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

  Valentine de Saint- Point’s “Manifesto of Futurist Women,” in which the

  role of women was to birth and foster male genius.11 As Lyon continues, providing further biographical background,

  By the end of 1914, after she had been through her sexually and emotion-

  ally disappointing affairs with Marinetti and Papini, her enthusiastic echoes

  of futurism gave way to probing analyses of futurism’s platform concerning

  women and heterosexuality. From 1914 to 1916 she produced a number of

  remarkable critiques of futurism’s relation to Woman and futurists’ relations

  with women, including the unpublished “Feminist Manifesto” (1914), the

  poem sequence Songs to Joannes (published 1915), the unpublished play The

  Sacred Prostitute (ca. November 1914), and the play The Pamperers (1916; published 1920).12

  This canon of futurist texts (to which I will add “Parturition” [1914])

  observes with a sharp critical eye the construction of femininity within

  the futurist avant- garde during the years leading up to World War I.

  As Lyon explains, Loy’s critique of futurism probes

  the Manichaean rift between the sexes wrought by futurists and their con-

  tinental progenitors. In them, as in a host of other works, Loy plays with

  futurism’s taxonomical constructions of “woman” and extemporizes her

  own alternative taxonomies of “man”: she also highlights deferred spaces

  of meaning between “woman” and “man” and so unhinges futurist certitude

  about the ontologically gendered foundations of avant- garde poetics. Finally,

  throughout her work Loy simply refuses to give up any of her own claims to

  avant- garde authenticity.13

  In Lyon’s reading of Loy, this criticism of a simplistic and profoundly

  discriminatory gender system (in which women are constructed in

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 31

  fragmented opposition to a philosophically smooth and whole mascu-

  linity endowed with action and speed) hinges on articulating a similarly

  fragmented model of masculinity. Further, Lyon intimates that Loy’s criti-

  cism of futurism stands in opposition to the specifically Nietzschean fer-

  vor of futurism’s overcoming.14

  It is this claim I want to complicate in this section. In my reading of Loy’s

  rhetoric, I find that her writings of critical futurism strongly deploy evo-

  lutionary futurist tropes and patterns. Moreover, Loy’s writing is strongly

  supportive of the Nietzschean posthuman paradigm. Lyon argues that

  Loy is critical of Nietzsche because of the predominant misunderstand-

  ing of what is meant by Übermensch. However, as Carolyn Burke makes

  clear in her biography, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (1997), Loy

  read widely in Nietzsche and others in the “New Thought” whose wider

  circulation in Europe marked a beginning of avant- garde modernism.15

  As additional evidence of her affinity for Nietzschean thought, in “Apho-

  risms on Futurism” (1914), Loy borrows the form of Nietzsche’s late writ-

  ing (the aphorism) to make her most orthodox contribution to futurism’s

  manifesto- driven culture. In fact, Burke’s biography mentions a specific

  episode in 1903 in which, tellingly, Loy dismisses the occult dabbling of

  Aleister Crowley and other occultists for having only, as Burke puts it,

  “slight knowledge of Bergson, tinged with an even slighter appreciation

  of Nietzsche. ”16 As Loy wrote in the manuscript for her never- published autobiography, from which Burke cites throughout Becoming Modern, she was unsettled by “their somewhat sinister conviction of being

  supermannish”— less a rejection of Nietzsche per se than a disappoint-

  ment with bad Nietzscheanism that she would level against the futurists

  later in her life, as I discuss below.

  This misunderstanding of Loy’s engagement with Nietzsche may hinge

  on finding a translation for the German phrase that accurately captures

  Nietzsche’s multivalent meaning for Übermensch. Many early translators

  chose to render the phrase as “superman” in English. As Michael Tan-

  ner declares in Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction, “I find ‘superman’

  absurd,” mirroring the opinion of many philosophers who grew up in

  a culture familiar with Action Comics.17 Beyond mere embarrassment, though, nearly every book about Nietzsche feels some need to comment

  on the chosen translation of the German phrase. Ullrich Haase’s account,

  from Starting with Nietzsche, offers a useful account of the stakes involved

  in the particular translation of this concept:

  32 . A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M

  The notion of Übermensch in Nietzsche’s works has long attracted considerable interest and it is perhaps not too surprising that much of this interest

  has led to sometimes amusing and sometimes catastrophic interpretations.

  Thus in particular the National Socialists of the German Third Reich have

  made out of this Übermensch the caricature of a self- willed “Blond Beast.”

  The first translation of this term in Nietzsche’s texts as the “Superman” has only worsened this absurd image. This idea of the Superman “having” a great

  Will to Power by means of which he would subjugate other humans has,

  unfortunately, held sway for a long time. This is not on account of any close

  reading of his works, but simply because that is how one could easily under-

  stand the terms Will to Power and Superman. Consequently, many translators have adopted the more literal translation “Overman.” This translation

  makes more sense in terms of the Über, but still suffers from implying a single individual. But Nietzsche does not speak about an individual male or female

  human being, but about the historical existence of the “human being. ”18

  Haase concludes by stating that he translates Übermensch as “Overhu-

  man” because it captures the essence of Nietzsche’s original concept: the

  Übermensch replaces the human as one philosophical concept replaces

  another, not as one individual replaces another. Far from being an actual,

  existing figure (as it is often documented in science fiction and comic

  book appropriations), the Übermensch is a guidepost for becoming: a bea-

  con to humans who want to overcome the contingent and base existence

  Nietzsche associates with humanist conceptions of life.

  So much of our rhetorical associations with the concept of Übermensch

  invoke individual superbeings (who often wear red capes), but how else

  can the Übermensch be a guidepost? The Übermensch represents an idea

  of a future being that is beyond the human condition. This idea does not

  have specific characteristics. Instead, the Übermensch stands for all ave-

  nues beyond the human, without a specific shape. Ullrich Haase uses

  a specifically ingenious means of explaining the relationship between

  Mensch and Übermensch: he imagines an ape thinking about a future in

  which their species ends. While the ape will not be able to articulate the

  specific shape of the species to come, it may be able to name this spe-

  cies to come “the overape.” Of course, in retrospect, we can see that the

  overape is the human, but we cannot know that before the fact.19 In other words, “Übermensch” is what we call any being that will come to fill our

  place as t
he dominant species on Earth.

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 33

  This distinction between individual supermen and a coming overhu-

  manity is critical to understanding both Loy’s critique of futurism and her

  importance in building a conceptual bridge between avant- garde mod-

  ernism and transhumanism. Loy is not critical of Nietzsche qua Nietzsche.

  Instead, she is critical of what we might call the “sullen little boy” model

  of Nietzsche, in which (and I am assuming we have all encountered these

  kinds of people) a teenager reads Nietzsche and assumes, because of his20

  perceived intellect, that he is the Übermensch. This is the sort of bad reading of Nietzsche that Loy assigns to the futurists. As Lyon writes, for Loy

  “no amount of individual will . . . can wish away the political, social, and

  biological components that accrue to gendered subjectivity. ”21 The often absurdly hyperbolic position of futurists such as Marinetti becomes petty

  teenage bombast in the face of the messy gendered realities Loy docu-

  ments, plastering over a frightening, confusing reality with a machismo

  masking the scared and lonely teenager within.

  Loy’s distinction is drawn out in Lyon’s reading of the dichotomy

  between lust in futurist writing and sex in Loy’s transhuman poetics. In

  Lyon’s reading, lust (which is the watchword in Valentine de Saint- Point’s

  various manifestos on futurism and women) is merely a “unilateral drive,”

  the kind of naive will- to- power of the sullen and solitary teenage Nietz-

  schean. In contrast, Lyon argues, “‘sex’ constitutes a rare overlap of sub-

  jectivities”; it is “intersubjectivity,” “an even more dynamic composition of

  both bodies and psyches. ”22 In this reading, Loy’s reconstitution of gender merges with the merging of bodies and souls in the congress of sex to open

  new vistas of personal evolution as well as species evolution. Lyon con-

  cludes her observations with this intersubjective understanding of eros,

  but I want to push on these evolutionary vistas. Regarding Loy’s accounts

  of sexuality and her readings of the Übermensch as signposts to be worked

  toward can, I argue, contextualize her writing as the first major instantia-

  tion of a particular evolutionary futurist topos, which psychologist Richard

  Bucke labeled in 1901 as “cosmic consciousness.”

  Bucke, a former asylum director, captures in Cosmic Consciousness: A

  Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901) an evolutionary model

  of consciousness in which various stages are dynamically and evolution-

  arily explored by life in its various configurations. His formulation sug-

  gests that there exist two widespread forms of consciousness: the simple

  consciousness of animals and the reflective consciousness of humans

  (which he calls “self consciousness”).23 In this formulation, human consciousness is singular, and singularly evolutionary, because of its ability

  34 . A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M

  to reflect back on itself. For Bucke, if we pause and meditate, we can move our consciousness to higher orders of contemplation. He finds

  models for this evolutionary thought in the life of Buddha and in Jesus.

  This reflexive quality is, beyond Bucke, central to many of the transhu-

  man accounts of the evolution of consciousness. For instance, Pierre Teil-

  hard de Chardin praises “the spiritual phenomenon of reflection” in his

  outline of noöspheric evolution, which I will discuss in greater depth in

  chapter 3. Similarly, sourcing his philosophy from Albert North White-

  head, Alfred Korzybski, who devised a system for overcoming the human

  through manipulations of basic grammatical rules, posits reflexivity as

  the chief means by which thought may become thought about thought,

  thereby opening the path to higher consciousness. Additionally, we find

  this idea of reflexive cognitive evolution at the core of a variety of mysti-

  cal and cybernetic systems, including Timothy Leary’s multifaceted the-

  ory of cybernetic circuits of mind outlined in Info- Psychology, the Spiral

  Dynamics of Beck and Cowan, the concept of aša in Zoroastrianism (itself

  an inspiration for Pythagoras’s concept of Cosmos in the first place), and

  the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. This tropic treatment of human con-

  sciousness, popularized in the West in the twentieth century by Bucke,

  has long been central to an evolutionary futurist rhetoric.

  More directly relevant to Mina Loy’s poetics and more connected to

  evolutionary futurism, however, is Bucke’s third stage of consciousness

  evolution, what he labels “cosmic consciousness.” Cosmic conscious-

  ness is an enlightened modality of thought, which Bucke says is “a con-

  sciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe. ”24

  Bucke states that this third state of consciousness is accompanied by “an

  intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the

  individual on a new plane of existence,” along with “an indescribable feel-

  ing of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral

  sense. ”25 Cosmic consciousness becomes a state of being at peace with the entirety of existence, in which a “universal scheme is woven in one

  piece and is permeable to consciousness. ”26 This cosmic frame of mind—

  beyond intersubjectivity— is the model foregrounded in Loy’s writing as

  she moves beyond futurism. For Lyon, Loy’s poetics atomize masculinity

  in the same way that sexist discourse in futurism atomizes (and thereby

  subordinates) “the” “feminine.” Loy is also doing something else, some-

  thing cosmic. In her “Aphorisms on Futurism,” a text Lyon describes as

  being primarily involved in “the eugenic individualism of the futurist

  mode,” Loy begins to make the case for cosmic consciousness as being

  A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M . 35

  of interest to (and perhaps of paramount importance for) the corporeally obsessed (male) futurists.27 Loy writes,

  today is the crisis in consciousness.

  consciousness cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as

  offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period

  of time it may remain a mere irritant— that molds consciousness to the

  necessary amplitude for holding it.

  consciousness has no climax.

  let the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its

  capacity, nothing that it shall not re- create.

  unscrew your capability of absorption and grasp the elements of

  Life— Whole.28

  Contrast this with F. T. Marinetti’s statement on the absolute in “The

  Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909):

  We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! . . . Why should we look

  back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Im-

  possible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute,

  because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.29

  Marinetti’s manifesto, inaugurating futurism, is obsessed with death,

  destruction, and liberating Italy from “the smelly gangrene of profes-

  sors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. ”30 Through the speed of the motorcar (which propels Marinetti and his futurist
colleagues on the

  mad chase after Death that famously opens the manifesto), humanity has

  already unlocked the absolute, the limits of human being. The only task

  remaining for art is to destroy the past in order to liberate this aesthetic

  of speed so that humanity can wake up to a new machinic consciousness.

  In contrast to this violent car crash with the absolute of the techno-

  modern death drive, Loy’s position in “Aphorisms on Futurism” is radically

  different: radically more transhuman, and, generally, more radical. Unlike

  Marinetti’s boys in fast cars, Loy recognizes (as Bucke similarly argues)

  that humanity exists on a continuum of cognitive evolution that, impor-

  tantly, “has no climax.” For Loy, the human is a transitory configuration in

  a much longer unfolding of consciousness into cosmos, an “unscrew”- ing

  of humanity’s “capability of absorption” to “grasp” the “Whole.” This merg-

  ing and expanding imagery is quintessentially transhuman and has little

  to do with the violent individualism of Loy’s literally small- minded peers

  in the futurist movement.

  36 . A N I N N E R T R A N S H U M A N I S M

  Loy’s transhumanization and the cosmic consciousness that results

  continues to develop as she more fully frees herself from the trappings of

  Italian futurism. In many ways, from our later historical perspective, Mina

  Loy is a transhumanist in search of a discourse. While futurism initially

  seems to provide this for her (especially in the “Manifesto” and “Apho-

  risms”), as she increasingly regards futurism as the boys- with- toys club

  that it (mostly) was, she begins to actualize her own evolutionary futur-

  ism, marking her as an early transhumanist. Beyond the allusions to a

  cosmic consciousness in “Aphorisms on Futurism,” the theme begins to

  explicitly appear in Loy’s work in “Parturition,” an account of giving birth

  in which Loy’s experience as “the centre / Of a circle of pain” opens up

  vistas to the kind of totality Bucke described.31 Moreover, Loy describes this experience as “cosmic,” first referring to her birthing chamber as “my

  congested cosmos of agony” before later describing

  A moment