While Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), a bleak portrayal of an ectogenetic future remains popular today, his brother’s role in bringing transhumanism into the public imagination is less well known. An evolutionary biologist, Julian Huxley was the first to use the term ‘transhumanism’ in 1927 to describe the new business of human species transcendence. The transhumanist mission is to intervene in the human evolutionary process using biotechnology, cognitive neurosciences, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Pop culture has brought these ideas to light in an arc of utopian and dystopian fantasies. From the possibility of eternal life offered in Altered Carbon (novel 2002, series 20018-), to moving beyond current physical and mental capacities with Limitless (film 2011, series 2015-16), to the unanticipated moral and ethical consequences of emerging technologies in Black Mirror (2011-). Heterosexual intimacy and gender-based violence in a future dominated by AI and virtuality is also explored in films such as Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2014). Though the future of the species as human 2.0 (including cyborg prosthetics, genetic modifications, and networked brain function) has the potential to dissolve some binaries that separate us (young and old, able-bodied and disabled, male and female), wealth seems fundamental to opportunity. Critics of transhumanism ask who will benefit from these advances, and will entrenched advantage become all the more unassailable in a transhumanist future? 

Questions of structural disadvantage are central to the intersectional and feminist approaches of the posthumanists. Understanding how and why these power dynamics persist requires a revision of the definition of human and its foundation in, and evolution with, the knowledge practices of the Western tradition. Human exceptionalism is a core tenet of Christianity in the Western world, the belief that humans represent the apex of a hierarchy of beings, over which we are given dominion. Enlightenment humanism perpetuates the human-centric and essentialist model of the world, through the elaboration of a rational, individual, citizen-subject. In this sense, the ‘post’ of posthumanism is not so much an abandonment of humanism (which is anti-humanism), as a delayed recognition of its inadequacy and role in maintaining inequalities. Donna Haraway’s ground-breaking Cyborg Manifesto (1985) argues for a liberation from the repressive taxonomies of this tradition that continue to justify domination in all its forms, such as colonialism, naturalism, industrial capitalism, and patriarchy. In its overt fabrication and hybridity, the cyborg provides a figuration for the fluidity of gender and sexuality, and in its monstrous fusion of the human, the non-human, the material and immaterial, and the machine, the cyborg celebrates affinity and cross-species kinship. 

Only last year the BBC found that ‘human’ cells make up only forty-three percent of the body’s total cell count, with the rest being microscopic colonists that mostly inhabit our bowels. Relinquishing out-dated ideas of the human as a discrete, pure, hierarchical being is a necessary step in the search for how to live well on a vulnerable planet. The quantum physicist Karen Barad claims that the concept of human independence and pure agency has no basis in the material composition of the universe; instead, we are enmeshed with the stuff of the world across time in an always-unfolding intra-active state of becoming. The sociologist Bruno Latour offers a formula for rethinking our place in the world and establishing a new form of ecological governance. By politicising ‘nature’, a word that is subjective, ideological, and used in binary terms against ‘culture’ or ‘society’, Latour argues that we might finally start to think of the human and non-human as part of a singular web, mutually embedded within a mesh of social, political, and phenomenal relations. Posthumanism at its core is about affinity and responsibility, and in our time of global crisis it is a vital rallying cry. 

Jaime Tsai, 2019

References:

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK; Malden, USA: Polity Press, 2013)

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke Univercity Press, 2016)

Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004)

Robert Manzocco, Transhumanism – Engineering the Human Condition, History, Philosophy and Current Status (Cham: Springer, 2019)

Photos: Docqment