them. And democrats seek to implement ongoing and resilient alternatives to the violent adjudication of disputes among the stakeholders with whom we share the world, peer to peer. Democratization works to accomplish this result through the experimental institutionalization of a scene of ever-better-informed ever-less-duressed consent (the say peers have to register the stakes peers have in public decisions). The institutionalization of responsiveness of the government to the governed and the ongoing creation of nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes are deeply inter-implicated projects of democracy as the experimental institutionalization of the scene of consent.
Those services will seem the least dispensable -- and so the least properly beholden to the risks of failure in market competition -- that substantiate the scene of consent and protect it from duress. The market is, after all, finally unable to distinguish an outcome duressed by the threat of force, penury, catastrophic risk, or abject humiliation from a genuinely consensual outcome. It is the business of democratic governance precisely to adjudicate such distinctions, checked in its inertial tendency to corruption and prejudice in this task by the periodic election of those who administer government and by the threat of their impeachment and ensured more deeply still by the constitutive impasse instituted into all democratic governance that those whose taxes render government practicable are through taxation guaranteed representation and so a say in the workings of that governance. Needless to say, all of this is fraught with vulnerabilities to abuse and corruption, but there it is.
Whatever its pathologies and frailties we can still generate a fairly forceful principle connecting democratic theory and democratizing practice here, and in a way that relates it to the "market" alternatives of neoliberal ideologues who would either claim to reduce democracy to "market exchanges" or, more honestly, recommend we substitute such commerce for democratization wholesale: Precisely to the extent that government is democratic through the real responsiveness of its institutions to the consent of the governed and to the material substantiation of that very capacity for consent by securing those who consent from misinformation and duress -- and only to the extent that government manages to be more democratic through these means -- can one then go on to say that market competition in matters that do not threaten either this responsiveness of government to the governed nor the capacity of all to engage in informed nonduressed consent yields the efficient outcomes for which markets are celebrated, or that market outcomes are free as their champions declare. Where governance is nonresponsive to the governed it responds instead mostly to parochial elites with which that government is identified at the expense of the governed more generally, and where governance fails to secure the scene of consent it will defend exploitation in the name of liberty and order but truly in the service of parochial beneficiaries at the expense of the exploited more generally. Under such circumstances, any talk of "market efficiencies" and "voluntary contracts" and "free trade" is a straightforward, palpable falsehood and deliberate fraud, and should be treated as such.
I advocate a substantiation of the scene of consent on which a proper peer-to-peer democracy depends that includes, among other less controversial measures, a universal non-means-tested guaranteed basic income, universal single-payer healthcare, unfettered access to the common heritage and collaborative creation of planetary multiculture as well as to reliable consensus scientific information on questions of urgent practical import. You can be sure that my advocacy of these measures would be decried not only by market fundamentalist ideologues but by many common or garden variety conservatives and even self-appointed rightward-skewing "Centrists" as an advocacy of "socialism," "totalitarianism," or who knows what else. (And I haven't even mentioned my championing of binding international regulatory bodies where matters of human rights, arms proliferation, labor standards, global ecosystemic impacts, and so on are concerned or for a democratically-elected planetary assembly!)
But the simple truth of the matter is that it seems to me all the great libertarian and pragmatic competitive advantages free marketeers endlessly promise us while the rubble pile of neoliberal catastrophe rises higher and higher before the eyes of anybody not lucky enough to roost at its summit are actually most likely to find their real fruition precisely when and only when this competition occurs among those who are secure enough in their persons and situations that they can truly consent to its terms.
Else, the competition of the market is a matter of the insulting misattribution of liberty to the injury of exploitation, the individualism of the market a matter of isolation, abandonment, and criminal neglect, the responsibility of the market a matter of austerity for the vulnerable and unearned reward for the privileged, the efficiency of the market a matter of the concentration of wealth as it is seen from the perspective of the beneficiaries of that concentration.
Again, none of this is enterprise properly so-called, and certainly not enterprise as advertised by its champions, but simply the same old brutal ineffectual and presumptuous aristocracy that has been the bane of progressive democratization throughout its long and too-slow world-building course in history.
I think I am a champion of free enterprise, as it can be with its proper support and confined to its proper orbit. I cannot help it if the ideologues who have appropriated the term would mistake me for an apologist of tyranny. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that petulant Royalists would decry as socialism or tyranny the effort of patriotic democrats to save free enterprise from itself.
By the way, democratic governance is no less beholden to such parochialisms, of course. Democracy, too, is better understood as an ongoing institutional experimentation rather than some kind of blueprint to which "democrats" are committed in advance and in the abstract.
Democracy really is better thought of as an ongoing process of democratization through which ever more people are enabled to have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them. And democrats seek to implement ongoing and resilient alternatives to the violent adjudication of disputes among the stakeholders with whom we share the world, peer to peer. Democratization works to accomplish this result through the experimental institutionalization of a scene of ever-better-informed ever-less-duressed consent (the say peers have to register the stakes peers have in public decisions). The institutionalization of responsiveness of the government to the governed and the ongoing creation of nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes are deeply inter-implicated projects of democracy as the experimental institutionalization of the scene of consent.
Those services will seem the least dispensable -- and so the least properly beholden to the risks of failure in market competition -- that substantiate the scene of consent and protect it from duress. The market is, after all, finally unable to distinguish an outcome duressed by the threat of force, penury, catastrophic risk, or abject humiliation from a genuinely consensual outcome. It is the business of democratic governance precisely to adjudicate such distinctions, checked in its inertial tendency to corruption and prejudice in this task by the periodic election of those who administer government and by the threat of their impeachment and ensured more deeply still by the constitutive impasse instituted into all democratic governance that those whose taxes render government practicable are through taxation guaranteed representation and so a say in the workings of that governance. Needless to say, all of this is fraught with vulnerabilities to abuse and corruption, but there it is.
Whatever its pathologies and frailties we can still generate a fairly forceful principle connecting democratic theory and democratizing practice here, and in a way that relates it to the "market" alternatives of neoliberal ideologues who would either claim to reduce democracy to "market exchanges" or, more honestly, recommend we substitute such commerce for democratization wholesale: Precisely to the extent that government is democratic through the real responsiveness of its institutions to the consent of the governed and to the material substantiation of that very capacity for consent by securing those who consent from misinformation and duress -- and only to the extent that government manages to be more democratic through these means -- can one then go on to say that market competition in matters that do not threaten either this responsiveness of government to the governed nor the capacity of all to engage in informed nonduressed consent yields the efficient outcomes for which markets are celebrated, or that market outcomes are free as their champions declare. Where governance is nonresponsive to the governed it responds instead mostly to parochial elites with which that government is identified at the expense of the governed more generally, and where governance fails to secure the scene of consent it will defend exploitation in the name of liberty and order but truly in the service of parochial beneficiaries at the expense of the exploited more generally. Under such circumstances, any talk of "market efficiencies" and "voluntary contracts" and "free trade" is a straightforward, palpable falsehood and deliberate fraud, and should be treated as such.
I advocate a substantiation of the scene of consent on which a proper peer-to-peer democracy depends that includes, among other less controversial measures, a universal non-means-tested guaranteed basic income, universal single-payer healthcare, unfettered access to the common heritage and collaborative creation of planetary multiculture as well as to reliable consensus scientific information on questions of urgent practical import. You can be sure that my advocacy of these measures would be decried not only by market fundamentalist ideologues but by many common or garden variety conservatives and even self-appointed rightward-skewing "Centrists" as an advocacy of "socialism," "totalitarianism," or who knows what else. (And I haven't even mentioned my championing of binding international regulatory bodies where matters of human rights, arms proliferation, labor standards, global ecosystemic impacts, and so on are concerned or for a democratically-elected planetary assembly!)
But the simple truth of the matter is that it seems to me all the great libertarian and pragmatic competitive advantages free marketeers endlessly promise us while the rubble pile of neoliberal catastrophe rises higher and higher before the eyes of anybody not lucky enough to roost at its summit are actually most likely to find their real fruition precisely when and only when this competition occurs among those who are secure enough in their persons and situations that they can truly consent to its terms.
Else, the competition of the market is a matter of the insulting misattribution of liberty to the injury of exploitation, the individualism of the market a matter of isolation, abandonment, and criminal neglect, the responsibility of the market a matter of austerity for the vulnerable and unearned reward for the privileged, the efficiency of the market a matter of the concentration of wealth as it is seen from the perspective of the beneficiaries of that concentration.
Again, none of this is enterprise properly so-called, and certainly not enterprise as advertised by its champions, but simply the same old brutal ineffectual and presumptuous aristocracy that has been the bane of progressive democratization throughout its long and too-slow world-building course in history.
I think I am a champion of free enterprise, as it can be with its proper support and confined to its proper orbit. I cannot help it if the ideologues who have appropriated the term would mistake me for an apologist of tyranny. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that petulant Royalists would decry as socialism or tyranny the effort of patriotic democrats to save free enterprise from itself.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Postmarxist Aesthetics and Politics
Students in my Postmarxist Aesthetics and Politics course at Berkeley are hard at work on their take-home finals these days. They are answering a question of their choice from each of the two parts below, A and B, and then tailoring the many prompts available in the questions they have chosen into the basis for strong claims they substantiate in five pages or so of close reading of texts from the class. It's been an enormously rewarding course, very provocative and also clarifying to my own thinking. Many of the themes from the course reappear in the consummating exam, of course, and so I thought it would provide an interesting glimpse into the work that has preoccupied most of my attention these last few months, a glimpse readers of Amor Mundi would not really have otherwise, since I spend so much of my time here squabbling with bioconservatives and techno-utopian idiocies and the cult formations that encrust them like barnacles.
PART A
Question One:
Bill Brown writes of "the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut." Jeanette Winterson begins her own account of an education into visual art by telling a story that seems to complement Brown's in key respects: "I was wandering happy, alone… when I passed a little gallery and in the moment of passing saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on." Brown draws on such experiences to flesh out his sense of the thing as distinct from the object. "These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you're 'caught up in things' and that the 'body is a thing among things.'" As for Winterson, it would seem for Brown that aesthetic encounters have something to teach us, especially when we are unprepared for them. What are the politics of this aesthetic education for Winterson and Brown? Do they seem to follow the same route from their initial encounter? Do the politics of this encounter differ or do they resemble the political education attributed to the "realist" art object in some of the Marxist aesthetics we read early on in the term? Assume a perspective on one of these questions, and make a claim that you substantiate with close reading of relevant passages from the texts.
Question Two:
Identify what looks to you like a key difference in the way Simon Frith and Iain Chambers document possible forms of political commitment in popular art practice and popular culture. What political significance attaches to this difference in your view? Substantiate your claim with close reading of relevant passages from the texts. In highlighting this difference you may (or may not -- it's entirely up to you) choose to point to the way in which you find in this difference an echo of a difference between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno reflected in their writings "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Culture Industry."
Question Three:
Name a way in which the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differs in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Make an argument about the key political significance that attaches in your view to this differing treatment of spectatorship in these texts and then substantiate your claim through readings of relevant passages from both texts.
PART B
Question One:
Charity Scribner proposes that in Joseph Beuys' Economic Values a collection of objects memorializes a State while Rey Chow proposes that in Lao She's story "Attachment" a collection of objects threatens a State. A work of Stately memory, it would seem, confronts a work of non-Stately priorities; and an uneasy past confronts an uncertain future. But how different, finally, do you think these projects of collection really are, how different do you think the works of collection they are documenting really are, how different do you think their politics really are? Does it matter that in each of these essays the State under scrutiny is at once an example, however flawed, of "actually-existing socialism" as well as a failed or tyrannical state? Substantiate your claim with close reading of the essays themselves.
Question Two:
The paradox of Luis Bunuel's film The Milky Way is that it denounces religious, philosophical, political, and artistic zealotry, but at the same time it embraces religious mystery, philosophical passion, political idealism, and artistic imagination. Does the film provide a clear path or even clues that might help us along the way toward reconciling this paradox? Is it possible in the terms of the film to embrace mystery without feeding tyranny? Provide your answer through close readings of scenes in the film itself or through an examination of what you take to be the film's larger narrative, formal, logical, or tropological structure.
Question Three:
In Mythologies, Barthes claimed "to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." How does his sarcastic truth differ from the fidelity of "blasphemy" Donna Haraway claims to express in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs'? When Haraway announces in her opening sentence that the project of her Manifesto is "to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism," it would seem that she is using myth in a different way than Barthes does. Or is she? Choose at least two moments in Haraway's Manifesto that seem to you to illustrate how her ironic cyborg mythologizing either is essentially continuous with or significantly different from the demythologizing drive of Barthes's project.
PART A
Question One:
Bill Brown writes of "the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power: you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut." Jeanette Winterson begins her own account of an education into visual art by telling a story that seems to complement Brown's in key respects: "I was wandering happy, alone… when I passed a little gallery and in the moment of passing saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on." Brown draws on such experiences to flesh out his sense of the thing as distinct from the object. "These are occasions outside the scene of phenomenological attention that nonetheless teach you that you're 'caught up in things' and that the 'body is a thing among things.'" As for Winterson, it would seem for Brown that aesthetic encounters have something to teach us, especially when we are unprepared for them. What are the politics of this aesthetic education for Winterson and Brown? Do they seem to follow the same route from their initial encounter? Do the politics of this encounter differ or do they resemble the political education attributed to the "realist" art object in some of the Marxist aesthetics we read early on in the term? Assume a perspective on one of these questions, and make a claim that you substantiate with close reading of relevant passages from the texts.
Question Two:
Identify what looks to you like a key difference in the way Simon Frith and Iain Chambers document possible forms of political commitment in popular art practice and popular culture. What political significance attaches to this difference in your view? Substantiate your claim with close reading of relevant passages from the texts. In highlighting this difference you may (or may not -- it's entirely up to you) choose to point to the way in which you find in this difference an echo of a difference between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno reflected in their writings "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Culture Industry."
Question Three:
Name a way in which the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differs in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Make an argument about the key political significance that attaches in your view to this differing treatment of spectatorship in these texts and then substantiate your claim through readings of relevant passages from both texts.
PART B
Question One:
Charity Scribner proposes that in Joseph Beuys' Economic Values a collection of objects memorializes a State while Rey Chow proposes that in Lao She's story "Attachment" a collection of objects threatens a State. A work of Stately memory, it would seem, confronts a work of non-Stately priorities; and an uneasy past confronts an uncertain future. But how different, finally, do you think these projects of collection really are, how different do you think the works of collection they are documenting really are, how different do you think their politics really are? Does it matter that in each of these essays the State under scrutiny is at once an example, however flawed, of "actually-existing socialism" as well as a failed or tyrannical state? Substantiate your claim with close reading of the essays themselves.
Question Two:
The paradox of Luis Bunuel's film The Milky Way is that it denounces religious, philosophical, political, and artistic zealotry, but at the same time it embraces religious mystery, philosophical passion, political idealism, and artistic imagination. Does the film provide a clear path or even clues that might help us along the way toward reconciling this paradox? Is it possible in the terms of the film to embrace mystery without feeding tyranny? Provide your answer through close readings of scenes in the film itself or through an examination of what you take to be the film's larger narrative, formal, logical, or tropological structure.
Question Three:
In Mythologies, Barthes claimed "to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth." How does his sarcastic truth differ from the fidelity of "blasphemy" Donna Haraway claims to express in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs'? When Haraway announces in her opening sentence that the project of her Manifesto is "to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism," it would seem that she is using myth in a different way than Barthes does. Or is she? Choose at least two moments in Haraway's Manifesto that seem to you to illustrate how her ironic cyborg mythologizing either is essentially continuous with or significantly different from the demythologizing drive of Barthes's project.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Greg Egan on the Transhumanists
Greg Egan is, in my estimation, among the greatest science fiction writers now living. He is also, together with Vernor Vinge (whose work I'm a fan of as well, as it happens), one of the authors who transhumanist-identified technocentrics tend to venerate with special fervor, especially because he explores questions of identity and consciousness under profoundly different material instantiations.
Techno-immortalists who pine (in my view incoherently) after a spiritualized digital eternity as "uploads" take a measure of comfort from Egan's daring and dazzling and, above all, detailed fictional explorations of this terrain.
Where I look for (and inevitably find) provocation in Egan, I suspect many of the transhumanists are seeking plausibility in his work, hankering after a "reality effect" with which they can infuse their superlative aspirations, a welter of details sufficiently substantial to offer a hat-hook to the hyperbolic hat of their techno-utopian handwaving.
Where for me Egan rewards the suspension of disbelief with an enrichment of imagination, I fear that for many transhumanist-types he affords an ascension into True Belief that impoverishes sense.
It must have come as something of a shock, then, to read Egan's dismissal of much of the transhumanist "movement," so-called, in the comments section of Russell Blackford's blog Metamagician and the Hellfire Club a few days ago. I am going to devote a few posts to an engagement with Blackford's discussion, as well as to some of the other comments to his post, but I wanted to begin by quoting Egan's comments, with most of which I agree.
I am excerpting from a few different comments Egan made over time and in conversation, and so I strongly encourage people to follow the link to Blackford's blog for the full passages in their actual context, both the initial piece and ensuing conversation, all of which are well worth your attention.
Notice that Egan has not offered up a substantial critique of transhumanism here for the most part, nor has he tried to leave the impression that he has done. He is just testifying to impressions of transhumanism that seem to me to be pretty generally true of people (though transhumanists are very quick to deny this, often in something of a panic), but which become especially notable coming from a writer and thinker whose imagination shares common ground with so many transhumanist preoccupations.
Egan makes comments about the PR problems of any movement foolish enough to name itself "post-humanism" and then expect human adherents here and now, and worries that a movement with goals arising out of sf fandom is going to be bedeviled in general by hyperbole that renders it impractical. But he hasn't asked here the question whether it makes sense in the first place to organize a "movement" based on shared identity (and on the relative disparagement of those outside that identity) that seeks to achieve technodevelopmental outcomes that sweep the world, including those who share the world but not the subculture itself. This is not a "PR" problem to be addressed, as Blackford honestly and well-meaningly proposes, by insisting on greater "inclusiveness" and "outreach" by the sub(cult)ure. Exclusivity is built in to any identity politics model, sub(cult)ural movements always substitute a moralizing fantasy of prevailing over difference for the properly political work of the ongoing, and in fact interminable, reconciliation of the aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders with whom we share the world.
For me, the transhumanists make the mistake of hoping to circumvent the political altogether (the "anti-egalitarian" tendencies of many of its adherents that worry Blackford and Egan -- both those transhumanists who incline disturbingly in the direction of market-fundamentalist foolishness or toward eerily eugenicist parochialism -- are just the iceberg tip of this deeper anti-politicism in my view) through the application of transcendentalizing technologies.
What Egan dismisses as a rather muddled enthusiasm arising out of fandom, I think is in many (possibly most) cases better described as a pernicious commandeering of the uncertainties of disruptive technoscientific change by a constellation of uncritical True Beliefs, an investment of a superficially instrumental vocabulary with what I describe as super-predicated "outcomes" -- superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance -- that both mime and mine the irrational energies of the theological imaginary: omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence. This suggests that the problem of transhumanist implausibility is not an accidental expression of overeager undereducated fans, but arises out of the very substance of transhumanism as such.
Richard Jones is a critic of Superlativity who focuses on the very questions of science that no doubt Egan would be most interested in himself, and Jones makes the point that the primary or at any rate unique content of transhumanism ultimately is confined to its rhetoric, its ideology, its subcultural idiosyncrasies. And hence it is to those dimensions of transhumanist discourse -- and not to the so-called "technical" questions that transhumanists at once hyperbolize beyond sense but then commandeer to create the impression of their relevance -- that we should turn if we would understand how transhumanism operates in the world, how it solicits identification among its members, how it impacts the discourse of technodevelopmental deliberation more generally and so on.
Techno-immortalists who pine (in my view incoherently) after a spiritualized digital eternity as "uploads" take a measure of comfort from Egan's daring and dazzling and, above all, detailed fictional explorations of this terrain.
Where I look for (and inevitably find) provocation in Egan, I suspect many of the transhumanists are seeking plausibility in his work, hankering after a "reality effect" with which they can infuse their superlative aspirations, a welter of details sufficiently substantial to offer a hat-hook to the hyperbolic hat of their techno-utopian handwaving.
Where for me Egan rewards the suspension of disbelief with an enrichment of imagination, I fear that for many transhumanist-types he affords an ascension into True Belief that impoverishes sense.
It must have come as something of a shock, then, to read Egan's dismissal of much of the transhumanist "movement," so-called, in the comments section of Russell Blackford's blog Metamagician and the Hellfire Club a few days ago. I am going to devote a few posts to an engagement with Blackford's discussion, as well as to some of the other comments to his post, but I wanted to begin by quoting Egan's comments, with most of which I agree.
I am excerpting from a few different comments Egan made over time and in conversation, and so I strongly encourage people to follow the link to Blackford's blog for the full passages in their actual context, both the initial piece and ensuing conversation, all of which are well worth your attention.
Though a handful of self-described Transhumanists are thinking rationally about real prospects for the future, the overwhelming majority might as well belong to a religious cargo cult based on the notion that self-modifying AI will have magical powers….
While at some level it's good to insist that every quality of the human phenotype be subject to clear-eyed scrutiny, the word "Transhumanist" appears to suggest the foregone conclusion that everything about the present species is destined for the rubbish bin -- which neither accords with what most people who've considered the matter would wish for, nor does much to encourage anyone else to treat the movement seriously….
I share [the] concern that so many prominent Transhumanists are anti-egalitarian, but at this stage, quite frankly… I [simply] consider a self-description of "Transhumanist" to be a useful filter to identify crackpots….
The word "transhumanism" (or, even worse, "posthumanism") sounds like a suicide note for the species….
And I'm not sure quite how much solidarity I'm compelled to have with someone, just because they've also noticed that we're not going to see out the millennium with physical substrates identical to those we've had for the last 200,000 years. People who think their manifest destiny is to turn Jupiter into computronium so they can play 10^20 characters simultaneously in their favourite RPG are infinitely more odious and dangerous than the average person who thinks this whole subject is science-fictional gibberish and would really just like to have 2.3 children that are members of his/her own species, so long as they don't have cystic fibrosis and live a slightly better life than their parents.
I don't doubt that there are, also, some dangerously intemperate adherents to the notion of humanity retaining its ancestral traits forever.... But for actual deranged monomaniacs on this particular subject, the pro side has a far higher proportion of nutjobs than its opponents….
I don't want to single anyone out for disparagement, either here or in private, because I haven't actually read anyone's entire corpus. I don't spend much time reading academic papers on this subject, or Transhumanist manifestos; the impression I've gained of the movement comes largely through the popular media and random exposure to blogs by people self-describing as "Transhumanist", regardless of their affiliations and qualifications. A large number of those bloggers will be people whose names are not famous and who have no particular influence; nonetheless, they consider themselves to be part of the Transhumanist movement, and so surely they contribute something to the wider public's impression of what such a movement entails. As with, say, socialism, it's not the academic definition that interests the general public, it's the behaviour of people they know (either personally or through the popular media) who self-describe as socialist.
Now there are obviously some grave deficiencies with such a viewpoint; I mean, a similarly based impression of quantum mechanics would also yield a picture of a world dominated by crackpots. But while quantum mechanics has a sound historical and academic bedrock that can (largely) withstand all the noise that surrounds it, I'm much less sanguine about the T word, given that its origins lie as much in SF, SF fandom, and technopunditry as it does in bioethics and other fields of philosophy. There's nothing wrong with that; SF and various non-academic techno-boosterist subcultures ought to be inspirational. But the lines between what's imminent, what's plausible in the medium term, what's possible in the long-term, and what's sheer wish-fulfilment fantasy, remain utterly blurred for most "rank-and-file" Transhumanists I encounter on the web, and also (from my limited reading of them) a substantial number of more prominent commentators. It's this that prompted me to say, earlier, that to first order I consider a self-identification of "Transhumanist" to be a sign of a crackpot. While there are doubtless people to whom that's unfair, filtering out anyone who uses that label is a pretty reliable way to ensure that you don't end up wasting time reading people who've completely lost touch with reality.
Notice that Egan has not offered up a substantial critique of transhumanism here for the most part, nor has he tried to leave the impression that he has done. He is just testifying to impressions of transhumanism that seem to me to be pretty generally true of people (though transhumanists are very quick to deny this, often in something of a panic), but which become especially notable coming from a writer and thinker whose imagination shares common ground with so many transhumanist preoccupations.
Egan makes comments about the PR problems of any movement foolish enough to name itself "post-humanism" and then expect human adherents here and now, and worries that a movement with goals arising out of sf fandom is going to be bedeviled in general by hyperbole that renders it impractical. But he hasn't asked here the question whether it makes sense in the first place to organize a "movement" based on shared identity (and on the relative disparagement of those outside that identity) that seeks to achieve technodevelopmental outcomes that sweep the world, including those who share the world but not the subculture itself. This is not a "PR" problem to be addressed, as Blackford honestly and well-meaningly proposes, by insisting on greater "inclusiveness" and "outreach" by the sub(cult)ure. Exclusivity is built in to any identity politics model, sub(cult)ural movements always substitute a moralizing fantasy of prevailing over difference for the properly political work of the ongoing, and in fact interminable, reconciliation of the aspirations of the diversity of stakeholders with whom we share the world.
For me, the transhumanists make the mistake of hoping to circumvent the political altogether (the "anti-egalitarian" tendencies of many of its adherents that worry Blackford and Egan -- both those transhumanists who incline disturbingly in the direction of market-fundamentalist foolishness or toward eerily eugenicist parochialism -- are just the iceberg tip of this deeper anti-politicism in my view) through the application of transcendentalizing technologies.
What Egan dismisses as a rather muddled enthusiasm arising out of fandom, I think is in many (possibly most) cases better described as a pernicious commandeering of the uncertainties of disruptive technoscientific change by a constellation of uncritical True Beliefs, an investment of a superficially instrumental vocabulary with what I describe as super-predicated "outcomes" -- superintelligence, superlongevity, superabundance -- that both mime and mine the irrational energies of the theological imaginary: omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence. This suggests that the problem of transhumanist implausibility is not an accidental expression of overeager undereducated fans, but arises out of the very substance of transhumanism as such.
Richard Jones is a critic of Superlativity who focuses on the very questions of science that no doubt Egan would be most interested in himself, and Jones makes the point that the primary or at any rate unique content of transhumanism ultimately is confined to its rhetoric, its ideology, its subcultural idiosyncrasies. And hence it is to those dimensions of transhumanist discourse -- and not to the so-called "technical" questions that transhumanists at once hyperbolize beyond sense but then commandeer to create the impression of their relevance -- that we should turn if we would understand how transhumanism operates in the world, how it solicits identification among its members, how it impacts the discourse of technodevelopmental deliberation more generally and so on.
Monday, April 21, 2008
From Neocon to Biocon
Neocons trump up an apocalyptic "War on Terror" designed to enable incumbent interests to centralize control and loot resources -- not to mention, distract attention from environmental disaster the remediative politics of which profoundly threaten their position -- and that rhetorically claims to defend "Democracy" while dismantling the rule of law and civil liberties on which democracy actually depends, all the while activating deep ugly irrational racism to set the tyrannical machineries in motion.
Biocons trump up an apocalyptic "War on Nature" designed to enable incumbent interests to maintain control over diversifying networked multiculture, and that rhetorically claims to defend "Dignity" while dismantling the scene of legible informed nonduressed consent on which dignity actually depends, all the while activating deep ugly irrational sexism and homophobia to set the tyrannical machineries in motion.
Biocons trump up an apocalyptic "War on Nature" designed to enable incumbent interests to maintain control over diversifying networked multiculture, and that rhetorically claims to defend "Dignity" while dismantling the scene of legible informed nonduressed consent on which dignity actually depends, all the while activating deep ugly irrational sexism and homophobia to set the tyrannical machineries in motion.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Moralizing Isn't Politics
The polis is not a moral community. Politics isn't Morals. And moralizing isn't politics.
Politics isn't organized by the demands of identification and dis-identification in the way morals are. The reactionary political philosopher Carl Schmitt made precisely the contrary claim in his own influential theory of the political, thinking politics through a Friend/Foe distinction that is indeed at the heart of mores, what Sellars called "we-intentions" (which deconstruction in turn reminds us rely on the disavowal of imagined "they-intentions"). But politics in my view isn't about policing the continence of tribal/subcultural formations at all the way morals very definitely are.
Politics is the ongoing, and in fact interminable, contingent reconciliation of the diverse aspirations of the stakeholders with whom one shares the world, on whose differences we will variously depend for our flourishing while at once they are potentially threatening of our positions.
All politics is strategic, dynamic, finally unpredictable, generating effects of resistance precisely where it generates effects that are compelling. It is in part against the grain of this agonism of present plurality and open futurity that we are drawn to engage in the formal universality of Ethical norms that solicit, again only formally, a more general affirmation, with an eye to "the decent respect for the opinions of mankind," the project of meta-moral meta-political cosmopolitan normativity, Universal Declarations of Rights, the priority of consent over virtue, the adherence to rules of order and published conventions even in war, and so on.
Our inhabitation in multilateral societies with a complex functional division of labor and liberal division of powers, and further, our immersion in networked mediation (both mass and p2p), solicit us into multiple moral identifications over the course of our lives. It is in part against the grain of these parochial, partial, dynamic -- also, by the way, absolutely indispensable to human flourishing -- moral identifications/dis-identifications that we are drawn to engage in the formal universality of Ethical norms that solicit, again only formally, a more general affirmation, with an eye to "the decent respect for the opinions of mankind," the project of a narratively coherent ethos, of public-selfhood.
At its essence the "Left" is the commitment to the fraught process of democratization, in all its centuries of vicissitudes, the commitment to the nonviolent resolution of disputes among peers all of whom deserve a say in the public decisions that affect them. (I have delineated this Left "ethos" in greater detail here). The "Right" at its essence is the commitment to the defense and consolidation of incumbent interests in the face of social stresses, whatever the costs, because the diminishment or downfall of incumbency is imagined to be the worst conceivable outcome.
It is not correct, however commonplace it may be, to think the distinction between Left and Right as a conflict between two vast moral communities or meta-cultures, because most people will exhibit progressive or conservative tendencies in some of their organizational affiliations (a progressive political party can incubate a conservative politics in some of its members who foreground the defense of a party Establishment or system of established procedures, and patronage, while still remaining legible as progressive in its larger platform), their attitudes toward some historical change if not others, and so on.
The proper normative work of the moral consists of policing the continence of their community -- by securing its borders, disdaining its Significant Others, and maintaining the continuity of its members -- the better to provide the membership with the indispensable concerns of the moral: legibility, belonging, solidarity. Whenever moral communities acquire more properly "political" ambitions, whenever they become imperial or evangelical, their characteristic modes of policing (entirely proper to the moral in its proper sphere) substitute catastrophically for the proper work of the political, imposing the ambition to prevail over difference rather than contingently to reconcile diverse aspirations, inevitably replacing political agonism with a genocidal rage for order. The substitution of the moral for the political, properly speaking, is moralizing and not politics, and it seems to me it is an enormously dangerous thing that so many seem to think the political through the lens of such moralizing.
By the way, the contrary substitution of the political for the moral seems to me to be just as disastrous in practice. People who misapply the contingency of political strategy to the moral communities they inhabit will acquire soon enough the reputation of opportunism and untrustworthiness, while the pluralism of the political will always seem suspiciously like relativism from the perspective of the moral. Needless to say, in an epoch of moralizing mistaken for politics such as out own, charges of relativism are rampant and, more often than not, bespeak an incomprehension of and hostility to the exactions and pleasures of the political as such.
Long time readers of Amor Mundi will recognize that this is an argument embedded in my larger proposal that secularism involves more than a separation of Church and State but (at least) a five-fold demarcation of human concerns, each of which yields reasonable beliefs and practices according to its own mode, with its own criteria of warrant, and with its own indispensable benefits. These are, again, briefly, an efficacious mode (under which the scientific is subsumed and for which the scientific has come to paradigmatic) yielding powers of prediction and control, a moral mode yielding legibility and belonging, an aesthetic mode yielding personal perfections offered up to the hearing of the world, an ethical mode yielding from the interminability of political normativity and incompleteness of moral normativity a formally coherent ethos and faculty of judgment, and a political mode reconciling the aspirations of the diversity of peers with whom we share the world, whether we identify with them or not.
While I have focused here on the proper demarcation of the moral, the ethical, and the political in particular, and on the mischief and confusions that arise from mistaking or substituting one mode for the others among these three, it is also true that the other modes can come into play here as well, as when too emphatic a valorization of the efficacious mode can inspire projects to circumvent the political altogether and substitute for it social engineering and technocratic policy, or as when too emphatic a valorization of the aesthetic mode can inspire what Benjamin diagnosed as the consummation of art pour l'art in fascism.
Politics isn't organized by the demands of identification and dis-identification in the way morals are. The reactionary political philosopher Carl Schmitt made precisely the contrary claim in his own influential theory of the political, thinking politics through a Friend/Foe distinction that is indeed at the heart of mores, what Sellars called "we-intentions" (which deconstruction in turn reminds us rely on the disavowal of imagined "they-intentions"). But politics in my view isn't about policing the continence of tribal/subcultural formations at all the way morals very definitely are.
Politics is the ongoing, and in fact interminable, contingent reconciliation of the diverse aspirations of the stakeholders with whom one shares the world, on whose differences we will variously depend for our flourishing while at once they are potentially threatening of our positions.
All politics is strategic, dynamic, finally unpredictable, generating effects of resistance precisely where it generates effects that are compelling. It is in part against the grain of this agonism of present plurality and open futurity that we are drawn to engage in the formal universality of Ethical norms that solicit, again only formally, a more general affirmation, with an eye to "the decent respect for the opinions of mankind," the project of meta-moral meta-political cosmopolitan normativity, Universal Declarations of Rights, the priority of consent over virtue, the adherence to rules of order and published conventions even in war, and so on.
Our inhabitation in multilateral societies with a complex functional division of labor and liberal division of powers, and further, our immersion in networked mediation (both mass and p2p), solicit us into multiple moral identifications over the course of our lives. It is in part against the grain of these parochial, partial, dynamic -- also, by the way, absolutely indispensable to human flourishing -- moral identifications/dis-identifications that we are drawn to engage in the formal universality of Ethical norms that solicit, again only formally, a more general affirmation, with an eye to "the decent respect for the opinions of mankind," the project of a narratively coherent ethos, of public-selfhood.
At its essence the "Left" is the commitment to the fraught process of democratization, in all its centuries of vicissitudes, the commitment to the nonviolent resolution of disputes among peers all of whom deserve a say in the public decisions that affect them. (I have delineated this Left "ethos" in greater detail here). The "Right" at its essence is the commitment to the defense and consolidation of incumbent interests in the face of social stresses, whatever the costs, because the diminishment or downfall of incumbency is imagined to be the worst conceivable outcome.
It is not correct, however commonplace it may be, to think the distinction between Left and Right as a conflict between two vast moral communities or meta-cultures, because most people will exhibit progressive or conservative tendencies in some of their organizational affiliations (a progressive political party can incubate a conservative politics in some of its members who foreground the defense of a party Establishment or system of established procedures, and patronage, while still remaining legible as progressive in its larger platform), their attitudes toward some historical change if not others, and so on.
The proper normative work of the moral consists of policing the continence of their community -- by securing its borders, disdaining its Significant Others, and maintaining the continuity of its members -- the better to provide the membership with the indispensable concerns of the moral: legibility, belonging, solidarity. Whenever moral communities acquire more properly "political" ambitions, whenever they become imperial or evangelical, their characteristic modes of policing (entirely proper to the moral in its proper sphere) substitute catastrophically for the proper work of the political, imposing the ambition to prevail over difference rather than contingently to reconcile diverse aspirations, inevitably replacing political agonism with a genocidal rage for order. The substitution of the moral for the political, properly speaking, is moralizing and not politics, and it seems to me it is an enormously dangerous thing that so many seem to think the political through the lens of such moralizing.
By the way, the contrary substitution of the political for the moral seems to me to be just as disastrous in practice. People who misapply the contingency of political strategy to the moral communities they inhabit will acquire soon enough the reputation of opportunism and untrustworthiness, while the pluralism of the political will always seem suspiciously like relativism from the perspective of the moral. Needless to say, in an epoch of moralizing mistaken for politics such as out own, charges of relativism are rampant and, more often than not, bespeak an incomprehension of and hostility to the exactions and pleasures of the political as such.
Long time readers of Amor Mundi will recognize that this is an argument embedded in my larger proposal that secularism involves more than a separation of Church and State but (at least) a five-fold demarcation of human concerns, each of which yields reasonable beliefs and practices according to its own mode, with its own criteria of warrant, and with its own indispensable benefits. These are, again, briefly, an efficacious mode (under which the scientific is subsumed and for which the scientific has come to paradigmatic) yielding powers of prediction and control, a moral mode yielding legibility and belonging, an aesthetic mode yielding personal perfections offered up to the hearing of the world, an ethical mode yielding from the interminability of political normativity and incompleteness of moral normativity a formally coherent ethos and faculty of judgment, and a political mode reconciling the aspirations of the diversity of peers with whom we share the world, whether we identify with them or not.
While I have focused here on the proper demarcation of the moral, the ethical, and the political in particular, and on the mischief and confusions that arise from mistaking or substituting one mode for the others among these three, it is also true that the other modes can come into play here as well, as when too emphatic a valorization of the efficacious mode can inspire projects to circumvent the political altogether and substitute for it social engineering and technocratic policy, or as when too emphatic a valorization of the aesthetic mode can inspire what Benjamin diagnosed as the consummation of art pour l'art in fascism.
Friday, April 18, 2008
My Exchange With Bioconservative John Howard Continues...
Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot:
John Howard: [A]llowing same-sex conception and approving of its development insults families where one or both parents are not related to their children.
Things that are different feel insulting to me, ban them! Bioconservativism in a nutshell.
[I]t sends a message to those kids that their parents don't love them as much as they would if only same-sex conception had been ready.
Quite apart from the fact that this "message" exists only in your mind, I daresay such "messaging" could be easily be compensated for by the actual parent actually indicating they actually love their actual child.
intentionally putting a child at extreme risk, which I don't think is eugenic to oppose, anymore than opposing someone purposefully drinking and smoking while pregnant who never drank or smoked before in her life, just to send some message of her right to do whatever she wants
Few parents want to harm their kids or put them at risk, you know, and providing reliable information about actual harms and risks according to scientific consensus (rather than transhumanist transcendentalizing hype or bioconservative reactionary panic) would go a long way to overcome your worries on this score, to the extent that they are legitimate ones.
There are also, by the way, laws against fraud and misinformation (that progressives should and most do want strengthened), or criminal neglect that would come into play in some cases.
I think we have to be very careful in deploying traditional intuitions about basic care or neglect, however, as healthcare shifts from a normalizing recovery model to a diversifying lifeway model. Some people seem to want to treat the conception of atypical offspring as a kind of "abuse" even if atypicality is not a barrier to flourishing on their own terms.
This is why it seems to me we need shift from the progressive ideal hitherto of an application of universal standards (which we never managed to implement in any case) to an ideal of universal access and informed nonduressed consent, else eugenic projects of bioconservative "preservationists" or transhumanist "optimizers" will trump consensual lifeway multiculture in an era of modification medicine.
exposing a future child to extra risk is wrong
What if the technique you disapprove of as "unnatural" doesn't expose a future child to undue risk, after all? Will you change your position then? Or is the "risk" that really exercises your imagination the "risk" of what you fear as difference?
Also, do you think that potential parents with strong dispositions to heart disease or other life threatening heritable conditions should be sterilized so that their kids won't be exposed to "extra risk," too? You'll forgive the "libelous" exposure of the eugenicism (possibly unconscious?) embedded in your position yet again.
I'm trying to stop all GE, and that includes same-sex conception too.
All GE? Even if it ameliorates suffering? Even if it treats hitherto untreatable conditions? Even if it is wanted by informed, nonduressed consenting adults?
It means preserving everyone's conception rights, everyone's right to use their own unmodified genes
Ah, the freedom not to be free to make consensual recourse to wanted techniques, the freedom to incarnate always only the parochial bioconservative vision of what humanity should look like and act like, whatever their peers have to say about it, the preservation of everyone's right not to have a right to modifications or modes of conception bioconservatives disapprove of. Up is down.
It's funny we both accuse the other of being an elite making a ban, but, well, I'm right and your wrong. I want Congress to make a law that makes it a major crime to attempt to conceive a child that is not the union of a man and a woman's actual representative unmodified gametes.
Yeah, isn't it "funny" how I accuse you of being a would-be tyrant when all you want is for "Congress to make a law that makes it a major crime to attempt to conceive a child that is not the union of a man and a woman's actual representative unmodified gametes." (I'm sure you are a perfectly nice fellow personally, of course.) It's also funny how I say you seem to have a wee problem with the Gay, endlessly intoning reverentially about the "natural" Union of "a man and a woman" and so on.
You want, presumably, a government agency, which will exist through clown administrations and even clowner adminstrations, that makes constant new rules and regulations and somehow prevents any labs from jumping the gun on any particular new technique before your agency says its OK.
Well, ya know, that's what regulation looks like in complex technoscientific societies. You act like I'm proposing some cr-a-a-a-a-a-azy new regime or something.
Progressives already know how corruptible regulatory and oversight processes are in principle and how utterly debauched they have actually become in the neoliberal era consummated by the Killer Clown Administration -- but few progressives are proposing junking rather than reforming these apparatuses in light of this understanding.
What, you don't like the EPA and OSHA just because Bush has screwed them up so royally? No, we fight to end the conflicts of interest, reverse the deregulatory trend, tighten the standards, make the processes more transparent, and so on.
If an actual consensus of relevant scientists propose that the basic science has reached a level that suggests clinical trials of a hitherto untried technique are warranted and desirable, then in a world that is operating more as it should (and can if we progressives make it so) I disagree that this is an evil thing to do. If informed nonduressed adults would make consensual recourse to emerging techniques eventuating from such a process of regulation and testing I disagree that this is an evil thing for them to do either.
Bioconservative fearmongering aside, people overwhelmingly like the idea of emerging medical treatments for hitherto untreatable conditions. But they want these treatments to be as safe as possible and they deserve access to reliable knowledge and the security of income and basic care to ensure they are not duressed in the decisions they come to. This seems exactly right to me, too.
Saying that it shouldn't be done until it is safe is meaningless because you don't have any idea how that determination would be made and how you would justify telling a gay couple that wants to try it anyway that the government doesn't think it is safe yet, but maybe next year it will be.
Again, it seems to me that we already have both professional organizations and regulative and administrative and legal apparatuses making decisions of this kind countless times every day. Obviously conflicts of interest, the short-sightedness of for-profit considerations above others, lack of transparency, insufficient regulation of fraud and misinformation and so on bedvil these processes, but part of what progressives are and should be devoted to is correcting these problems.
As I have already said, I do also happen to think it's true that emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive techniques that will be wanted will include non-normalizing ones that trouble traditional progressive intuitions about universal standards of care and demand a shift -- about which debate seems to me perfectly warranted and useful -- into norms of universal access and substantial consent (substantial consent backed by real knowledge and real security, not the vacuous pro forma consent of duressed market outcomes). Be all that as it may, this is not a shift that demands an utter jettisoning of administrative apparatuses that are already functioning today, if not as smoothly or fairly or democratically as progressives are fighting for, and familiar to everybody.
I don't see how you are going to tell the libertarians that it is not safe enough to try yet.
However foolish I find them I don't think libertarians want to harm their kids any more than anybody else does, so if some emerging therapy isn't safe you and other qualified people should tell them why and the overwhelming majority will do the right thing if your worries are warranted. Libertopians will certainly benefit, as always, from life in a non-libertopian society that doesn't barrage them with fraudulent hype and misinformation from cynical for-profit health-providers (because that should be illegal).
But if market libertarians want to go ahead and do actually unsafe or harmful things therapeutically -- and by "unsafe" I am assuming you don't just mean either "unnatural" or "sub-optimal" by your lights but actually reckless (on a reasonable person standard) or demonstrably lethal things -- then I daresay they can be stopped in the same way that they can be stopped from murder or theft even if they want to commit them. With, you know, like, laws and police and stuff.
Tell me the mechanism, tell me, why are you not agreeing with me that it should be banned right now?
In perpetuity?
Right now it is legal!
So de facto are anti-gravity boots powered by black-holes in their heels, but if clinical trials for same-sex conception are actually being contemplated then of course professional medical organizations and government regulators will be stepping in to oversee what is afoot. Are you mad?
Right now any lab in the country could create an embryo however they want and implant it in a uterus (except Missouri, where they prohibit the implanting part). I smell something again.
Me too. Your paranoia.
Skepticism is one thing, especially in this era of corporate-militarist debasement. And, look, if patients are being used as test subjects for actually risky unprecedented medical procedures without oversight, without social workers and regulators with clipboards and sensible shoes, without schools of muckraking journalists sharking around, raftloads of professional reputations at stake, and armies of lawyers on hand -- you can be sure I will be right there on the barricades with you.
But even then I won't demand a blanket ban or a ban in perpetuity, because I see no compelling reason (I could definitely be persuaded otherwise if there were actual reasons and evidence on offer) to think that safe same-sex conception won't be made available soon enough.
John Howard: [A]llowing same-sex conception and approving of its development insults families where one or both parents are not related to their children.
Things that are different feel insulting to me, ban them! Bioconservativism in a nutshell.
[I]t sends a message to those kids that their parents don't love them as much as they would if only same-sex conception had been ready.
Quite apart from the fact that this "message" exists only in your mind, I daresay such "messaging" could be easily be compensated for by the actual parent actually indicating they actually love their actual child.
intentionally putting a child at extreme risk, which I don't think is eugenic to oppose, anymore than opposing someone purposefully drinking and smoking while pregnant who never drank or smoked before in her life, just to send some message of her right to do whatever she wants
Few parents want to harm their kids or put them at risk, you know, and providing reliable information about actual harms and risks according to scientific consensus (rather than transhumanist transcendentalizing hype or bioconservative reactionary panic) would go a long way to overcome your worries on this score, to the extent that they are legitimate ones.
There are also, by the way, laws against fraud and misinformation (that progressives should and most do want strengthened), or criminal neglect that would come into play in some cases.
I think we have to be very careful in deploying traditional intuitions about basic care or neglect, however, as healthcare shifts from a normalizing recovery model to a diversifying lifeway model. Some people seem to want to treat the conception of atypical offspring as a kind of "abuse" even if atypicality is not a barrier to flourishing on their own terms.
This is why it seems to me we need shift from the progressive ideal hitherto of an application of universal standards (which we never managed to implement in any case) to an ideal of universal access and informed nonduressed consent, else eugenic projects of bioconservative "preservationists" or transhumanist "optimizers" will trump consensual lifeway multiculture in an era of modification medicine.
exposing a future child to extra risk is wrong
What if the technique you disapprove of as "unnatural" doesn't expose a future child to undue risk, after all? Will you change your position then? Or is the "risk" that really exercises your imagination the "risk" of what you fear as difference?
Also, do you think that potential parents with strong dispositions to heart disease or other life threatening heritable conditions should be sterilized so that their kids won't be exposed to "extra risk," too? You'll forgive the "libelous" exposure of the eugenicism (possibly unconscious?) embedded in your position yet again.
I'm trying to stop all GE, and that includes same-sex conception too.
All GE? Even if it ameliorates suffering? Even if it treats hitherto untreatable conditions? Even if it is wanted by informed, nonduressed consenting adults?
It means preserving everyone's conception rights, everyone's right to use their own unmodified genes
Ah, the freedom not to be free to make consensual recourse to wanted techniques, the freedom to incarnate always only the parochial bioconservative vision of what humanity should look like and act like, whatever their peers have to say about it, the preservation of everyone's right not to have a right to modifications or modes of conception bioconservatives disapprove of. Up is down.
It's funny we both accuse the other of being an elite making a ban, but, well, I'm right and your wrong. I want Congress to make a law that makes it a major crime to attempt to conceive a child that is not the union of a man and a woman's actual representative unmodified gametes.
Yeah, isn't it "funny" how I accuse you of being a would-be tyrant when all you want is for "Congress to make a law that makes it a major crime to attempt to conceive a child that is not the union of a man and a woman's actual representative unmodified gametes." (I'm sure you are a perfectly nice fellow personally, of course.) It's also funny how I say you seem to have a wee problem with the Gay, endlessly intoning reverentially about the "natural" Union of "a man and a woman" and so on.
You want, presumably, a government agency, which will exist through clown administrations and even clowner adminstrations, that makes constant new rules and regulations and somehow prevents any labs from jumping the gun on any particular new technique before your agency says its OK.
Well, ya know, that's what regulation looks like in complex technoscientific societies. You act like I'm proposing some cr-a-a-a-a-a-azy new regime or something.
Progressives already know how corruptible regulatory and oversight processes are in principle and how utterly debauched they have actually become in the neoliberal era consummated by the Killer Clown Administration -- but few progressives are proposing junking rather than reforming these apparatuses in light of this understanding.
What, you don't like the EPA and OSHA just because Bush has screwed them up so royally? No, we fight to end the conflicts of interest, reverse the deregulatory trend, tighten the standards, make the processes more transparent, and so on.
If an actual consensus of relevant scientists propose that the basic science has reached a level that suggests clinical trials of a hitherto untried technique are warranted and desirable, then in a world that is operating more as it should (and can if we progressives make it so) I disagree that this is an evil thing to do. If informed nonduressed adults would make consensual recourse to emerging techniques eventuating from such a process of regulation and testing I disagree that this is an evil thing for them to do either.
Bioconservative fearmongering aside, people overwhelmingly like the idea of emerging medical treatments for hitherto untreatable conditions. But they want these treatments to be as safe as possible and they deserve access to reliable knowledge and the security of income and basic care to ensure they are not duressed in the decisions they come to. This seems exactly right to me, too.
Saying that it shouldn't be done until it is safe is meaningless because you don't have any idea how that determination would be made and how you would justify telling a gay couple that wants to try it anyway that the government doesn't think it is safe yet, but maybe next year it will be.
Again, it seems to me that we already have both professional organizations and regulative and administrative and legal apparatuses making decisions of this kind countless times every day. Obviously conflicts of interest, the short-sightedness of for-profit considerations above others, lack of transparency, insufficient regulation of fraud and misinformation and so on bedvil these processes, but part of what progressives are and should be devoted to is correcting these problems.
As I have already said, I do also happen to think it's true that emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive techniques that will be wanted will include non-normalizing ones that trouble traditional progressive intuitions about universal standards of care and demand a shift -- about which debate seems to me perfectly warranted and useful -- into norms of universal access and substantial consent (substantial consent backed by real knowledge and real security, not the vacuous pro forma consent of duressed market outcomes). Be all that as it may, this is not a shift that demands an utter jettisoning of administrative apparatuses that are already functioning today, if not as smoothly or fairly or democratically as progressives are fighting for, and familiar to everybody.
I don't see how you are going to tell the libertarians that it is not safe enough to try yet.
However foolish I find them I don't think libertarians want to harm their kids any more than anybody else does, so if some emerging therapy isn't safe you and other qualified people should tell them why and the overwhelming majority will do the right thing if your worries are warranted. Libertopians will certainly benefit, as always, from life in a non-libertopian society that doesn't barrage them with fraudulent hype and misinformation from cynical for-profit health-providers (because that should be illegal).
But if market libertarians want to go ahead and do actually unsafe or harmful things therapeutically -- and by "unsafe" I am assuming you don't just mean either "unnatural" or "sub-optimal" by your lights but actually reckless (on a reasonable person standard) or demonstrably lethal things -- then I daresay they can be stopped in the same way that they can be stopped from murder or theft even if they want to commit them. With, you know, like, laws and police and stuff.
Tell me the mechanism, tell me, why are you not agreeing with me that it should be banned right now?
In perpetuity?
Right now it is legal!
So de facto are anti-gravity boots powered by black-holes in their heels, but if clinical trials for same-sex conception are actually being contemplated then of course professional medical organizations and government regulators will be stepping in to oversee what is afoot. Are you mad?
Right now any lab in the country could create an embryo however they want and implant it in a uterus (except Missouri, where they prohibit the implanting part). I smell something again.
Me too. Your paranoia.
Skepticism is one thing, especially in this era of corporate-militarist debasement. And, look, if patients are being used as test subjects for actually risky unprecedented medical procedures without oversight, without social workers and regulators with clipboards and sensible shoes, without schools of muckraking journalists sharking around, raftloads of professional reputations at stake, and armies of lawyers on hand -- you can be sure I will be right there on the barricades with you.
But even then I won't demand a blanket ban or a ban in perpetuity, because I see no compelling reason (I could definitely be persuaded otherwise if there were actual reasons and evidence on offer) to think that safe same-sex conception won't be made available soon enough.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Neither Nostalgia Nor Hype Is Progress
Bioconservative John Howard offers up this characterization and critique of my technoscience politics in the Moot:
I don't see myself offering a Third Way, because I think transhumanism and bioconservatism are both "no ways." Advocating consensual multiculture, peer-to-peer, isn't about implementing A Way, it is about keeping futurity open.
Zealots always see "a clear line" they push folks to either side of, and both transhumanists and bioconservatives do the same thing when they start carving up the world into warring tribes that reflect their assumptions while ignoring the complexities of the world.
I don't think actually progressive technodevelopmental social struggle is facilitated by either transhumanist or bioconservative hyperbole or moralizing. Bioconservatism and transhumanism are both ideologies, perfectly complementary and to a certain extent inter-dependent in their shared recourse to superlative figures one side vilifies and the other side valorizes.
I think both perspectives derange efforts to achieve fairer distributions of technodevelopmental risks, costs, and benefits by activating irrational panics, desires, and moralizing where what is wanted in openness, critical thinking, and democratic deliberation.
The danger is that bioconservative and transhumanist frames and figures are essentially the lens through which everybody thinks about emerging technologies now.
Because of bioconservative and transhumanist hype it's always about "living forever" and "babies designed to order" and "uploaded robotic minds" and "clone armies," when what really matters is research and development and regulation for emerging and improving therapeutic techniques for hitherto untreated conditions, providing access to those techniques, and providing access to reliable information about those techniques in a scene of informed nonduressed consent.
If you feel content to say "Enough" it just means you're privileged. Sorry, that's it. People in the world do not have enough, enough freedom, enough health, enough legal recourse, enough equity. I'm far from satisfied.
I definitely don't approve of those who claim to love progress so that they don't have to work for justice here and now with what we have on hand, but neither do I revile the very possibility of a progress that should be made to benefit everybody by everybody, peer to peer.
Bioconservatives want to sell nostalgia as progress and transhumanists want to sell hype as progress.
I'm not fooled and I'm not interested.
OK, "deluded" is probably more accurate. You sincerely think you are offering some third way that is neither transhumanist or bio-conservative. But the fact remains that I got the wrong impression of your position regarding Dvorsky, so I think the explanation has got to be that said "third way" is paved with bullshit and you haven't realized that yet. Thinking that some Transhumanists are fetishizing robots and over-estimating how possible various transhumanist ideas are doesn't put you into a third category. It's a clear line and everyone is on one side or the other: either you believe we should say "Enough" at natural conception with a law, or you believe it isn't enough, and we should (continue to) allow people to be created that aren't from natural conception.
I don't see myself offering a Third Way, because I think transhumanism and bioconservatism are both "no ways." Advocating consensual multiculture, peer-to-peer, isn't about implementing A Way, it is about keeping futurity open.
Zealots always see "a clear line" they push folks to either side of, and both transhumanists and bioconservatives do the same thing when they start carving up the world into warring tribes that reflect their assumptions while ignoring the complexities of the world.
I don't think actually progressive technodevelopmental social struggle is facilitated by either transhumanist or bioconservative hyperbole or moralizing. Bioconservatism and transhumanism are both ideologies, perfectly complementary and to a certain extent inter-dependent in their shared recourse to superlative figures one side vilifies and the other side valorizes.
I think both perspectives derange efforts to achieve fairer distributions of technodevelopmental risks, costs, and benefits by activating irrational panics, desires, and moralizing where what is wanted in openness, critical thinking, and democratic deliberation.
The danger is that bioconservative and transhumanist frames and figures are essentially the lens through which everybody thinks about emerging technologies now.
Because of bioconservative and transhumanist hype it's always about "living forever" and "babies designed to order" and "uploaded robotic minds" and "clone armies," when what really matters is research and development and regulation for emerging and improving therapeutic techniques for hitherto untreated conditions, providing access to those techniques, and providing access to reliable information about those techniques in a scene of informed nonduressed consent.
If you feel content to say "Enough" it just means you're privileged. Sorry, that's it. People in the world do not have enough, enough freedom, enough health, enough legal recourse, enough equity. I'm far from satisfied.
I definitely don't approve of those who claim to love progress so that they don't have to work for justice here and now with what we have on hand, but neither do I revile the very possibility of a progress that should be made to benefit everybody by everybody, peer to peer.
Bioconservatives want to sell nostalgia as progress and transhumanists want to sell hype as progress.
I'm not fooled and I'm not interested.
Monday, April 14, 2008
From One Extreme to Another
A commenter over at Pam's place seems to be implying I'm some sort of "closeted transhumanist" just because I don't want to pre-emptively ban any possible emerging therapies, even actually promising ones, that some religious and social conservatives deem "unnatural"? I suppose it was inevitable. But it is hard not to wonder is it really simply impossible to resist the drift into either technophilic or technophobic extremes when people contemplate emerging technologies?
In my view, most of the transhumanists want to be techno-immortalized and/or have their minds uploaded into digital networks (aspirations that are actually impossible as rather crazy and which symptomize in too many cases a worrisome sociopathy and body-loathing in my humble opinion) -- meanwhile the bioconservatives start howling about designer sooperbabies and clone armies and human-animal hybrids the moment people propose their support for research for stem-cell therapies to address hitherto untreatable conditions.
My interlocutor says that the "people driving this agenda aren't planning on stopping at a cure for Alzheimer's or whatever the disease is that gathers the most sympathy." First of all, I do want to point out that curing Alzheimer's is an unambiguously desirable thing even if bioconservatives are afraid it sets humanity somehow upon a "slippery slope" at the end of which cats and dogs start sleeping together or whatever it is that has them so exercised. When he speaks of the "people driving this agenda" I can't help but wonder who my interlocutor means. Does he mean the transhumanists themselves? People like Ray Kurzweil or Glenn Reynolds (when he's being awful and idiotic about robots rather than just awful and idiotic about everything else)? To the extent that the transhumanists themselves don't "plan" to stop short of immortal sooperbodies and sooperbrains in techno-topia the fact is that it is reality that will stop them in their tracks.
But if what my interlocutor really means to point out is that there are a lot of corporate-militarists who want docile workers and conscientious foot-soldiers and are eager to deploy Pharma to those ends, then I agree certainly with him. If he wants to point out that racist, sexist, heterosexist, and typicality assumptions still drive a huge amount of conventional Development and bioethics discourse, then I agree with him there too. The people in power taking up these pernicious anti-democratizing discourses aren't for the most part transhumanists in the sense of belonging to the actual rather-cultlike marginal membership organizations that attract literally "transhumanist-identified" people (at least as far as I know), but my conversational partner is right in my view to discern a conceptual kinship between these broader cultural currents and the wacky doctrines explicitly handwaved about by transhumanists who "identify" as such. Transhumanism looks to me kinda sorta like the iceberg tip of a more general reductionism, technocratic elitism, eugenic-normalizing, techno-utopian hyperbole that prevails in western neoliberal development discourse more generally.
But I honestly strongly disagree with him that the way to address what is dangerous in that development discourse (with transhumanism as its reductio) is to pretend that transhumanist transcendental fantasies are a real threat on their own terms, only now re-framed as bioconservative nightmares.
I think that deranges sensible deliberation about ongoing technoscientific change.
I think we need to emphasize access to reliable knowledge so that people (including regulators) make more informed decisions, we need to correct the corruption of for-profit healthcare and corporate-cozy regulation of Pharma and r&d, and we need to provide more equality so that people are less likely to "consent" to techniques in ways duressed by inequality, informal status, social stigma and so on (and focus a bright light on actual practices wherever such duress is currently in play).
It's true that I do think technoscientific knowledge can contribute to emancipatory ends for all if it is directed by a more democratic, more fair, better regulated polity. I don't care if the places scientific change take us look "unnatural" to social and religious conservatives. I'm a queer atheistical vegetarian and I've been conducting myself "unnaturally" and thinking "unnaturally" all my life.
To the extent that my interlocutor is worried about actual harms, then I agree with him. To the extent that he is worried about actual safety, then I agree with him. To the extent that he is worried about actual corruption, then I agree with him. To the extent that he is worried that people will be forced or even eager to settle for a scene of consent that is actually subverted by fraud, misinformation, or duress, then I agree with him.
But if what is really wanted is to "preserve" what some parochially construe as "human nature" from the very idea of a safe and wanted medical facilitation of queer kids with two mommies and no man in sight, or differently enabled (a much better word than "disabled") folks who want kids who share their valued morphological lifeways, their deafness, their neuro-atypicality, or what have you, if what is wanted is to preserve the customs some describe as "nature" even against the wishes of informed nonduressed consenting adults -- well, then, I'm not going to agree with that anti-democratic nonsense so readily anymore. That seems too much like a declaration of pre-emptive bigotry to me. If parents want their kids to be deaf, or queers want to have kids of their own when safer techniques become available to do so, or people with aspergers demand dignity on their own terms, it seems eugenicist to me to deny their standing where they would make consensual therapeutic recourse to express their wants -- to the extent that we establish and enforce safety standards, standards of reliable information, universal access, noncorrupt oversight, and so on. (I'm not accusing my interlocutor of particular positions on these issues, I'm casting about for analogies to give people a sense of what my values cash out as on the ground.)
It seems either a little confused or possibly even a little dishonest to imply that my views amount to nothing but "moderate" or "stealthy" transhumanism. (Just ask the transhumanists who rampage about my views here on a nearly daily basis!) I'm a secular democrat who believes in consent, who values lifeway diversity, and who thinks scientific progress is possible and desirable so long as it is regulated and fair and responsive to its stakeholders.
I think that transhumanist and bioconservative outlooks are pretty much equally hyperbolic and deranging of sense: One undercritically technophilic, the other undercritically technophobic; one invested in a eugenic vision of engineering the "enhanced" "optimal" post-human lifeways with which transhumanists identify, the other invested in a eugenic vision of "preserving" the "natural" "properly" human lifeways with which bioconservatives identify.
In my view, most of the transhumanists want to be techno-immortalized and/or have their minds uploaded into digital networks (aspirations that are actually impossible as rather crazy and which symptomize in too many cases a worrisome sociopathy and body-loathing in my humble opinion) -- meanwhile the bioconservatives start howling about designer sooperbabies and clone armies and human-animal hybrids the moment people propose their support for research for stem-cell therapies to address hitherto untreatable conditions.
My interlocutor says that the "people driving this agenda aren't planning on stopping at a cure for Alzheimer's or whatever the disease is that gathers the most sympathy." First of all, I do want to point out that curing Alzheimer's is an unambiguously desirable thing even if bioconservatives are afraid it sets humanity somehow upon a "slippery slope" at the end of which cats and dogs start sleeping together or whatever it is that has them so exercised. When he speaks of the "people driving this agenda" I can't help but wonder who my interlocutor means. Does he mean the transhumanists themselves? People like Ray Kurzweil or Glenn Reynolds (when he's being awful and idiotic about robots rather than just awful and idiotic about everything else)? To the extent that the transhumanists themselves don't "plan" to stop short of immortal sooperbodies and sooperbrains in techno-topia the fact is that it is reality that will stop them in their tracks.
But if what my interlocutor really means to point out is that there are a lot of corporate-militarists who want docile workers and conscientious foot-soldiers and are eager to deploy Pharma to those ends, then I agree certainly with him. If he wants to point out that racist, sexist, heterosexist, and typicality assumptions still drive a huge amount of conventional Development and bioethics discourse, then I agree with him there too. The people in power taking up these pernicious anti-democratizing discourses aren't for the most part transhumanists in the sense of belonging to the actual rather-cultlike marginal membership organizations that attract literally "transhumanist-identified" people (at least as far as I know), but my conversational partner is right in my view to discern a conceptual kinship between these broader cultural currents and the wacky doctrines explicitly handwaved about by transhumanists who "identify" as such. Transhumanism looks to me kinda sorta like the iceberg tip of a more general reductionism, technocratic elitism, eugenic-normalizing, techno-utopian hyperbole that prevails in western neoliberal development discourse more generally.
But I honestly strongly disagree with him that the way to address what is dangerous in that development discourse (with transhumanism as its reductio) is to pretend that transhumanist transcendental fantasies are a real threat on their own terms, only now re-framed as bioconservative nightmares.
I think that deranges sensible deliberation about ongoing technoscientific change.
I think we need to emphasize access to reliable knowledge so that people (including regulators) make more informed decisions, we need to correct the corruption of for-profit healthcare and corporate-cozy regulation of Pharma and r&d, and we need to provide more equality so that people are less likely to "consent" to techniques in ways duressed by inequality, informal status, social stigma and so on (and focus a bright light on actual practices wherever such duress is currently in play).
It's true that I do think technoscientific knowledge can contribute to emancipatory ends for all if it is directed by a more democratic, more fair, better regulated polity. I don't care if the places scientific change take us look "unnatural" to social and religious conservatives. I'm a queer atheistical vegetarian and I've been conducting myself "unnaturally" and thinking "unnaturally" all my life.
To the extent that my interlocutor is worried about actual harms, then I agree with him. To the extent that he is worried about actual safety, then I agree with him. To the extent that he is worried about actual corruption, then I agree with him. To the extent that he is worried that people will be forced or even eager to settle for a scene of consent that is actually subverted by fraud, misinformation, or duress, then I agree with him.
But if what is really wanted is to "preserve" what some parochially construe as "human nature" from the very idea of a safe and wanted medical facilitation of queer kids with two mommies and no man in sight, or differently enabled (a much better word than "disabled") folks who want kids who share their valued morphological lifeways, their deafness, their neuro-atypicality, or what have you, if what is wanted is to preserve the customs some describe as "nature" even against the wishes of informed nonduressed consenting adults -- well, then, I'm not going to agree with that anti-democratic nonsense so readily anymore. That seems too much like a declaration of pre-emptive bigotry to me. If parents want their kids to be deaf, or queers want to have kids of their own when safer techniques become available to do so, or people with aspergers demand dignity on their own terms, it seems eugenicist to me to deny their standing where they would make consensual therapeutic recourse to express their wants -- to the extent that we establish and enforce safety standards, standards of reliable information, universal access, noncorrupt oversight, and so on. (I'm not accusing my interlocutor of particular positions on these issues, I'm casting about for analogies to give people a sense of what my values cash out as on the ground.)
It seems either a little confused or possibly even a little dishonest to imply that my views amount to nothing but "moderate" or "stealthy" transhumanism. (Just ask the transhumanists who rampage about my views here on a nearly daily basis!) I'm a secular democrat who believes in consent, who values lifeway diversity, and who thinks scientific progress is possible and desirable so long as it is regulated and fair and responsive to its stakeholders.
I think that transhumanist and bioconservative outlooks are pretty much equally hyperbolic and deranging of sense: One undercritically technophilic, the other undercritically technophobic; one invested in a eugenic vision of engineering the "enhanced" "optimal" post-human lifeways with which transhumanists identify, the other invested in a eugenic vision of "preserving" the "natural" "properly" human lifeways with which bioconservatives identify.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
"Post-Gender" or Gender Poets?
Hearing so-called transhumanists calling gender a "disease" fills me with unease. After all, the transhumanists also like to say that aging and death are diseases, and seriously propose that imminent medical breakthroughs will eliminate vulnerability and mortality altogether, that freezing their brains will enable them to be revived in immortal robot bodies, or that they will be able one day to "upload" a snapshot-scan of their minds into heavenly digital-spiritual computer networks. My point isn't to dismiss these beliefs because they're weird (lots of weird beliefs end up becoming commonsense in time, after all) but to point out that this is just techno-triumphalism, a fantasy that loose talk of "science" and "technology" can handwave away what are essentially social and political and cultural problems. Sexism isn't something science can steamroller away on the road to a techno-utopian future. It is far more likely that sexism will shape the uses to which scientific discoveries are put in ways few but feminists will be warning us about.
In the first sentence of his "Postgenderism" article, George Dvorsky first claims to be "frustrated with modern feminism" and to desire a "sensible male approach to gender issues." Apart from wondering why a "post-genderist" would have truck with the very idea of a "male approach" to anything, let alone "gender issues" (shouldn't he be "post" both of these things?), the simple truth is I get nervous when another straight white guy claims to be frustrated with "feminism" -- as if that were a single thing -- and then proposes to junk "it" and replace "it" with another internet manifesto and "movement" he just invented consisting of a neologism and a few ideas every one of which has already been under discussion by at least some feminists for years and years.
In several of his writings on this topic Dvorsky claims that Donna Haraway is another contributor to this "movement" he is talking about. Perhaps he would be interested in a few comments made by Haraway in 1999, published in the Donna Haraway Reader in 2004.
Historically, as more medical techniques to help women more safely end and prevent unwanted pregnancies, as more alternate reproductive technologies (ARTs) to facilitate wanted ones, as more transsexual surgeries and therapies and so on become available they have been taken up creatively and opportunistically by people to practice their sexed, gendered, desiring lives in ways that accord better with their own sense of who they are and what they want, while at once, to be sure, these emerging techniques have also been deployed in risky, confused, exploitative ways (surrogacy and organ harvesting stratified by realities of poverty, fraud, misinformation, duress, for example -- and one can only imagine the abuses in unregulated quests for reproductive cloning given current ignorance and risks) and were understood in terms of prevailing norms used to police possibility and constrain sexed-gendered lifeways even as they ramify them. Technology isn't inherently emancipatory -- it isn't inherently anything -- techniques and artifacts become emancipatory only as they are taken up by people organized to ensure emancipatory outcomes. The very same gender reassignment techniques that empower an informed and consenting transsexual person might be deployed to coerce an intersex child in ways that disempower them catastrophically. I worry that the technological determinism of Dvorsky's transhumanist handwaving about inherently emancipatory technologies, his airy dismissal of modern feminism, his glib acquiescence to a simplistic and sexist vision of genetic destiny (why treat the ways in which men and women presumably are different from one another as more salient than the ways in which men differ from one another and women differ from one another?) all point to an epic underestimation of the practical political work of anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, anti-cisssexist discourse and practice and witness and play to democratize gender, peer-to-peer.
Part of what Haraway is getting at that seems a bit lost on the transhumanist "post-genderists" is her point that sex-gender is, in her words, "an obligatory distribution of subjects in unequal relationships." I mean, leave it to a straight white guy to actually imagine he has "accomplished" the incarnation of a post-gender subjecthood. It isn't enough to point to the evil of the violations and vulnerabilities of sexism and heteronormativity, the fact remains that sex-gender is not so much a disease as a language we all speak, a language we learn if we are to speak at all. People who recognize that language can be used to lie or confuse don't declare ourselves post-linguistic, but strive to remake language to tell more truth. We use it to testify to neglected experiences, we subject it to critical scrutiny, we use it to make poetry.
When we push against the customary demands and expectations of sex and gender to live our lives more as we see fit, we are subversively citing and reciting sexed and gendered terms in the world we are born into. We are not then "post-gender" so much as we are striving to write new poetry with gender. And when we push against sex and gender in the real world we know that sex and gender push back, they exact costs on us, they impose risks on us, they take us by surprise in ways that can be dangerous and deranging. Deviance and defiance aren't happening on the Holodeck in an episode of Star Trek. Who needs to cheerlead about shiny immortal teledildonic robot bodies that may never arrive when people here and now are using language and bodylanguage and artifacts to play with sex-gender norms and make them sing a new tune, with real costs and real risks at stake? There is nothing "post-gender" about subversive but still citational queer practices (and I mean queer in the most capacious understanding of that term) of butch/femme, polyamorous, top/bottom, S/M, bisex/asex/intersex recodings of desire and pleasure and practice. This is about the real world politics of consensual lifeway multiculture, peer to peer. I think I'll stick with the feminists in the real world for now, thanks, and leave the transhumanoid "post-genderists" in the science fiction aisle (after all, we might have a good mutually enriching conversation about Octavia Butler's novels there).
In the first sentence of his "Postgenderism" article, George Dvorsky first claims to be "frustrated with modern feminism" and to desire a "sensible male approach to gender issues." Apart from wondering why a "post-genderist" would have truck with the very idea of a "male approach" to anything, let alone "gender issues" (shouldn't he be "post" both of these things?), the simple truth is I get nervous when another straight white guy claims to be frustrated with "feminism" -- as if that were a single thing -- and then proposes to junk "it" and replace "it" with another internet manifesto and "movement" he just invented consisting of a neologism and a few ideas every one of which has already been under discussion by at least some feminists for years and years.
In several of his writings on this topic Dvorsky claims that Donna Haraway is another contributor to this "movement" he is talking about. Perhaps he would be interested in a few comments made by Haraway in 1999, published in the Donna Haraway Reader in 2004.
DH: I have no patience with the term "post-gender." I have never liked it.As you can see, Haraway doesn't reject the term completely, probably reluctant to throw out completely any tool that shows any promise at all of helping us tinker with patriarchal sex-gender systems in ways that might help more actually existing people live more freely and more legibly within its shifting still too constricting terms. But I don't think Dvorsky -- and other so-called "technoprogressives" and "transhumanists" -- should take much comfort in Haraway's concession because I think his use of the term exactly the sort of clumsy insensitive techno-utopian appropriation she is so skeptical of.
Interviewer: But you used it in the manifesto…" [The interviewer refers to Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," published fifteen years before the interview, and probably her most influential essay so far. --d]
DH: Yes, I did. But I had no idea that it would become this "ism"! [Laughter] You know, I have never used it since! Because post-gender ends up meaning a very strange array of things. Gender is a verb, not a noun. Gender is always about the production of subjects in relation to other subjects, and in relation to artifacts. Gender is about material-semiotic production of these assemblages, these human-artifact assemblages that are people. People are always already in assemblage with worlds. Humans are congeries of things that are not us. We are not self-identical. Gender is specifically a production of men and women. It is an obligatory distribution of subjects in unequal relationships, where some have property in others. Gender is a specific production of subjects in sexualized forms where some have rights in others to reproductivity, and sexuality, and other modes of being in the world. So, gender is specifically a system of that kind, but not continuous across history. Things need not be this way, and in this particular sense that puts focus on a critical relationship to gender along the lines of critical theory's "things need not be this way" -- in this sense of blasting gender I approve of the term "post-gender." But this is not "post-gender" in a utopian, beyond-masculine-and-feminine sense, which it is often taken to mean. It is the blasting of necessity, the non-necessity of this way of doing the world….
It has much to do with "post-gender" in the sense of blasting the scandal of gender and with a feminism that does not embrace Woman, but is for women. This kind of "post-gender" involves the powerful theories of intersection that came out of post-colonial theory, and women of color feminist theory, and that came overwhelmingly, though not only, from people who had been oppressed in colonial and racial ways. They insisted on a kind of relentless intersectionality, that refused any gender analysis standing on its own, and in this context, I find that the term "post-gender" makes sense. Here it can be understood as a kind of intensified critical understanding of these many threads of production of inequality.
Historically, as more medical techniques to help women more safely end and prevent unwanted pregnancies, as more alternate reproductive technologies (ARTs) to facilitate wanted ones, as more transsexual surgeries and therapies and so on become available they have been taken up creatively and opportunistically by people to practice their sexed, gendered, desiring lives in ways that accord better with their own sense of who they are and what they want, while at once, to be sure, these emerging techniques have also been deployed in risky, confused, exploitative ways (surrogacy and organ harvesting stratified by realities of poverty, fraud, misinformation, duress, for example -- and one can only imagine the abuses in unregulated quests for reproductive cloning given current ignorance and risks) and were understood in terms of prevailing norms used to police possibility and constrain sexed-gendered lifeways even as they ramify them. Technology isn't inherently emancipatory -- it isn't inherently anything -- techniques and artifacts become emancipatory only as they are taken up by people organized to ensure emancipatory outcomes. The very same gender reassignment techniques that empower an informed and consenting transsexual person might be deployed to coerce an intersex child in ways that disempower them catastrophically. I worry that the technological determinism of Dvorsky's transhumanist handwaving about inherently emancipatory technologies, his airy dismissal of modern feminism, his glib acquiescence to a simplistic and sexist vision of genetic destiny (why treat the ways in which men and women presumably are different from one another as more salient than the ways in which men differ from one another and women differ from one another?) all point to an epic underestimation of the practical political work of anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, anti-cisssexist discourse and practice and witness and play to democratize gender, peer-to-peer.
Part of what Haraway is getting at that seems a bit lost on the transhumanist "post-genderists" is her point that sex-gender is, in her words, "an obligatory distribution of subjects in unequal relationships." I mean, leave it to a straight white guy to actually imagine he has "accomplished" the incarnation of a post-gender subjecthood. It isn't enough to point to the evil of the violations and vulnerabilities of sexism and heteronormativity, the fact remains that sex-gender is not so much a disease as a language we all speak, a language we learn if we are to speak at all. People who recognize that language can be used to lie or confuse don't declare ourselves post-linguistic, but strive to remake language to tell more truth. We use it to testify to neglected experiences, we subject it to critical scrutiny, we use it to make poetry.
When we push against the customary demands and expectations of sex and gender to live our lives more as we see fit, we are subversively citing and reciting sexed and gendered terms in the world we are born into. We are not then "post-gender" so much as we are striving to write new poetry with gender. And when we push against sex and gender in the real world we know that sex and gender push back, they exact costs on us, they impose risks on us, they take us by surprise in ways that can be dangerous and deranging. Deviance and defiance aren't happening on the Holodeck in an episode of Star Trek. Who needs to cheerlead about shiny immortal teledildonic robot bodies that may never arrive when people here and now are using language and bodylanguage and artifacts to play with sex-gender norms and make them sing a new tune, with real costs and real risks at stake? There is nothing "post-gender" about subversive but still citational queer practices (and I mean queer in the most capacious understanding of that term) of butch/femme, polyamorous, top/bottom, S/M, bisex/asex/intersex recodings of desire and pleasure and practice. This is about the real world politics of consensual lifeway multiculture, peer to peer. I think I'll stick with the feminists in the real world for now, thanks, and leave the transhumanoid "post-genderists" in the science fiction aisle (after all, we might have a good mutually enriching conversation about Octavia Butler's novels there).
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