Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia

252 Pages·2017·2.28 MB·English

by  Andrew Pilsch

Transhumanism
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TRANSHUMANISM
Evolutionary Futurism and the
Human Technologies of Utopia
Andrew Pilsch
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
A different version of chapter 2 was published as “Fan Utopias and Self- Help
Supermen: Political Utopianism in World War II–E ra Science Fiction,” Science
Fiction Studies 41, no. 3 (2014): 524– 42.
Excerpts from “Aphorisms on Futurism,” “Parturition,” and “Songs to Joannes”
are from The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy. Works of Mina Loy copyright
1996 by the Estate of Mina Loy. Introduction and Edition copyright 1996 by
Roger L. Conover. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Also published in the United Kingdom in 1991 by Carcanet Press.
Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pilsch, Andrew, author.
Title: Transhumanism : evolutionary futurism and the human technologies of utopia /
Andrew Pilsch.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039456 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0101-1 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0102-8 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Humanism. | Philosophical anthropology.
Classification: LCC B821 .P46 2017 (print) | LCC B821 (ebook) | DDC 144—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039456
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 An Inner Transhumanism: Modernism and Cognitive
Evolution 25
2 Astounding Transhumanism! Evolutionary Supermen and
the Golden Age of Science Fiction 63
3 Toward Omega: Hedonism, Suffering, and the Evolutionary
Vanguard 103
4 Transhuman Aesthetics: The New, the Lived, and the Cute 139
Conclusion: Acceleration and Evolutionary Futurist
Utopian Practice 175
Acknowledgments  205
Notes  207
Index  231
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INTRODUCTION
What Is Transhumanism?
We exist in an age in which human futures have radically changed. As the
revolutionary energy flickered out at the end of the psychedelic sixties,
an organized movement of technologists, philosophers, and scientists
calling itself “transhumanism” began to emerge, especially in Western
Europe and the United States. First named in its modern incarnation by
FM- 2030,1 transhumanism is an increasingly pervasive movement and
an important actant, especially in technology policy and bioethics de-
bates, whose members seek, broadly, to hack the human biocomputer
to extend life, increase welfare, and enhance the human condition. As
Max More, transhuman philosopher and advocate for radical life exten-
sion, defined in 1990, “transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life
that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent
life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means
of science and technology, guided by life-p romoting principles and val-
ues.”2 More’s revised 1996 version of this definition also clarifies that the
movement seeks to use “a rational philosophy and values system” to rec-
ognize and anticipate “the radical alterations in the nature and possibili-
ties of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies such as
neuroscience and neuropharmacology, life extension, nanotechnology,
artificial ultraintelligence, and space habitation.”3
Since the 1970s, transhumanism has been gaining speed and influ-
ence, particularly among people who work with computers in places such
as California’s Silicon Valley or New York’s Silicon Alley, as the dizzying
pace of information technology appears to give increasing credence to the
ideas futurists such as FM-2 030 and Max More have been documenting for
. 1
decades. Inspired by theories of ever-o utward technological expansion—
such as Moore’s Law, which states that computing performance doubles
every eighteen months, or George Dyson’s observation that “global pro-
duction of optical fiber reached Mach 20 (15,000 miles per hour) in 2011,
barely keeping up with demand”— transhuman philosophy articulates a
stance toward communication technology that sees such massive, plan-
etary expansion of humanity’s technological reach as suggesting coming
mutations in the basic nature of the human condition.4 Transhuman-
ism, Max More suggests, comes after humanism, which More suggests
was “a major step in the right direction” but one that “contains too many
outdated values and ideas.”5 Transhumanists, according to More, seek
to remix the legacy of humanist thought from a “philosophy of life that
rejects deities, faith, and worship, instead basing a view of values and
meaningfulness on the nature and potentials of humans within a ratio-
nal and scientific framework” into one that embraces and anticipates the
radical changes brought about by planetary communication technologies
and radical technologies of the body.6
In More’s articulation of the movement’s philosophy, which has since
become the reference point for self-d efinition within the movement,
transhumanism represents a new form of the future that emerges in
response to these planetary changes. Most of the futures we are used to in
popular culture borrow from classical narratives of the American Golden
Age of science fiction (SF) and signal their futurity through some kind of
new technology external to our bodies (think of the various technological
marvels of the USS Enterprise on Star Trek or the famous Robert A. Hein-
lein sentence, “the door dilated,” in the first paragraph of Beyond This
Horizon [1942]). In these classical versions of the future, humans are more
or less the same and rely on their innate ingenuity, creativity, and new
technological tools to solve the various problems posed by whatever new
horizon is being explored. In this kind of speculative story, humanity is
presented amongst new technologies but is for the most part unchanged.
Transhumanism, instead, articulates a new kind of futurity, one in which
humans are rendered into a kind of posthumanity7 through technologies
that fundamentally alter basic elements of the human condition: lifespan,
morphology, cognition. Rather than evolving our future’s mise-en- sc ène,
transhumanism represents a new vision of the future in which we are
ourselves being evolved by the futuristic setting we have already created
for ourselves.
While transhumanism is often dismissed in academic circles as a
.
2 INTRODUCTION
retrogressive assertion of Cartesian humanism, a techno-s ecular reimag-
ining of Christian fundamentalist salvation history, and a celebration of
the most brutal forms of capitalist excess in the present, I argue in this
book that transhumanism is also what utopian thought might look like
in the age of network culture, big data, and the quantified self: a utopian
rhetoric for the information age. As cutting-e dge post- Marxist theorists
lament the failure of state-c entric utopia in the face of neoliberal capi-
talist expansion—m ost notably in Franco Berardi’s The Soul at Work and
Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future— transhumanism helpfully
articulates a rhetoric of utopia that uses the human body and the human
soul, which Berardi claims is colonized by capital, as the material for imag-
ining futures that are not mere re- presentations of the present. Although
there are flaws in transhumanist argumentation—i ts alien rationality and
its problematic defense of a myriad of concepts abandoned by avant-
garde philosophy being just two examples—i t is the only discourse today
actively imagining a radical future as radically alien as communism’s idea
of a classless society was in the late nineteenth century.
To recover this core of utopian argumentation, I argue for consider-
ing transhumanism from a much longer perspective than the movement
itself chooses to acknowledge. Specifically, transhumanism is part of a
utopian rhetoric of technology I call evolutionary futurism. Evolutionary
futurism, of which transhumanism is one heir in the present, rhetorically
situates technology as exerting mutational, evolutionary pressures on the
human organism. However, as I argue here and expand on throughout the
book, the longer history of evolutionary futurist rhetoric focuses more
explicitly on the ways of being— new philosophies, new social orders,
new affordances—u nlocked by an evolutionary overcoming of the cat-
egory of the human. Many of transhumanism’s most alien features, espe-
cially its problematic entwining with consumer capitalism, emerge from
a fetishization of the material pathways toward an evolutionary future at
the expense of the sweeping philosophical changes mandated by these
very imagined, radical futures.
To connect the terms I am working with—t ranshumanism, evolution-
ary futurism, and utopia—I move through each in its turn in this Introduc-
tion, building up an argument that connects contemporary definitions of
transhumanism to my concept of evolutionary futurism as a long- view,
unifying radical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with
calls for new, post- Marxist utopian praxis in the twenty- first. This Intro-
duction, thus, constitutes a sketch of the theoretical terms in operation
INTRODUCTION . 3