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

alien version of transhumanism. While, as I have been arguing up to

  this point, transhumanism uses a rhetorical mode that sees evolution-

  ary change being mediated by technological progress, the larger project

  of this book is to document how this rhetorical mode actually predates

  the mid- 1970s organization of transhumanism into a coherent move-

  ment. Instead, I argue that this older rhetorical mode is more produc-

  tively labeled as “evolutionary futurism”— a set of rhetorical strategies

  meant to depict a future in which our machines evolve us beyond our cur-

  rent human limitations— and that it organizes a wildly disparate swath of

  twentieth- century intellectual history, including avant- garde modernism,

  early science fiction, poststructural philosophy, and evolutionary synthe-

  sis in biology. In tracing this rhetorical mode through these various sites,

  I examine moments that may not specifically appear as “transhuman”

  in the orthodox sense. In doing so, I show the rich and varied rhetorical

  practices that contribute to the emergence of evolutionary futurism as a

  rhetorical mode and that help lay the foundation for transhumanism as

  an organized movement of evolutionary futurists in the present. Addi-

  tionally, I route many of these explorations through philosophers, such

  as Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze, not specifically associated with

  transhuman philosophy but who have been connected with arguments

  about the limits of the human and the transcendence of these limits.32

  This method is not intended to dilute transhumanism as an intellectual

  movement; instead, I argue that evolutionary futurism shapes broad and

  12 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  fruitful discourses that we ignore when we reject transhumanism as a

  serious intellectual endeavor.

  Methodologically, I enact a series of conversations between contem-

  porary transhuman philosophy and this larger, older body of evolutionary

  futurist rhetoric. In doing so, I explore the more nuanced valences of this

  rhetorical mode outside the perceived flaws in orthodox transhumanism.

  Additionally, these conversations document other rhetorical choices that

  may not have been taken up into the core of transhuman argumentation.

  By focusing in this way on the wider universe of rhetorical possibility con-

  tained in evolutionary futurism, I show how transhumanism contains

  a potent rhetorical core that allows for the rethinking of utopia in the

  age of informatics, specifically by shifting our attention from the state to

  the body as the needed site of utopian investment. To further clarify this

  point and to suggest the broader method deployed throughout this book,

  in the remainder of this introduction I offer an example of a discourse

  (automata theory) that uses evolutionary futurist argumentation but is

  not commonly hailed as orthodox transhumanism, and then conclude by

  connecting my interest in evolutionary futurist rhetoric to a crisis in con-

  temporary conceptions of utopia, arguing that this rhetoric is a rhetoric

  of utopia. In connecting evolutionary futurism to utopian thought, I show

  how, in tracing a broader intellectual history of transhuman argumenta-

  tion, evolutionary futurism constitutes an emergent and contemporarily

  relevant rhetoric of the future, one that reinvests the utopian imaginary

  into the human body. In an age dominated by theories that hinge on the

  failure of the welfare state as a utopian experiment, this rhetorical shift

  (from the state to the body) offers a potential means to reanimate specu-

  lation about spaces beyond the current configuration of power.

  Evolutionary Futurist Rhetoric in Action: Automata Theory

  As an example of something not classically hailed as transhuman but

  involved in the rhetorical work of transhumanism, John von Neumann’s

  paradigm of the body as information is key to the emergence of contem-

  porary transhumanism. Von Neumann, a polymath and major figure in

  computer science whose work with the EDVAC team at the University of

  Pennsylvania led to the publication of First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC

  (1945) as well the formalization of the modern computer architecture

  that still bears his name and structures most computers in use today, was

  interested, toward the premature end of his life (von Neumann died at 53

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  . 13

  from bone cancer, likely contracted from his presence at the first thermo-nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll in 1946), in the interconnections between bio-

  logical and computational processes. While obviously not a transhuman-

  ist (he died well before the movement began in the 1970s), his work shares

  many similarities to, and, as I argue in this section, stands as an important

  example of, the rhetorical moves an evolutionary futurism can make.

  Von Neumann’s contribution to the movement is not entirely ignored

  in the transhuman literature, specifically as Raymond Kurzweil, in The

  Singularity Is Near, cites a conversation between Stanislaw Ulam and John

  von Neumann as being the first mention of a technological singularity.33

  Additionally, despite this limited contribution, I suggest von Neumann’s

  late work is an important rhetorical precursor to the transhuman vision of

  the future of the body. Relatedly, considering von Neumann’s theories of

  computation in this way focuses our attention on the mutational aspects

  of this rhetorical mode.

  Late in his life, von Neumann turned his attention to biology and psy-

  chiatry in an attempt to further intensify his theories of computation.

  Describing “automata theory,” von Neumann argued that all processes

  of sufficient complexity, biological or computational,

  can be viewed as made up of parts which to a certain extent are indepen-

  dent, elementary units. We may, therefore, to this extent, view as the first

  part of the problem the structure and functioning of such elementary units

  individually. The second part of the problem consists of understanding how

  these elements are organized into a whole, and how the functioning of the

  whole is expressed in terms of these elements.34

  For von Neumann, this insight suggested the possibility of easily trans-

  ferring biological processes to computational hardware, the foundational

  narrative for the so- called strong theory of artificial life.

  Summarizing this work on automata, technology journalist Mark Ward

  suggests that “von Neumann saw that it was the manipulation of informa-

  tion that keeps an organism alive, allows it to beat back entropy, and that

  life is a process not a property. ”35 These insights are key to what would become transhumanism, especially for extropians such as computer scientist Hans Moravec and technologist Raymond Kurzweil who both map

  a transhuman future in which humans will upload their consciousnesses

  into machines. A quote popularly attributed to von Neumann suggests

  that the upshot of this work on automata was a view that “life is a process

  which can be abstracted away from any particular medium. ”36

  14 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  By understanding life as a process that can be serialized between media (presumably between biological wetwa
re and computational hardware),

  the idea that the body is information entered cultural currency. This

  transformation and its development in first- and second- order cybernet-

  ics is traced through N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman

  (1997), but is also important for the emergence of particular transhuman

  topoi. Building on von Neumann’s work, for instance, in his 1987 mani-

  festo of artificial life, Christopher Langton suggests a linguistic move from

  “machine,” as von Neumann used it, to “algorithm,” as Langton defined

  it, “the logic underlying the dynamics of an automaton, regardless of the

  details of its material construction. ”37 At this point, we see an outline of the completion of the informational body of transhumanism: if life is an

  algorithm, then we can tinker with or hack that algorithm to better opti-

  mize its outputs (us) along various ends.

  By understanding thought as a mechanical process, and specifically

  as a process of simple, cellular automata working in concert to produce

  complex phenomena, von Neumann not only opened up this algorithmic

  understanding of cognition, he also suggested a specifically evolution-

  ary futurist take on computational theory. As his editor Arthur W. Burks

  describes in the introduction to Theory of Self- Reproducing Automata,

  working to build ever faster computers, von Neumann sought to avoid

  the extreme unreliability of the components, such as vacuum tubes, “not

  by making them more reliable, but by organizing them so that the reli-

  ability of the whole computer is greater than the reliability of its parts. ”38

  He was specifically interested in this, reports Burks, because he wanted

  to produce artificially intelligent machines in the late 1950s, using the

  unreliable components at hand. After von Neumann’s death, his radical

  work was abandoned in favor of building more reliable and faster com-

  ponents with an eye toward producing intelligent machines some time in

  the future. For von Neumann, the rudimentary computers such as ENIAC

  suggested a mutated view of the human, and this new paradigm of human

  cognition further suggested a near- future evolutionary leap in technologi-

  cally mediated humanity.

  In any case, von Neumann’s work on automata theory, algorithmic con-

  sciousness, and vacuum tube AI provides an example of early computation

  immediately feeding back into mutations within the human organism. Our

  technologies external to the body come to color our understandings of our-

  selves in a way that focuses on near- future evolutionary change. Beyond

  the ideas of human perfectibility associated with Cartesian humanism,

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

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  automata theory’s use of a computational paradigm to describe the human body suggests a means for attaining this perfectibility, as well as showing the move from external tool development to internal tool imbibing.

  Transhumanism and the Desire Called Utopia

  Despite a serious commitment to imagining a new world and building a

  discourse to shape a better future, transhumanists are quick to assert that

  they are not utopians. There are a number of reasons suggested in the lit-

  erature for this perspective; however, the issue of transhumanism as or

  as not a utopian movement came to a head in the 2011 edited collection

  H+/- : Transhumanism and Its Critics, in which a number of academics

  working on transhumanism wrote position papers to which prominent

  transhuman thinkers wrote rebuttals. A number of the academic posi-

  tion papers used the word utopia to describe transhumanism, and the

  responses from the transhumanists to this issue are highly suggestive of

  a terminological disjunction between academic and transhuman think-

  ers. In “From Mind Loading to Mind Cloning,” Martine Rothblatt sug-

  gests that “the transhumanists are no more utopian or naïve than were

  the sociotechnological pioneers of the nineteenth century who believed

  in and fought for universal education, railroads, and public health. ”39

  While Rothblatt’s ethos throughout the entire essay is similar to Robert

  Ettinger’s earlier bafflement about those who would choose to die, the

  specific juxtaposition— “utopian or naïve”— is most emphatic on the issue

  of “utopia” in transhuman thought.

  Stemming from Thomas More’s definitional 1516 book, utopia has

  been, at the level of the word itself (literally “no place” in Latin), con-

  nected to notions of daydream, fancy, or idle speculation. Transhumanism

  seeks to avoid the idea of the lazy speculator, imagining future wonders:

  Rothblatt’s juxtaposition suggests that utopian thought is naivety itself

  and that transhumanism is, instead, a philosophy of action. Moreover,

  Rothblatt focuses on the reality of the possibility that transhuman rhetors

  seek to impart: “this is not speculation,” her dismissal of the utopian label

  suggests, “what we talk about will happen.” Utopia— in this more popular

  understanding (tied to a contemporary instantiation in science fiction but

  indebted to a much longer history)— is an unreal, unrealizable imaginary

  future. Transhumanists, long disparaged in academia, are particularly sen-

  sitive to rhetorical moves that distance the movement from a practical,

  serious, and, most important, realistic future.

  16 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  Also suggestive of the transhuman attitude toward utopianism is Max

  More’s response to the “utopian” label in H+/- . He suggests that “True

  Transhumanism” (his essay’s title) does “not see utopia or perfection as

  even a goal.” He continues,

  The Idol of Paradise and the idea of a Platonically perfect, static utopia, is so

  antithetical to true transhumanism that I coined the term extropia to label

  a conceptual alternative. Transhumanists seek neither utopia nor dystopia.

  They seek perpetual progress— a never- ending movement toward the ever-

  distant goal of extropia.40

  More makes two important assumptions here: First, he suggests that uto-

  pia implies the creation of a static state, in which no more progress is pos-

  sible. Second, he suggests that, instead, transhumanism values a contin-

  ual progress narrative in which a perfect state is never possible to reach.41

  Despite More’s rejection, I want to use his idea of this “ever- distant goal

  of extropia” to claim that while transhumanism may not be utopian, it is

  definitely Utopian. My use of the lowercase and uppercase to draw a dis-

  tinction may seem too facile, but I do so to signal a potent distinction in

  the concept of Utopia itself. Written with the lowercase, “utopia” connects

  to the so- called utopian socialists that Marx and Engels use as one group

  of conceptual enemies in the emergence of Marxist theory, and generally

  to the idea of naive speculation rejected by Rothblatt.42 “Utopia” written in uppercase is the collection of processes for imagining spaces beyond

  capitalism that feed into the practices of political resistance in the pres-

  ent, especially in the works of Fredric Jameson, where he wants us “to

  understand Utopianism . . . as a whole distinct process” rather than the

  cre
ation of a specific place or scheme.43

  In Jameson’s work on Marxism in the age of the postmodern, “Utopia”

  comes to mean a kind of methodological imagination. Primarily detailed

  in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), the discussion of Utopia throughout

  Jameson’s career has foregrounded it as a “mechanism” for the specula-

  tive production of new modes of being.44 As he asks in “Utopia as Replication,” “we ordinarily think of Utopia as a place, or if you like a non- place

  that looks like a place. How can a place be a method?”45 In answer to this, Jameson suggests that in culture there exists an “obligation for Utopia to

  remain an unrealizable fantasy. ”46 Jameson’s understanding of Utopia as a method and a fantasy— he would label it “the desire called Utopia,” using

  the Lyotardian formula so prevalent in his more recent work— shows his

  intense debt to the cybernetic psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, for whom

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  . 17

  the object of fantasy always recedes from our graspings after it. For Jameson, Utopia is a method of imagining schemes, spaces, objects, whole

  futures that, through the power of fantasy and desire, inspires political

  change in the real world but never actually arrives from the fantastic into

  the real.

  This idea of an endlessly receding horizon is also what More means by

  extropia. Thus, the progressive creation of new social forms is what makes

  transhumanism Utopian, and specifically, as I discuss below, a form of

  Utopia uniquely relevant in an age when paths not moving toward the

  cybernetic brutality of multinational capital appear to be exhausted. In

  both Utopia and extropia, we find a process by which humanity can con-

  stantly exceed its current limits and imagine future forms for itself. Jame-

  son is also careful, like More, to build a method that sees an interchange

  between and finds inspiration in the everyday, suggesting that any “Uto-

  pian enclave” (Jameson’s term for a site of speculative, Utopian invest-

  ment, such as money in the Early Modern Utopias or the Internet in the

  early 1990s) eventually “becomes ‘only that,’ descending from a transcen-

  dental ideal into a contingent set of empirical arrangements. ”47 This move between the fantasy (the ever- exceeding goal More labels “extropia”) and

  the quotidian is important for Jameson’s thought and his analysis of cul-