|
A peer-reviewed
electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 21(1)
– June 2010 |
Deconstruction and
Excision in
Philosophical Posthumanism
David Roden
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 21 Issue 1 – June 2010 - pgs 27 - 36
http://jetpress.org/v21/roden.htm
Abstract
I
distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position
which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds
that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in human
terms. I claim that this transcendence can be viewed as analogous to that of the
thing-in-itself in Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy. This schema
implies an impasse for transhumanism because, while the radically non-human or
posthuman would elude evaluation according to transhumanist principles such as
personal autonomy or liberal freedom, it is morally unacceptable for
transhumanists to discount the possible outcomes of their favoured policies. I
then consider whether the insights of critical posthumanists, who employ a
cyborg perspective on human-technology couplings, can dissolve this impasse by
“deconstructing” the opposition between the human and its prospective posthuman
successors. By exhibiting its logical basis in the postructuralist philosophies
of Derrida and Deleuze, I show that the cyborg perspective is consistent with
both cyborg humanism and a modified speculative posthumanism. This modified
account treats the alterity of the posthuman as a historically emergent feature
of human and posthuman multiplicities that must be understood through their
technical or imaginative synthesis, not in relation to a transcendental
conception of the human.
Contemporary transhumanists argue that
human nature can and should be altered through technological means where such
enhancements are likely to lead to the majority of individuals leading better
lives. This ethic is premised on prospective developments in Nanotechnology,
Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science – the so-called
“NBIC” suite. One of the areas of particular concern for transhumanists is the
use of such technologies to enhance human cognitive functions such as learning,
memory, and attention. For example, such pharmacological agents as Modafinil
are currently used to enhance learning and working memory. Transcranial
Magnetic Stimulation of areas of neural tissue may, one day, be routinely
employed to increase the neural plasticity associated with learning and
memorization (Bostrom and Sandberg 2006). More speculatively, micro-electric
neuroprostheses might interface the brain directly with non-biological
cognitive or robotic systems (Kurzweil 2005, 317).1 Such
developments could bring the day when all humans will be more intellectually
capable, whether because of enhancements of their native biological machinery
or through interfacing with artificial information processing systems.
However, some transhumanists such as
Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec argue that a convergence of NBIC
technologies will not only enhance human intelligence, but give rise to beings
with superhuman intellectual capacities. Since designing intelligence is,
itself, a feat of intelligence, a super-intelligence could design a still more
super intelligence, and so on through an unbounded series of recursive
improvements. Beyond this threshold, there would be an exponentially fast
change in the level and quality of mentation. Vinge refers to this point as
“the technological singularity,” claiming that such a singularity could occur
with the creation of a single super-intelligent machine (Vinge 1993; Bostrom
2005, 8). Vinge is sensibly agnostic about the precipitating causes of such a
singularity: the super-intelligence in question might result from some targeted
biological alteration in human beings, from the use of “human/computer
interfaces” of the kind anticipated by Kurzweil, or from an emergent property
of large information systems (Vinge 1993).
Since such a situation is unprecedented,
the best we can do to understand the
post-singularity dispensation, Vinge claims, is to draw parallels with the
emergence of an earlier transformative intelligence: “And what happens a month or two (or a day or
two) after that? I have only analogies to point to: The rise of humankind” (Vinge 1993). If this analogy between the
emergence of the human and the emergence of the posthuman holds, we could no
more expect to understand a post-singularity entity than a rat or non-human
primate – lacking the capacity for refined propositional attitudes – could be
expected to understand such human conceptions as justice, number theory, and public
transportation.
Vinge’s position nicely exemplifies a generic
philosophy of the posthuman that I will refer to as “speculative
posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanists claim that descendants of current humans could cease to be human by virtue
of a history of technical alteration. The notion of descent is “wide”
insofar as the entities that might qualify could include our biological
descendants or beings resulting from purely technological activities (e.g.,
artificial intelligences, synthetic life-forms, or uploaded minds).
Speculative posthumanism claims that an
augmentation history of this kind is metaphysically and technically possible.
It does not imply that the posthuman would improve upon the human state
or that there would exist a scale of values by which the human and posthuman
lives could be compared. If
radically posthuman lives were very non-human indeed, we could not assume they
would be prospectively evaluable. For example, Vinge suggests that a
super-intelligent machine might lack awareness of itself as a persistent “subject” of experience. For a modern tradition
exemplified in the transcendental philosophy of Kant and later phenomenological
philosophers, this possibility is problematic. For Kant, this is because the
subject is not a “bare
locus” of identity but has a transcendental function
of synthesizing or “unifying” sensory information given under the
subjective forms of space and time into experiences of a common, objective
world.
However, Kant allowed that there could be
thinkers whose mental life does not entail the synthesis of sensory
representations. In the Critique
of Pure Reason, he speculates about
non-sensory “intellectual
intuition” that produces
objects rather than, as in humans, imposing a synthetic unity on their sensory
affects (Kant 1787, B 307). A being with intellectual intuition could have
unmediated knowledge of things as they are-in-themselves (noumena) rather than as represented under the sensory forms of
space and time (phenomena).
If Kant
is right, then the presence of first-person subjectivity in humans does not
preclude a radically non-subjective phenomenology in non-humans. Most of Kant’s successors in the idealist and
phenomenological traditions have rejected both the in-itself and the
possibility of intellectual intuition, claiming that a thing is nothing other than an object for a possible
subject. Subject and object would then be indissociably related (Meillassoux 2006). “Correlationism,” as the philosopher Quentin
Meillassoux christens this position, has dominated post-Kantian European
philosophy, morphing into a slew of postmodern idealisms. However, as
Meillassoux argues, correlationism has the absurd consequence that the cosmic
emergence of subjectivity or language becomes inconceivable; for, since nothing
exists outside the correlation, it has no history. If we reject correlationism,
however, we must hold that reality is not exhausted by any system of
correlations: the unconditioned thing-in-itself must be admitted and so must
the possibility of different modes of access to it. Thus even if our way of
accessing the real requires a subject, others may not. Given this minimal
realism, Vinge’s
speculations about posthuman non-subjective intelligence are conceptually
coherent, irrespective of their technical possibility.
It seems,
then, that a posthuman reality could be, as Vinge (1993)
avers, “too different to fit into the
classical frame of good and evil.” Our public
ethical frameworks arguably presuppose that candidates for our moral regard
have phenomenologies similar to humans, if only in the sentient capacities for
pain, fear, or enjoyment. Moral
conceptions such as autonomy or responsibility would be inapplicable to a
subjectless posthuman. The central value that modern liberal theory places on
liberty and democratic legitimacy would be likewise unintelligible.
How should transhumanists
respond to this possibility? Should they simply discount it, confining their
attention to the evaluable outcomes of transhumanist intervention? Discounting
the posthuman is morally irresponsible, though, given the possible role of
transhumanist intervention in producing it. Thus transhumanists should try to
evaluate the emergence of an incommensurate posthuman alterity. However,
if we recognize evaluation as a non-starter, any attempt to do so would be
incoherent. Thus it appears that transhumanists are morally obliged to evaluate
the unevaluable. We can refer to this
impossible demand as the “posthuman
impasse.”
However, this formulation of
a transhumanist aporia invites a
critical riposte from a position distinct from speculative posthumanism or
transhumanism: critical posthumanism.
Vinge’s formulation of the singularity hypothesis
is, as we have seen, reflexively anti-prognostic. We can at best anticipate
the antecedent conditions of the singularity, not the form of a
post-singularity dispensation. In that sense, the singularity is formally
analogous to Kant’s thing-in-itself. Just as a representable thing could not be
a thing-in-itself, so an anticipatable
future could not be a post-singularity future. In each case, we are confronted
by a logically conceivable reality that transcends the principled limits of
human cognition and knowledge.
However,
the claim that there are principled limits to human cognition is philosophically
objectionable on a number of grounds. In the present context, the most
significant of these is that the strong incommensurability claim presupposes:
a) a fixed set of cognitive forms proper to a fixed human nature; and b) that
there is no such fixed form and no human nature. For a
significant cohort of intellectuals in the academic humanities – so-called
critical posthumanists such as Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and Cary Wolfe
– the claim that human thought has a fixed form is belied by what might be
termed “the inner logic of transhumanism,” which insists on the improvability
of human nature. What this narrative of progress ignores, according to Hayles,
is the possibility that technology does not merely express an independently
constituted human nature, but actively forms and is co-original with it:
This assumption, known as technogenesis, seems to me compelling
and indeed virtually irrefutable, applying not only to contemporary humans but
to Homo
Sapiens
across the eons, shaping the species biologically, psychologically, socially
and economically. (Hayles 2008.)
Technogenesis
sits comfortably with the view that humans are, in Andy Clark’s words, “natural
born cyborgs” – cybernetic organisms whose mental life promiscuously extrudes
into culturally constructed niches such as public symbol-systems, industrial
megamachines and computer networks (Clark 2003). This claim that our minds are
as much in our tools and environments as in our crania is expressed in a
principle of “parity” between processes in the head and functionally equivalent
processes outside of it:
Epistemic action, we suggest,
demands spread of epistemic credit. If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a
process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in
recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive
process. Cognitive processes ain't (all) in the head! (Clark and Chalmers 1998.)
For
example, I make numerical marks on paper to keep in mind a lengthy
calculation. The parity principle states that my mental activity includes this
inscriptional process in addition to the skilful operation by which I track
each stage of the computation and determine when the result is returned. For
Hayles’ seminal study How We Became Posthuman showed how the possibility of
re-describing humans as cyborg assemblages emerges historically with
information theory, cybernetics and symbolic theories of computation. These
allow us to conceive mental operations in a wholly substrate-neutral manner.
Cyborgian thinking, Hayles writes, “challenges the human-animal difference;
explaining the behaviour of thermostats and people through theories of
feedback, hierarchical structure and control, it erases the animate/inanimate
distinction” (Hayles 1999, 84). It
implies that mental powers of deliberation, inference, consciousness, etc., are
already distributed between endogenous biological networks,
actively-sensing bodies and a range of increasingly clever artefacts (Hayles
1999, 239).
Thus speculations about humanity being transcended
by disembodied post-mortals or swarms of super-intelligent droids are naïve
since, as the title of Hayles’ work suggests, we are witnessing the
philosophical dereliction of the humanism that warranted these fantasies of
transcendence. The posthuman, according to Hayles, does not signify the “end of the humanity” but the end of a conception of the human as a
self-present, autonomous agent that “may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the
wealth, power and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings
exercising their will through individual agency and choice” (1999, 286).
The
promised, or perhaps threatened, transition to a world of wired humans and
semi-intelligent gadgets is just one more move in an ancient game. … We are
already masters at incorporating nonbiological stuff and structure deep into
our physical and cognitive routines. To appreciate this is to cease to believe
in any posthuman future and to resist the temptation to define ourselves in
brutal opposition to the very worlds in which so many of us now live, love and
work. (2003, 142.)
So does critical posthumanism blunt the
promise/threat of a posthuman alterity, obviating the posthumanist impasse?
I will argue that the insights of
critical posthumanism – cyborg theory and technogenetic anthropology – leave
open the possibility of a posthuman alterity while allowing us to displace the
terms in which the impasse is formulated in a more ethically productive way. To
see why, we need to recognize the profound philosophical debt critical
posthumanism owes to post-war French deconstruction and anti-humanism: a debt
acknowledged explicitly or implicitly in its formative texts. For example,
Hayles argues that “deconstruction is the child of the information age,”
crediting its main philosophical proponent, Jacques Derrida, with the insight
that speech is a cyborg act, never simply present or absent but dependent on
operations and contexts that exceed the consciousness of the speaking subject
(Hayles, 44). Likewise, Donna Haraway’s widely cited “Cyborg Manifesto” revels
in the cyborg’s metaphorical power to destabilize binary oppositions between
entrenched political identities, even as it gestures beyond the deconstructive
obsession with the divided subject (Haraway 1989). However, as I hope to show,
Derrida and other poststructuralists, such as Gilles Deleuze, have been more
scrupulous in elaborating the philosophical consequences of treating
subjectivity as an effect of mutable systems or assemblages, and they furnish
us with a more nuanced account of human and posthuman conditions.
The humanism interrogated by Francophone
anti-humanists such as Louis Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Jean-François
Lyotard, and Deleuze envisages the human subject as a source of meaning and
value and as the basis for historical explanation. Its invariant nature
legitimates progress through the scientific control of nature and the
construction of institutions that fully realize its moral powers (Soper 1986).
In deconstruction and poststructuralism,
humanist narratives of progressive self-understanding and mastery are
challenged by ontologies which, like cyborg theory, resist any description of
the human subject as a self-present source of meaning or self-authenticating
source of value. Instead, these new ontologies characterize the human as an
effect of “generative systems” whose character is complex, changeable and
inaccessible to conscious reflection. Two philosophically current examples of
such systems are Derrida’s general textuality and the Deleuzean ontology of the
virtual.
Derrida’s notion of a “general text”
refers to a highly abstract set of conditions for the production of “sense” or
“meaning” which any signifying item must satisfy. For example: any semiotic or
semantic theory must assume a distinction between sign tokens and ideal types
which each repetition or “iteration” of a sign instances. But, Derrida argues,
iteration cannot be reinstantiation of an abstract object, for any significant
particular can always be detached from its context and “grafted” into a new one
in which it means otherwise.
Thus
repetition is not the repetition of the self-same, but is constantly divided by
differences that no theory can program in advance. In Derrida’s later work this
undecidable logic assumes a broader ethical significance. Iterability
implies that the text is both
context-bound and transcends any given context, supposing “both
that there are only contexts, that nothing exists outside context … but also
that the limit of the frame or the border of the context always entails a
clause of nonclosure. The outside penetrates and thus determines the inside”
(Derrida 1988, 152). Any application of a moral or legal principle is thus
potentially an act of reinterpretation or invention: “Each
case is other, each decision is different and requires an absolutely unique
interpretation, which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee
absolutely” (Derrida 2002, 251). If iterability is a
feature of general textuality (a condition of thought or meaning as such) it
implies an open-textured temporal structure. The subject of
thought, experience and intentionality is, accordingly, an “effect” of a mobile
network of signifying states structurally open to modification or
recontextualisation. Derrida’s neologism différance
captures this essential openness by capitalizing on the homonymy between the
French verbs for differing and deferring.
The identity or stability of the system of traces is differed-deferred
because “vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element” (Derrida
1986, 13–17).
Analogously,
as Paul Patton observes of the work of Derrida’s philosophical coevals Foucault
and Deleuze: “a
distinction is drawn between present reality, which can be understood as a
product of history, and ‘what we are in the process of becoming that is to say,
the Other, our becoming-other’ which can only be understood in relation to the
virtual, the untimely or, in Foucault’s case, the actual” (Patton 2007, 47).
Deleuze, like Derrida, emphasizes forms of
open temporality and non-identical (or differential) repetition. The “virtual” refers to tendencies inherent in
different kinds of system: potentialities for re-integration or migration into
new contexts and couplings. However, whereas Derrida understands these as
abstract conditions of thought or meaning, and is relatively unconcerned with
their realization, Deleuze explicitly locates this open-textured temporality in
the dynamics and constitution of bodies and the various “assemblages’ from which they are composed
or within which they operate in turn. Particularly relevant for our purposes is
Deleuze’s conception of a “line of flight.” In Deleuzean ontology, this designates an abstract potential for
the transformation of a non-unified and heterogeneous system or “multiplicity” into a new state or new mode of
functioning. A multiplicity is a system that is not bound together by a common
essence but is, Deleuze writes, “an organization belonging to the many as such, which has no need
whatsoever of unity in order to form a system” (Deleuze 1994, 182). Many philosophers of
biology hold that the interpretation of biological taxa most consonant with
Darwinian evolution is that they are individual populations differentiated from
other populations by reproductive, ecological and symbiotic relationships
rather than a common essence. A population (not an essence or kind) can be
differentiated and variable and, in consequence, can undergo the
self-organizing feedback processes required by Darwinian Theory. Thus
understood, a species is a good example of a Deleuzean multiplicity. The
transformation of the “wild
type” in a species, under the selection
pressures of a new environment allows the emergence of an ecologically or
reproductively distinct species. This is illustrative of the virtual potential
for “becoming other” and actualizing new forms of individual
that inheres in a multiplicity by virtue of variations and differences between
its elements (Deleuze and Guatarri 1988, 8, 55; DeLanda 2009, 9-41).
Formally,
these poststructuralist philosophies introduce a logic of excision into their accounts of generative systems such as
texts and virtual multiplicities. As a consequence of its dependence on
generative systems the subject must be susceptible to “becoming other” – to transformative lines of flight – and, as
Derrida’s analysis
implies, there must be constitutive limits on the capacity of practical
rationality to determine the value of a particular process of transformation
into the other, since such lines of flight will be liable to reframe or
reinvent any practical principles that we might bring to bear on them.
Now, we
can see that both Derrida and Deleuze agree with proponents of cyborg ontology
that humans are not unified subjects but effects of generative systems that can
be grafted or iterated onto other systems when material conditions allow,
generating new kinds of subject-effects. This implies one version of what the
Deleuzean philosopher of science Manuel DeLanda calls a “flat ontology” in which there are no superior organizing
principles such as essences; in this case, no hierarchy between the
transcendental realm in which the modality of entities is bestowed by their
mode of appearance and an “ontic” sphere
describable by empirical science (DeLanda 2009, 58; Roden 2006). A flat
ontology dissipates the transcendental subject underlying the correlationist
theses criticized by Meillassoux: those of Kant and Husserl, as well as its ostensibly
anti-Cartesian avatars such as Heidegger’s Dasein (Derrida
1986, 124-126). However, it is easy to show that this de-transcendentalized
world leaves in place a range of mundane, empirical subjects, many of which are
perfectly conducive to the humanist project.
To
begin with, does it matter for liberal conceptions of autonomy that embodied
approaches to cognition relocate many cognitive processes outside the skin-bag
to interactions between bodies and environments? Let’s suppose, along with
Hayles and other proponents of embodied cognition, that the skin-bag is an
ontologically permeable boundary between self and non-self (or exo-self).
However, given the principle of parity between bodily and extra-bodily
processes, this need not make the business of thinking and deliberating less
evaluable in terms of the standards of rationality that humans currently apply
to their actions. Even if the humanist subject emerges from the cumulative
activities of biological and non-biological agents, this metaphysical
dependence (or supervenience) need not impair its capacity to subtend the
powers of deliberation or reasoning the liberal theory requires of it.
What
about the effects of the iterability, difference and repetition on
the stability of meaning that arguably underlies the exercise of rational
deliberation and reasonable discourse? Derrida’s deconstruction of the
constitutive power of the subject, like Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference,
certainly emphasizes the way a conceptually irreducible or differential
repetition escapes a formalist conception of thought as a tokening of concepts
of intentional contents (see Bearn 2000 for a refined comparison of Derrida’s and Deleuze’s theories). I
have argued elsewhere that we can read Derrida’s arguments in a naturalized/secular
way or in a quasi-mystical fashion formally analogous to the structures of
transcendence discussed earlier. The mystical interpretation holds that the
iterable mark is not merely indeterminate but implies a “trace”
of radical otherness that ultimately eludes theoretical articulation (Roden
2006, 81). However, this mystical otherness implies a superior organizing
principle that it radically eludes, which is incompatible with the flat
ontology outlined here. The secular reading treats Derrida’s argument as a more
modest interrogation of the limits of any metaphysics of content or meaning
which makes it depend on finite contexts or systems (Roden 2006, 82).
According to the
secular reading, Derrida’s insight that language and thought (insofar as the
latter is textual) is always “cut off. …from
its ‘original meaning’
and from its belonging to a saturable and constraining context” implies a
materialism for which the production of sense is a transformative event within
a complex system sensitive to variations that no formal theory can wholly
capture (Derrida 1988, 12; Roden 2006, 84). However, this reading is consistent
with the relative invariance of interpretation over contexts whose intrinsic
variability is small and requires us to differentiate these
“mundane” contexts from singular contexts – including singularities - whose novelty calls for
the inventive iteration of principles or categories.
Critical posthumanism – drawing on
deconstruction, postructuralism and theories of embodied cognition – thus
complicates and nuances the metaphysics of autonomy and personhood
characterizing traditional humanism. However, a distributed subject, “smeared” in both space
(extended cognition) and time (différance,
the virtual) can exercise normal capacities for deliberative rationality
required by liberal theory just so long as its world is relatively stable and
singular contexts rare or infrequent.
Thus the
deconstructive implications of cyborg ontology are far narrower than commonly
appreciated. The fact that the demise
of the transcendental subject is so routinely confused with that of the liberal
subject, say, can be attributed to a failure to heed Derrida’s precautionary distinction between
transcendental and anthropological humanisms (Derrida 1986, 118).
Transcendental humanisms, such as Hegel’s and Husserl’s phenomenologies, furnish arguments against
the relativist claim that reason or thought is bounded by particular historical
or cultural constructions of reason; exhibiting these as phases in the history
of a universal reason that is, at the same time, a “human” reason stemming from the structure of first person subjectivity
(Derrida 1986, 122).
However,
the deconstruction of transcendental humanism (and the consequent rejection of
the claim that the limits of cognition or reason are co-extensive with
invariant forms of subjectivity) is consistent with a cyborg humanism that
attributes a shared cognitive nature to humans.
For
example, it is possible that the refined cognitive powers that allow humans to
make promises, think about non-existent or merely hypothetical entities, enter
into contracts, and consider the coherence of scientific theories depend on a
capacity to frame thoughts with a compositional and recursive symbolic
structure. Complex symbols such as sentences and predicate expressions are composed according to
grammatical rules. Rules governing logical connectives or embedded clauses, for
example, allow symbols of arbitrary
complexity to be composed recursively by reapplying them to their own output
(Bermudez 2002). Terrence Deacon
(1997) has hypothesized that the emergence of proto-languages produced
selection pressures favouring good symbolic cognizers, even as limitations on
symbolic cognition imposed constraints on the form of culturally transmissible
languages. Extended mind theorists cite current research in cognitive
psychology suggesting that these capacities “co-opt” the public representational resources of syntactically structured symbol
systems (Clark 2006; Carruthers 2002).
Presaging this
line of enquiry with a purely conceptual analysis, Donald Davidson has argued
that the possession of propositionally structured
beliefs – such as the belief that
If
propositional thinking is predicated on the use of linguistic vehicles of
content, then the emergence of a public non-linguistic medium capable of
implementing refined cognitive processes of some kind could spell the end of a
propositional attitude psychology shared by otherwise disparate human cultures
and historical epochs. What is envisaged here is not theoretical eliminativism
of the kind mooted by Paul and Patricia Churchland, but the instrumental elimination of human minds
through the technological erosion of their cultural preconditions. This
hypothetical medium might consist of a complex form of virtual reality that
provides the kind of capacities for reflection and self-monitoring which
extended mind theorists attribute to language in a non-symbolic form. One of the
requirements of a symbol system such as a language is that it is possible to
determine unambiguously what symbol type a particular token symbol belongs to
(finite differentiation). A continuous system of representations, each of whose
infinitesimal variations were semantically significant, would thus fail the
finite differentiation test and count as non-symbolic according to this
criterion.
The
computer scientist Brian MacLennan has argued that such continuous systems – he
refers to them, in terms reminiscent of Plato, as simulacra and their representations as images – could have analogues of the grammatical composition and
reflectivity that we find in languages (MacLennan 1995, 2002). For example, it
is possible to represent a program for transforming any arbitrary image with
another image (MacLennan 1995, 9-10). Such a shared cognitive workspace could
generate a new class of hybrid thoughts embodied in an immersive virtual
reality. If this were done, an entirely new type of cyborgian thinker might
emerge whose thoughts could defy ready translation into a far more restrictive
symbolic medium.
Such
a cognitive hybrid could qualify as posthuman not by failing to instantiate a
timeless human nature, but by actualizing a line of flight relatively
inaccessible to unaugmented humans. Whether this new multiplicity was posthuman
or transhuman would be contingent upon whatever possibilities of political and
personal engagement it afforded those who did not participate in the workspace.
This scenario presupposes controversial positions in cognitive
science, anthropology, and the theory of computation. These may well turn out
to be incorrect. However, the philosophical importance of these speculations
does not lie in their prognostic reliability (which is limited) but in their
capacity to displace the sense of “speculation” itself. They are not speculative in the way that Kantian
claims about the transcendence of the noumenon are. There, “speculation” denotes the
positing of an absolute that exceeds the limits of human cognition. If human
cognition arises from a fixed cognitive nature, the human subject can know what
transcendence means insofar as it can reflect upon transcendental conditions
for subjective experience – e.g. through phenomenological investigation. If the
extended mind theorists and critical posthumanists are correct, however, there
is no invariant cognitive nature in this sense and thus no way to delineate the
character of posthuman difference a priori. This shows that even if we
accept the core tenets of critical posthumanism, we cannot exclude, a
priori, the possibility of a posthuman alterity. We can only preclude an a priori conception of what that possibility
entails.
This
reframing of the speculative character of speculative posthumanism suggests how
transhumanist ethics can negotiate the posthumanist impasse without the morally
dubious recourse of discounting the possibility of radically non-human
posthumans. If the genuinely posthuman would be, like the human, a historically
emergent multiplicity, there can be no a priori “posthumanology.” We can
understand the posthuman only in the process of its emergence or line of flight
from the human. Thus understanding the posthuman is not rendered impossible by
imaginary limitations on human understanding, but nor will it be achieved by
armchair speculation on the essential nature of the human and the posthuman. It
can be achieved only through participating – to a greater or less degree – in
the excision of the posthuman from the human.
The
posthuman is thus the idea of a speculative transformation of the human that
can be developed through a range of synthetic activities: say, by developing
and testing enhancement technologies, the development of cybernetic art forms
or the fielding of imaginative possibilities in philosophy or literature. In
Derridean terms, these productive activities occasion singular judgements in
which we re-invent our understanding of anthropocentric concepts. In Deleuze’s,
more materialist, terms they are the “untimely
becomings” in which posthuman entities acquire
profoundly new capacities to act and to be affected, eventuating lines of
flight that might conceivably weaken affiliations to preceding forms of
bio-political organization such as liberalism or capitalism.
I
have argued that the concept of the posthuman as the excision of the human
escapes the posthumanist impasse. Whereas the impasse entailed a vacillation
between equally untenable options, the logic of excision forces us to accept
that there is no rigorous or pure demarcation between theoretical and practical
thinking. Judging the value, or the nature, of the posthuman becomes possible
on condition that we are already engaged in becoming just a little
posthuman! The speculative posthumanist cannot rest content with pure speculation.
Note
1. For
a rather less sanguine commentary on the state of the art in non-invasive
scanning see Jones 2009 (with thanks to Jon Turney).
References
Bermudez, J. L. (2002). Domain generality and
the relative pronoun, Behavioural and Brain
Sciences
25,
676-77.
Bostrom, N. and A. Sandberg
(2006). Converging cognitive enhancements, Annals
of the New York Academy of Sciences 1093:
201–227.
Carruthers, P.
(2002). The cognitive functions of language, Behavioral and Brain
Sciences
25:
657-726.
Clark, A.
(2003). Natural born cyborgs.
Clark, A.
(2006). Material symbols, Philosophical Psychology 19(3): 291-307.
Churchland, P. (1981).
Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes, Journal of Philosophy 78(2): 67-90.
Davidson, D. (1984). Thought and talk, in Inquiries into truth and interpretation,
155-70.
Deacon, T.
(1997). The symbolic species: The
co-evolution of language and the human brain.
DeLanda, M. (2009). Intensive science and virtual philosophy.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition, Paul Patton (trans.).
Deleuze, G. and F.
Guattari (1992). A thousand plateaus,
Brian Massumi (trans.).
Derrida, J. (1986). Margins of philosophy, Alan Bass (trans.).
Derrida, J. (1988). Limited inc. Samuel
Weber (trans.). Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, J. (2002). Acts of religion, Gil Anidjar (ed.).
Haraway, D. (1989). A manifesto for cyborgs:
Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In Coming to terms, ed. Elizabeth Weed,
173-204.
Hayles, K. (1999). How we became
posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics.
Hayles, K. (2008), Wrestling with
transhumanism, The Global Spiral
9(3): http://www.metanexus.net/Magazine/tabid/68/id/10543/Default.aspx,
accessed 12 April 2010.
Jones, R. (2009). Brain interfacing with
Kurzweil, http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=450, Accessed 8 September 2009.
Kant,
Meillassoux, Q.
(2006). After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency, Ray
Brassier (trans.).
Patton, P.
(2007), Utopian political philosophy: Deleuze and Rawls, Deleuze Studies 1(1): 41-59
Roden, D.
(2006). Naturalising deconstruction, Continental
Philosophy Review 38(1-2): 71-88.
Soper, Kate (1986). Humanism and anti-humanism.
Vinge, V. (1993). The coming technological
singularity: How to survive in the posthuman era, http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html. Accessed 24 April 2008.
Wolfe, C. (1995). In
search of posthumanist theory: The second-order cybernetics of Maturana and
Varela, Cultural Critique (Spring):
33-70.