It’s funny, though, that these advocates of our glorious extropian future don’t seem to realize how historically specific is the idea of the “human” that they’re so keen to transcend. As Foucault puts it in The Order of Things:

It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that  man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form (xxiii).

The transhumanist idea that at some point in the future technology will lead to a radical alteration of what it means to be human assumes that there is something fixed about “what it means to be human” in the first place. But it seems to me that, if there is a defining characteristic of human beings, it’s our lack of a defining characteristic: “man is what he is not, and is not what he is,” as Sartre says. To put it another way, the technological event that changed the meaning of being human is the invention of technology itself; our bold futurists aren’t just 19th century throwbacks: they’re a couple of million years behind the times.

The other 19th century ideology underlying transhumanism, of course, is the idea of progress, the idea that the present will have its meaning given to it by something existing in the future; “the desire to be saved by something that isn’t there (or even the desire to be destroyed by something that isn’t there) and throws off no evidence of its ever intending to exist,” as Ellis puts it. Though he doesn’t mention it in the post, this aspect of the Singularity ties in with Ellis’s new comic series. Doktor Sleepless is about the future or, rather, the absence of the future. The story is complicated, and the motivation and character of the “cartoon mad scientist,” Doktor Sleepless remain opaque. One theme, though is disappoint at the failure of the future to materialize: “where’s my jetpack?” But I wonder if the Doktor’s nurse (in the panels at the top of the post) doesn’t have it right. If the future was always a trick, “pie in the sky when you die,” shouldn’t we start thinking about the absence of the future as a liberation?

(This might tie in with discussions at Nate’s about an obsession with “newness” in political theory, as well as Benjamin’s connection of futurity with social democratic reformism. And, I recommend reading Doktor Sleepless while listening to Benga’s  “Zombie Jig”).

Related posts:

1. Recipes for the delica­tes­sens of the future Discussions of the recent communist conference have me thinking about the relationship between theory and practice, again. Conveniently, I was reading Poulantzas today on the role of theories of the state in revolutionary action: They can never be anything other than applied theoretical-strategic notions, serving, to be sure, as guide...
2. Why is Habermas so dumb? Maybe I subsconsciously believe the analytic misrepresentations of Derrida. At least, I wouldn’t have expected that in a debate between Derrida and Habermas, it would be Derrida who provides the lucid, rigorous arguments. But what else are we to make of passages like this: The specialized languages of science and...
3. Ada Lovelace and Lucy Parsons Today is Ada Lovelace Day, on which people are blogging about “unsung heroines,” the women who have all too frequently been erased from histories and representations of technology. There’s something paradoxical about this erasure, as women have been integral to the history of technology at least since the industrial revolution....

Holy shit. I’ve just read Civil War: Frontline #4 , which features pictures from the current storyline overlaid with text about the Vietnam War, and explicitly draws parallels between the superhero “resistance” in the story and the NLF. The hubris is inspiring.

Some time back, k-punk quoted a critical take on recent comics in general, and Civil War in particular, which attacked them as stories “which do nothing more than mimic current events.” I think this misses the mark, though. While I agree with the implied criticism of the pointless, dreary reaction of postmodern “realism,” I don’t think, at least in the case of Marvel comics, that it makes sense to contrast this realism simpy with the fantastic or utopian. Marvel comics have always been about a certain relationship to realism, which is why Spider-man, a superhero who finds school and girls more difficult than supervillains, is the quintessential Marvel character. This is not, however, the simple assertion of the reality principle one finds in contemporary attempts show that heroes are “just like us,” that is, the deflationary realist view that There Is No Alternative. Quite the contrary, the introduction of the superhero’s “real life” into Marvel’s comics functions parodically to show the absurdity of such a deflation. The point is to escape from the more subtle assertion of the reality principle in the presentation of utopian possibilities as utopian. Inserting real life into the ludicrous world of the comic shows that it is precisely the real world that is ludicrous; that the impossible not only happens, but cannot help from happening.

Related posts:

1. “It does no good to the things to say merely that they have being” Recent posts at Object Oriented Philosophy and Larval Subjects made me think it’s worth disentangling a number of different ways in which objects could be thought to be “real.” First would be to maintain that objects cannot be reduced to their components, either physical or sensory (that is, there really...
2. And you shouldn’t fucking talk about telekinesis Bush’s press conference a few days back reminded me of the much-ridiculed line from a White House aide about the “reality-based community”: The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious...
3. Virtual life Good post by Moll on how the Internet has and hasn’t changed our lives. She’s particularly bang-on about Second Life. The odd thing about Second Life is how much effort has been put in to reproducing real life, but worse in every respect. Moving through physical space (but through the...