INTRODUCTION TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF POSTHUMAN FUTURES

Bart Simon

Francis Fukuyama's latest book, Our Posthuman Future: Conse-

quences of the Biotechnology Revolution, opens with a description of Aldous Huxley's scientifically engineered dystopia in Brave New World. "The aim of this book," states Fukuyama, "is to argue that

Huxley was right, that the most significant threat posed by contem-

porary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a 'posthuman' stage of history" (7). Both

sympathetic and critical readers of Fukuyama's previous work may be able to discern how the book proceeds; it is an impassioned de- fense of liberal humanism against contemporary cultures of laissez- faire individualism and unregulated corporate technoscience. While scientific progress is needed and desired for the good of all, if un- checked that progress threatens to alter the conditions of our com- mon humanity with the prospect of terrible social costs. The threat here is fundamental for Fukuyama; genetic technologies will alter the material and biological basis of the natural human equality that serves as the basis of political equality and human rights. Fukuyama asks, "[W]hat will happen to political rights once we are able to, in effect, breed some people with saddles on their backs, and others with boots and spurs?" (9-10).

Fukuyama's book is timely, not for the persuasiveness of his

arguments, but for his staunch defense of the state regulation of

biotechnology grounded in an Enlightenment narrative of a shared and inviolable human essence. In a world increasingly populated with genetically modified organisms and artificial life of all kinds, including the practical and potential manipulation of the biology of

Cultural Critique 53-Winter 2003-Copyright 2003 Regents of the University of Minnesota

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human beings, the return of human nature in Fukuyama provides fresh reinforcement for the crumbling humanist barricades in the

rising tides of posthumanity. Fukuyama's arguments are also em- blematic of the contradictions that arise when a historically humanist

public culture confronts contemporary corporate technoscientific fan- tasies of infinitely malleable life. We need not just look to Fukuyama for this; in public debates over reproductive technologies, artificial

life, biometrics, genetically modified organisms, gene therapy, cloning, and stem cell research, we can witness the confrontation on a daily basis around the globe.

But what precisely is this posthuman future that should be the cause of so much concern? With respect to this question, there has been unproductive confusion between what one might call a popular and a more critical posthumanism. Fukuyama's concern targets the

popular form, reducible perhaps to the following description from

Christopher Dewdney's Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era: "[W]e are on the verge of the next stage in life's evolution, the stage where, by human agency, life takes control of itself and guides its own des-

tiny. Never before has human life been able to change itself, to reach into its own genetic structure and rearrange its molecular basis; now it can" (1). This popular posthumanist (sometimes transhuman- ist) discourse structures the research agendas of much of corporate biotechnology and informatics as well as serving as a legitimat- ing narrative for new social entities (cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and virtual societies) composed of fundamentally fluid, flexible, and

changeable identities. For popular posthumanism, the future is a space for the realization of individuality, the transcendence of biological limits, and the creation of a new social order (Terranova 1996; Thacker, in this issue). While extreme versions of this discourse, such as the

writings of Max More (founder of the California-based extropian movement), remain on the margins of public culture, less extreme versions can be found in the pages of Time magazine and the New York Times, popular films such as The Matrix, the writing of scientists like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil, and the public relations of the Monsanto Corporation. Fukuyama has good reason to be concerned.

However, while targeting popular posthumanism, Fukuyama misses out on the substantial contributions of what Jill Didur (in this issue) calls a critical posthumanism, an interdisciplinary perspective

INTRODUCTION 1 3

informed by academic poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminist

and postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies. It is on the terrain of critical posthumanism that this special issue seeks to intervene by calling into question at the same time the politics and

analytical prospects of various liberal and philosophical humanisms as well as popular posthumanism. The collective goal of the authors featured in this issue is ambitious: to help develop an alternative framework for addressing the discourse and practice of posthu- man futures without resurrecting human nature or promising to be

blindly faithful to seemingly postmodern ideologies of infinitely mal- leable life. While there are other singular critical posthumanist texts that have made crucial inroads in accomplishing this task in far more

depth than we can undertake here (especially Haraway 1991; Latour

1993; and Hayles 1999), this collection marks an important cross-

disciplinary collective engagement, probing the limits and possibilities of posthumanist discourse for theoretical and political intervention in the humanities and the sciences.

The essays for this special issue grew out of two sessions on the

politics and theory of posthumanism organized by Jill Didur and Teresa Heffernan for the Third Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, held in Birmingham in June 2000. The mutual interaction of partici- pants at those sessions made it clear that all the authors brought together for this issue share a basic commitment to critical post- humanism in the sense evoked by Catherine Waldby (2000) as "a

general critical space in which the techno-cultural forces which both

produce and undermine the stability of the categories of 'human' and 'nonhuman,' can be investigated" (43). Our common project in this

special issue is neither for nor against posthuman futures but rather seeks to find a more potent analytics by weaving understandings of

biotechnological practice, public discourse about biotechnology and

informatics, and threads of critical and anti-posthumanist cultural

theory. Taken collectively these papers produce a tapestry that cap- tures what we perceive to be the most important dimensions of

posthumanist critique. At the core of this critique is the problematic of the humanist

subject with its traditional repercussions on questions of agency, identity, power, and resistance. Notwithstanding the technoscientific

developments that inform much of what counts as posthumanist

4 | BART SIMON

thought, the question of what it means to be human has been a source of contentious debate in the humanities for the last two decades. The

revolutionary Enlightenment narratives that challenged an oppres- sive feudal order and reenvisioned "man" as rational, autonomous,

unique, and free have been in turn challenged and deconstructed. The emancipatory impulse of liberal humanism has come to be understood as being unwittingly complicit in colonialist, patriarchal, and capitalist structures. As Heffernan (in this issue) writes, "Under- stood as local, fluid, contingent, and as contesting and rending the hierarchies of nature/culture, self/other, male/female, human/non- human, this postmodern subject is by now a familiar alternative to the conception of the self as fixed, autonomous, authentic, coherent, and universal." The postmodern subject is an unstable, impure mix- ture without discernable origins; a hybrid, a cyborg.

Given the humanist complicity that invited the critique of subjec- tivity that led to the postmodern model in the first place, the question now is whether that model is equally and unwittingly complicit. As Heffernan observes, the proliferation of hybridizing practices in bio-

technology and genetic engineering seem to turn the postmodern conception of hybrid subjectivity into a technoscientific fact, and

increasingly the discourse of popular posthumanism and theoretical

postmodernism seem to parallel each other. This is a troubling situa- tion for those invested in the political promise of the postmodern franchise. How does one disentangle the critical potential of hybrid subjectivity from the corporate technoscientific practice of produc- ing hybrids so well suited to the needs of global capitalism? Fuku-

yama's solution is to excavate a pure human subject, and while we are skeptical and concerned about humanist critiques of science that continue to posit nature and culture as epistemologically and ethically inviolate domains, we are not unaware of the importance of these human(ist) remains (see Badmington and Burfoot, in this issue). As for postmodern theory, we share the growing concern with a lack of attention to the material conditions for the organization, practice, and representation of contemporary sciences. The project then, is to sort out how to proceed.

To begin, Neil Badmington's "Theorizing Posthumanism" oper- ates on the terrain of contemporary cultural theory to work through the idea of posthumanism in terms of an inescapable tension between

INTRODUCTION | 5

humanism and antihumanism. Drawing on the latent critique of

Cartesian humanism present in Descartes's own writing as well as humanist traces in the work of Haraway, Badmington allows for a more nuanced theorizing of posthumanism by not giving in to the

temptation to characterize posthumanism as a radical break with

humanism. Indeed, as Badmington demonstrates, the construction of

the posthuman as a radical break or "pure outside" makes way for

the critical myopia of Fukuyama's brand of "apocalyptic posthuman- ism" as well as the popular posthumanism of the extropians and

biotechnological discourse. It stands to reason that "if 'Man' is pre- sent at 'his' own funeral, how can 'he' possibly be dead?" For Bad-

mington, a critical posthumanism must be willing to live with the

ghosts of humanism in the sense that "humanism has happened and continues to happen to 'us"' despite the fears and precautions (for some) or else elation (for others) at the prospect of the end of "Man."

Badmington's warning about the lingering ghosts of human- ism takes even more tangible form in Laura Bartlett and Thomas B.

Byers's "Back to the Future: The Humanist Matrix." This essay focuses on a crucial piece of posthuman popular culture, the 1999 Wachowski Brothers film, The Matrix. The film has been instrumental in establishing and entrenching cultural legitimacy for the popular posthumanist desire for disembodied agency explored in depth by N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman. Bartlett and Byers's close reading of this film teases out the tension of the human and the

posthuman alluded to by Badmington and calls attention to the humanist pretension latent in the desire to dissolve the material body. Indeed, Bartlett and Byers remain wary of the popular posthuman subject and note the surface correlation between the deconstructive model of postmodern subjectivity and the fluid, flexible, and frag- mented subjects of The Matrix. Across the central figure of the charac- ter Neo we see the postmodern valorization of hybrids and cyborg subjectivity along with the less than subtle cultural justifications of

posthuman futures grounded in new information technologies. Bartlett and Byers's analysis shows how "discourses of postmodern subjectivity are appropriated by the popular media for the produc- tion of a contemporary style," where "the subject may exhibit a sexy patina of postmodernism while still not differing in any fundamental

way from its liberal humanist predecessor."

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Bartlett and Byers's deconstruction of liberal humanist values

masquerading as posthuman critique is pursued along a different route in Annette Burfoot's "Human Remains: Identity Politics in the Face of Biotechnology." While keenly aware of the importance of the postmodern subject in terms of decentering and situating the discourse of human nature, Burfoot draws on contemporary feminist

critiques of the postmodern discursive subject to make the case for a materialist approach to posthumanism that is wary of masculine desires for an unaccountable transcendence or dissolution of the wholistic or "formative" body. Through discussions of the work of

Judith Butler, Somer Brodribb, and Karen Barad, Burfoot argues for the importance of "rescuing matter" or materiality from post- modern dissolution as a key aspect of critical posthumanism. And

yet, the task of rescuing matter is not particularly simple, as this is

precisely what the technosciences already do so well. Burfoot uses the term "biopleasure" to refer to the technoscientific materialism that fetishizes "the body as components" by "reify[ing] the objectifi- cation of the body in terms of denying its formative role and by affirming it as irreducible atomic matter." For Burfoot the technolo-

gies of biopleasure problematically rescue matter as a commodity form and an object of masculine desire and/or horror.

The issue of materiality and technoscientific practice continues as a central theme of Eugene Thacker's "Data Made Flesh: Biotechnol-

ogy and the Discourse of the Posthuman." Thacker's analysis ex- tends the work of Hayles on the history and discourse of cybernetics into the sphere of bioinformatic practice, showing that materializa- tion is at the heart of understanding bodies in terms of information. Indeed, bioinformatics has less to do with the disembodied human consciousnesses of The Matrix and more to do with a rematerializa- tion of bodies in accordance with what Thacker calls an "informatic essentialism" that codes all matter in terms of information. What is crucial for Thacker is that bioinformatics does not represent "a

repression, denial, or effacement of the body-rather it proposes that the relationships between the biological body and information tech-

nology is such that the body may be approached through the lens of information." It is this informated matter that serves as the basis of the posthuman fantasies of biotechnology; "materiality is now a

INTRODUCTION | 7

programmable informational pattern with real effects" that suit the needs of global capitalism in a manner similar to Burfoot's technolo-

gies of biopleasure. The "real effects" of biotechnological practice in light of post-

human critique form the subject of Jill Didur's "Re-embodying Tech- noscientific Fantasies: Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life." Didur reads the recent work of the

philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and the public discourse of the Mon- santo Corporation's genetically modified foods research as a form of

popular posthumanism producing an eerily humanist understand-

ing of genes as disembodied and dematerialized entities that is both contested and contestable within the frame of critical posthuman- ism. Further, when Didur looks to representatives of the anti-GMO

(genetically modified organisms) movement for a rejoinder to Sloter-

dijk's neo-eugenics and Monsanto's capitalist imperative, she finds an equally problematic position where "Genetic engineering in the lab ... is represented as a violent assault on nature and a form of con- tamination invading the otherwise pure and untainted boundaries of the body of the liberal subject." This last point is crucial for Didur; the effective critique of genetic engineering and biotechnology does not lie with the preservation of absolute boundaries between natural and artificial kinds. In this sense, corporate and critical posthuman- ism certainly share a distrust of the rhetoric of "pure" nature de-

ployed by the Green movement, but critical posthumanism insists on

foregrounding the material context of informatic essentialism and

biopleasure. This not only guides the critique of popular posthuman discourse but may also have an impact on experimental practice as Didur illustrates in the case of Anne Clarke, a Canadian scientist with a different, perhaps critically posthuman view of agricultural genetics.

Didur's critique of typically humanist responses to Monsanto is revisited in the context of Heffernan's "Bovine Anxieties, Virgin Births, and the Secret of Life." Offering a critical posthumanist read-

ing of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Heffernan's essay picks up directly on the horror implied by the posthuman through an exami- nation of the public discourse around the ethics of developing trans- genetic organisms like the cow-human. While resonating with many

8 1 BART SIMON

of the key themes in the other papers, Heffernan brings critical race

theory to the table and argues for an analytic frame for thinking through the implications of genetic hybrids without having to fall back on pure humanist categories that make revulsion, rejection, and exclusion the only viable modes of resistance to corporate techno- scientific practice. For Heffernan, Frankenstein's monster provides a means for working through the residual humanism of biotechno-

logical discourse. "The biotech companies mobilize hybridity as if humans were safeguarded from it; hence nature is merely an instru- ment designed for 'our' disposal in the pursuit of immortality. Criti- cal posthumanists recognize that this violent differentiation between humans and nature paradoxically produces us as increasingly hybrid, as increasingly part of and produced by that other."

This special issue ends with a contribution from N. Katherine

Hayles, whose writing has both inspired and informed much of the collective work featured here. Hayles helps to bring the project into focus by providing an afterword that ties the main themes and argu- ments of the essays to her own thought. As her comments help demonstrate, in the negotiation and complication of the politics of the

postmodern and liberal humanist subject, critical posthumanism involves a specification of the relationship between information and

materiality that characterizes contemporary technoscience and popu- lar posthuman discourse. Further, we are reminded that the posthu- man is figured not as a radical break from humanism, in the form of neither transcendence nor rejection, but rather as implicated in the

ongoing critique of what it means to be human.

Works Cited

Dewdney, Christopher. Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era. Toronto: Harper- Collins, 1998.

Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002.

Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Lon- don: Free Association Books, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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Terranova, Tiziana. "Posthuman Unbounded: Artificial Evolution and High-Tech Subcultures." In FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture, ed. George Robertson et. al. London: Routledge, 1996.

Waldby, Catherine. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. London: Routledge, 2000.