Human Enhancement as Fantasy Projection

Machines “project” as the phenomenologists say or, as the techno-theorists put it, they “extend” our human senses and our consciousness. The addictive and phantom effects of the internet have everything to do with this. Using this same phenomenological reading of technology, trans- and post-humanists are fond of speaking of human “enhancement.”  

But a phenomenological analysis of technology would remind us that the augmentation in question is more attuned to the machine than it is (or can be -- and this is in spite of the detours that Latour and actor-network theorists rightly emphasize) cut to human measure. 

Bruno Latour

 It is a reflection of this very attunement that, to speak as the ethnographers and sociologists who study this phenomenon, we are “machine-obedient.” 

Martin Kusch

Harry Collins

Nor are we as mechanically tractable or responsive as we are because we wish to be — because we love our machines, erotically, affectively, as Latour suggests that we do[1] or else as Donna Haraway has also argued (albeit in another way),[2] but and quite simply inasmuch as we have to be machine-obedient simply to use our machines in the first and last place. 

This is true from our autos to our computers and cell phones and cameras, indeed and even Facebook and so on. 

And here there is a network-actor loop (or loophole) at work: for it turns out that the greater our obedience, the more we comply, the better technologically attuned or, just to show our easy familiarity, the better techno-geeked out we are, the “better” the machine “obeys” our every whim.  

Christian Bale’s Batman survives the end of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises not just because of his technology, from his batsuit and its associated gadgets to his humvee (with wings) or tank transporter in the sky, but because of his intimate, second nature, or automatic (done weeks ago) coding prowess.

 

Bruce Wayne not only zen-wills himself out of a physical breakdown, with the aid of chiropractic, a ‘science’ traditionally derided by modern medicine but widely known for its efficacy, but through transcendence of will, he rises, learning fear, becoming like a child, out of the cave of his Jodhpur prison (this ascent is the meaning of the title).

But, and this is the film’s great Lacanian secret, this is the heart, this is the rule of the Symbolic Order, Bale’s Batman in addition to being Batman and having all Batman’s resources (that would be comic book fantasy oodles of money colliding with real-live OWS corruption and the associated economic implosions of the same, and that would also be the star power of Morgan Freeman and the always excellent Michael Caine) also writes software like no one else can. 

And he does it on the fly, there’s that deus ex machina of movie time, a full six weeks ago, always already. 

It is this that “saves” him -- precisely by saving the girl, who, shades of Pretty Woman, “saves him right back.”

Ah, equality. 



Notes

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[1] Latour, Aramis or the Love of Technology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

[2] Donna Haraway, Modest Witness@Second Millennium: Female_Man©_Meets_Oncomouse^TM, London & New York, Routledge 1997 but see also her “A Cyborg Manifesto,” taken from her Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), chapter 8, pp.  149-181. Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html) is an online dissemination of this chapter that works if anything has worked, through the erotic, feminist fantasy cover designed by Haraway and the painter, whose work was originally not attributed, Lynn Randolph. 

As the artist describes her own picture. 

“I placed my human-computer / artist / writer / shaman / scientist in the center and on the horizon line of a new canvas. … A giant keyboard sits in front of her and her hands are poised to play with the cosmos, words, games, images, and unlimited interactions and activities. She can do anything.”  

http://www.lynnrandolph.com/ModestWitness.html 

Donna Haraway

With all the power lent by the imaginary, Haraway remains the go-to reference for writings on the posthuman or human-cyborg techno-hybrid. See for one example, just for a start, Haraway’s interview with Hari Kunzru, “You Are Cyborg,” Wired Magazine, 5/2 (1997): 1-7.

Nietzsche: On "getting oneself a culture"

Nietzsche’s own reflections on
 what is needed for an “education” as such are quite formidable—even as his own education was an extraordinary one. To this extent, we betray something of the limitations of our own formation whenever we find ourselves insisting that Nietzsche took or borrowed  his ideas from other thinkers—what does it mean (and this will be the point here) to “take” or “borrow” an idea?—ranging from Pascal and Spinoza or else Spir and Lange or Emerson, or Gerber, or Stirner or ultimately and of course, from Wagner himself (especially for the Wagnerians for whom no limit to the master’s own cultural prowess can be imagined).  

I am not saying that Nietzsche was not familiar with these thinkers, far from it. I am saying that an education is this familiarity and much, much more. Thus although it is amusing to note that the identity of the supposed origination of (the so-called ‘sources’ for) Nietzsche’s ideas just happens to change in the scholarly literature over time (and not less with the mood and, nota bene!, educational formation of his commentators), it is also noteworthy that the very same set of assumptions applies (negatively speaking) for those who are fond of insisting that Nietzsche could never have read Kant (just to pick one contentious example, contentious given the influence of Kant on the 19^th century, an influence we fail to see in the 20^th as in the 21^st century, at least so far).

The idea that an education, the getting of or the having of one, is a simple affair, and thus that the parallel idea of an upgrade to the more-than-human, that is now: the trans-human would simply be like taking a course, signing up for an instructive module, supposes that one pretend, (as transhumanists do like to pretend) that one can/should set aside questions of cultural inequalities, differences in wealth, “class” differences and so on. In this (an sich inherently optimistic when it is not calculating when it is not deliberately mendacious) regard, the transhumanist movement may be revealed as a humanism, here using the term as Sartre once spoke of Existentialism as a Humanism.

By contrast Heidegger’s “Humanismusbrief” is written against such a presupposition. See Sartre’s L’existentialism est un humanisme and compare both with Sloterdijk’s controversial Elmau lecture: Regeln für den Menschenpark. 

Hence and at least in principle, human enhancement may be regarded, if only for the sake of argument, as corresponding to “enhancement for all,” like “micro-chips for all,” or “airport security searches for all.”