Posthuman Studies Reader

POSTHUMAN STUDIES 02

POSTHUMAN STUDIES READER CORE READINGS ON TRANSHUMANISM, POSTHUMANISM AND METAHUMANISM ´ EVI D. SAMPANIKOU / JAN STASIENKO (EDS.)

Posthuman Studies

Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (ed.)

Volume 2

Evi D. Sampanikou / Jan Stasieńko (eds.)

Posthuman Studies Reader Core readings on Transhumanism, Posthumanism and Metahumanism

Schwabe Verlag

The publication is partially funded by the University of Lower Silesia, Wroclaw, Poland.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Schwabe Verlag, Schwabe Verlagsgruppe AG, Basel, Schweiz This work is protected by copyright. No part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or translated, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover illustration: © Jaime del Val Cover design: icona basel gmbH, Basel Cover: STROH Design, Kathrin Strohschnieder, Oldenburg Graphic design: icona basel gmbh, Basel Typesetting: 3w+p, Rimpar Print: CPI books GmbH, Leck Printed in Germany ISBN Hardcover 978-3-7965-4193-3 ISBN eBook (PDF) 978-3-7965-4318-0 DOI 10.24894/978-3-7965-4318-0 The ebook has identical page numbers to the print edition (first printing) and supports full-text search.

Furthermore, the table of contents is linked to the headings. rights@schwabe.ch www.schwabe.ch

To Stefan Lorenz Sorgner For the inspiration he gave us To our families For having to cope with this task for a rather long time

Contents

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9

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Stelarc: Anti-Prologue

A.

PEDIGREES OF POSTHUMAN STUDIES AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE AND CONTEMPORARY POSTHUMAN MOVEMENTS

B.

TRANSHUMANISM

1.

Julian Huxley: Knowledge, morality, and destiny: I (1951) . . . . . . . .

43

2.

FM-2030: Transhumans-2000 (1974) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47

3.

Natasha Vita-More: Transhumanist Manifesto (1983/1998/2008/2020) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49

4.

David Pearce: Hedonistic Imperative (1995) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57

5.

Anders Sandberg: Morphological Freedom – Why we not just want it, but need it (2001) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

65

6.

Max More: The Proactionary Principle (2004/2005) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77

7.

Francis Fukuyama: The World’s Most Dangerous Ideas: Transhumanism (2004) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85

8.

James Hughes: Democratic Transhumanism 2.0 (2004)

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89

9.

Nick Bostrom: Letter from Utopia (2006/2008/2020)

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115

10. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner: Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism (2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

123

C.

POSTHUMANISM

11. Ihab Habib Hassan: Prometheus as a Performer. Toward a Posthumanist Culture? (1977) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

139

12. Donna Haraway: Cyborg, Companion Species, Chthulucene (1985/2003/2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

141

13. N. Katherine Hayles: What does it mean to be posthuman? (1999) . .

161

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Contents

14. Neil Badmington: Approaching Posthumanism (2000) . . . . . . . . . . . .

167

15. Elaine Graham: The Promise of Monsters (2002) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

175

16. Brian Massumi: The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason: Stelarc (2002) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

183

17. Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter (2003)

207

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18. Cary Wolfe: What Is Posthumanism? (2010) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

235

19. Rosi Braidotti: Posthuman Critical Theory (2013) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

251

20. Claire Colebrook: Posthuman Humanities (2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

257

D.

METAHUMANISM

21. Jaime del Val: Metahuman: Post-anatomical Bodies, Metasex, and Capitalism of affect in Post-posthumanism (2009/2016) . . . . . . . . . .

281

22. Jaime del Val and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner: A Metahumanist Manifesto (2010) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

295

23. Jaime del Val: The Dances of Becoming and the Metahumanist Manifesto. Its genealogy, evolution and relevance 10 years after (2020) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

299

24. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner: Adage of Metahumanism (2020) . . . . . . . . . .

305

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

309

Permissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

331

Anti-Prologue Stelarc

Consider – a body that is directly wired into the Net – a body that stirs and is startled by the whispers and twitches of REMOTE AGENTS – other physical bodies in other places. AGENTS NOT AS VIRAL CODES BUT AS DISPLACED PRESENCES – a body whose authenticity is grounded not in its individuality, but rather in the MULTIPLICITY of remote agents that it hosts – a body whose PHYSICALITY IS SPLIT – voltage-in to induce involuntary movements (from its net-connected computer muscle stimulation system) and voltage-out to actuate peripheral devices and to respond to remote transmissions – a body whose pathology is not having a split personality, but whose advantage is having a split physiology (from psycho-social to cyber-systemic) . . a body that can collaborate and perform tasks REMOTELY INITIATED AND LOCALLY COMPLETED – at the same time, in the one physiology . . or a body whose left side is remotely guided and whose right side intuitively improvises – a body that must perform in a technological realm where intention and action collapse, with no time to ponder – A BODY ACTING WITHOUT EXPECTATION, producing MOVEMENTS WITHOUT MEMORY. Can a body act with neither recall nor desire? Can a body act without emotion?

– a body of FRACTAL FLESH, whose agency can be electronically extruded on the Net – from one body to another body elsewhere. Not as a kind of remote-control cyber-Voodoo, but as the DISPLACING OF MOTIONS from one Net-connected physical body to another. Such a body’s awareness would be neither “all-here” nor “all-there”. Awareness and action would slide and shift between bodies. Agency could be shared in the one body or in a multiplicity of bodies in an ELECTRONIC SPACE OF DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE – a body with TELEMATIC SCALING OF THE SENSES, perceiving and operating beyond its biology and the local space and human scale it now occupies. Its VIRTUAL VISION augmenting and intensifying it[s] retinal flicker

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Stelarc

– a body remapped and reconfigured – not in genetic memory but rather in electronic circuitry. A body needing to function not with the affirmation of its historical and cultural recall but in a ZONE OF ERASURE – a body no longer merely an individual but a body that needs to act beyond its human metabolism and circadian rhythms – a body directly wired into the Net, that moves not because of its internal stimulation, not because of its being remotely guided by another body (or a cluster of remote agents), BUT A BODY THAT QUIVERS AND OSCILLATES TO THE EBB AND FLOW OF NET ACTIVITY. A body that manifests the statistical and collective data flow, as a socio-neural compression algorithm. A body whose proprioception responds not to its internal nervous system but to the external stimulation of globally connected computer networks Excerpt from Stelarc’s “Earlier Statements”, section “Fractal Flesh”, http://stelarc. org/?catID=20317.

Introduction

The concept of Posthumanism, a new discipline formed over the last decade in the twilight of postmodernism, an outcome of a productive encounter between philosophy and cultural studies/New Marxism, under the influence of the encounter between technological sciences and social studies, a meeting of the theories of Darwin and Nietzsche with the ancient Ionian philosophers, but also Platonic and Aristotelian thought, is not a single philosophy, described in specific fixed definitions. It contains a set of autonomous theoretical subcategories dealing with a series of different sociopolitical interpretations of the relation between humans and technology. Such categories are Transhumanism, originally defined as a rather liberal theory, dealing with the limitless interaction of human beings with biotechnology and the building of an improved human race, or Metahumanism, dealing with the very core of a philosophical/political existence of beings through ‘amorphogenesis’ and ‘proprioception’ and several forms of artistic experimentations with technology (metaformances, microdances), while what was originally defined as ‘Posthumanism’ used to be the democratic alter ego of both Transhumanism and the Humanism taught by the Enlightenment, is now moving to the thread of a renewed approach, Critical Posthumanism. Critical Posthumanism is now becoming the very field of a gradual integration among Transhumanism, Metahumanism and Posthumanism, an evolving but firm ground, wide open to the new philosophical concepts about a less anthropocentric, less racist, more ethical and more clearly politicized future. This shift has taken place during the last few years, at a series of international conferences under the general title “Beyond Humanism Conferences”, where Critical Posthumanism has developed as a more idealistic link among the previous trends, especially Posthumanism and Transhumanism, the relationship between the two evolves and the two currents converge to an expanded one with clearer ethical boundaries. It is in fact a new philosophical current that expands the framework of the anthropocentric dichotomy of Humanism/Enlightenment, including for example other living beings and nature as a whole, in other words it is an ideological expression of a contemporary cultural theory.

The idea to compile a reader containing the most essential texts on Post-, Trans- and Metahumanism goes back to 2010 during the second Beyond Humanism Conference in Mytilene (Lesvos, Greece). Hundreds of long discussions with colleagues have taken place since then, while much updating and many

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Introduction

transformations of Posthumanism occurred. Additionally, as human biotechnology has in the meantime progressed immensely, and the related research has entered a crucial stage, Meta-, Post- and Transhumanists have put forward perspectives concerning technological issues which represent radical challenges to traditional judgements (e. g. a number of transhumanists keep affirming that the likelihood of the coming about of the posthuman is being promoted by means of enhancement technologies). New papers, collected volumes as well as several dozen books and monographs and even entire journals dedicated to the topic have appeared in the meantime and also much criticism that shaped the present form of an integrated kind: Critical Posthumanism. Critical Posthumanism seems for the moment to be seeking more mature answers in relation to new technologies. As technologies emerge every day, we are permanently confronted with new challenges which potentially have an enormous impact both upon our understanding of who we are as well as upon the options of what we can do in the world we live in. In many cases, it is still hard to imagine the potential consequences of the technologies emerging today. They seem to bring about problems which are unlike every other challenge with which we have been confronted in the past.

For a period of time we kept thinking whether a reader would still be useful, but it wasn’t long before we decided we should at last have it in 2021. The international conditions of this special year and the Covid-19 crisis led us to the conclusion that a reader could in a very elaborate way summarize and underline the importance of posthumanist ideas as signifiers of a new era. And here we are.

A variety of theoretical (sub)trends are nowadays related to Posthuman Studies. Aside from Post-, Trans- and Metahumanism, it is worth pointing to the very close links between posthuman studies and animal studies, new materialism and object-oriented ontology, eco-criticism, and new animism.

Although all these currents and schools of thought interact with each other around the world, there also are geographic specifics. Posthumanism has so far been quite influential in the continental context, while Transhumanism has gained a considerable influence in Anglo-American cultural spheres during the previous decade. Metahumanism has on the other hand a clearer South European/ South American orientation on socio-artistic and philosophical grounds.

All the above trends deal with contemporary technological challenges and their impact upon our life, ethics, politics, art and culture. Originally, their genealogical differences brought up antagonistic attitudes mainly concerning the use of language, in both definitions and terminology but also in the emphasis on the importance of language itself, while initially the intellectual exchanges between Transhumanism and Posthumanism were rather limited. Due to an increasing amount of interdisciplinary research on several fields with scholars working in all three trends and especially the slow but increasing impact of Metahumanism, a complete separation is no longer valid, as gradual integration

Introduction

is now becoming a reality, through prolific exchanges that are currently taking place in journals, conferences and public events like the ones mentioned above; all these are receiving acceptance not only in the academic world but also by wider public audiences.

Academics all over the world, among them a number of leading figures in the field, artists, philosophers, and the general educated public keep an enormously increasing interest in the various posthuman issues mainly related to the future human through the development and usage of new technologies. Moreover, expressions of contemporary audiovisual culture, such as science fiction and fantasy literature (The Transhumanist Wager, Inferno, The Possibility of an Island, The Handmaid’s Tale – Testaments) and a series of older and recent films (Her, Transcendence, Simone) and TV series (Humans, Black Mirror, Years and Years, Westworld, Ex Machina, Transcendence) plus increasing numbers of comics and graphic novels (Lazarus, The Sculptor), deal, explicitly and implicitly, with transhuman and posthuman challenges and provide further material for theoretical analyses.

All the above underline the need for anyone interested in Posthumanism to access some of the pioneering central historical texts related to the various ‘beyond humanism trends’ which in some cases have been shaping posthuman thinking for a very long time. Therefore, this reader is our attempt to concentrate some of the most well-known authors who have founded the discipline in one introductory volume available for any audience, students and scholars especially. The reader includes all classic texts concerning Posthuman Studies. It is divided up into four parts: A. Pedigrees of Posthuman Studies as an Academic Discipline and Contemporary Posthuman Movements; B. Transhumanism; C. Posthumanism; D. Metahumanism. The texts are arranged in chronological order so as to show the development of each trend and their interrelations.

The “Anti-Prologue” is written by Stelarc, a leading figure whom we believe to be the personification of the convergence that is taking place in Posthumanism.

Although we have selected many seminal texts for this book which shaped the wide field of Posthuman studies, it was not possible to present all of them in full. This is why in part A under the title “Pedigrees of Posthuman Studies as an Academic Discipline and Contemporary Posthuman Movements” we decided to present a shorter description of some important positions and concepts. We included here not only leading examples of philosophers and authors who have been the forerunners of Posthumanism (Anaximander, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Darwin, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Habermas), but also a number of 20th and 21st century prodromic and parallel influential views on the relation between human and technology, either as purely technological or as parallel trans- and posthumanist trends (Varela, Kabat-Zinn, Weizenbaum, Minsky, Moravec, Kurzweil,

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14

Introduction

Pepperell, Rothblatt, Stelarc, Sloterdijk, Fuller, Hauskeller, LaGrandeur, Tuncel, Ferrando, Roden).

Part B of the reader focuses on ten Transhumanist texts that have been extremely influential for both the development of this trend and for its gradual integration with Posthumanism. These texts are presented in chronological order starting with an excerpt from Huxley’s “Knowledge, morality, and destiny” from 1951 which is followed by the works of FM-2030, Natasha Vita-More and Max More, Pearce, Sandberg, Fukuyama, Hughes, Bostrom and Sorgner.

Part C focuses on ten Posthumanist texts that have been the most influential so far for shaping contemporary Critical Posthumanism. The papers are again presented in chronological order. The first text is Hassan’s seminal “Prometheus as a Performer. Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” (1977), which is very often claimed to be the first text in which the term ‘posthumanism’ is mentioned. The third part also includes later authors such as Haraway, Hayles, Badmington, Graham, Massumi, Barad, Wolfe, Braidotti and Colebrook.

Part D of the reader is concerned with Metahumanism and its development. It focuses on the “Manifesto” (del Val, Sorgner), which is accompanied by an earlier text by one of the inspirers (del Val) and two present-day commentary texts by both authors. This last text, “Adage of Metahumanism”, written by Sorgner, one of today’s leading Posthumanism scholars, is an excellent Epilogue to the reader and offers us the possibility of getting into contact with a series of great and original thinkers from the distant and recent past as well as from the closest present that are related to Posthumanism.

A. PEDIGREES OF POSTHUMAN STUDIES AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE AND CONTEMPORARY POSTHUMAN MOVEMENTS

Posthumanism has never been a completely ‘new’, ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ stream of thought. It has always been there even during periods that were not expected. Seeds of Posthumanistic considerations were merged within the origins of philosophical thinking into the Pre-Socratic Ionian Philosophy. They were there even during the late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance period into St Francis’s (1181/82–1226) non-anthropocentric embracement of the natural environment and animals. It was present during the development of Western philosophy from the late 17th to the 20th century.

The pre-Socratic Ionian philosopher Anaximander (c. 610–c. 546 BC), an early proponent of science and an early ecologist who compared human laws with the laws of nature, underlining that everything that disturbs nature will not last (see Park 2005), can first be mentioned as one of the oldest pedigrees of posthuman discourse. As Anna Markopoulou has suggested (2019a),1 Anaximander’s views had been wider than simply anthropocentric, mainly focusing on the “eternal movement of apeiron” (“On Nature”, poem mentioned in Suda).

His views have influenced not only the ancient world but also modern Western philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger as will also be discussed later.

Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475 BC) later reformulated/rephrased Anaximander’s views in another non-anthropocentric approach to the natural world/universe as being continuously under uninterrupted change and movement (Markopoulou 2020a, 2020b), while wisdom is being aware of the “steering plan” for all: ἓν τὸ σοφὸν· ἐπίστασθαι γνώμην ὅκη κυβερνῆσαι πάντα διὰ πάντων. (LIV (D. 41, M. 85) Diogenes Laertius IX.1.)

The wise is one, knowing the plan by which it steers all things through all. (Kahn 1979, p. 55)

We have to add here that while Heraclitus has always been considered the author of the famous phrase: “τά πάντα ρεῖ” (“Everything flows”) the truth is that while the phrase contains the core meaning of Heraclitus’ philosophy, Plato (in his work Cratylus 402a) was the only author from Antiquity that has saved the memory of this saying: λέγει που Ἡράκλειτος ὅτι πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει καὶ ποταμοῦ ῥοῇ ἀπεικάζων τὰ ὄντα λέγει ὡς δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἄν ἐμβαίης. (Diels, Kranz 1960, A6)

See also her unpublished study under the title “The notion of ‘apeiron’ (άπειρον) in Anaximander’s Ontology: Tracing the origins of Critical Posthumanism?” that the author has kindly allowed us to use (to be announced for the next “Beyond Humanism Conference”, 2021–2022).

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Pedigrees of Posthuman Studies as an Academic Discipline and Contemporary Posthuman Movements

Heraclitus says, doesn’t he, that all things move on and nothing stands still, and comparing things to the stream of a river he said that you cannot step twice into the same river.

(Kahn 1979, p. 168)

Heraclitus was not the only one to have visualized the universe as entropy and wisdom as knowing about “the plan”. A later philosopher, Epicurus (341–270 BC) discussed how “[…] the concept of correcting habits of thought, which confers a philosophical meaning on the Greek word pharmakon (φάρμακον), constructs a dialectical relationship of unity between nature and human beings”, while “the traditional meaning of pharmakon as an artificial means of therapy, is ideologicalized in a dualism between the superior technology, which rules, and the inferior human nature, which is ruled”. The term tetrapharmakos (fourfold cure) is “the basis of Epicurus ethics, inextricably linked with the four criteria of truth”, according to his epistemology. “The shift established by Epicurus’s ethics constitutes a rupture with the traditional meaning of the word pharmakon insofar as it shows that by restoring the function of phronesis, sober reasoning is the ultimate end of a philosophical cure for the mind. Furthermore, in Epicurus sober reasoning is shown to be the main means of transcending the human condition so that, as he characteristically states, ‘man lives as a god among men’. In that sense, establishing a post-nature as it ensues from the Epicurean ethics of the tetrapharmakos constitutes a philosophical paradigm shift towards a new critical posthumanism” (Markopoulou 2019b).

Much later, in the 17th century, Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677) in his Ethics (1677) underlined the importance of investigating for understanding nature (human beings included) in a scientific way: Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved. (Spinoza 1677, part 1, appendix) [emphasis added]

According to Steven Nadler (2020), what Spinoza intends to demonstrate in his Ethics is the truth about God, nature and especially ourselves, and the most certain and useful principles of society, religion and the good life. Despite the great deal of metaphysics, physics, anthropology and psychology that take up Parts One through Three, Spinoza took the crucial message of the work to be ethical in nature. It consists in showing that our happiness and well-being lie not in a life enslaved to the passions and to the transitory goods we ordinarily pursue, nor in the related unreflective attachment to the superstitions that pass as religion, but rather in the life of reason. […] In propositions one through fifteen of Part One, Spinoza presents the basic elements of his picture of God.

Pedigrees of Posthuman Studies as an Academic Discipline and Contemporary Posthuman Movements

God is the infinite, necessarily existing (that is, self-caused), unique substance of the universe. There is only one substance in the universe; it is God; and everything else that is, is in God. (Nadler 2020)

But what illustrates better Spinoza’s approach to the non-duality of substance is the following excerpt, containing Propositions 5 to 10 from the first part of his Ethics: Proposition 5: In nature, there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute.

Proposition 6: One substance cannot be produced by another substance.

Proposition 7: It pertains to the nature of a substance to exist.

Proposition 8: Every substance is necessarily infinite.

Proposition 9: The more reality or being each thing has, the more attributes belong to it.

Proposition 10: Each attribute of a substance must be conceived through itself. (ibid.)2

Spinoza was much later re-discovered by one of the leading philosophers of Postmodernism, Gilles Deleuze, who thought very highly of the 17th century Dutch philosopher. According to Deleuze, Spinoza is one of the figures of the past who have most influenced contemporary philosophy the same way Leibniz or later Nietzsche have done. For Deleuze, at the very beginning of the Ethics, “Spinoza is setting out from a Cartesian framework, but what must be most carefully considered is just what he takes over from Descartes, what he discards and, above all, what he takes over from Descartes in order to turn it against him.

The principle that there are only substances and modes, modes being in something else, and substance in itself, may be found quite explicitly in Descartes”.3 Thus, the Deleuzian approach makes Spinoza one of the forerunners of Postmodern thought too, apart from being part of the pedigrees of Posthumanism.

But it was only in the 19th century that Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) with his journeys, scientific investigation and especially the writings that were his resulting theory (On the Origin of Species, 1859 and The Descent of Man, 1874) established the modern philosophical frame of Posthumanism.

Darwin’s theory that all species (human beings included although he did not openly discuss it in the beginning) have descended over time from common ancestors is now widely accepted as a foundational concept in science and a unifying theory explaining the diversity of life. And, although, due to the strong objections his theory met, he didn’t actually enter into deep explicit discussion of human origins, he stated: In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power 2 3

See also Scruton 2002, pp. 38–55.

Deleuze 1992, pp. 28–29.

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