The Unbearable Stasis of "Accelerating Change"
Ten Things You Must Fail To Understand If You Want To Be A Transhumanist For Long
Schlock and Awesome; Or, The Futurists Are Worse Than You Think
"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again"
I Don't Think That Phrase "Straw Man" Means What You Think It Does
Futurologists Are Mortal, But Faith-Based Futurology Is A Zombie That Cannot Be Killed
What People Are Really Talking About When They Are Talking About "Geo-Engineering"
Not Necessarily Abnormal, But Certainly Stupid
Technological Progress Is Not the Same As Social Progress (In One Simple Chart)
Taurus Londono, You Are Going to Die
An Open Letter to the Robot Cultists
The Artificial Man the Killer Clowns Made and the Mouse Child Who Said What She Saw
Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, December 23, 2012
What Is Patriarchy?
Patriarchy names in the first place those sociocultural systems in history in which authority and control over property, and especially the generational transmission of property -- and therefore authority -- from fathers to sons, requires that women be owned as property as well to ensure male control over female reproductive capacity.
Patriarchy names in the second place a whole system of norms and institutions that preferentially benefit men in respect to women, both to facilitate the control of women by men that is patriarchy in its primary sense, but also those norms and institutions that tend to arise as results, expressions, or symptoms of this ongoing control. It is crucial to grasp that vestiges of these norms and institutions will tend to linger on, denigrating and disabling women in respect to men, or denigrating and disabling that which is associated with what is construed as "femininity" in respect to what is construed as "masculinity," even in societies and cultures that have overcome some or even most of the violence and injustice represented by patriarchy in its primary sense.
Patriarchy names in the third place those discursive operations through which bodies and lifeways are imagined and attended to and so produced as "sexed" and "gendered" in ways that are only legibly taken up and valued and hierarchized by sociocultural formations that are patriarchal in the first and second senses above. It is crucial to grasp that patriarchal sex-gender vocabularies not only prepare and facilitate bodily experience and desire for the denigration and disablement of women in respect to men, and femininity in respect to masculinity, in patriarchy's second sense above, but that the patriarchal in its third sense generates possibilities as well for still-circumscribed resistances to these denigrations and disabilities, contingent valorizations, ambivalent celebrations of femininity and womanhood within patriarchy's sex-gender terms. It is no less crucial to grasp that patriarchal sex-gender vocabularies open the way for new denigrations and disabilities of bodies and lifeways than those highlighted by patriarchy's first and second senses as when, for example, an intersex body is surgically policed into conformity with a normative sexual dimorphism whatever injurious consequences may follow from this operation, or when a wanted transsexual lifeway premised on the pleasures of the transitional itself rather than on a primary aversion to the legibly sexed "pre-operative" body or an ideal identification with the legibly sexed "post-operative body" is pathologized, criminalized, or otherwise dehumanized. In these cases the patriarchal assignment of facts and values functions not so much to denigrate women in respect to men, or femininity in respect to masculinity, so-called, but to denigrate and disable any body, experience, desire, or lifeway that is not legibly male or female, legibly masculine or feminine, or legibly reprosexual, beyond but still in service to the damage the patriarchal goes on to do to the bodies, experiences, desires, and lifeways that are legible in its terms according to patriarchy's first and second senses.
Patriarchy names in the second place a whole system of norms and institutions that preferentially benefit men in respect to women, both to facilitate the control of women by men that is patriarchy in its primary sense, but also those norms and institutions that tend to arise as results, expressions, or symptoms of this ongoing control. It is crucial to grasp that vestiges of these norms and institutions will tend to linger on, denigrating and disabling women in respect to men, or denigrating and disabling that which is associated with what is construed as "femininity" in respect to what is construed as "masculinity," even in societies and cultures that have overcome some or even most of the violence and injustice represented by patriarchy in its primary sense.
Patriarchy names in the third place those discursive operations through which bodies and lifeways are imagined and attended to and so produced as "sexed" and "gendered" in ways that are only legibly taken up and valued and hierarchized by sociocultural formations that are patriarchal in the first and second senses above. It is crucial to grasp that patriarchal sex-gender vocabularies not only prepare and facilitate bodily experience and desire for the denigration and disablement of women in respect to men, and femininity in respect to masculinity, in patriarchy's second sense above, but that the patriarchal in its third sense generates possibilities as well for still-circumscribed resistances to these denigrations and disabilities, contingent valorizations, ambivalent celebrations of femininity and womanhood within patriarchy's sex-gender terms. It is no less crucial to grasp that patriarchal sex-gender vocabularies open the way for new denigrations and disabilities of bodies and lifeways than those highlighted by patriarchy's first and second senses as when, for example, an intersex body is surgically policed into conformity with a normative sexual dimorphism whatever injurious consequences may follow from this operation, or when a wanted transsexual lifeway premised on the pleasures of the transitional itself rather than on a primary aversion to the legibly sexed "pre-operative" body or an ideal identification with the legibly sexed "post-operative body" is pathologized, criminalized, or otherwise dehumanized. In these cases the patriarchal assignment of facts and values functions not so much to denigrate women in respect to men, or femininity in respect to masculinity, so-called, but to denigrate and disable any body, experience, desire, or lifeway that is not legibly male or female, legibly masculine or feminine, or legibly reprosexual, beyond but still in service to the damage the patriarchal goes on to do to the bodies, experiences, desires, and lifeways that are legible in its terms according to patriarchy's first and second senses.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
There Is No Constitutionally Protected Right To Own Guns
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Guns. Lots of guns.
There is no specification of the Arms protected by the Second Amendment, and the fact that nobody seriously proposes either that the Amendment is restricted to the possession of muskets actually available at the time of the writing or expands to protect private ownership of nuclear or biogenic weapons indicates that everybody already accepts the premise that Arms are a selective category, and even that considerations of safety can determine weather particular weapons can be banned or not.
Given the speed with which gun advocates inevitably point to the fact that the banning of guns will not eliminate murder since many artifacts can be used as lethal weapons -- table knives, golf clubs, fuel-fat jets -- it should be noted that, perhaps contrary to purpose, gun advocates are demonstrating through such arguments that even the banning of all guns altogether (which is a position few to none advocate at all) would leave citizens quite free to keep and bear any number of forms of Arms.
Neither is it true nor Constitutionally indicated that unrestricted access or private ownership are the only conditions satisfying the state of "keep[ing] and bear[ing]" of Arms that is Constitutionally protected. That access to guns be circumscribed by mandated security standards, locking mechanisms, restricted locations, or even contracted out to public officials working in the public interest need not necessarily be regarded as violations of "keep[ing] and bear[ing] Arms" under certain possible interpretations of the Constitution (not all of which I personally regard as plausible, nor would necessarily endorse myself, I'm just pointing out that the phrase is not one with a singular easily legible interpretation).
I personally think that the initial framing of the Constitutional provision by considerations of "a well regulated Militia" (you will notice that the word "regulation" appears right there in the very Amendment itself, and is clearly not thought inherently to infringe the right of the people to keep and bear Arms that follows it) in an era of precarious national security without reliable standing armies is enormously significant to a proper understanding of the Second Amendment, and one that is quite catastrophic to the arguments of so-called gun advocacy politics. But I also think there is little rhetorical force in any of that, true though it may be, because I don't think Americans generally have much awareness of the concrete historical context the phrase references nor do they much care for arguments that take such contextual and intentional considerations into account in the first place. I think Americans are more interested in the plausible applicability of Constitutional principles and phrases to contemporary problems and conditions than their initial ones, frankly. As someone who regards the Constitution as a living document I don't even think that is a particularly bad thing all told.
I will say, however, that I believe there is a profound and paranoid anti-governmental mentality at the heart of the most aggressive gun advocacy, while the Amendment deployed in the service of this anti-governmentality actually originally expressed a profoundly patriotic support of the need to defend the government from enemies. The commandeering of the Second Amendment in the service of a white-racist patriarchal anti-governmental anti-civilizational mindset declaring government of by and for the people itself to represent an antithetical occupational force represents a profound perversion of the spirit of the Amendment, and of the Document of which it is a part at the deepest imaginable level.
Friday, December 21, 2012
"Is Transhumanism Racist?"
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, "Black Guy From the Future Past" has this to say:
Still, as you mention in your comment, as a subculture the transhumanoids and other sub(cult)ural futurologists are relentlessly white, male, and privileged folks, and I do think their assumptions, aspirations, and discourse reflect that demographic reality.
For as long as I've been studying them, this non-representativeness has occasionally provoked nervous efforts at "outreach" which inevitably produce little change, and to the extent that "outreach" as an organizational operation aimed at diversity is always a matter of "us" (North Atlantic upperclass-identified white males) "reaching out" from where "we" are to "them" (the Ladies, the Blacks, the Poors, the Olds, etc.), of course it structurally replicates the terms of exclusion in the very gesture of welcoming, so I am not surprised that these inept efforts tend to go unrewarded. Transhumanoids will probably point to their latest efforts to build missionary "chapters" in the "third world" or "developing countries" (I probably don't need to tell you that describing overexploited regions of the world as if they were an alien "third" world or as if they are parts of the world that have not yet "attained" presumably supreme western developmental standards in the first place are inherently colonialist/ racist) as evidence belying their endless futurological white penis parade, but I daresay the historical precedents/ analogies of racist "civilizing missions" are too obvious to require spelling out here. Usually, the better, more anxious transhumanoids (of whom there are not really very many as far as I can see) will trot out photogenic links to afro-futurist aesthetics occasionally -- Sun Ra and Octavia Butler come up a lot, and after all, Sun Ra and Octavia Butler ARE fabulous -- but the exceptions here scream out the rule to my ears, especially when they remain so few, so static, so defensive.
I mean, there are some elephants in this room, aren't there? Like the fact that transhumanism in its sanewashing efforts at academic and media respectability has had a wee bit of trouble with links cropping up to straight-up neo-Nazi white-power sites online, with a distressing tendency to be a place where explicitly racist Bell Curve nonsense is defended, with a fatal susceptibility to evopsycho bio-reductionist nonsense more generally -- again, much of that being an endless occasion for sexists and racists to air their sexism and racism with a pseudo-scientific patina. This susceptibility to evopsycho is a problem shared across digital-fixated subcultures and discourses as an effect of their aversion to materiality and coping with that aversion through a (false) equation of the digital with the spiritual conjoined to a (false) refiguration of evolutionary biology as an algorithmic optimization randomly exploring an abstract "problem space."
Is such "digital-utopian" disdain of "meat bodies" racist? Well, it need not be on its face, certainly, but given the whiteness of these subcultures and of the "reason" qua rage for order with which they so often identify, and given the distressing tendency of race to function precisely as a discourse producing bodies raced qua "the bodily" as such -- that is to say, as the epidermalized body, the muscularized body, the body as bestialized, infantilized, precivilized atavism, the body as seat of irrational and threatening passions, and on and on -- one doesn't have to look very hard to find all sorts of racist symptoms cropping up in these precincts, even among the, er, nicest people.
And, oh yes, many transhumanists explicitly champion eugenics. No racism to see here, folks! Pretty much all transhumanists, as a matter of their very definition qua transhumanists, defend an "enhancement" discourse that stealths its eugenicism by pretending to advocate an "inclusive" "access" to parochial norms pretended in turn to name "neutral" markers of "capacity" or "optimality," blissfully unaware of all the racism and sexism and imperialism so many of them are letting in through the back door.
To the extent that transhumanism styles itself a humanism at all, of course, one would hope it tries to be vigilant in the aftermath of a long humanist history in which a presumably universal humanity named only a minority of actually living humans and universal human rights were enjoyed by that minority usually at the expense of other actually living humans, a project organized around the figure of a "human race" often deeply indebted to racist legacies for its categories and institutions. At least some academic variations of the "post-human" -- with which the transhuman is sometimes identified by observers, possibly too glibly -- are indebted to Fanonian ambivalence about the humanist project, at once recognizing its racist legacy but also demanding it live up to its universalism in a way that facilitates anti-racism.
I would like to say that the transhumanoids partake in that tradition -- but I can't say I have seen much inclination in any of them even to read Fanon, let alone take up such a nuanced discourse on humanism. More usual are the most facile imaginable re-enactments of racist imperialism, as when non-human animals are refigured in their exclusion from the human race as always only suffering lack in ways that demand the ethical response of techno-transcendently re-writing them in the image of parochially-imagined human conformity and then declaring this flabbergasting chauvinist aspiration uplift. Is transhumanism racist? I leave that to the reader to decide.
Hello Dale. Is transhumanism racist? I've been reading your blog and you continually make reference to how most futurists tend to be white. Also, many scientific fields are dominated by white people, more specifically white males. How does this skew ideas about the "future". I await your response. Thank you. (BTW I am that rare black guy who has encountered transhumanist ideas on the net and have noticed the alarming lack of representation of other races, cultures and their ideas)Is transhumanism racist? Since there are unquestionably transhumanist-identified people who are conscientiously anti-racist anything like an affirmative answer by me will provoke the usual howls about my hostile unfair ad hominem attacks. As always, one needs to recall at the outset that one can benefit from racist legacies or mobilize racist discourses without necessarily affirming racist beliefs, indeed while earnestly affirming anti-racist ones, and so recognizing the force of racism is often a matter of exposing structural effects rather than making accusations of unalloyed bigotry.
Still, as you mention in your comment, as a subculture the transhumanoids and other sub(cult)ural futurologists are relentlessly white, male, and privileged folks, and I do think their assumptions, aspirations, and discourse reflect that demographic reality.
For as long as I've been studying them, this non-representativeness has occasionally provoked nervous efforts at "outreach" which inevitably produce little change, and to the extent that "outreach" as an organizational operation aimed at diversity is always a matter of "us" (North Atlantic upperclass-identified white males) "reaching out" from where "we" are to "them" (the Ladies, the Blacks, the Poors, the Olds, etc.), of course it structurally replicates the terms of exclusion in the very gesture of welcoming, so I am not surprised that these inept efforts tend to go unrewarded. Transhumanoids will probably point to their latest efforts to build missionary "chapters" in the "third world" or "developing countries" (I probably don't need to tell you that describing overexploited regions of the world as if they were an alien "third" world or as if they are parts of the world that have not yet "attained" presumably supreme western developmental standards in the first place are inherently colonialist/ racist) as evidence belying their endless futurological white penis parade, but I daresay the historical precedents/ analogies of racist "civilizing missions" are too obvious to require spelling out here. Usually, the better, more anxious transhumanoids (of whom there are not really very many as far as I can see) will trot out photogenic links to afro-futurist aesthetics occasionally -- Sun Ra and Octavia Butler come up a lot, and after all, Sun Ra and Octavia Butler ARE fabulous -- but the exceptions here scream out the rule to my ears, especially when they remain so few, so static, so defensive.
I mean, there are some elephants in this room, aren't there? Like the fact that transhumanism in its sanewashing efforts at academic and media respectability has had a wee bit of trouble with links cropping up to straight-up neo-Nazi white-power sites online, with a distressing tendency to be a place where explicitly racist Bell Curve nonsense is defended, with a fatal susceptibility to evopsycho bio-reductionist nonsense more generally -- again, much of that being an endless occasion for sexists and racists to air their sexism and racism with a pseudo-scientific patina. This susceptibility to evopsycho is a problem shared across digital-fixated subcultures and discourses as an effect of their aversion to materiality and coping with that aversion through a (false) equation of the digital with the spiritual conjoined to a (false) refiguration of evolutionary biology as an algorithmic optimization randomly exploring an abstract "problem space."
Is such "digital-utopian" disdain of "meat bodies" racist? Well, it need not be on its face, certainly, but given the whiteness of these subcultures and of the "reason" qua rage for order with which they so often identify, and given the distressing tendency of race to function precisely as a discourse producing bodies raced qua "the bodily" as such -- that is to say, as the epidermalized body, the muscularized body, the body as bestialized, infantilized, precivilized atavism, the body as seat of irrational and threatening passions, and on and on -- one doesn't have to look very hard to find all sorts of racist symptoms cropping up in these precincts, even among the, er, nicest people.
And, oh yes, many transhumanists explicitly champion eugenics. No racism to see here, folks! Pretty much all transhumanists, as a matter of their very definition qua transhumanists, defend an "enhancement" discourse that stealths its eugenicism by pretending to advocate an "inclusive" "access" to parochial norms pretended in turn to name "neutral" markers of "capacity" or "optimality," blissfully unaware of all the racism and sexism and imperialism so many of them are letting in through the back door.
To the extent that transhumanism styles itself a humanism at all, of course, one would hope it tries to be vigilant in the aftermath of a long humanist history in which a presumably universal humanity named only a minority of actually living humans and universal human rights were enjoyed by that minority usually at the expense of other actually living humans, a project organized around the figure of a "human race" often deeply indebted to racist legacies for its categories and institutions. At least some academic variations of the "post-human" -- with which the transhuman is sometimes identified by observers, possibly too glibly -- are indebted to Fanonian ambivalence about the humanist project, at once recognizing its racist legacy but also demanding it live up to its universalism in a way that facilitates anti-racism.
I would like to say that the transhumanoids partake in that tradition -- but I can't say I have seen much inclination in any of them even to read Fanon, let alone take up such a nuanced discourse on humanism. More usual are the most facile imaginable re-enactments of racist imperialism, as when non-human animals are refigured in their exclusion from the human race as always only suffering lack in ways that demand the ethical response of techno-transcendently re-writing them in the image of parochially-imagined human conformity and then declaring this flabbergasting chauvinist aspiration uplift. Is transhumanism racist? I leave that to the reader to decide.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Fighting the Single Most Dangerous Organized Force in the World
The single most dangerous organized force in the country right now in my opinion is the Republican Party in this moment of its catastrophic disconnection from reality.
This disconnection manifested itself in a comically terrifying way over the course of the latest election in the freakshow primary, the unskewed polling nonsense, and then in the very real confusion of the Romney campaign at losing an election they were obviously losing -- in addition to the bewilderment of the key players on the tee vee in the aftermath of the election, which might be dismissed as gamesmanship at some level, they spent unprecedented millions on a "transition team" premised on that victory that just can't be dismissed as kabuki but only as serious delusion. Death Panel Summer and Birtherism and even the Clinton Impeachment were all earlier exhibitions of this wingnut disconnect, of course. But the disconnection is more significantly indicated in the rejection of Keynesian economics by pretty much the whole party from top to bottom that stands in the way of the obvious solution to our unemployment crises through a vast investment in sustainable infrastructure and renewable energy (or even in the misrecognition of the human tragedy of this unemployment crisis as one eclipsed by a fiscal non-crisis that is threatening only the unearned privileges of a miserable miserly plutocratic micro-minority), the sincere or pretended climate-change denialism by pretty much the whole party from top to bottom that stands in the way of action in the face of the single most urgent civilizational threat of our time, the widespread disdain of Darwin, science, fact-based and harm-reduction policy-making models more generally, the capture of the right by a gun-lobby promoting a gun-culture expressing a more deeply apocalyptic anti-governmental anti-civilizational hyper-individualism than most sensible people are willing to contemplate, the endless exhibitions of patriarchal sexism and heterosexism that endlessly frustrate efforts to provide access to healthcare and education and opportunity to women and girls and of white-racism that bedevil hopes for immigration reform let alone any real address of racist legacies stratifying our society, squandering so much energy, intelligence, and potential.
Because the Republican Party is one of the most powerful forces in American society and America is by many measures one of the most powerful forces in the world, the disconnection of the Republican Party from reality is even more dangerous the wider your planetary perspective and the longer your historical prospect in my view. I think the Republican Party in its deranging Movement Republican phase achieved its consummation in the criminal war-adventuring of George W. Bush and since then has been in a state of ever amplifying crisis and dysfunction and marginalization. But I have no doubt at all that the GOP will remain long capable of authoring extraordinary destruction in this country and in the world in the midst of its ongoing self-destruction.
Although Obama's crucial victories symptomize generational demographic transformation in our country, I think that this is not what he means when he says he wants to be a "transformational" president. I do believe that no small part of Obama's politics consists of his trying to redirect the Republican Party out of its Movement Conservative madness by constantly trying to open spaces in which the GOP is either allowed to make a spectacle of its dysfunction in ways that accelerate its self-marginalization or to act on its better angels and gain power through its partnership with him toward solving actually real shared problems in actually real ways. Given the fact that the Congress lacks the numbers to strong arm his agenda through either house, let alone administer it across all the layers of our federal system and multilateral institutions, this effort on Obama's part is necessary both in absolutely practical terms here and now as well as in light of the larger question of renewing our civic agencies to address our shared planetary problems.
If I didn't think the Republican Party was the most dangerous force in the country and hence in the world in this moment, my politics would look more conventionally radical lefty, I'm sure, simply concerned with economic justice, devoted to sustainability, and celebrating multiculture and especially the creative arts and scientific research. But I judge the GOP the chief (far from the only) obstacle to progressive accomplishment in my country and in the world right now, and that is the lens through which I read quite a lot of politics.
To fail to grasp the conspicuous enemy in the room isn't a sign of great seriousness in my view, and those who bray about Obama's secretmuslikenyasocialist betrayals on the right or about Obama's cryptofascicorporatist betrayals on the left, or about how exhilarating and emancipatory anarchist happenings are or about how exhilarating and emancipatory the latest or imaginarily emerging sooper-gizmos are, all seem to me, you will forgive me, more nonsensical and misguided than words can say.
I agree that getting stuck in the muck of compromised and compromising politics at the partisan level isn't exactly elevating, but nobody consults our aesthetic preferences in advance as to who our objective enemies are going to be, or the level of the sociocultural terrain at which those enemies will be most effectively engaged in the service of sustainable equity-in-diversity. You know, progress.
This disconnection manifested itself in a comically terrifying way over the course of the latest election in the freakshow primary, the unskewed polling nonsense, and then in the very real confusion of the Romney campaign at losing an election they were obviously losing -- in addition to the bewilderment of the key players on the tee vee in the aftermath of the election, which might be dismissed as gamesmanship at some level, they spent unprecedented millions on a "transition team" premised on that victory that just can't be dismissed as kabuki but only as serious delusion. Death Panel Summer and Birtherism and even the Clinton Impeachment were all earlier exhibitions of this wingnut disconnect, of course. But the disconnection is more significantly indicated in the rejection of Keynesian economics by pretty much the whole party from top to bottom that stands in the way of the obvious solution to our unemployment crises through a vast investment in sustainable infrastructure and renewable energy (or even in the misrecognition of the human tragedy of this unemployment crisis as one eclipsed by a fiscal non-crisis that is threatening only the unearned privileges of a miserable miserly plutocratic micro-minority), the sincere or pretended climate-change denialism by pretty much the whole party from top to bottom that stands in the way of action in the face of the single most urgent civilizational threat of our time, the widespread disdain of Darwin, science, fact-based and harm-reduction policy-making models more generally, the capture of the right by a gun-lobby promoting a gun-culture expressing a more deeply apocalyptic anti-governmental anti-civilizational hyper-individualism than most sensible people are willing to contemplate, the endless exhibitions of patriarchal sexism and heterosexism that endlessly frustrate efforts to provide access to healthcare and education and opportunity to women and girls and of white-racism that bedevil hopes for immigration reform let alone any real address of racist legacies stratifying our society, squandering so much energy, intelligence, and potential.
Because the Republican Party is one of the most powerful forces in American society and America is by many measures one of the most powerful forces in the world, the disconnection of the Republican Party from reality is even more dangerous the wider your planetary perspective and the longer your historical prospect in my view. I think the Republican Party in its deranging Movement Republican phase achieved its consummation in the criminal war-adventuring of George W. Bush and since then has been in a state of ever amplifying crisis and dysfunction and marginalization. But I have no doubt at all that the GOP will remain long capable of authoring extraordinary destruction in this country and in the world in the midst of its ongoing self-destruction.
Although Obama's crucial victories symptomize generational demographic transformation in our country, I think that this is not what he means when he says he wants to be a "transformational" president. I do believe that no small part of Obama's politics consists of his trying to redirect the Republican Party out of its Movement Conservative madness by constantly trying to open spaces in which the GOP is either allowed to make a spectacle of its dysfunction in ways that accelerate its self-marginalization or to act on its better angels and gain power through its partnership with him toward solving actually real shared problems in actually real ways. Given the fact that the Congress lacks the numbers to strong arm his agenda through either house, let alone administer it across all the layers of our federal system and multilateral institutions, this effort on Obama's part is necessary both in absolutely practical terms here and now as well as in light of the larger question of renewing our civic agencies to address our shared planetary problems.
If I didn't think the Republican Party was the most dangerous force in the country and hence in the world in this moment, my politics would look more conventionally radical lefty, I'm sure, simply concerned with economic justice, devoted to sustainability, and celebrating multiculture and especially the creative arts and scientific research. But I judge the GOP the chief (far from the only) obstacle to progressive accomplishment in my country and in the world right now, and that is the lens through which I read quite a lot of politics.
To fail to grasp the conspicuous enemy in the room isn't a sign of great seriousness in my view, and those who bray about Obama's secretmuslikenyasocialist betrayals on the right or about Obama's cryptofascicorporatist betrayals on the left, or about how exhilarating and emancipatory anarchist happenings are or about how exhilarating and emancipatory the latest or imaginarily emerging sooper-gizmos are, all seem to me, you will forgive me, more nonsensical and misguided than words can say.
I agree that getting stuck in the muck of compromised and compromising politics at the partisan level isn't exactly elevating, but nobody consults our aesthetic preferences in advance as to who our objective enemies are going to be, or the level of the sociocultural terrain at which those enemies will be most effectively engaged in the service of sustainable equity-in-diversity. You know, progress.
Thursday, December 06, 2012
Prosthetic Sex/Gender and Healthcare Politics
Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot, from an exchange with a long-time reader and frequent critic of mine, the "normal sex crusader" John Howard, this time provoked by the post Transhumanism Is Either A Vacuity or Crazytown: Either Way It Is A Fraud.
Howard dilates on a familiar theme:
My response:
Heaven only knows what you personally regard as the "fixed limits" of sexual morphology and gender practice, but the fact that you speak of "either sex" suggests that you have a rather bleakly reductive understanding assuming a foundational biological sexual dimorphism onto which comparably bleakly reductive gender roles are thereupon overlaid -- even though intersexed human bodies palpably complicate such a schema even without artifice entering the picture, stricto sensu, and even though presumably "second-order" cultural gender assumptions palpably organize and articulate the "first-order" biological realities that presumably function as foundational in this understanding, and even though far more complex sexed/gendered performances have been part of human multiculture throughout history and have been part of normative healthcare for over a century.
I will set to the side your radically impoverished understanding of sex/gender as vectors in the material and semiotic systems of signification and life-making in which we all make our way through the world. I will also set to the side what I know from other posts from you over the years the sexism and anti-gay bigotry that drives so much of your rage and fear. I will try instead to use your question as the occasion to say something useful in general about the relation of futurology and healthcare for a readership that includes but is thankfully not confined to you. Maybe this time even you will see some sense, or move your phobic circus act to some other venue.
You obviously don't have to join a Robot Cult to champion the rights of transpeople, intersex people, and queer folks. You obviously don't have to join a Robot Cult to champion the rights of the "disabled"/ differently enabled. You obviously don't have to join a Robot Cult to be pro choice and champion the rights of informed, nonduressed responsible people to make actually safe wanted choices about reproductive health and recreational sensoria and the bodily modification (tattoos, scars, piercings, and the like) through which to signal subcultural memberships and interpersonal expressivity. While some Robot Cultists may sympathize with or participate in some of these communities and struggles, queer, differently enabled, and Choice politics all long predate and vastly outsize the scope and memberships of the marginal sub(cult)ures of superlative futurology, and I can think of not a single theoretical insight or practical strategy originating uniquely in any futurological discourse to which these struggles are the least bit indebted.
Needless to say (one would think), neither do you have to join a Robot Cult to advocate universal access to safe, effective, affordable, or even free healthcare to everybody, including all these queer, differently enabled, diversely prostheticized people .
None of these people have "sooper-bodies." They have human bodies. None of these people are on the road to super-powers or immortality or virtuality as the result of their recourse to any of these technical practices. None of the actual political, social, cultural stakes of access to or application of any of these techniques (among which are the stakes you mention, how do we human beings ensure that all people are flourishing equitably in our diversity) is clarified by hyperbolizing them via futurological narratives of comic book superheros, immortals, clone armies, cyber-angels, bush robots, and the like.
Every human being is and always has been a "cyborg" in Donna Haraway's sense, an ineradicably acculturated being whose significance is historically situated and whose agency is expressed in social struggle. Clothes, language, bodily bearing are all already artifactual. All culture is prosthetic, all prostheses are cultural. The transhumanoids fetishize certain real and imaginary "technologies" and also naturalize others (everybody does this actually, it is a historical commonplace, but the transhumanoids idiotically try to make a virtue of being uncritical about it and then pretend this is somehow a critical or constructive practice), always the better to invest some artifacts with the status of sacred signifiers that bespeak inevitable progress toward techno-transcendental outcomes they identify with "The Future" at the cost of a profound dis-identification with the present in its lived diversity and profound precarity.
Transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, digi-utopians, and other superlative futurologists of the Robot Cult variety believe many outright nonsensical things, they talk about "technology" in ways that derange the terms of public deliberation to the harm of all, they are indulging in faith-based initiatives that seem in many of them to yield irrational passions and undercritical, defensive, dishonest, even authoritarian subcultural practices.
I have no deep problem with Robot Cultists who want to be enthusiasts about ridiculous techno-transcendental fancies of theirs (though I am not above ridiculing them for being ridiculous now and again, as you know), but I focus my critique on their efforts to pretend these fancies constitute scientific practice, scientific literacy, scientific policy-making, serious philosophy (including philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, technocultural theory, ethics or bioethics, STS, etc.), or contributions to progressive technodevelopmental deliberation, as well as focusing on the ways their discourse provides clarifying extreme illustrations of more prevailing pathologies in our unsustainable, corporate-militarist, white racist and patriarchal, scientistically reductive, techno-fetishizing, techno-triumphalist, mass-mediated, hyper-conformist, hyper-individuated, consumer society more generally.
As I said, I have been around the track with you John Howard many many times in the past. This is not the beginning but the end of this conversation. Your inevitable hysterical anti-queer follow-up screeds and declarations that I am the worst Robot Cultist of them all because I refuse to pre-emptively condemn the non-existing sexualized "technologies" that haunt your fever dreams will all be remorselessly deleted, so don't even go there.
Howard dilates on a familiar theme:
OK, well which is allowing reproduction with someone of the same sex? Which is "overcoming the limits of fixed sex" and being able to be either sex. Is that medicine or crazyyown? I say it is Transhumanism and I don't see how you can claim it is just regular old healthcare, or a major enhancement of healthy human bodies into sooper-bodies?
My response:
Heaven only knows what you personally regard as the "fixed limits" of sexual morphology and gender practice, but the fact that you speak of "either sex" suggests that you have a rather bleakly reductive understanding assuming a foundational biological sexual dimorphism onto which comparably bleakly reductive gender roles are thereupon overlaid -- even though intersexed human bodies palpably complicate such a schema even without artifice entering the picture, stricto sensu, and even though presumably "second-order" cultural gender assumptions palpably organize and articulate the "first-order" biological realities that presumably function as foundational in this understanding, and even though far more complex sexed/gendered performances have been part of human multiculture throughout history and have been part of normative healthcare for over a century.
I will set to the side your radically impoverished understanding of sex/gender as vectors in the material and semiotic systems of signification and life-making in which we all make our way through the world. I will also set to the side what I know from other posts from you over the years the sexism and anti-gay bigotry that drives so much of your rage and fear. I will try instead to use your question as the occasion to say something useful in general about the relation of futurology and healthcare for a readership that includes but is thankfully not confined to you. Maybe this time even you will see some sense, or move your phobic circus act to some other venue.
You obviously don't have to join a Robot Cult to champion the rights of transpeople, intersex people, and queer folks. You obviously don't have to join a Robot Cult to champion the rights of the "disabled"/ differently enabled. You obviously don't have to join a Robot Cult to be pro choice and champion the rights of informed, nonduressed responsible people to make actually safe wanted choices about reproductive health and recreational sensoria and the bodily modification (tattoos, scars, piercings, and the like) through which to signal subcultural memberships and interpersonal expressivity. While some Robot Cultists may sympathize with or participate in some of these communities and struggles, queer, differently enabled, and Choice politics all long predate and vastly outsize the scope and memberships of the marginal sub(cult)ures of superlative futurology, and I can think of not a single theoretical insight or practical strategy originating uniquely in any futurological discourse to which these struggles are the least bit indebted.
Needless to say (one would think), neither do you have to join a Robot Cult to advocate universal access to safe, effective, affordable, or even free healthcare to everybody, including all these queer, differently enabled, diversely prostheticized people .
None of these people have "sooper-bodies." They have human bodies. None of these people are on the road to super-powers or immortality or virtuality as the result of their recourse to any of these technical practices. None of the actual political, social, cultural stakes of access to or application of any of these techniques (among which are the stakes you mention, how do we human beings ensure that all people are flourishing equitably in our diversity) is clarified by hyperbolizing them via futurological narratives of comic book superheros, immortals, clone armies, cyber-angels, bush robots, and the like.
Every human being is and always has been a "cyborg" in Donna Haraway's sense, an ineradicably acculturated being whose significance is historically situated and whose agency is expressed in social struggle. Clothes, language, bodily bearing are all already artifactual. All culture is prosthetic, all prostheses are cultural. The transhumanoids fetishize certain real and imaginary "technologies" and also naturalize others (everybody does this actually, it is a historical commonplace, but the transhumanoids idiotically try to make a virtue of being uncritical about it and then pretend this is somehow a critical or constructive practice), always the better to invest some artifacts with the status of sacred signifiers that bespeak inevitable progress toward techno-transcendental outcomes they identify with "The Future" at the cost of a profound dis-identification with the present in its lived diversity and profound precarity.
Transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, digi-utopians, and other superlative futurologists of the Robot Cult variety believe many outright nonsensical things, they talk about "technology" in ways that derange the terms of public deliberation to the harm of all, they are indulging in faith-based initiatives that seem in many of them to yield irrational passions and undercritical, defensive, dishonest, even authoritarian subcultural practices.
I have no deep problem with Robot Cultists who want to be enthusiasts about ridiculous techno-transcendental fancies of theirs (though I am not above ridiculing them for being ridiculous now and again, as you know), but I focus my critique on their efforts to pretend these fancies constitute scientific practice, scientific literacy, scientific policy-making, serious philosophy (including philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, technocultural theory, ethics or bioethics, STS, etc.), or contributions to progressive technodevelopmental deliberation, as well as focusing on the ways their discourse provides clarifying extreme illustrations of more prevailing pathologies in our unsustainable, corporate-militarist, white racist and patriarchal, scientistically reductive, techno-fetishizing, techno-triumphalist, mass-mediated, hyper-conformist, hyper-individuated, consumer society more generally.
As I said, I have been around the track with you John Howard many many times in the past. This is not the beginning but the end of this conversation. Your inevitable hysterical anti-queer follow-up screeds and declarations that I am the worst Robot Cultist of them all because I refuse to pre-emptively condemn the non-existing sexualized "technologies" that haunt your fever dreams will all be remorselessly deleted, so don't even go there.
Sunday, December 02, 2012
What Futurology Does To Science Fiction
James Hughes (from an abstract of his talk at Robo-Easter yesterday):
First of all, it seems to me that transhumanoid futurists are not derided so much for their "association" with science fiction but for their confusion of science fiction with science practice and science policy. Some folks deride sfnal fandoms, sure, but this derision (of which I would be a prime target myself) is importantly different from the derision of futurological fandoms (of which I would not properly be a target myself), which usually focuses on the superficiality, pseudo-scientificity, non-representative whiteness-boyness-privilege, Guru-Wannabe/True Believer organizational idiosyncrasies, un(der)critical technophilia/technophobia of the latter in my experience. In speaking of an unspecified "association" he is indulging in a consoling evacuation of a whole lot of substance his own avowed political commitment would otherwise demand he critique in ways that would risk his identification. This has always been my chief problem with James Hughes (and hence it is different from my problem with many other techno-transcendentalists).
Second of all, I think it is quite wrong to propose that science fiction is "the principal arena in which human beings imagine their own future radically transformed by social and technological change" since I think almost the whole range of the humanities, social sciences, and policy discourses offer up preeminent arenas for such imagination, work, and contestation. And I have to add, to amplify this point, that literally every actually legibly constituted profession and discipline of knowledge-production has a foresight dimension that functions as a facet of the arena Hughes is talking about: Indeed, one of the chief problems of the futurological as a kind of pseudo-discipline in my view is that it has no actually existing subject-matter of fact/concern over which it has a unique expertise and from which it would produce unique insight and foresight, but then simply declares its subject "Foresight" as such to disavow that vacuity while actually enacting it.
Anyway, not only do I disagree that science fiction is the principal arena in which foresight is elaborated, for the reasons I have already said, but I must say that I do not even agree that science fiction has anything to do with consequentialist scenario-spinning AT ALL (although the sfnal occasionally, very incidentally, may throw up sparks of foresight like any sustained human endeavor will just as well), or anything to do with "The Future" in the futurological sense AT ALL either. I say this because I regard science fiction, like all literature -- and especially good science fiction like all good literature -- as an engagement with the present (not always only the present in which the text originates, but always crucially starting from there), exaggerated, stylized, allegorical, or otherwise imaginatively alienated to provide critical purchase on and occasions for widening empathy in the present mostly unavailable to us outside of the literary.
Futurists and Transhumanists have been derided for association with science fiction, and conservatives have warned of the totalitarian implications of utopian speculation. But speculative fiction is the principal arena in which human beings imagine their own future radically transformed by social and technological change, try to anticipate the pitfalls, and motivate themselves to grasp the opportunities.I suppose it won't exactly be a newsflash for me to say I disagree with this, but I do think it is useful to pressure this formulation.
First of all, it seems to me that transhumanoid futurists are not derided so much for their "association" with science fiction but for their confusion of science fiction with science practice and science policy. Some folks deride sfnal fandoms, sure, but this derision (of which I would be a prime target myself) is importantly different from the derision of futurological fandoms (of which I would not properly be a target myself), which usually focuses on the superficiality, pseudo-scientificity, non-representative whiteness-boyness-privilege, Guru-Wannabe/True Believer organizational idiosyncrasies, un(der)critical technophilia/technophobia of the latter in my experience. In speaking of an unspecified "association" he is indulging in a consoling evacuation of a whole lot of substance his own avowed political commitment would otherwise demand he critique in ways that would risk his identification. This has always been my chief problem with James Hughes (and hence it is different from my problem with many other techno-transcendentalists).
Second of all, I think it is quite wrong to propose that science fiction is "the principal arena in which human beings imagine their own future radically transformed by social and technological change" since I think almost the whole range of the humanities, social sciences, and policy discourses offer up preeminent arenas for such imagination, work, and contestation. And I have to add, to amplify this point, that literally every actually legibly constituted profession and discipline of knowledge-production has a foresight dimension that functions as a facet of the arena Hughes is talking about: Indeed, one of the chief problems of the futurological as a kind of pseudo-discipline in my view is that it has no actually existing subject-matter of fact/concern over which it has a unique expertise and from which it would produce unique insight and foresight, but then simply declares its subject "Foresight" as such to disavow that vacuity while actually enacting it.
Anyway, not only do I disagree that science fiction is the principal arena in which foresight is elaborated, for the reasons I have already said, but I must say that I do not even agree that science fiction has anything to do with consequentialist scenario-spinning AT ALL (although the sfnal occasionally, very incidentally, may throw up sparks of foresight like any sustained human endeavor will just as well), or anything to do with "The Future" in the futurological sense AT ALL either. I say this because I regard science fiction, like all literature -- and especially good science fiction like all good literature -- as an engagement with the present (not always only the present in which the text originates, but always crucially starting from there), exaggerated, stylized, allegorical, or otherwise imaginatively alienated to provide critical purchase on and occasions for widening empathy in the present mostly unavailable to us outside of the literary.
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