Why Do Libertopians Love Science Fiction So Much?

At the heart of the "market" libertarian worldview is a deep incomprehension of and acid hostility to the basic ineradicable fact of human social interdependence.

Peak everything eco-catastrophe scenarios notwithstanding, facile pastoral fantasies of pre-democratic orders in which elites are sufficiently insulated by a vast ritual and institutional artifice from the sprawling majorities of "expendable" "infrahuman" fellow-humans on whom they depend for their prosperity no longer seem quite so viable in an era of global media immersion coupled with relentless, likewise global, niche-marketing and exploitation (yes, "everything solid melts into air"). Therefore, nowadays the antidemocratic mindset often turns instead to a pining for a prosthetic encrustation and empowerment of select individuals with which to circumvent this social interdependence -- since disavowing it usually isn't adequately sustainable for long.

More often than not, though, libertopians can be counted upon to drift ineluctably back into straightforward feudalist fantasias in any case, even in their more stridently technofuturist modes. They can't seem to help themselves (contemplate, if you dare, Ayn Rand's whole crappy corpus, Robert Heinlein's famous middle-works, the early Vernor Vinge, and so on), and it rarely takes a particularly careful or sophisticated reader to discern the bloody vestigial trace of antidemocratic self-appointed aristocratic self-congratulation in between the stiff efficacious men, the robot sex-slaves, and the scary alien invaders.

And in case you hadn't noticed, techno-immortalist fantasies about medical progress are used by Republicans to justify decreasing benefits and delaying the retirement age of people who work for a living and for whom life expectancy at retirement age is not factually increasing in ways that justify these anti-equitable anti-governmental fantasies, just as the NRA and ALEC fantasy of ruggedly hyper-individualized white racist cyborg gun warriors "standing their ground" in Thunderdome anarcho-scapes are a real-world implementation of still more market libertopian assumptions and aspirations that belong in the science fiction aisle but are finding their way instead into laws with which our lives are menaced for real.

This Should Go Without Saying

I was frankly flabbergasted to see that someone for whom I have a good deal of respect and who I count as a friend (and of course I still do despite my frustration with them at the moment) actually made some sympathetic noises about Bush's recent rhetorical line about "Islamic Fascism." This is a person who shares my atheism and I think finds it appealing in some abstract way to think that religious fundamentalism is being connected in a very public way with totalitarian ideology. All this provokes in me an almost unbearable wearying desolation.

Look, this should go without saying, but Bush is grotesquely obviously using the term "fascism" here to create a visceral emotional connection between his catastrophic unending and unendable "global war on terror" (by means of state terror) and the apparently morally unimpeachable Second World War.

Now, fascism historically is an authoritarian formation of corporatism -- and, it should go without saying, the United States is considerably closer to that formation than are most of the regimes Bush selectively attacks in his disgusting criminal oil grab.

If you get taken in by the general frame that Bush is circulating here, it simply doesn't matter how often you go on to make your sad inevitable ritual genuflection to the effect that "now, of course I know not all Muslims are terrorists" or what have you. It should go without saying, but this is exactly as tired as the creaky clumsy inevitability with which a racist comment always follows immediately after the preamble protestation, "now, I'm not racist, but..." Bush's multiply ignorant, endlessly cynical "islamofascist" rhetoric circulates to inculcate a universalizing connection between Islam and totalitarianism (via the iconography of the bleak disastrous "glory days" of muscular Cold War conservatism) and everybody knows it by now and, hence, again, all this should really go without saying by now, too.

You know, this really should go without saying, but, once again, only a vanishingly small minority of the world's Muslims are terrorists, and the vast majority of the ones who are terrorists have been radicalized by social insecurity, hopelessness, and exploitation (usually, it should go without saying, faciliated directly by US and North Atlantic foreign and trade policy) and not at all by their Islamic faith or practice.

Now, I'm an atheist and, it should go without saying, fundamentalism (which is a sociopolitical formation rather than a metaphysical one) scares me as much as it does anybody here. As an atheist feminist faggot democrat I know quite well what my life is worth in a theocracy. But neoconservatives have been wreaking havoc on the planet throwing glib crapola around about "fascism" "the Muslim World" (there is no such monolithic thing) "the clash of Civilizations" and so on -- and the people who come to my friend's website to discuss technoscientific topics are too smart and earnest to be robotically repeating still these bloodsoaked know-nothing soundbites after so many years of stupid appalling devastation.

All this should go without saying.

This isn't a tea party conversation, people. This rhetoric is doing real material work in the world. It is pulling triggers and dropping bombs and radicalizing sprawling populations of people who have little to lose and with whom we will be sharing the world for the rest of our lives. Things can actually get much worse if intelligent people of good will get too lazy to understand what is afoot here. There is certainly important political work to do to secularize this multicultural world in which we find ourselves, to make the world safer for atheists as well as for folks who practice marginal spiritual creeds, or what have you. But it should go without saying that we have to be incredibly sensitive to the ways in which American fundamentalists (of the Christian and market varieties) eagerly appropriate anti-fundamentalist militancy in the service of their own gunslinging moralizing in the clash of contemporary fundamentalisms, killing numberless innocents in our name.

The Politics of Morphological Freedom

Morphological freedom (or prosthetic self-determination) is a discourse which designates and elaborates the idea that human beings have the right either to maintain or to modify their own bodies, on their own terms, through informed, nonduressed, consensual recourse to -- or refusal of -- available remedial or modification medicine.

The politics of morphological freedom expresses commitments to the value, standing, and social legibility of the widest possible (and an ever-expanding) variety of desired morphologies and lifeways. These politics tend to become especially controversial when they defend the preservation of actually desired atypical capacities and lifeways that are stigmatized as "disability" or otherwise "suboptimal," or when they defend actually desired modifications that constitute the introduction of atypical capacities and lifeways that are stigmatized as "perverse" or otherwise "unnatural."

The politics of morphological freedom and prosthetic self-determination seem legible as emerging from standard attitudes and problems associated with liberal pluralism, secularism, progressive cosmopolitanism, and (post)humanist multiculturalisms, but applied to an era of disruptive planetary technoscientific change, and especially to the ongoing and palpably upcoming transformation of the understanding of medical practice from one of conventional remedy to one of consensual self-creation, via genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification.

I first encountered the term “morphological freedom” in a short paper by neuroscientist Anders Sandberg, and I have taken up and extended the term (for example here and here) myself in ways that may well differ in some respects from Sandberg’s initial formulation.

Sandberg defines morphological freedom quite simply as "the right to modify oneself according to one’s desires." In Sandberg’s formulation, the right to morphological freedom derives from a conventional liberal doctrine of bodily self-ownership and amounts, more or less, to a straightforward application of negative liberty to the situation of modification medicine. The political force of such a commitment under contemporary conditions of disruptive technoscientific change is quite clear: It appeals to widely affirmed liberal intuitions about individual liberty, choice, and autonomy in order to trump bioconservative agendas that seek to slow, limit, or altogether prohibit potentially desirable medical research and individually valued therapeutic practices, usually because they are taken to threaten established social and cultural norms.

But I worry that this formulation of morphological freedom, however initially appealing and sensible it may seem, is fraught with the quandaries that bedevil all exclusively negative libertarian accounts of freedom. The visceral, universal and hence foundational force of our intuitions about the undeniability of our own bodily “self-ownership,” for example, never actually seamlessly nor unproblematically map onto the historically specific entitlements and protocols that will claim to be derived from the foundation of this bodily self-certainty.

That we own our aging abled vulnerable pleasurable painful bodily selves incontrovertibly may be a well-nigh universally asserted insight. But just what is entailed in that assertion in the way of capacities, responsibilities, entitlements, significances will vary enormously from society to society, from place to place, from generation to generation. Such foundational gestures will tend to mobilize compensatory rhetorical projects to deny and disavow the many possible (some of them desired) alternate available formulations of entitlements and protocols compatible with the selfsame foundation. These projects to “naturalize” and hence depoliticize what are in fact historically contingent conventions through reference to the indubitability of bodily self-ownership inevitably privilege certain morphologies and lifeways and their correlated constituencies over others, and so just as inevitably eventuate in some form or other of conservative politics.

In my own understanding of the term, then, a commitment to morphological freedom should derives primarily or at any rate equally from positive commitments to diversity and to consent, conceived as public values, public goods, and, crucially, as public scenes that depend for their continued existence on supportive normative, legal, and institutional contexts the maintenance of which exact costs that must be fairly borne by all their beneficiaries.

The force of the commitment to diversity implies that the politics of morphological freedom and prosthetic self-determination will properly apply as much to those who would make consensual recourse to desired remedial or modification medicine as it does to those who would refrain from such medicine. I disapprove of the strong bias in favor of intervention and modification at the heart of many current formulations of the principle of morphological freedom. While this bias is quite understandable given the precisely contrary bias of the bioconservative politics the principle is intended to combat, I worry that an interventionist bias will threaten to circumscribe the range of morphological and lifeway diversity supported by the politics of morphological freedom. I suspect that some will take my own foregrounding of the commitment to diversity as an effort to hijack the politics of morphological freedom with the politics of “postmodern relativism” or some such nonsense. But the simple truth is that any understanding of “morphological freedom” that prioritizes intervention over diversity will threaten to underwrite eugenicist projects prone to imagine themselves emancipatory even when they are nonconsensual, and will police desired variation into a conformity that calls itself “optimal health,” stress management, or the most “efficient” possible allocation of scarce resources (whatever wealth disparities happen to prevail at the time). Whenever the term "enhancement," for example, is treated as neutral or objective, rather than a term to express an actually desired capacity or lifeway by some one among others, in respect to some end among others, it risks underwriting parochial perfectionisms stealthed as "objective optimality."

The force of the commitment to consent seems to me to imply that the politics of morphological freedom and prosthetic self-determination are of a piece with democratic left politics. I disapprove of the strong bias in favor of negative libertarian formulations of freedom at the heart of many current discussions of the idea of morphological freedom. Although neoliberal, neoconservative, and market libertarian formulations often appear content to describe any “contractual” or so-called “market” outcome as consensual by definition it is quite clear that in actuality such outcomes are regularly and conspicuously duressed by the threat or fact of physical force, by fraud and mis-information, and by basic unfairness. And so, whenever I speak of my own commitment to a culture of consent I mean to indicate very specifically a commitment to what I call substantiated rather than what I would reject as vacuous consent. A commitment to substantiated consent demands universal access to trustworthy information, to a basic guaranteed income, and to universal healthcare (actually, democratically-minded people of good will may well offer up competing bundles of entitlements to satisfy the commitment to substantiated consent, just as I have offered up a simplified version of my own here), all to ensure that socially legible performances of consent are always both as informed and nonduressed as may be. I suspect that some will take my own foregrounding of the commitment to substantiated consent as an effort to hijack the politics of morphological freedom with the politics of social democracy (or democratic socialism). But the simple truth is that any understanding of “morphological freedom” that demands anything less than democratically accountable and socially substantiated scenes of informed, nonduressed consent will function on the one hand to encourage the exposure of vulnerable people to risky and costly experimental procedures in the service of corporate profit and military competitiveness, while on the other hand it will function to underwrite the efforts of authoritarian moralists with unprecedented technological powers at their disposal who would impose their parochial perfectionisms on a planetary scale, quite satisfied to retroactively rationalize the righteousness of even mass slaughters and mass capitulations.

Murray Bookchin Has Died

Murray Bookchin died yesterday in his home, from heart failure. He was 85 years old. Bookchin was a libertarian socialist and social ecologist who wrote a number of wonderfully provocative, promising, poetic, uncompromisingly radical works.

Among these was a book called Post-Scarcity Anarchism which had a profound early influence on my own political thinking. I was deeply inspired by Bookchin's advocacy of a radical democracy inseparable from sustainability, his advocacy of an ecological consciousness inseparable from a demand for emancipatory technoscience. I drew abiding clarity and confidence from his uncompromising repudiation of corporate-militarist vocabularies of global "development," from his repudiation of uncritical technophobia or nostalgic luddisms, and from his refusal of the facile biological determinism that freights so much of the discourse of technoscientific culture to this day. My own insistence that technoprogressives should never speak of "technological development" but always of "technodevelopmental social struggle" (despite the gawky awkwardness of the phrase) derives ultimately from Bookchin's own insistence that technologies are never politically neutral.

An online archive of works by Bookchin is available here , and I can think of no better tribute to Bookchin than to encourage those who do not know his work already to begin an exploration of his thinking online today.

Here are the opening paragraphs from a piece published in 1969, Toward a Post-Scarcity Society:

The twentieth century is the heir of human history -- the legatee of man's age-old effort to free himself from drudgery and material insecurity. For the first time in the long succession of centuries, this century has elevated mankind to an entirely new level of technological achievement and to an entirely new vision of the human experience.

Technologically, we can now achieve man's historical goal -- a post scarcity society. But socially and culturally, we are mired in the economic relations, institutions, attitudes and values of a barbarous past, of a social heritage created by material scarcity. Despite the potentiality of complete human freedom, we live in the day-to-day reality of material insecurity and a subtle, ever-oppressive system of coercion. We live, above all, in a society of fear, be it of war, repression, or dehumanization. For decades we have lived under the cloud of a thermonuclear war, streaked by the fires of local conflicts in half the continents of the world. We have tried to find our identities in a society that has become ever more centralized and mobilized, dominated by swollen civil, military and industrial bureaucracies. We have tried to adapt to an environment that is becoming increasingly befouled with noxious wastes. We have seen our cities and their governments grow beyond all human comprehension, reducing our very sovereignty as individuals to ant-like proportions -- the manipulated, dehumanized victims of immense administrative engines and political machines. While the spokesmen for this diseased social 'order' piously mouth encomiums to the virtues of 'democracy,' 'freedom' and 'equality,' tens of millions of people are denied their humanity because of racism and are reduced to conditions of virtual enslavement.

Viewed from a purely personal standpoint, we are processed with the same cold indifference through elementary schools, high schools and academic factories that our parents encounter in their places of work. Worse, we are expected to march along the road from adolescence to adulthood, the conscripted, uniformed creatures of a murder machine guided by electronic brains and military morons. As adults, we can expect to be treated with less dignity and identity than cattle: squeezed into underground freight cars, rushed to the spiritual slaughterhouses called 'offices' and 'factories,' and reduced to insensibility by monotonous, often purposeless, work. We will be asked to work to live and live to work -- the mere automata of a system that creates superfluous, if not absurd, needs; that will steep us in debts, anxieties and insecurities; and that, finally, will deliver us to the margins of society, to the human scrapheap called the aged and chronically ill -- desiccated beings, deprived of all vitality and humanity...

The debasement of social life -- all the more terrifying because its irrational, coercive, day-to-day realities stand in such blatant contradiction to its liberatory potentialities -- has no precedent in human history. Never before has man done so little with so much; indeed, never before has man used his resources for such vicious, even catastrophic ends. The tension between 'what-could-be' and 'what-is' reaches its most excruciating proportions in the United States, which occupies the position not only of the most technologically advanced country in the world but also of the 'policeman of the world,' the foremost imperialist power in the world. The United States affords the terrifying spectacle of a country overladen with automobiles and hydrogen bombs; of ranch houses and ghettoes, of immense material superfluity and brutalizing poverty. Its profession of 'democratic' virtue is belied daily by racism, the repression of black and white militants, police terrorism, Vietnam, and the prospect of Vietnams to come.

Thinking About Rights Again

"Natural rights" aren't particularly appealing to those of us who think the term "natural" just names an ideological project to render contestable customs apparently inevitable, usually to the benefit of elites. But, needless to say, I think there is still an important place for rights talk, so long as rights are construed as historical rather than natural. I think of rights as part of the ritual artifice of working democratic cultures, and I think it is helpful to keep in view here the etymological connection between right and rite.

Rights are like prohibitions, in that they function as links between the various dimensions of our normative lives. Bans or prohibitions arise out of our moral normativity (morals, from mores, speak to the way in which norms confer the sense of membership or belonging through operations of identification and disidentification), while rights arise out of our ethical normativity (ethics take a form that solicits universal assent and confers legible subjecthood). Political normativity, in turn, takes an ineradicable plurality of human aspirations as its point of departure and the ongoing contingent reconciliation of these aspirations as its end -- but inevitably draws on the forms and experiences of other normative modes to do important parts of its work.

It is true that once we relinquish the futile project to ground rights (claims of universal entitlement) in "nature" they are exposed in their interminable vulnerability to abuse or replacement. But presumably it was our realization that ascribing "nature" to the rights we hold most dear already actually fails to confer invulnerability on them that we are moved to repudiate the notion in the first place. It is difficult to see why we should mourn too much the loss of something we never really had -- and seeing clearly how fragile our rights are only motivates us to better secure them on terms that are actually available to us.

It seems to me we will still want to define a field of entitlements that formally aspire to universality and hence will be less likely to give way under the vicissitudes of politics and culture. Locating rights at the heart of law creates conditions in which the violation of the right threatens the edifice itself, and this does provide for right a real measure of security even if such universality is never actually secured in fact.

Since self-evident truths are self-evident whether they are held to be so or not I have always taken that curious phrasing ("We hold these truths to be self-evident...") in the Declaration to indicate that the focus of the phrase was the connection of that "we" to the rights enumerated thereafter, rather than a grounding of rights in nature or in divinity. That life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are self-evident rights is a nonsensical claim, inasmuch as its evidence has scarcely been universally affirmed historically. What matters is the conjuration of a "we" who are defined by their shared assertion that these rights are self-evident to them. These rights are secured by the fact that their preservation is placed at the heart of the polity itself, so that to threaten them is now to threaten more than these rights but the polity itself.

Because rights are not self-evident, not underwritten by natural law nor nature's god, but only by the significance with which we invest them and the devastating costs we manage to connect to the prospect of their overthrow, it is key that we refrain from declaring entitlements a matter of right too lightly, too often, or in cases too prone to ready displacement, else we risk undermining the force of law itself.

Bans run the same risk -- and it is especially reckless to attempt to secure momentary respite from proximate technodevelopmental problems through absolute legal prohibitions, since, needless to say, many of these problems will wither in time (especially whenever they really amount to problems of engineering rather than ethical quandaries), and the prohibition will come to seem absurd despite its formal assertion of universality, and hence legal prohibitions that deserve to remain absolute -- on murder, on torture, on lying under oath -- risk trivialization by association.

Thinking About Democracy Again

Relatively democratic societies strive to facilitate ongoing nonviolent reconciliation between deeply diverse stakeholders to issues at hand. This is because what we call "democracy" really amounts to a long history of experimental institutional implementations of the ideas that (a) people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them and that (b) the reconciliation of diverse human aspirations is better the less violent it is.

The problem is that there are real tensions between (a) and (b), since the commitment to (a) puts nearly everything "up for grabs," a state of affairs that produces a general anxiety and can facilitate outcomes that actually violate (b), especially if we accept that humiliation and insecurity can be kinds of violence.

Rights are formal affirmations of certain universal entitlements that seek to contingently restabilize the conditions on which human integrity and dignity are provisionally thought to depend, in the face of the relentless destabilization of social conditions unleashed by democratic processes themselves.

Two key caveats: First, needless to say, an affirmation of an entitlement is not the same thing as its accomplishment, and the fact is that even entitlements protected by right (rite) remain vulnerable.

Rights can only seek to secure key entitlements by frustrating their violation, for example by connecting them as directly as possible to the foundation of the ritual artifice of law and governance in such a way that to threaten them will be tantamount to threats to the given social order as such, and hence threats in which majorities should sense a personal stake.

Second, any characterization of the conditions on which integrity and dignity depend necessarily will be more parochial and contingent than the universal form in which it will be phrased, and there will always be a tension between what is an essentially conservative defense of any such characterization and the thrust of democratic politics itself.

But it seems to me that we have no choice in the matter of whether or not we will find this "not-democratic" kernel at the heart of any implementation of the democratic project, inasmuch as some conception of integrity and dignity will always mobilize and maintain the project of democratization in the first place.

Even as deep democrats, we cannot not want to preserve an inviolable human agency from even the energies of democracy itself. Indeed, it is only in the name of the protection of this agency and in the hope that this agency will so find its fullest flowering that democracy usually will be deemed worth fighting for in the first place.

But make no mistake, this is a way of naming a paradox but not resolving it. Democracy is always striking balances and bargains arising out of the different entailments of the commitments to ongoing democratization and to human rights.

Posthuman Terrains

I think... that we have not yet become human. Or, I might say, in a different way, that the category of the human is in the process of becoming. What constitutes the human is a site of contestation. [T]here are clashing cultural interpretations about what the human ought to be, and... every time you assert human rights, you are also adding to the meaning of what the human is. -- Judith Butler

What Our Bodies Say "After" Humanism

I have long wondered what difference it might make to think that when Aristotle defined "man" [sic] as the "political animal," this formulation constituted a fledgling kind of cyborg manifesto written many centuries before Donna Haraway's own. What if Aristotle's definition amounts to the claim that human (and possibly other) animals have become different in their “essential natures” because they have come to live together in cities?

On such a view, this Aristotelian formulation is not a replacement but a complement to his more commonplace definition of humanity as the "rational animal." For Aristotle as for most of the Greeks reason is dialogic and there is a real sense in which one cannot claim to “know” a thing until one is capable of communicating that knowledge successfully to one’s peers. For Aristotle’s political animal, then, to be rational is always to be able to communicate intelligibly to others, to testify to one’s experience in public, to convey one’s desires and intentions successfully, to be responsive in the face of failure with one's peers, to facilitate acting in concert. Taken together these definitive political/rational characterizations make humanity prostheticized or cultural through and through, they understand human animals as beings constituted in conversation and in collaboration, sustained by ritual and infrastructural artifice as surely as we are by food and air.

Our biological bodies are sites of transformation, not only of metabolism but of significance. That is to say, for one thing, we are maintained and transformed in the ongoing metabolism of the human organism with its environment. But we are maintained and transformed no less in our constantly adapting signifying practices as well as in the significance borne by our bodies themselves. Just think how, over the course of our lives, as our bodies first mature and then as they age, how differently promising they are in their bearing, how richly and differently scarred and skilled they become, how they come to be differently raced, differently sexed, differently sexualized, and so on.

Human bodies are crucially maintained in both their biological continence and their social legibility in the company of others. Our bodies are exposed not only to the elements but to scrutiny, vulnerable to criticism, open to change, needy for connection, practically interdependent, eager for the pleasure and danger and the unpredictable novelty of public contact no less than for the security and support and quotidian routine of intimacy.

And so, for Aristotle as for us all our embodied selves do not decisively end in our skins, but spread out into and are definitively impinged upon by the world, by artifice and by the ritual and material artifice of normative cultures. This urban prostheticization of Aristotle’s political/rational animal does not and did not make human animals into some kind of "posthuman species," of all things, but defined instead the inaugural moment when humanity stepped onto the scene of history. This inaugural moment is a fable, of course. At best a fable, in fact: at once a promise and the broken promise. More to the point, this prostheticization names the abiding material reality of humanity -- such as it is: raced, gendered, aged, enraged, desiring, desirable, promising, calculating, skilled, scarred -- in a shared world of technodevelopmental social struggle among a plurality of stakeholders who are our peers.

What History Feels Like After Humanism

I think it is unquestionably true to say that neoliberal corporate-militarist flows of capital, force, and significance, the unsustainable practices of extractive global industrialization, the planetary distribution of information, communication and transportation networks, and so on, have transformed altogether the concrete forms, practical significance, and proper ambitions of "humanism" as a democratizing and emancipatory language of ethical universality.

For one thing, in the long bloody twentieth century, World Wars, genocides, avoidable famines and neglected diseases, vast forced migrations, the countless catastophes of petrochemical industry, the cynical anti-democratic deployments of mass media -- all of these struggles variously facilitated and exacerbated by unprecedented technoscientific developments, and all of them no less exposed and resisted through opportunistic recourse to technoscientific developments -- have undermined, probably fatally, any universal appeal that might once have been made in the name of humanism, exposing instead a vision expressing parochial pretensions, false promises, and endless alibis for current exploitation.

Clothed in the language of universality, the entitlements of the humanity proclaimed by humanists have never extended to more than a fraction of actual human beings. Assured of its location on a “natural” progressive trajectory attaining inevitably toward universal emancipation, humanism too readily accommodated contemporary injustices as temporary and, hence, somehow tolerable -- especially to those humanists who didn’t happen to suffer them. And, further, as the ethics of a questionably construed "human race" and of the universal "civilization" problematically connected to this race, it grows ever more difficult to shake the troubling analogies between humanism and its debased technoscientific companion discourse: the "race science" that legitimized every brutal imperial, colonial, globalizing, ghettoizing, apartheid regime in modern memory.

Needless to say, these painful recognitions demand painful reckonings. It is this crisis of humanist conscience -- which is not really one crisis, so much as many different crises, arising out of a variety of concrete situations and taking a proliferating variety of consequential forms -- that more properly goes by the name "post-humanism."

Post-humanism in its interesting construals is the furthest thing from some facile identification with any particular prosthetic practice, current or imagined. Contemplate, for a moment, the present, emerging, and proximate-prospective terrain of disruptive technodevelopmental social struggle -- with its battles over climate change, pandemics, intellectual property, media ownership, rigged election machines, unfair trade policies, proliferating weapons, neglected diseases, drug wars (that is, wars on some drugs through the mandated use of other drugs), clashes of extractive against renewable industry, and so on.

This already hopelessly (and hopefully) fraught technoscientific era is opening onto an even more perilous and promising terrain, named by the prospect (strictly speaking, probably another fable in its clearest formulation) of a "convergence" of nano- bio- info- and cognitive technologies, and an almost unfathomable transformation within the lifetimes of many now living of the fundamental terms of what is possible and important. It is this terrain of ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle that defines the various post-human and post-humanist strategies and sensibilities, rather than any particular “post-human” personage, tribe, or social formation thrown up in any one moment of that world-historical technodevelopmental storm-churn.

The “post-human” is not one kind of prostheticized person, nor is “post-humanism” a singular response to a particular kind of prostheticized personhood, whether involving digital network immersion, peer-to-peer Netroots democracy, post-Pill feminism, transsexual queerness, post-“disability” different-enablement prostheses, open source biopunks and leapfroggers and copyfighters, or what have you -- nor certainly the more fantastic identifications with robots, or eugenicized superheros, or artificial intelligences, or aliens that seem to come up so often when “post-humanism” is discussed as a topic online.

Such identifications (and, crucially, their attendant disidentifications) are moralistic in form, not ethical. And whatever else we may say of it, the ongoing and upcoming crises of humanism -- no less than its emergence with the appearance of the political/rational animal -- are profoundly ethical: "Post-humanism," properly so-called, names the ethical encounters of humanism with itself, the confrontations of a universalism with its historical and practical limits and contradictions. And the ethical visions that emerge either out of ("post" in the sense of "after") or in resistance to ("post" in the sense of "over") that confrontation are themselves ethical terms. One might even discern in them the best impulses that have animated humanism in its emancipatory aspect.

If we accept Lyotard's definition of "post-modernity" as a distrust of meta-narratives then many post-humanisms certainly seem "post-modern" in his sense as well. But it is key to recognize that distrust need not imply dismissal, denial, or even overcoming. Post-humanism names a distrust of a particular metanarrative: a normative vocabulary presumably rendered universal through its grounding in a “human condition” shared essentially across the species. But whatever one’s distrust, it may well be that the universality of ethical language remains, in Gayatri Spivak's phrase, something "we cannot not want." Mistrusting, we miss trust. And in our distrust we need not break trust.

The technoscientific dislocations that have exposed the pretensions and limitations of humanism have not rid us of the need for a more general normativity than moralist identification, even if candidate-vocabularies for ethical universality inevitably come to be viewed retroactively as contingent or strategic, and freighted with qualification. Certainly, our distrust has scarcely nudged human beings into any ironic global bourgeois order that “ends history” in any meaningful sense, one in which more than a small pampered fraction of human beings could claim to be content with immersion in private moralisms and with the public adjudication of differences falling to “markets” or engineers or what have you. Far from it.

Instead, the eclipse of humanist pretension has coincided with the organization of a host of variously and curiously technoscientifically-competent compensatory fundamentalist formations -- among them superficially anti-religious scientisms and reductionist design discourses. These fundamentalisms are in fact moralisms re-engineered as bloody-minded pseudo-ethics, each one aiming to achieve universality by denying history and prevailing over living differences. In such an historical moment, especially, it seems to me disastrous to conceive post-humanism as a moralizing identification with some tribe defined by any idiosyncratic fetishization of particular technologies or other. Rather, we should think of it as an ethical recognition of the limits of humanism provoked by an understanding of the emerging terms of technodevelopmental social struggle and, hence, any ethical perspective arising out of this recognition that demands cosmopolitanism, democracy, and emancipation shape the terms of this struggle, come what may.

Balancing the Values of Consent, Diversity, and Universal Standards

So long as a trait does not render the scene of consent illegible -- the expressed need for sexual reassignment, valuing deafness, or the exhibition of mild autism, among countless other things, all seem to me clear examples of such traits -- then it seems to me that advocates of a culture of consent cannot properly deny any citizens who incarnate such a trait as a part of their own personhood either

(a) the validity of any of their performances of consent on that basis or

(b) the consensual recourse to modification medicine to come to exhibit that trait or the consensual restraint from modification so as to maintain the trait.

It is crucial to realize that legibility of consent is a weaker standard than, say, "optimality" (on whatever construal) would be -- and that it is a weaker standard for a reason: Too restrictive a standard will likely skew the difficult balance between the democratic value of informed, nonduressed consent (which, to be substantial rather than vacuous has to be propped up with universal standards on contentious questions of basic health and general welfare), and the no less democratic value of diversity.

People of good will can argue about the extent to which an "optimal" scene of consent might properly be encouraged or discouraged via strategies of subsidization and such, whether in the name of administrative economies, general welfare, or what have you. But the simple fact is that anybody who advocates both a substantive vision of the general welfare as well as for the value of diversity is eventually going to stumble onto fraught moments when they have to figure out how to reconcile these values on the ground.

I do personally think the legible, informed, nonduressed consent of citizens is the key to work through some of these difficulties, but it has to involve a substantive rather than vacuous commitment to consent. That is to say, to be legitimate, the scene of consent needs to be shored up with all sorts of assurances against misinformation, ignorance, force, and duress that don't presently prevail for the most part. Also, the standard of legible consent must be a standard weak enough to incubate a real proliferation of consensual performances rather than a standard so strong that it imposes conformity... and yet the standard must be strong enough to ensure that "consent" doesn't become an alibi for violation, exploitation, or neglect.

I speak, by the way, not as an autistic person, or as a deaf person who wants to raise a nonhearing child, or as the parent of a healthy child with three functional arms or intersex genitals unsure what their obligations are, or what have you... I speak simply as a big fag who knows all too well that had I been born just one generation earlier I might have had to defend my own sane healthy proper personhood in the face of "well-meaning" medical and social administrators who might have thought they had democracy, science, righteousness, and even my own best interests on their side even as they worked to "cure" or otherwise obliterate me.

Rethinking Democracy Among the Experts

Back in September, 2005, I tossed off a quick response to something I had read on the technoliberation list, and then I revised it into a short essaylet for Amor Mundi. Since I posted the original here, "Democracy Among the Experts" has exerted a weird fascination on me, for some reason. Every few weeks or so I find myself drawn back into it, and I start tinkering, editing, generally fussing around with it again. I realize now that the essay has grown quite different from the original, and although I cannot promise that it has reached a more final form, it did occur to me that it was sufficiently different at this point to merit consideration on its own terms. I am starting to suspect that the rather throwaway comment at the beginning of the piece -- about deliberative and sustainable development being the two parallel planks in my own technoprogressive vision -- probably tells me where this essay will eventually go next... Showing how deliberative and sustainable development are not only both necessary to a properly technoprogressive politics, but interdependent as well. Anyway, here's the piece as is:

A demand for more deliberative development is exactly as central to my own version of technoprogressive politics as is the demand for sustainable development.

That phrase, "deliberative development," may conjure up the facile and fussy image of "progress" by plan or by committee meeting, a vision of a domesticated development smoothed, controlled, and constrained by experts. But the fact is that technodevelopmental social struggle releases inherently unpredictable forces into the world. It is ineradicably dynamic, interminably contentious, ideally open... So just what do I mean by deliberative development after all?

For one thing, deliberative development would indeed involve highly transparent, generously funded processes of consensus science coupled with a scientifically literate professional policy apparatus to assess risks, costs, and benefits and advise our elected representatives as they struggle to do their job to regulate, study, and fund research and development to promote general welfare. In practice, this would inevitably amount to proliferating committee meetings and inspection tours and licensing standards and granting bodies and blue-ribbon panels and published conference proceedings and impact studies and public hearings and all the rest. I happen to like nice social workers and dedicated public servants and credentialized do-gooders as a type, and I pine for a civilization in which their indispensable work is generally more appreciated than demeaned, and so this is not a vision that inspires in me the dread and disgust that will have overcome many a (self-described) "rugged" "no-nonsense" critic at this point in my account.

But I do want to insist that, even for me, the real force of any such ramifying procedural elaboration must be the deeper democratization rather than any quixotic domestication of technodevelopmental social struggle. The object will be to anticipate and document technodevelopmental outcomes in their variety on the multiple, contending stakeholders to that development, and hence to give those stakeholders a voice in articulating the form developments take from moment to moment, to better ensure that the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscience are as fairly shared as may be by all of those stakeholders on their own terms.

Given the devastating debasement of consensus science and the corrupt substitution of lobbying for deliberation under the present Bush Administration, I hope that my focus on deliberative development as a commitment to transparent processes and sound standards makes a certain kind of sense. But it is crucial to point out that the ideal of deliberative development is also a commitment to enrich and democratize the terrain of policy analysis as much as possible across its many social, institutional, and cultural layers. It is in highlighting this second dimension that I hope it becomes clearer that deliberative development is not a matter of constraining but democratically expressing technodevelopmental social struggle, not a matter of domesticating but democratizing the forces of collaborative and individual creativity.

The ongoing, experimental implementation of this dimension of deliberative development might well involve the use of digital networked media to engage citizens more directly in the assessment of alternate science and technology initiatives, perhaps to use social software to re-invigorate the concept of citizen juries on developmental questions, to create extensive occasions for citizens to testify to their own sense of technodevelopmental costs, risks, benfits, and problems, and, perhaps most promising of all, to implement peer-to-peer models of research over customary corporate-militarist models wherever possible.

Such a commitment also demands, in my view,

[1] the promotion of scientific literacy and critical thinking skills for all citizens through a stakeholder grant in lifelong education and training,
[2] universal access to networked information and communication technologies,
[3] a liberalization of "fair use" entitlements and other measures to protect and widen access to the common archive of human knowledge, as well as
[4] ensuring the availability of clear and dependable sources of information from consensus science and the most representative possible diversity of stakeholder positions on policy questions at issue.

This commitment to dependable information might also very well require more stringent regulation of advertising claims to limit fraud as well as explicit legal standards to define just what can go by the name of "news." Eventually, the commitment might also provide a rationale for the public subsidization of some consensual genetic, prosthetic, neuroceutical modifications of memory, concentration, or temper.

In general, I think that what are sometimes broadly conceived as "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to good governance are in fact both indispensable to the facilitation of progressive and technoprogressive developmental outcomes. I have noticed that this kind of bifocal perspective on developmental politics comes up again and again in my own technoprogressive formulations. And so, for example, I advocate democratic world federalism and peer-to-peer collaborative democratization at once and as part of a single technoprogressive vision of global governance. I realize that each lens of such a bifocal approach has its own palpable dangers and terrors to display. Some progressives are wary of threats to social justice and democracy from especially one direction, others from another.

But I think we should be careful not to fetishize only one mode of governance as the more properly or more essentially democratic one over the other. A fetishization of "top-down" implementations of progressive visions facilitated their perversion in state-capitalist models all through the twentieth century, for example, while the current overcompensatory fetishization of "bottom-up" implementations renders the contemporary left imaginary -- and especially any technology-focused left in an era like our own, when corporate profit-making almost exhaustively defines the global technodevelopmental terrain -- deeply vulnerable in my view to appropriation by libertarian ideology and its always ultimately conservative, facile self-congratulatory fables of "spontaneous order."

And so, yes, I really do think that deference to the advice of credentialed experts is indispensable to good governance and certainly to technoprogressive governance. The problem these days isn't the administrative recourse to scientific and professional expertise; it is the substitution of public relations and partisan calculus for the recommendations of consensus scientists and other professionals.

Certainly, I keenly grasp the vulnerability to anti-democratic elitism in any "rule of experts." But many things count as democratic within their proper bounds that are vulnerable nonetheless to misuses that render them anti-democratic at their extremes (what passes for "free markets" provides an obvious example). I was recently reminded that Bakunin made a useful distinction between being an authority and being in authority that seems relevant here.

I think it is important for progressive and technoprogressive people to embrace a wide-ranging experimentalism and pluralism when it comes to the practical implementation of the rather broad value of democracy. So long as experts are beholden to elected representatives and elected representatives held accountable for their conduct (including the uses to which they put expert advice) I don't think we should think of their role as anti-democratic, nor should we necessarily be too quick to write them off as just regrettable but instrumentally necessary for the proper function of governance. I worry about the politics that gets stealthed under cover of presumably pre-political "instrumental calculation" in political discourse. I say, rather, that there are more-democratic and less-democratic implementations of a representative policy apparatus beholden to the verdicts of consensus science and that democratic technoprogressives want more democratic rather than less democratic implementations is all. I was going to say, "it isn't rocket science," but then at least sometimes, of course, it will be.

Meme Therapy Interview

The good folks over at Meme Therapy have published an interview with me on technoprogressive politics. Have a look and tell me what you think, either here or there. It was actually a lot of fun, and I hope that I was able to describe my positions in a way that usefully highlights important differences but, for once, without stepping on any toes that don't deserve stepping on.

And Now, a Few Words About Democracy

Democracy is a host of social formations all of which can be taken to be implementations of the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them.

This ideal is expressed in a number of familiar formulations and slogans, "we the people, in order to… etc., etc., ordain and establish," "governments... deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed," "no taxation without representation," "nothing about us without us," etc. -- all of which are clearly related but have importantly different institutional entailments.

In my view, governments should legitimate themselves in the eyes of the world in large part through their adherence to (a broad construal) of democratic governance. Democracies should legitimate themselves in the eyes of the world in large part through their adherence to human rights norms. Human rights regimes should legitimate themselves in the eyes of the world through the work they do to secure the public scene of informed non-duressed consent on which human dignity depends in large part for its maintenance and legibility. Also, I agree with the pragmatic idea that democracy in its essence seeks to provide nonviolent institutional recourse for the adjudication of disputes.

Since the point of departure for rational political thinking (as opposed to, say, rational scientific, moral, or ethical thinking) is that there is and will always be an ineradicable plurality of values and ends among the peers who share social worlds governed by civic institutions, this implies that the ongoing work of reconciling aspirations nonviolently is constantly renewed and never-ending. It also implies that there will be an ongoing balancing act between the particular provisional compromise formations that effect this reconciliation from moment to moment historically and the more universal or general or stable or meta-contextual language and architectural constraints that enable this work of reconciliation to take place at all. All this, in turn, implies a certain dynamism, openness, and experimentalism across the layers of democratic culture, from mediation of concrete disputes, all the way through to reformism at the level of actual democratic institutions themselves.

Not to put too fine a point on it, it seems to me, then, that there is something inherently radical and revolutionary about even the most quotidian and mainstream democratic conception of politics -- as opposed to, say, conventional conservative politics.

Now, we live (and have done, ever more so, since the classical or Revolutionary era) in what Foucauldians would call disciplinary and bio-political regimes, which is to say in an era in which governments legitimate themselves and function through social administration -- the regulative norms for which tend to be things like, say, "productivity," "general welfare," "risk" and "stress management," etc. -- articulated for the most part through normalization and atomization operations in the context of multilateral social, civic, and international institutions.

A large part of what democratic regimes will do in a disciplinary/bio-political era is provide for nonviolent adjudication of disputes through a pre-emptive amelioration of social problems that would tend to engender such conflict (plague, hunger, homelessness, addiction, illiteracy, intolerance, inassimilable wealth disparity or inequity, corruption, etc.) or to secure the scene of legible informed nonduressed public consent by maintaining the material social conditions of reliable information, equity, diversity, security and such on which it relies.

These democratic values might well be satisfied through different means in an era that was not defined by bio-politics and modern disciplinarity -- eg, the aristocratic Greek era, the Republican Roman era, the agrarian Jeffersonian era, possibly a post-bio-political era of morphological freedom in the context of a culture of consent or a post-disciplinary era of peer-to-peer democracy, what have you. (By the way, I am not convinced that these latter ideas truly are post-biopolitical or post-disciplinary, but that is a vast digression for another time.)

Anyway, the work of social administration in this disciplinary/bio-political era of North Atlantic democracy in the era post-colonial military-corporate globalization usually doesn't seem particularly revolutionary at the day to day level of application and routine, but all this is crucial to an understanding of the way democracy works in the world in which we live today.

It is for this reason that I am content to describe myself as a social democrat for the most part. Understanding how this gray quotidian level of administration connects to the maintenance of the scene of consent, however, yields a fairly radical (in the sense of fundamental) understanding of the democratic project, but also tends to yield attitudes on particular political questions of the day that will land one in the camp of "radicals" as often as not.

(Wonks with any kind of concrete knowledge of policy and practice conjoined to the most rudamentary systemic analysis of institutional interdependies and even a modest commitment to mainstream progressive democratic aspirations will regularly discover as a matter of course that they are advocating positions on sustainablility, on reforms of election protection and campaign finance, on health, education, and welfare entitlement, even basic income guarantees and universal single-payer healthcare, and such, that are, from the perspective of the mainstream discourse -– extruded through the sausage factory of corporate media and the bought-and-paid corporate-militarist noise machines –- "extreme left" positions.)

But I do also describe myself as a radical democrat in moments when I want to call attention to the ways in which the language of normativity at the root of so much social administration can often work against the grain of the deeper democratic commitments to openness, diversity, and experimentalism, or when I want to call attention to the ways in which a stealthy conservatism colonizes the organizations themselves that do the otherwise worthy work of administration, or whenever it seems important to break the crust of convention to remember the antagonisms, vulnerability, unpredictability, novelty, chance at the heart of the political world as such.

The Politics Are Prior to the Toypile

I believe that much of what people really mean when they either praise or excoriate something they call, in some general way, "technology" is to speak instead about the political values and concrete practices that drive technodevelopmental social struggle from moment to moment on the ground.

The very same corporate-militarism in America that has devastated independent media, co-opted our elections, debauched our representatives, fueled the drumbeat of deregulation without end that presided over the vast looting of our supportive infrastructure, and dismantled our civil liberties is of course the very same corporate-militarism that would enclose the creative and now, too, the genetic commons, that bolsters primitive extractive petrochemical industries while constraining the emergence and implementation of networked renewable alternatives, fights a puritanical war on re-creational drugs by means of corporate-approved drugs of docility and distraction, arms the diabolical machineries that drench the world in blood and violence.

In the hands of elites and in the service of elite agendas technologies too often exacerbate inequity and exploitation. While in more democratic societies, technologies have the best hope of serving emancipatory ends instead: Regulated by legitimate democratic authorities to ensure they are as safe as may be. And regulated as well to best ensure that their costs, risks, and benefits are shared by all of their stakeholders. And all of this in the context of a culture of informed nonduressed consent -- that is, with open access to consensus scientific knowledge and in the absence of the duress of physical force, financial ruin, or conspicuous humiliation.

Current democratic formations have demonstrated their extreme vulnerability to the depredations of corporate-militarism, as have the world's most vulnerable people by the millions. We must take up emerging peer-to-peer digital networked media and social software to reclaim and reshape our democracies just as we must take up emerging renewable technologies to lighten the human bootprint on our earth even as we welcome ever more human minds and lives into the community of full democratic citizenship. Both of these efforts are indispensable to any realizable globalization of the promise of democracy as well as any serious effort to turn the global anti-democratic corporate-military tide.

Further, I believe we must facilitate the fuller flowering of diversity and freedom made possible when the resources of culture expand to encompass the informed, nonduressed, consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification of human lifeways in the image of our diverse values.

Without democratic accountability, answerability, responsibility corporate-military technodevelopment will leave the earth a charred cinder, but so too without the emerging tools of peer-to-peer digital networks, sustainable energy technologies, better-than-well medicine (and, one hopes, soon enough, replicative nanoscale manufacturing), the social formations of democratic governance progressives and technoprogressives advocate will little likely command the material and rhetorical resources to fight the vast established interests that drive corporate-militarism today, nor to mobilize humanity imaginatively today and tomorrow to establish a global democratic, sustainable order and culture of universal informed, nonduressed consent in an open future.

That's what I mean when I say technology needs democracy and democracy needs technology. I eagerly welcome questions, comments, and criticisms.

Sometimes, Democracy Is Like That

A while back I posted a brief, perplexed comment here about the fact that I am often accused of exhibiting a sort of “negativity” in my writing that is off-putting and counterproductive. In my dissertation, for example, there are extended close readings of texts by “Cypherpunks” Eric Hughes and Tim May (in chapter two), David Brin (in chapter three), and David Friedman (in chapter four) that some seemed to regard as unfair and even as derogatory. More recently, I have received a spate of comparable complaints in response to my reading of a short text by John Smart I posted here on Amor Mundi a week or so ago.

This time around, I think I am in a better position to say what is afoot when at least some folks respond negatively to what they call my “negativity,” and why I think such responses are for the most part symptomatic distractions highlighting why I am on the right track when I am being what they call “negative.” But before I get to that I think it is time to say first a little bit about what it is I think I am up to when I read a text, and what I think such reading is good for.

I’m a critic, I criticize. My mode of critique is one I call, quite simply, “reading,” but it is clear that by reading here I do not mean to describe exactly that commonplace activity that goes by the name reading when one is superficially reading People Magazine on the bus on the way to work in the morning.

When I read expository, argumentative, even polemical writings, I try to read them closely, and in this I read them in much the same way that I read works of fiction or films closely. That is to say, I look in argumentative writing for the logical entailments among its explicit and implicit propositions (scouting for key contradictions, warrants, substantiations, assumptions, etc.), of course, but I tend to focus even more on the argumentative work done through their imagery and their figures, for the effects they achieve through their citation of generic and topical conventions, for various significant symptomatic omissions, aporias, and stylistic idiosyncracies, all sorts of things. Often the elements of a work that strike me as most interesting and as the ones that do the most compelling argumentative work do so against the grain of the ones you would highlight in a straightforward propositional analysis.

I happen to think many technophiles in this particular historical and cultural moment of advocacy and enthusiasm are often caught up in and even entrapped by certain recurring argumentative gestures: claims about “inevitability,” claims about "development" construed in a monolithic way to which a single “definitive” characteristic is then attributed, like, accelerating, disrupting, converging, superhumanizing, subhumanizing, etc. Furthermore, many technophiles seem to share a set of compelling metaphors that have come to assume the status of a kind of orthodoxy among them: evolutionary metaphors, for one, the figure of “spontaneous order” for another, and what Jeron Lanier has sometimes referred to as "cybernetic totalism" for yet another. And part of the work I try to do is to highlight the ways in which these assumptions, gestures, and metaphors play out in various concrete pieces of writing. In highlighting these dimensions of the culture of technology advocacy in this historical moment, through readings of exemplary texts like David Brin’s or Tim May’s or John Smart’s, my point isn't to "expose" some nefarious plot or impugn the motives of people I don't know and have every reason to expect are perfectly intelligent and conscientious as far as that goes. What I see myself as doing is trying to delineate a kind of larger language of technology-talk in this historical moment, the broader culture of customary framing in which particular arguments tend to be embedded just now, and which delineate the shared bounds within which even contrary technodevelopmental arguments and values are staked out.

Further, I happen to think the assumptions that drive much contemporary technology advocacy are reductionist (for one example, they might try to impose the proper standards for warranted assertibility in consensus science onto improper contexts, such as in the assertion of moral, ethical, political, or esthetic beliefs) and anti-democratic (either, for example, in the service of particular elite agendas, or in a way that undermines the openness of ongoing stakeholder politics more generally) and hence contrary to my own commitments to a humanistic -- or maybe humanely post-humanistic would be a better way of putting it -- and deeply democratic technoscientific culture.

But the truth is, of course, that those who deploy these assumptions in making their various cases for the technodevelopmental outcomes they prefer often are just competently making use of the language and culture of the day as it is ready to hand. If I try to expose the limitations of this culture through the texts that exemplify it, it is key to realize that I am often pitching my critique at a level that does not necessarily make any claims whatsoever about whether or not the authors of such exemplary texts themselves explicitly or consciously affirm all the entailments I discern in them myself.

In fact, given my larger beliefs about the radical openness of language and the way the rhetorical content of a text radically depends on the context in which it circulates, the last thing in the world I would ever assume is that the force of an argument is entirely under the conscious control of its "author" in the way I think my critics have to mean when they personalize my critiques and assume I am attributing malign motives to the writers of the texts I read critically.

Since the points I am making in my readings seem to be odd and unfamiliar to the audiences at which I am aiming them it becomes especially difficult to always lodge them in a second meta-critique that would make all these added complexities always explicit all the time. I actually do go out of my way to try to gesture at these interrelations here and there at least, just so that readers are occasionally reminded of the sort of critique I am making. Frankly, I happen to think that one of the reasons that contemporary literary and critical theory is often derided among popular technoscience enthusiasts (with whom I otherwise have some measure of affinity, at least when their politics lean left) for its “unreadability” and “fashionable nonsensicality” is that theory in this mode incessantly tries to register all these complexities in anticipation of all-too-familiar objections, and that this is a very difficult, if not impossible, business to articulate in a legible and also compelling way.

Here on Amor Mundi I devote quite a lot of my time to critiques of what I consider the reactionary nostalgia and anti-democratic moralism of the bioconservative politics of “nature.” But be assured that I consider technophilia an uncritical, or at best superficially critical attitude toward technological change as well. To the extent that technophiles denigrate popular technodevelopmental deliberation as “impractical” this perspective is exactly as reactionary, elitist, and anti-democratic as bioconservatism is. To the extent that technophilia affirms historically contingent market protocols as “spontaneous orders,” or affirms sexist, racist, heterosexist, class privileges through the figure of “evolution” this perspective is exactly as nostalgic, moralistic, and perniciously “naturalist” as bioconservatism is.

I happen to know that there are plenty of people who think my own attitude is too technophiliac. My own writings about the possibilities for emancipatory and democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle sometimes have been read by others rather like the way I have read those who presently protest my unfairness and negativity toward them. But, look, disagreement isn't always comfortable. It seems to me a sure sign of unexamined privilege more than anything else to imagine one is somehow entitled to coddling even by those who honestly think one's views facilitate truly negative outcomes and then offer up reasons to justify their views. My critics don't have to know my intimate heart or read everything I have ever written to be in a position to identify as best they can the logical entailments or generic conventions cited by a particular text of mine and then to discuss the argumentative work they think my text is doing as it circulates legibly in a world of comparable texts.

Of course, I hate to think intelligent, politically righteous critics of my work might decide that a text of mine is naïve, or morally pernicious, or might undermine justice in a way they think I personally approve of. Who doesn’t feel distress in such scenes? But the fact is that these misunderstandings are usually overcome readily enough in conversation, and there is nothing about a harsh close reading that forecloses such conversation. I personally regard close reading as a sign of seriousness and hence a gesture of respect, even when I consider a particular reading mistaken or misguided. I take serious critics quite seriously, and feel defamed by not a single one of them, even when they are harsh with me.

It is fine for the objects of my critiques (and their partisans) to disagree with my assessments of their texts or to disapprove of my methods of reading texts in general, but it is hard to square the discomfort and pique with which some folks respond to my readings with a real commitment to the agon of a truly democratic culture of criticism that duly and seriously registers the actual perspectives of the actual diversity of stakeholders to technodevelopment in the world, a cultural outcome I personally welcome and even demand.

As for me, I am uninterested in the kindness of strangers but quite eager to benefit from their criticisms. I do not need to know whether or not an author affirms a commitment to democratic politics in whatever construal, to highlight rhetorical forces afoot in their writings that are more trouble than they are worth if what is wanted is to do the work of deepening democracy in an era of global technodevelopmental transformation. If critics discern such antidemocratic propositions, figures, and gestures at work in my own writing you better believe I want to hear about it -- precisely because I want to do the work of democracy as best I can. I wouldn't take such a reading as personal defamation (unless it was explicitly defamatory, of course), however uncomfortable it made me, but as contribution to a conversation among peers collaborating in the work of democracy in a serious way.

I think that for reasons related (among others) to the ones Snow delineated ages ago in his "Two Cultures" argument, recent generations of science and technology enthusiasts have rarely been forced to take seriously modes of argument and critique like the ones I tend to produce. Perhaps these modes of argument have sometimes seemed technoscientifically rather illiterate or have seemed uncritically technophobic in ways that my own certainly are not, and so possibly dismissing them altogether might not have seemed so devastating a loss after all. But as NBIC technologies become ever more proximate -- with all their destabilization, problems, and promises in tow -- this splendid isolation seem ever more unworkable and nudges ever more of those who seek smugly to maintain it to near irrelevence. Technoscientific deliberation is going to become very interesting and unpredictable indeed for all of us as more and more of the actual stakeholders to technodevelopment take their places at the table and testify to their experiences and to their righteous hopes and fears. I for one am looking forward to this outcome, and am pleased to have a hand in facilitating it where I can. Bruises are sure to accompany the thrills of pleasure and flashes of insight to come as we struggle to figure out how we use the same familiar languages to say and do extraordinarily unfamiliar things in matters of passionately shared concern, as we convulsively collaborate in the making of shared futural worlds. Sometimes, democracy is like that.

Politics: Two Points of Departure

[1] I think the point of departure for a political understanding of the world is that there will always be a plurality of stakeholders in any social formation whose ends will differ in ways that cannot be reconciled without contestation and compromise.

[2] I think the point of departure for a democratic understanding of the world is that we should create, maintain, and improve (through experimentation and reform) spaces that provide nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes arising from this political plurality and which provide all these stakeholders with as much and ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.

Does Technophilia Incline Right?

It is a matter of ongoing perplexity and frustration to me that technodevelopmental discourse in an affirmative mode seems so readily to drift into a project of accommodation to or consolation for established elites or to take up the contours of ring-wing ideology, and how even explicit left-identified progressive technodevelopmental discourse often seems (at least to me) far more supportive and generous of arguments and figures coming out of the right than one would one would normally expect from the left.

Let me grant in advance that I may simply be wrong about all this as a straightforward empirical matter. Maybe I am wrong to discern an overall rightward technophiliac skew. Also, maybe I am simply oversensitive to any manifestations of such a skew among my colleagues, rubbed raw my whole adult life through in the debased era of conservative ascendancy from Reagan through Clinton (possibly the greatest Republican President of the Twentieth Century) through Gingrich through to the terminally awful gun-toting criminal clown college that is the Bush Administration.

But if I do happen to be the least bit right about this rightward technophiliac skew, it seems to me worthwhile to try to puzzle through some of the conditions that may have engendered it. And so, let me propose a couple of initial candidates, and then we can see where we can go on to from here:

First: Technoscientific research and development is a matter of material cultures, with actual people occupying legible sociocultural positions in it, engaging in material institutional and ritual lives. It matters, then, that research and development is driven almost exclusively by the urgencies of corporate-militarism in a market globalist developmental order.

Second: It also matters that warranted consensus scientific beliefs converge onto best descriptions according to shared protocols and shared values, while warranted political beliefs in a democratic mode strive for a kind of peaceful productive dissensus. That is to say, democratic politics would see a convergence or stabilization of public belief as a sign of tyranny, not success. There are, then, rather deep differences in the ways belief and value operate in the modes of reasonable technoscientific versus reasonable political life and belief.

I sometimes think there is a cultural and temperamental strain that resists or quails at the exactions of democratic stakeholder politics right at the very heart of technoscientific practice in an important sense (even if, as I have written elsewhere, I also think consensus science is a more democratic than authoritarian accomplishment, too -- just in a different way than stakeholder politics is).

Anyway, taken together, this temperamental tendency in addition to the historical context of a technoscientific development driven by the exigencies of corporate-militarism both contribute to an almost irresistable drift to the right in contemporary technology discourse and political practice.

The left and especially the technoprogressive left need to understand this far better than they seem to do and need to compensate with a greater scrupulousness and care around their formulations, sympathies, and alliances.

Under the present structural circumstances it seems to me technoprogressive discourses, however necessary and marvellous, are actually deeply vulnerable to appropriation by right-wing ideologies in a number of variations -- human-racist eugenicism, "free trade" global coporate-militarism, transcendentalizing techno-sublime consolation for religious fundamentalisms, etc.

Technoprogressives need to be clearer about the stakes here, about the structural conditions and historical forces that constitute the context in which we are acting, and about what these stakes and conditions tell us about who are friends are.

A Dose of the New Medical Reality

Schiavo as Symptom

On Thursday morning, March 31, 2005, Terri Schiavo died quietly in a Florida hospice. The person who Terri Schiavo had been ceased to exist 15 years before, according to the testimony of her husband and many who knew her, as well as the best determination of credible doctors and scientists. The memory of Schiavo will make its home in the lives of the people who actually knew her for years to come. And no doubt the public figure of Schiavo will likewise continue to resonate into the future, condensing into a few flashes of ineradicable imagery what are in fact the endlessly complex and emotionally fraught quandaries of bodies and lives rendered newly questionable in their limits, capacities and social intelligibility by ongoing and emerging technological developments.

So long as medicine is conceived primarily as a remedial enterprise its recommendations are driven most conspicuously by the straightforward instrumental rationality of what consensus science takes to be relevant causes and effects. What “health” consists of in the first place and what is desirable about the maintenance of that state are to an important extent simply treated as if they are "givens." But as our prosthetic practices proliferate the ways in which people can live "livable" lives, we look less and less to medicine to remedy the ways in which our bodies deviate into pathological difference and more and more to deliver us into differences we desire.

Of course, the goal of producing and maintaining a "healthy body" through medical and hygienic practice has never in fact been the instrumentally neutral ideal painted in such a picture. Our diagnoses of disease, infirmity, fitness, and illness have always been ineradicably freighted with cultural and moral significance. But what I mean to call attention to here is that the scope and force of ongoing and palpably upcoming medical intervention is deranging our sense of the standards against which we would strive to measure the distance of the variety of actually living human bodies from the "normative" body we would traditionally impose and maintain through recourse to that medicine. Already, we cannot be quite sure what we are capable of or what we can rightly expect or demand of our newly queer, prostheticized bodily selves.

Medicine is taking humanity on an unprecedented path from remedy to self-creation. But our assumptions and our language have not yet managed to keep up with this emerging state of affairs. Meanwhile, our hopes and desires and sometimes our demands for medicine often seem to range hyperbolically forward past our present capacities.

The heartbreaking and hysterical public spectacle of the dead but surreally lively prostheticized body of Schiavo attests to our perplexity and our present distress. There are many such spectacles to come.

Human-Racism and the “Bright Line” Between Life and Death

In an influential editorial prompted by the Schiavo case, David Brooks claimed at the time to discern as the main difference between conservative and progressive bioethical discourse that only conservative bioethics is properly moral in its concerns while progressives are somewhat blind to the "values" dimension of policy.

This is, of course, just the sort of dismissive or oblivious attitude we have come to expect public conservative figures to take whenever they encounter values with which they disagree. (One recalls, for example, in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic 2004 Presidential Election the conjuration by many conservative pundits of a so-called "Values-Voter," which seemed to describe as "moral" only that segment of the American population that hated gay people enough to be mobilized by their pathological homophobia to vote for a second term of America’s most disastrous Administration, quite palpably against their own stated interests on many other social questions.)

But it is worthwhile to set aside our reasonable annoyance at the tired dishonesty and craven partisanship evident in his rhetoric, because Brooks' discussion of the differences in the ways many conservatives and progressives talk about the dilemmas of a case such as Schiavo's does in fact highlight important moral, cultural, temperamental distinctions that illuminate what I have called the emerging terrain of bioconservative and technoprogressive positions on technodevelopmental social struggle as well.

Brooks claims that "[t]he core belief that social conservatives [have]... is that the value of each individual life is intrinsic. The value of a life doesn't depend upon what a person can physically do, experience or achieve. The life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult." Against the social conservatives, he suggests that progressives hold as their own "core belief that... quality of life is a fundamental human value." Progressives don't, Brooks accuses, "emphasize the bright line between life and death; they describe a continuum between a fully lived life and a life that, by the sort of incapacity Terri Schiavo has suffered, is mere existence."

To the extent that this emphasis on the “bright line between life and death” seems not to nudge conservatism into a nonhuman animal rights position, and to the extent that it explicitly refuses elaboration through a discussion of quality of life (which apparently is somehow “relativist” compared to the bright brute line of “life and death” or just plain “liberal” and hence inherently questionable in some unspecified way), it is clear that the foundational gesture of bioconservatism is a straightforward human-racist emphasis on the presumably “intrinsic value” of the process of metabolism when it is incarnated in representatives of only the human species, even if that process itself is indistinguishable, as a process, from the life incarnated in indefinitely many living species.

Of course, there is in fact a progressive moral value quite as luminous as anything he would attribute to conservative human-racist moralists that is rumbling in the background of Brooks’ discussion here, a value he seeks to trivialize through the comparably anemic phrasing of “quality of life.” This value is widely and passionately affirmed, and the recent track record of conservatives in the defense of this value, and of the more “fully-lived” lives that depend on it, is troubling indeed, whatever their occasional lip-service to the contrary.

That value? Consent.

Denigrating Lives by Denigrating Consent

One has to wonder just why it is that conservatives proud to "err on the side of life" seem so regularly impelled in so doing to denigrate consciousness and violate consent.

For progressives, there is indeed a texture in personal life beyond the "mere existence" we share with shrimp and snails, and which demands broad affirmation on its own terms. Personal lives are uniquely lived in the webs of meaning and thought and conversation woven by public beings, lives that reverberate with choices, with desires, with injuries, with deeds.

All the while the armies of the conservative so-called "culture of life" seem to defend life only in some more vegetable or mineral mode always best exemplified by organisms that have not yet arrived among the community of poets and peers, or of those who have already departed from the scene.

Brooks proposes that "[t]he central weakness of the liberal case is that it is morally thin. Once you say that it is up to individuals or families to draw their own lines separating life from existence, and reasonable people will differ, then you are taking a fundamental issue out of the realm of morality and into the realm of relativism and mere taste."

But to denigrate the morality of consent as "the relativism of mere taste" is to confess a complete moral blindness to the way in which we actually want to do morality here in democratic civilizations these days. And it follows as the night does the day that those who denigrate consent will go on then to denigrate the dignity of actual democratic citizens with whom they happen to disagree. Notice how often "erring on the side of life" seems to conservatives to require a violation of the terms in which citizens with whom they disagree actually choose to live their own lives.

I think it is fair in fact to agree with Brooks when he goes on to declare that for the conservatives in Bush's America "[t]he life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult."

That is to say, not very much.

Conservatives really do seem to adore claiming to speak for nonpersons (especially fetal not-quite-yet persons and stubbornly vegetative no-longer-quite persons) who cannot speak for themselves. How dearly they seem to love to put words into the mouths of those who are in no position to protest the imposition. What better way, after all, of multiplying their own voices in a world where sprawling majorities of actual people simply disagree with them, than to claim that their own overpowered voices stand in fact for countless voiceless voices as well as their own?

When conservatives seek to extend the dignity and status of the citizen to nonpersons they inevitably impoverish the exercise of that status for actually-existing citizens. This, of course, is the point of the exercise. Given the contours of Brooks’ argument, what is paradoxical is that in ascribing "dignity" so broadly it is the social conservatives themselves who stretch morality as thin as the skin of a soap bubble -- the better to puncture its fragile skin.

And it matters little to conservatives that their own morality is finally so thin since ultimately they seem to prefer to turn for their moral guidance to the dictates of authorities claiming to speak for God, or Tradition, or Homeland when all is said and done, than to the more contingent contentious verdicts of their own best worldly and reasonable deliberation.

Now, consent is indeed a notoriously thorny value to implement since its exercise, to be legible, demands that it be competent, informed, and nonduressed.

In the absence of competence, adequate and trusted information, and freedom from duress the “scene of consent” is apt to be a scene of violation in which the vulnerable rather than the violators are treated as guilty perpetrators of the violations they themselves suffer: As if a child has somehow “consented” to sexual abuse from a trusted authority figure. As if a consumer has somehow “consented” to the risks of a toxic, addictive product if its makers and marketers have fraudulently declared it healthful and nonaddictive. As if an impoverished or dependent wage-earner freely “consents” to exploitation at the hands of a wealthy or independent employer.

But the difficulty and danger is that securing a scene of legible consent for all citizens requires the formulation and application of the standards through which competence, knowledge, and freedom from duress are recognized as such. And this indispensable project inevitably risks mistaken formulations and misapplications that might actually violate particular performances of consent in their extraordinarily overabundant diversity and dynamic proliferation.

What Brooks mistakes as the “relativism of mere taste” is in fact the fraught and demanding dignity of diversity, the morality of self-creation, and the project of interminable criticism and self-criticism. Progressives know that they must accept a costly measure of abiding doubt and vigilance as the fair price that would help assure that our standards protect the changing life of consent rather than policing difference into conformity in the name of a “dignity” that always speaks in the voice of established authorities or in the easy, nostalgic, but stultifying voice of the past. Since conservatism is at heart a preference for obedience over critical autonomy it is scarcely surprising that conservatives would denigrate consensual self-creation as “mere taste” or mistake confident critical uncertainty as “relativism,” but it is a curiously delusive spectacle when they go on to peddle their obedience as independence, their complacency as dynamism, their faith as knowledge, and their humiliation as dignity.

From “Disability” to Diversity

Technoprogressives maintain that technological development is becoming not just a disruptive but, potentially, a genuinely revolutionary force. Technodevelopmental transformation undercuts the normative weight of claims made in the name of the "natural" in ways that, conjoined to a deepening of democracy and extension of fairness, technoprogressives insist can be made to be ultimately emancipatory for all.

For technoprogressives, the ongoing revolution in reproductive medicine and emerging genetic and neuroceutical medicine opens up consensual prosthetic practices of self-creation that will be this generation's historical contribution to the ongoing conversation of humankind.

I use the term "morphological freedom" to describe the ways in which consensual prosthetic practices are enlarging the scope of personal freedom, even while they derange our expectations, demand new responsibilities, and introduce unprecedented possibilities for injustice, violation and harm against which we must struggle interminably.

Along with many other progressives I felt disgust at the public figures who so loudly and cynically attached themselves to the distress of the family of Schiavo in bids for personal attention. I worried together with other techno-progressives about the widespread American anti-scientific benightedness that blistered yet again to the surface of public discourse in the midst of the media circus, connecting up in the most ominous imaginable ways with conservative hostility to evolutionary science via the rhetoric of "intelligent design," hostility to environmental science via the rhetoric of climate-change denial, hostility to social science via the rhetoric of "abstinence-only education," and hostility to economic science via the rhetoric of market fundamentalism. And of course I shared the concerns of other liberals about legislative efforts to bypass the courts, insinuations of martial law, and all the rest.

But I also share the concerns of many "disability" advocates who found themselves at odds with some of the progressive and most of the technoprogressive consensus in this cultural moment and who worry that there is something quite pernicious in the conventional liberal discourse that claims that if only Schiavo had a real "chance at recovery" then liberals, too, along with social conservatives, would be demanding that her "life" be protected and preserved.

These advocates for the differently enabled are rightly suspicious that the idea of "recovery" in such arguments mobilizes what amounts in fact to a highly restrictive normative concept of the sort of lives that are ultimately "lives worth living." Too often the notion of a properly "livable life" is a concept that denigrates many differently enabled people who, whatever their struggles or sorrows, live lives suffused with dignity, joy and value worth affirming and supporting the same as anyone else's.

Now, I strongly agree with the clinicians and experts whose thorough and repeated examination of the evidence located Schiavo's body in particular decisively with the dead rather than with the disabled. And in any case, I would insist like most progressives do on the absolute moral necessity to respect her own decisions and attitudes in a case like this, however these have been best ascertained by a number of courts, where matters of the care of her own body are concerned.

But it is clear nevertheless that the figure of disability was circulating in the Schiavo case in ways that matter to advocates for the differently enabled as well as to advocates and scholars of morphological freedom.

There are many "disabled" people who will seem superficially similar to Schiavo to an untrained eye, after all, and whose lives are routinely dismissed as "not worth living" in consequence. Advocates for the differently enabled fight heartbreaking, exhilarating battles to champion the rights and standing of these people every single day.

What it must mean to respect the differently enabled as the actually fully real people they are is to respect them and support them in their differences whenever they affirm the value of these differences on their own terms, just as it must likewise require the best provision of prosthetic avenues for rewriting their bodies and lives in the image of their own desires, also on their own terms, to the extent that this is possible and wanted by them.

Consensual Prosthetic Practices

The process of "life" in medical technocultures is one of ongoing practices of genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification in pursuit of personal meanings, responsibilities, and pleasures that are bound to strain against the imposition of normative conceptions of "wellness," however construed.

From the perspective of morphological freedom it seems to me the standard of "recovery" is always therefore worrisomely conservative, naturalizing some contingent standard of proper health as more desirable than indefinitely many alternate possibilities. Morphological freedom is never properly a matter of any coercive imposition of a normative body in the name of a moral standard of "health," but is an embrace of genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification practices in the name of a proliferation of ways of being properly and meaningfully in the world.

To the extent that the rhetoric of "recovery" impels us to misrecognize some manifestations of diversity as "disability," technoprogressives seem to me well rid of it. And to the extent that technoprogressives will sometimes affirm the desirability of "better than well" healthcare provision this would seem to encourage a repudiation of the discourse of "recovery" as well.

It is especially interesting for me to note the extent to which so many of the differently enabled depend on ongoing cyborgization and prosthetic practices to find their ways to more enriching lives on their own terms: communicating through computer interfaces, locomoting in motorized conveyances, and engaged in sometimes lifelong medical procedures of extraordinary intimacy and profundity.

Now, these considerations do not nudge us into any kind of blanket morphological relativism, since we will still prefer and testify to our own personal paths of self-determination on the basis of reasons at least intelligible enough to satisfy the conditions of informed, competent, and nonduressed consent. And in any case the proper public provision of the resources that enable prosthetic practices of self-creation also demands the maintenance of intelligible standards to ensure democratic accountability, fairness, security and meaningful deliberation in that provision.

Morphological freedom prevails to the extent to which discernible differences among peers arise from consensual prosthetic practices of self-determination or self-creation, rather than being imposed or unduly duressed by conditions of exploitation, violence or ignorance (any of which might broadly mobilize responsible intervention). What will be key for a properly technoprogressive bioethics that affirms morphological freedom will be a shift in focus from a moral(istic) concern with parochial standards of health, beauty or custom into an ethical concern with the meaningful consent of peers with whom one may or may not identify morally in the slightest.

This essay is a revised and edited version of a column published April 1, 2005 -- the day after Terri Schiavo died -- on Betterhumans.com. That column contained material from a number of shorter texts that I had already published on this blog during the height of the discussion of Schiavo case. All of that material should be accessible through the archives here.