Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia Page 4
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
. 19
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
. 21
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