Transhumanism
I’ve been reading Paul Virilio lately for a paper that was originally going to be about Virilio’s warped remixes of the Frankfurt School (it would have been called “Electro-Shock: Virilio and the Spectre of the Frankfurt School”). I was going to write about how Virilio’s hyper-denunciation of digital technology was a continuation of Theodore Adorno’s popular culture studies begun in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ultimately, the conclusion of the piece was to be that Virilio’s method is outmoded and nostalgic for a world that no longer exists and is no longer able to exist (which is not to say that this world is inevitable, but to say that life without the Internet would be both possible and desirable is hopelessly naive). Anyway, reading through his extensive body of work, it became apparent that his recent stuff has become concerned with the transhuman and, specifically, the origins of the term in eugenics and what he calls “the logics of the camp” (with the camps being places like Auschwitz).
I find this critique troubling and am attempting to work through it in the paper, which is now going to be about critical methods for dealing with radical human evolution (probably titled “Electro-Shock!:Moves Beyond Human in Contemporary Theory”). I’m a little concerned, though, about Virilio’s conclusions on transhumanism, because they make some sense (sort of). He basically argues that to imagine a super-human is, at the same time, to imagine a sub-human and this seems, to him, to be closely aligned to Nazi rhetoric wrt Judaism and the Final Solution. I think the way I want to get to an answer to his question is, perhaps, by moving through it. I think he’s right, but I’m not sure he has drawn the inevitable conclusions from his super/sub human diagnosis. What I mean is this: while transhumanism does advocate for the creation of new and “better” humans, what that actually means is anybody’s guess (as a side note, I’m thinking about writing a paper about transhumanism in SF literature as a radical Other (in the sense that, in most books, transhuman entities are never dealt with directly, because representing them in the narrative is difficult if not impossible, given the radical difference that seems to underscore the transhuman condition (I think it may end up being an argument about textuality and how linear language cannot handle the multiplicity consciousness attributed to most transhuman entities in popular SF))). In other words, transhumanism is not a program of action, rather it is a process, a way of moving beyond the limits of the human. That may end up in the space that many writers have crafted in SF of a faster and more intense form of capitalism (in which case I’m inclined to agree with Virilio’s diagnosis) but it may end up somewhere else entirely (the influences of Buddhism and psychedelics on transhumanism should not be ignored). So, I think that’s going to be my method for this paper, but I’m really a lot more interested in this whole question, now that I’m starting to understand the stakes more and, also, the fact that the transhuman future does not, necessarily, have to be “good” (but it can be, I think).
