Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia Read online

  Transhumanism

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  TR ANSHUMANISM

  Evolutionary Futurism and the

  Human Technologies of Utopia

  Andrew Pilsch

  University of Minnesota Press

  Minneapolis

  London

  A different version of chapter 2 was published as “Fan Utopias and Self- Help Supermen: Political Utopianism in World War II– Era Science Fiction,” Science

  Fiction Studies 41, no. 3 (2014): 524– 42.

  Excerpts from “Aphorisms on Futurism,” “Parturition,” and “Songs to Joannes”

  are from The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy. Works of Mina Loy copyright

  1996 by the Estate of Mina Loy. Introduction and Edition copyright 1996 by

  Roger L. Conover. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  Also published in the United Kingdom in 1991 by Carcanet Press.

  Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

  a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written

  permission of the publisher.

  Published by the University of Minnesota Press

  111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

  Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520

  http://www.upress.umn.edu

  The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pilsch, Andrew, author.

  Title: Transhumanism : evolutionary futurism and the human technologies of utopia /

  Andrew Pilsch.

  Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016039456 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0101-1 (hc) |

  ISBN 978-1-5179-0102-8 (pb)

  Subjects: LCSH: Humanism. | Philosophical anthropology.

  Classification: LCC B821 .P46 2017 (print) | LCC B821 (ebook) | DDC 144—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039456

  C O N T E N T S

  Introduction 1

  1 An Inner Transhumanism: Modernism and Cognitive

  Evolution 25

  2 Astounding Transhumanism! Evolutionary Supermen and

  the Golden Age of Science Fiction 63

  3 Toward Omega: Hedonism, Suffering, and the Evolutionary

  Vanguard 103

  4 Transhuman Aesthetics: The New, the Lived, and the Cute 139

  Conclusion: Acceleration and Evolutionary Futurist

  Utopian Practice 175

  Acknowledgments  205

  Notes  207

  Index  231

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  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  What Is Transhumanism?

  We exist in an age in which human futures have radically changed. As the

  revolutionary energy flickered out at the end of the psychedelic sixties,

  an organized movement of technologists, philosophers, and scientists

  calling itself “transhumanism” began to emerge, especially in Western

  Europe and the United States. First named in its modern incarnation by

  FM- 2030,1 transhumanism is an increasingly pervasive movement and an important actant, especially in technology policy and bioethics debates, whose members seek, broadly, to hack the human biocomputer

  to extend life, increase welfare, and enhance the human condition. As

  Max More, transhuman philosopher and advocate for radical life exten-

  sion, defined in 1990, “transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life

  that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent

  life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means

  of science and technology, guided by life- promoting principles and val-

  ues. ”2 More’s revised 1996 version of this definition also clarifies that the movement seeks to use “a rational philosophy and values system” to recognize and anticipate “the radical alterations in the nature and possibili-

  ties of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies such as

  neuroscience and neuropharmacology, life extension, nanotechnology,

  artificial ultraintelligence, and space habitation. ”3

  Since the 1970s, transhumanism has been gaining speed and influ-

  ence, particularly among people who work with computers in places such

  as California’s Silicon Valley or New York’s Silicon Alley, as the dizzying

  pace of information technology appears to give increasing credence to the

  ideas futurists such as FM- 2030 and Max More have been documenting for

  . 1

  decades. Inspired by theories of ever- outward technological expansion—

  such as Moore’s Law, which states that computing performance doubles

  every eighteen months, or George Dyson’s observation that “global pro-

  duction of optical fiber reached Mach 20 (15,000 miles per hour) in 2011,

  barely keeping up with demand”— transhuman philosophy articulates a

  stance toward communication technology that sees such massive, plan-

  etary expansion of humanity’s technological reach as suggesting coming

  mutations in the basic nature of the human condition.4 Transhuman-

  ism, Max More suggests, comes after humanism, which More suggests

  was “a major step in the right direction” but one that “contains too many

  outdated values and ideas. ”5 Transhumanists, according to More, seek to remix the legacy of humanist thought from a “philosophy of life that

  rejects deities, faith, and worship, instead basing a view of values and

  meaningfulness on the nature and potentials of humans within a ratio-

  nal and scientific framework” into one that embraces and anticipates the

  radical changes brought about by planetary communication technologies

  and radical technologies of the body.6

  In More’s articulation of the movement’s philosophy, which has since

  become the reference point for self- definition within the movement,

  transhumanism represents a new form of the future that emerges in

  response to these planetary changes. Most of the futures we are used to in

  popular culture borrow from classical narratives of the American Golden

  Age of science fiction (SF) and signal their futurity through some kind of

  new technology external to our bodies (think of the various technological

  marvels of the USS Enterprise on Star Trek or the famous Robert A. Heinlein sentence, “the door dilated,” in the first paragraph of Beyond This

  Horizon [1942]). In these classical versions of the future, humans are more

  or less the same and rely on their innate ingenuity, creativity, and new

  technological tools to solve the various problems posed by whatever new

  horizon is being explored. In this kind of speculative story, humanity is

  presented amongst new technologies but is for the most part unchanged.

  Transhumanism, instead, articulates a new kind of futurity, one in which

&nbs
p; humans are rendered into a kind of posthumanity7 through technologies that fundamentally alter basic elements of the human condition: lifespan,

  morphology, cognition. Rather than evolving our future’s mise-en- sc ène,

  transhumanism represents a new vision of the future in which we are

  ourselves being evolved by the futuristic setting we have already created

  for ourselves.

  While transhumanism is often dismissed in academic circles as a

  2 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  retrogressive assertion of Cartesian humanism, a techno- secular reimagining of Christian fundamentalist salvation history, and a celebration of

  the most brutal forms of capitalist excess in the present, I argue in this

  book that transhumanism is also what utopian thought might look like

  in the age of network culture, big data, and the quantified self: a utopian

  rhetoric for the information age. As cutting- edge post- Marxist theorists

  lament the failure of state- centric utopia in the face of neoliberal capi-

  talist expansion— most notably in Franco Berardi’s The Soul at Work and

  Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future— transhumanism helpfully

  articulates a rhetoric of utopia that uses the human body and the human

  soul, which Berardi claims is colonized by capital, as the material for imag-

  ining futures that are not mere re- presentations of the present. Although

  there are flaws in transhumanist argumentation— its alien rationality and

  its problematic defense of a myriad of concepts abandoned by avant-

  garde philosophy being just two examples— it is the only discourse today

  actively imagining a radical future as radically alien as communism’s idea

  of a classless society was in the late nineteenth century.

  To recover this core of utopian argumentation, I argue for consider-

  ing transhumanism from a much longer perspective than the movement

  itself chooses to acknowledge. Specifically, transhumanism is part of a

  utopian rhetoric of technology I call evolutionary futurism. Evolutionary

  futurism, of which transhumanism is one heir in the present, rhetorically

  situates technology as exerting mutational, evolutionary pressures on the

  human organism. However, as I argue here and expand on throughout the

  book, the longer history of evolutionary futurist rhetoric focuses more

  explicitly on the ways of being— new philosophies, new social orders,

  new affordances— unlocked by an evolutionary overcoming of the cat-

  egory of the human. Many of transhumanism’s most alien features, espe-

  cially its problematic entwining with consumer capitalism, emerge from

  a fetishization of the material pathways toward an evolutionary future at

  the expense of the sweeping philosophical changes mandated by these

  very imagined, radical futures.

  To connect the terms I am working with— transhumanism, evolution-

  ary futurism, and utopia— I move through each in its turn in this Introduc-

  tion, building up an argument that connects contemporary definitions of

  transhumanism to my concept of evolutionary futurism as a long- view,

  unifying radical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with

  calls for new, post- Marxist utopian praxis in the twenty- first. This Intro-

  duction, thus, constitutes a sketch of the theoretical terms in operation

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  . 3

  throughout the rest of the book and also is a defense of transhumanism as an avenue of intellectual inquiry. Rather than merely dismissing the movement out of hand for not conforming to state- of- the- art theories about

  the end of the human and the limits of reason, this book instead considers

  transhumanism as a font of utopian rhetoric that, however flawed, must

  be taken seriously if we are to understand utopia today.

  Although still a relatively small and fringe movement in terms of core

  believers, the transhuman perspective on culture filters into our lives as

  an ideology of technology. As an example, though not explicitly transhu-

  man in the same way as something like mind uploading or radical life

  extension, the quantified self movement, in which participants treat their

  bodies as data sets and attempt to optimize this data, responds to the

  transhuman perspective that the human is nothing more than an infor-

  mation pattern that happens to be currently instantiated in fleshy form.

  Moreover, recent documentaries such as The Immortalists (2013) and

  Transcendent Man (2011), about prominent transhumanists Aubrey de

  Grey and Raymond Kurzweil, respectively, have further popularized the

  basic beliefs of the movement, especially as both films have been promi-

  nently featured on the extremely popular streaming service provided by

  Netflix.

  Against this backdrop, More’s assertion that technologies will and are

  radically altering “the nature and potentials of humans” in our current

  age articulates an inherently evolutionary version of futurism. In this new

  version of the future, humans are subject to intense evolutionary pres-

  sures exerted by the external technologies we created to ease our lives in

  the first place. In many ways, transhumanism, as it first began to articu-

  late itself in works such as Robert Ettinger’s Man into Superman (1972)8

  and FM- 2030’s UpWingers (1973), stands in answer to the challenges and

  perils documented by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970), an extremely

  influential bestseller addressing “the shattering stress and disorientation

  that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in

  too short a time. ”9 Toffler argues that “the acceleration of change in our time is, itself, an elemental force” that leads to a “psycho- biological condition” that “can be described in medical and psychiatric terms. ”10 He suggests that we suffer, and will suffer more in the future, from a “disease of

  change,” that we “are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown. ”11

  Toffler’s book goes on to document the torments and possible solutions

  to what he saw as a too- rapid pace of change.

  Perhaps, then, responding to Toffler’s concept of a “disease of change”

  4 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  explains some of the oppositional tone of the earliest transhuman works (most of which were published in the ten years following Future Shock)

  and the rational structure More uses throughout his philosophical oeu-

  vre. Where Toffler situates future shock as a kind of hysteria, an outburst

  of irrational unconscious energy, the often mollifying tone of transhu-

  man philosophy suggests that the radical future is nothing to be worried

  about. Writing in Man into Superman, Ettinger is dumbfounded by the

  response of potentially future- shocked people who refuse to believe in

  his transhuman vision:

  Today there are vast segments of the world population that will not concede

  it is better to be rich than poor, better to be bright than dull, better to be

  strong than weak, better to be free than regimented, or even that it is better

  to live than to die.12

  This strong moral imperative swirls around transhuman discourse into

  the present. “In the face of the evolutionary imperative posed by digi-

  tal technology,” transhumanism seems to ask, “why would you choose

  t
o die?” For many transhumanists, the availability of these technologies

  suggests an imperative to use them to remake ourselves into something

  more than merely human.

  Talking about radical futurity as though it were the most obvious thing

  is, as one might suspect, not without its critics. Prominent transhumanist

  Hans Moravec was famously eviscerated in the opening of N. Katherine

  Hayles’s influential How We Became Posthuman (1999) as her first exam-

  ple of the transhuman tendency to declare human embodiment passé at

  the moment in which postmodern feminists were specifically contesting

  patriarchy through questions of embodiment. Similarly, Cary Wolfe dis-

  misses the movement in What Is Posthumanism? (2009) by saying that

  transhuman arguments derive “directly from ideals of human perfectibil-

  ity, rationality, and agency inherited from Renaissance humanism and the

  Enlightenment. ”13 For Wolfe, statements such as More’s definition (“the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond

  its currently human form and human limitations”) stand in opposition to

  the basic aims of a truly posthuman philosophy. For Wolfe, “‘the human’

  is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature,

  the biological, and the evolutionary, but more generally by transcending

  the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether. ”14 Wolfe’s “sense of posthumanism is the opposite of transhumanism” because transhumanism is merely “an intensification of humanism. ”15

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  . 5

  As I argue below, Wolfe’s claims about transhumanism are not entirely

  representative. Moreover, transhumanism is more complicated than just

  “an intensification of humanism,” as we have already seen in Max More’s

  argument that transhumanism is also a radical refiguring of what it is

  possible to do as a human. The claims of the movement, though, have a

  variety of dangerous and dubious rhetorical associations and, to better

  understand the potential affordances of transhuman thought, we need to

  first consider the major criticism of transhumanism: its complicated and

  often contradictory relationship to Christian salvation history.