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

  ture, where even degraded cultural forms such as advertisements or the

  inartistic films he often discusses48 are able to articulate “the oldest Utopian longings of humankind. ”49

  However, this connection between transhumanism and Jameson is not

  merely terminological, nor even just methodological. We can construct

  a transhuman Jameson based on the language of mutation and cogni-

  tive expansion prevalent throughout his work. A transhuman Jameson’s

  investment in the Utopia as a place that is also a method spills over into a

  belief in evolutionary futurism as the only possible avenue of revolution-

  ary politics in the present moment of globalized capital. In Archaeologies

  of the Future, he suggests that his vision of Utopian speculation “is prob-

  ably on the side of the imagining of the post- human. ”50 Jameson continues by adding that Utopian speculation may be on the side “even of the

  angelic” as well as the posthuman. By using two models of human perfect-

  ibility, I argue, Jameson uses the term here in the way the transhuman-

  ists use it: an imagined placeholder for what comes out the other end of

  their transformative processes. This contrasts sharply with notions of the

  word in, say, Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? which allies the term

  with a post- Cartesian openness to the Other. This association between

  18 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  Utopia and a transhuman posthuman further intensifies the reality of a transhuman Jameson. The pattern of usage of “post- human” in Archaeologies, mostly in the chapters “Journey into Fear” and “Synthesis, Irony,

  Neutralization, and the Moment of Truth,” situates that strand of inquiry

  within the longer tradition of Utopia, suggesting that to imagine beyond

  the human is, for Jameson, specifically Utopian.51 In encapsulating the argument of the book, before moving into its equally enigmatic conclusion, Jameson suggests,

  We have come laboriously to the conclusion that all ostensible Utopian con-

  tent was ideological, and that the proper function of its themes lay in critical

  negativity . . . In addition we have been plagued by the perpetual reversion

  of difference and otherness into the same, and the discovery that our most

  energetic imaginative leaps into radical alternatives were little more than

  projections of our own social moment and history or subjective situation:

  the post- human thereby seeming more distant and impossible than ever!52

  In concluding this summary of his argument about the history of Utopia

  as he does, Jameson seems to suggest that the move beyond the human,

  the creation of posthuman existence, is the end point of Utopia, espe-

  cially in the present.

  In addition to this discussion of the posthuman as goal for Utopia,

  Jameson’s most direct engagement with evolutionary futurism occurs in

  the famously puzzling reading of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles in

  Postmodernism. Lost amid the challenging architecture of John Portman’s

  dizzying and maze- like lobby, Jameson declares “the newer architecture

  therefore . . . stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs,

  to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable,

  perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions. ”53 From merely speculating on the creation of a “post- human” through Utopian thought, here Jameson begins to imagine the creation of these new beings, with new organs

  and, most important, new cognitive capacities. Cognitive mapping is

  Jameson’s specific response to the Bonaventure’s call to grow new organs,

  to evolve beyond our present form. For Jameson, this cognitive mapping

  is the Utopian response to the “perceptual barrage of immediacy” and the

  related “fragmented and schizophrenic decentering and dispersion of”

  the human that makes up life in the postmodern.54 Like transhumanists arguing that our technologies of global communication exceed our philosophies for understanding them, Jameson suggests that our narratives

  of self and state, as well as our ability to grow either, are fundamentally

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

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  broken amid this perceptual barrage that we lack the expanded sensorium to process. The challenge of the postmodern— indeed the challenge of the

  Bonaventure or the dizzying media landscapes of sculptor Nam June Paik

  or many of the other texts Jameson famously reads in Postmodernism—

  “often takes the form of an impossible imperative to achieve that new

  mutation in what can perhaps no longer be called consciousness. ”55 This

  “new mutation,” potentially growing “new organs,” is, I argue, the core of

  articulating Jameson as a thinker committed to an evolutionary futurist

  mode of argumentation. Moreover, in connecting these two quotes, we

  see Jameson articulating the properly transhuman argument that changes

  in morphology yield to changes in cognition, as Max More articulates in

  his definition of the movement.

  Jeffrey Nealon, in his heavily Jamesonian Post- Postmodernism, glosses

  the “new mutation” quote in terms that map “consciousness” to some-

  thing like class consciousness in Marxist theory or a consciousness of aes-

  thetic forms.56 Similarly, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, in Programmed Visions, glosses the “new organs” quote as being about our need to “grasp our

  relation to totality— to make sense of the disconnect between, and pos-

  sibly to reconnect, the real and the true. ”57 I read both these comments as taking Jameson’s call for mutation and new growth as metaphors for the

  need to rewire our thought for a new age of the political. But I ask: What

  if Jameson means this literally? Literal new organs, literal mutations in

  cognition. If we take Jameson at his word, instead of interpreting these

  calls metaphorically, we start to see the emergence of a properly trans-

  human Jameson, one who suggests that we must now evolve in response

  to our media ecology. In constructing this transhuman Jameson, we see

  that transhumanism is a Utopian system for imagining the new organs we

  might grow if we are to survive in the dizzying media landscape we have

  constructed for ourselves but do not yet understand.

  Both Chun and Nealon articulate the desire behind this transhuman

  Jameson’s call to expand our sensorium: there is a problem mapping our

  limited, human cognition into the global flows of information that make

  up postmodern life. This lack emerges as a crisis in the Utopian imaginary.

  In Nealon’s reading, Jameson’s Utopian project of imagining a “new organ”

  in the body and a “new mutation” in cognition was provoked by mutations

  in the exploitation of the human by capital, exploitative forms of power

  made possible by the kinds of technologies that inspire transhumanism

  in the first place. By looking back at and tracing forward Jameson’s 1991

  argument, Nealon, following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire,

  20 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  suggests the postmodern was the emergence of a move within capital-

  ism from an “extensive” economy, in which new markets are sought, to

  an “intensive” one, in which old markets are valued and exploited in new

  ways: “now [capital] turns inward toward intensification of existing bio-

  political resources. The final product, in the end, i
s you and me. ”58 In this era of capitalism, cognition is the chief site of labor, as Italian autonomist

  Franco Berardi has highlighted: “work is performed according to the same

  physical patterns: we all sit in front of a screen and move our fingers across

  a keyboard. We type. ”59 As Berardi, Negri, and the other Italian autonomist Marxists have argued, the configuration of the economy as a cybernetic

  information system, at the core of this neoliberal economic revolution,

  has made the mind, its maintenance, and its discipline as important today

  as the discipline of the body was to modes of capital organized around

  industrial production.

  Domesticated Evolutionary Futurism: Commodification of the Self versus

  Radical Thought in the Present

  Transhumanism has had a problematic relationship with this economics

  of the soul. Specifically, this difficult association is related to a crisis in

  evolutionary futurist ethos. On the one hand, as we shall see in chapter 1,

  the more mystical versions of evolutionary futurism are often dismissed

  by mainstream transhumanists as lacking in rigor and seriousness. On

  the other, the much more rational ethos of someone like Robert Ettinger

  risks being rejected for attempting to be serious about something that,

  to many people, seems far- fetched. In both cases, either a radically mys-

  tical or a radically rational approach to evolutionary futurity comes off

  as rhetorically unseemly to many audiences. In attempting to solve this

  problem of ethos, contemporary transhumanists often subtract many of

  the more radical claims made in the long history of evolutionary futurist

  rhetoric to create what we might call a domesticated strain of evolutionary

  futurism. This domestic evolutionary futurism suggests worrying linkages

  to the neoliberal construction of subjectivity as commodity and to the

  reduced capacity for basic empathy seemingly integral to contemporary

  global capital (as when, for instance, Silicon Valley insiders suggest that

  food stamps might effectively be replaced with boxes of the engineered

  nutritional supplement Soylent, a product designed specifically to help

  users optimize their flawed bodies). Further, these moves to domesticate

  evolutionary futurism risk reducing the alien philosophy proposed by Max

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

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  More and other thinkers working in the evolutionary futurist mode to a kind of defanged technological solutionism. Separating this tendency to

  march in lockstep with neoliberal productions of the self from the Uto-

  pian core of evolutionary futurist rhetoric is a potent vector for reigniting

  radical thought in the present.

  Berardi’s work, especially in recent years, has focused on this machin-

  ing of the unconscious as a tool for neoliberal subject- making, and, gen-

  erally, we might extend his thinking along evolutionary futurist lines to

  suggest that, if the mind is at stake in neoliberal capitalism, a discourse

  designed to expand the mind into new and radical dimensions would

  be a potent antidote to this cybernetic machining. Unfortunately, con-

  temporary transhumanism only partially provides such a curative. As the

  remainder of this book unpacks, there are many moments in the history

  of evolutionary futurism that anticipate a Utopian cognitive evolution.

  However, equally, the increasing trend toward domesticating the contem-

  porary transhuman movement— stripping the more radical philosophical

  insights of someone like Max More— and focusing on a kind of technologi-

  cal solutionism risks aligning transhumanism with the neoliberal machin-

  ing of the unconscious into a field of value production. Nealon’s analysis

  of neoliberalism, in which ultimately the product produced “is you and

  me,” highlights the commodification of the private and the use of brand-

  ing as a means of packaging the self as both a product for sale and as chief

  consumer. In this way, Nealon highlights the centrality of lifestyle brand-

  ing to contemporary economics.

  The move to domesticate transhumanism, as a strategy to solve the

  movement’s alien ethos, is not immune to creating a transhuman life-

  style brand. In FM- 2030’s Are You a Transhuman? (1989), the rhetoric of

  the movement shapes transhumanism as a kind of postindustrial life-

  style brand in which buying the right high- tech gadgets will make con-

  sumers into “the earliest manifestations of new evolutionary beings. ”60 To

  help readers answer its titular question, FM- 2030 also provides more than

  two hundred pages of Cosmo- style quizzes— “How Fluid Are You?” “How

  High Tech Is Your Attention Span?” “What Is Your Level of Humanity?”— to

  evaluate how close you are to “aligning and accelerating your rate of per-

  sonal growth. ”61 In doing so, FM- 2030 accelerates the rational futurity of Ettinger and, instead of asking readers to be unafraid, asks them to be

  at home with a radical future. Buying products becomes radical evolu-

  tion. In 2010, Raymond Kurzweil and the medical doctor Terry Grossman

  published Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, a kind of

  22 . I N T R O D U C T I O N

  self- help guide for readers to learn how to extend their lives long enough to capture the radical life extension technologies that were sure to arrive

  in the near future. Related to this publication, Kurzweil and Grossman

  also launched their company, Ray and Terry’s Longevity Products, to

  market a variety of supplements and health foods— including Green Tea

  Extract and Melatonin— to help their readers attain this future immortal-

  ity. However, as their website also makes clear, they are not merely another

  company selling herbal supplements. Their “About Us” page reads like a

  catalog of evolutionary futurist topics, exhorting customers to “reprogram

  your outdated system” and “take control of your own health status. ”62 In

  effect, the company creates transhumanism as a kind of lifestyle brand in

  the same way that Apple effectively articulates its products into a lifestyle

  narrative to be purchased and inhabited. While aligned with the general

  New Age focus on healthy and holistic living, the company explicitly con-

  nects its product line to a lifestyle organized around transhuman goals:

  longevity, control, reprogramming, and so on.

  When I can purchase longevity products from Ray and Terry to turn

  myself into a transhuman, I am intensifying my brand identity as a trans-

  human consumer, playing into the logic of capitalist intensities at the

  core of the neoliberal reprogramming of the unconscious: I manufacture

  myself as a member of the transhuman demographic. On the other hand,

  however, the more extropian visions of transhumanists, such as the one

  outlined by Max More, imply the subversion of the very logic of human

  subjectivity that this form of capital requires for its operation. This sub-

  version is the reason, I argue, that Jameson’s postmodern understanding

  of Utopia resonates so strongly with transhumanism. Although Jameson

  is staunchly committed to an idea of Utopia as being about an overcom-

  ing of the state,63 ideas about the human as the conceptual limit in our era are every
where in his work. Additionally, the shift in focus from the

  body to the unconscious, as suggested by the Italian autonomists, changes

  the necessary location of Utopian investment, and evolutionary futurism

  provides the concepts for imagining new political and cultural futures

  for humanity in which the human and not the state must be radicalized.

  Despite this Utopian possibility, many in the contemporary transhu-

  man movement see a more limited scope for what they hope to accomplish.

  I recently had a conversation on Twitter with a self- identified transhuman-

  ist who declared that transhumanism to him was just “people interested

  in using technology to help people,” which is a classic definition of tech-

  nopositivism, the philosophical belief that technology will always be able

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

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  to solve any problem humanity needs to overcome. With the emergence

  of a whole swath of lifestyle artifacts associated with transhumanism—

  from Ray and Terry’s various pills to Google Glass and Soylent to the lat-

  est in smart- home swag— there is a risk of diminishing the profoundly

  disruptive narratives about the future told by evolutionary futurism and

  turning this Utopian rhetoric into just another disruptive, solutionist ide-

  ology, thereby dangerously aligning transhumanism with core concepts

  of neoliberal subjectivity. So, in an effort to be taken seriously, how will-

  ing is transhumanism to dilute the content of its core insights? Moreover,

  what damage is done to the broader scope of evolutionary futurism, as a

  discourse of a Utopian future for our present moment, if this association

  between the neoliberal subject and the transhuman is intensified?

  By recovering the older, weirder aspects of evolutionary futurism,

  we can more clearly see the contributions transhumanism can offer to

  thinking about Utopia in the present. I wonder— and hence this book’s

  investigation into the rhetorical mode of transhumanism— if the lim-

  its of a certain configuration of the human also represent a limit to this

  kind of power relationship. In other words, I wonder if Max More’s defini-

  tion of transhumanism— “the continuation and acceleration of the evo-

  lution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human