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Hayles Program in Literature, Duke University, North Carolina Response Essay After shocks: Posthuman ambivalence N. Katherine Hayles Program in Literature, Duke University, North Carolina. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 262–271. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.28 When I began writing How We Became Posthuman (1999), I was drawn to the topic in part because of the intense ambivalence I felt toward the idea of the posthuman. I thought, no doubt naively, that writing would help me resolve it. Far from overcoming mixed feelings, the writing intensified my emotions by bringing the issues into sharper focus. As David Gary Shaw rightly observes, the book is drenched in feelings – feelings of dread, possibility and hope. More than a decade later, my ambivalence remains unresolved. I do not doubt that coming decades will see us plunging deeper into what I have elsewhere called the regime of computation, creating more intelligent machines and more pervasive data systems that, having already transformed the meaning of ‘human,’ will continue to do so with increasing urgency and momentum. What are we to make of this trajectory, and what are the possibilities for constructive interventions? While I have not escaped dread in contemplating these questions, I want to focus in this inaugural issue of postmedieval on what posthumanism can offer to premodern studies, and what premodern studies can offer to posthumanism. In my view, we cannot prevent the regime of computation from continuing to expand, but we have an opportunity to interpret it in ways that may help to maximize its positive potential and minimize its risks. With this objective in mind, I want to focus on three areas that seem to me particularly promising, richly explored in the essays in this collection: futurity, non-human others and distributed cognition. r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 262–271 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ Posthuman ambivalence Futurity in posthumanism finds its most extreme version in transhumanism, the philosophy articulated and embraced by an international movement that holds human evolution is not complete and that it is our duty – to ourselves, our ancestors and our descendants – to further human evolution to its ‘postbiological’ phase, when the human species will be technically able to escape the limitations of 1 embodiment, particularly mortality. Although transhumanism comes in several 1 See www. flavors, one of its principal ideas is the notion of the ‘singularity,’ a concept first humanityplus.org proposed by Vernon Vinge and taken up by Ray Kurzweil and others (Vinge, for the Humanity þ 1993; Kurzweil, 2006). ‘Singularity’ here alludes to its cosmological meaning of organization, aruptureinthefabricofspacetimethatcreatesablackhole,withagravitational formerly the World field so extreme nothing can escape being sucked into it once the event horizon Transhumanist has been passed. For transhumanism, this translates to a transformation in the Association. conditions of human life so extreme as to constitute a radical break from all previous human history. The posthuman singularity shares aspects with premodern versions of apocalypse, along with significant differences. Like the apocalypse, not everyone will advance to the next level; only those right-thinking individuals with access to high technology will make the transition successfully. Transhumanism consequently emphasizes the individual, especially the extraordinary person with the foresight and resources to prepare for the singularity and with the will and determination to help bring it about. Ray Kurzweil recently founded ‘Singularity University’ (http://singularityu.org/) with the proclaimed goal of preparing its elite students for the coming transformation. Unlike the apocalypse, however, the singularity does not consist of absolute and infallible (divine) judgment but rather a concatenation of technological, political, economic and social factors. If we grant for the moment the premise of a singularity, those ‘left behind’ will undoubtedly include the poor and disenfranchised of every country, as well as citizens of under-developed nations struggling to feed their populations, much less push them toward immortality. As a metaphor, the singularity both reveals and conceals crucial aspects of the contemporary global situation. Already visible are systemic differences in life outcomes so huge as to seem like a rupture in human history. One of the possibilities that transhumanism embraces, for example, is life extension – Kurzweil, a devout believer in life extension as a palliative measure until death is technologically conquered, is said to take over 250 pills and injections per day; he is determined, in his words, to ‘live long enough to live forever’ (Kurzweil and Grossman, 2005), which will be quite a challenge for a person over 60. Kurzweil’s obsessions aside, life extension is already a site at which inequalities are dramatically manifest. Some African countries, devastated by HIV/AIDS, have life expectancies in the low 40s, whereas most developed countries enjoy life expectancies in the 70s and 80s. Transhumanism espouses a philosophy of enlightenment, but in its emphasis on the extraordinary r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 262–271 263 Hayles individual, it also largely ignores questions of equity, allocation of resources, and national and class conflicts between the haves and the have-nots. Premodern studies can provide resourcesforunderstandingthepolitical, economic, social and cultural implications of the contemporary clash between radically different expectations: a privileged elite who look to much extended lifetimes (and in the extreme case, immortality) while assuming they will be able to avail themselves of the resourcesnecessarytoachieveit,andothers whom Thomas Pynchon refers to as the ‘preterite,’ those who have no chance to enjoy the benefits of advanced technology and the ‘long now’ that transhumanism predicts for its adherents. Meanwhile, of course, the same nations in which transhumanism flourishes are disproportionally depleting the earth’s natural resources and causing irreparable harm to the global environment. An example of the perspective that premodern studies can bring to contemporary concerns about the future is Karl Steel’s ‘Woofing and Weeping with Animals in the Last Days,’ a poignant evocation of the cries of animals when they realize that life on earth is ending and they have no possibility of being among the elect, since they putatively lack reason and so cannot participate in the Last Judgment. By destabilizing the category of the human, as Julian Yates points out, posthumanism can demonstrate once again how negotiable is the boundary of what counts as human; throughout history, some populations have been labeled as ‘animals’ or ‘sub-human’ to justify all kinds of atrocities and genocides. Another example is Jen Boyle’s concept of ‘transtime,’ a complex configuration in which past, present and future are compounded, with temporal trajectories tracing forward, backward and sideways. Such a concept helps to deconstruct the temporal linearity of the ‘singularity,’ in which time is conceptualized as moving irrevocably toward a unitary event that will presumably happen everywhere all at once. Short of worldwide nuclear holocaust or catastrophic asteroid strike, however, events do not proceed in this way. Rather, they are compounded of many local variations and speeds, some moving quickly, others slowly, and still others barely affected. Moreover, they do not all point in the same direction. Even with globally scaled events such as climate change, local variations and different adaptation strategies yield a wide variety of outcomes. In addition, premodern studies can offer counter-examples in which it is not the prospect of a future rupture that undoes existing social orders but other configurations of time; a case in point is Jonathan Gil Harris’s study of the ‘volatile now’ in Romeo and Juliet that sucks in the protagonists and subverts the order of children who carry on the patrimony of the fathers. Whereas premodern studies can complicate and diversify posthuman futurity, with influence flowing mostly forward in time from past cultural productions to the present, the dynamics are more reciprocal when it comes to non-human others. Destabilizing the category of the human, posthumanism is closely allied 264 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 262–271 Posthuman ambivalence 2 with such fields as animal studies and disability studies. Questions about the 2 See, for status of animals and plants, philosophical arguments that ground rights on example, Wolfe something other than human species-ism, debates on the ethics associated with (2009). stem cell research, and the possibility of human cloning are exemplary areas energized by posthumanism. These kinds of projects are well represented in the essays assembled here, with non-human others variously understood as including animals, plants, Paleolithic people, the dead and even stones. Here premodern studies serve to expand the category of the non-human, while simultaneously historicizing the ways in which humans and non-humans interact and co-constitute each other as categories. A related but distinct project is the exploration of the co-constitution of humans and tools. Technogenesis (sometimes called originary technicity), the idea
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