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The Transhumanist Delusion

      The urgency of keeping up with recent technological, social and ecological developments is also shown by the extent to which classical humanist ideas and anthropocentric habits are returning in the school of transhumanism. While the transhumanist movement is one of the most dominant trends within mainstream posthumanism, I will argue why this school is problematic and controversial from a feminist posthuman perspective.

      Transhumanism proposes to overcome the current format of the human through technologically mediated enhancement techniques. Transhumanism believes in the fusion of human consciousness with computational networks. The aim is to achieve human enhancement via brain–computer interface and it is proposed that cerebral and neural expansion is a way of fulfilling the potential of rational human evolution. The fusion of human brainpower and biology with technologies, in a phenomenon called Singularity, is presented as the fulfilment of the humanist project of perfecting humanity through scientific reason and technological advancement (Kurzweil, 2006). Human enhancement, far from making humans obsolete, is seen as an evolutionary leap forward of human abilities. However, transhumanism revives humanism insidiously through active interaction with the fluid but brutal workings of cognitive capitalism. Politically, the transhumanists defend liberal individualism and contribute to it. The transhumanists remain indebted to the Enlightenment project of social and political emancipation, through the moral deployment of the universal values attached to rationalist scientific progress (Bostrom, 2014).

While preaching moral universalism, the transhumanists pursue self-interest and implement the profit motives of advanced capitalism. In so doing they stipulate the dominant formula of transhumanist ethos: it is analytically post-anthropocentric, in that it confirms the decentring of the human by technology, but normatively, it reinstates the individual as holder of neo-humanistic ethical values, and politically it is aligned with economic neoliberalism. The combination of analytic posthumanism and normative neo-humanism, under the aegis of capital, makes transhumanism the mainstream model of posthumanism.

      However, from a feminist perspective this is problematic because it entails an explicit template for human evolution, which perpetuates and even exacerbates the patterns of discrimination, exclusion, disqualification (Braidotti, 2013) and de-selection (Wynter, 2015). Posthuman feminism works through the intersectional critical lenses of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ability, age, among others, acknowledging the differences in power and status among humans and between humans and non-human species. Posthuman scholars stress the relational bond and symbiotic continuum to the non-human world (Wolfe, 2010; Haraway, 2017). The transhumanists, on the contrary, dwell within the humanistic tradition (More, 2013), and embrace it for the sake of human enhancement, as indicated by their symbol ‘H+’ as an abbreviation for ‘Humanity Plus’. Science and technology are the means to reach this goal, which is set somewhere in the near future, with some humans becoming posthuman faster than others (Bostrom, 2014). You may remember that I argue instead that the posthuman convergence as the site of convulsive transformations of the human is already here. Contrary to the equivocations of the transhumanists that both support and undermine the ‘Man’ of humanism, posthuman feminism can be seen as a paradigm shift towards posthumanist, post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic ways of thinking and being.

The feminist engagement with the transhumanist project as a problematic response to the posthuman convergence dates back decades. It ties in with the postmodern discussion and its feminist repercussions.¹⁰ Hard-core postmodernists like Baudrillard (1988) and the Krokers (1987, 2014) took a euphoric stance on the changing status of the human and espoused early AI experiments with human–machine symbiosis (Minsky, 1985). They neglected the more sober accounts of this technologically driven mutation, offered, for instance, by Jean-François Lyotard (1984 [1979]; 1989 [1988]). From the 1980s onwards, a generation of cyberpunk writers, notably William Gibson (1984) made the switch from the postmodern flair for the artificial to the posthuman synthetic. In no time they confined the enfleshed human body to the rubbish heap of history, and synthetic biology and information technologies carried the day. Bruce Sterling, who wrote a passionate cyberpunk Hacker Crackdown manifesto (1992), initiated a current of speculative posthumanism in 2012. Surveying this early posthumanist landscape, Katherine Hayles summarized it as follows: ‘Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now obsolete, or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves’ (1999: 283). These male-centred and body-denying positions of hyper-humanism were targeted by many feminists from the 1990s and formed the core of my critique in Metamorphoses (2002). Cyberfeminists, as we shall see in a later chapter, paved the way for this criticism. Writers and activists like Kathy Acker (1990), Faith Wilding and the Critical Art Ensemble (1998), Pat Cadigan (1991), VNS Matrix (1991, 1994), and the Old Boys Network (1998) led the charge. They were technophilic, but not naïve, and took a more critical and original stance about technological enhancement (Plant, 1997). After all, the feminist tradition had by then already produced one of the most visionary pioneering texts on the mutations of the human: Donna Haraway’s ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ in 1985 (subtitled as a socialist-feminist manifesto). These agenda-setting interventions position feminism as both one of the originators of the posthuman turn and a vehement critic of its exclusionary aspects.

The rallying point for feminists is the acknowledgement that the human is changing in ways that put an end to 500 years of European humanism, as Hassan predicted in 1977. The concern shared by cyberfeminists, as by posthuman feminists, is that this mutation may entail a replication of the old patterns of patriarchal, capitalist and colonial exclusions. As we have seen in transhumanism, the danger is indeed that it perpetuates the denial of the embodied and embedded structure of all the subjects, and the more vulnerable forms of embodiment of the oppressed. On the contrary, cyberfeminists embraced the new technologies but with a difference (Braidotti, 1996), which means grounding and embodying the posthuman subject. That is also Francesca Ferrando’s tactic (2013, 2018). She makes a useful distinction between posthumanism and transhumanism by stressing the non-dualistic and intersectional strength of posthumanism. Ferrando radicalizes transhumanism by hacking it, that is to say delinking the project of human enhancement from the humanist ideal of perfection.

      This creative interpretation of the posthuman predicament is not new, but in fact a recurrent feature of feminist thinking. Feminism produced the very early posthumanist texts, such as Posthuman Bodies (Halberstam and Livingston, 1995). Feminists also focused on the technologies of sexed and gendered bodies (Bukatman, 1993; Stone, 1995; Turkle, 1995; Balsamo, 1996; Plant, 1997). All these theoretical interventions trust the embodied intelligence of humans as a species that has perfected its own complexity over a long evolutionary history, which cannot be reduced to, or incorporated into, the machinic apparatus. In so doing, they oppose the transhumanist project.

      In her important intervention, Hayles (1999) takes on the dominant idea of the transhuman as an extension of the Cartesian illusion of a mind–body dichotomy, where the mind stands for informational patterns that get privileged over material instantiation. This means that all matters related to the body and biology, including affects and emotions, are accidental and not fundamental. They can accordingly be manipulated at will. This illusion is built into an evolutionary programme whereby human consciousness and cognition, the core of the humanist definition of ‘Man’, can be enhanced by integration into machinic systems. The result is a fusion of human and technology, whereby one cannot distinguish bodily existence from computer simulation, cybernetic from biological organisms. Hayles argues that this approach expresses an enduring attachment to the liberal humanist vision of the individual, endowed with more-than-human technological powers.

      More recently, working from an Indigenous perspective, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017) also single out the complicity between Eurocentric humanism and advanced technology, as expressed both in the Silicon Valley ideology and the Oxford school of transhumanism. They are critical of the transhumanists’ definition of the posthuman condition as moving analytically beyond the human, but normatively remaining more humanistic than ever. How such a contradictory position can have any credibility is a wonder for critical posthumanists, who see transhumanism as one of the major reasons for the current demise

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