"H+/-: Transhumanism and its Critics"

"Transhumanism" is seldom mentioned in discussions concerning the posthuman in literary and cultural theory. Katherine Hayles, with her critique of our cultural condition of "virtuality," in which we privilege information over the material locations in which it is instantiated, is perhaps an exception to this observation. Indeed, in her essay, "Wrestling with Transhumanism," she writes, "transhumanism for me is like a relationship with an obsessive and very neurotic lover. Knowing it is deeply flawed, I have tried several times to break off my engagement, but each time, it manages to creep in through the back door of my mind. In How We Became Posthuman, I identified an undergirding assumption that we will soon be able to upload our consciousness into computers and leave our bodies behind. I argued that this scenario depends on a decontextualized and disembodied construction of information" (215).

Hayles goes on to observe that "there are, of course, many versions of transhumanism, and they do not all depend on the assumption I critiqued. But all of them… perform decontextualizing moves that oversimplify the situation and carry into the new millennium some of the most questionable aspects of capitalist ideology" (215).

Whether or not we agree with the latter part of Hayles claim, H±: Transhumanism and its Critics, presents a series of essays by transhumanist and posthumanist thinkers that explores the “many versions” of transhumanism.

How to define "transhumanism"? Oxford professor and transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom offers the following influential definition:

Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rationale means, we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have. (29)

"Transhumans," then, represent an intermediary stage between the human and the posthuman. The transhuman community is involved in envisioning an evolutionary path for the transhuman into its posthuman future, using emerging NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive sciences) developments to better the human, while at the same time avoiding the "existential risks" (to use Bostrom’s phrase) posed by these converging technologies.

The sixteen advocates and critics of transhumanism whose essays are collected in the book seem to agree that transhumanism represents an outgrowth of the Enlightenment project of humanism and secular rationalism characterized as "attempts by science and technology to improve the human condition" (Tirosh-Samuelson 32).  When viewed from its origins in Western secular humanism, "transhumanism is not as novel as it seems, since all of us are already augmented beings if we take into consideration the many technological advancements over the centuries that have transformed who we are. Thus, agriculture, writings, postal services, navigation, calculus, antibiotics, radio, television, photography, and computers are all technological innovations that have shaped who we are, and it is reasonable to assume that we will continue to be augmented by future technologies. So long as transhumanism simply advocates the nineteenth-century commitment to progress and alleviation of human suffering, it is hard to critique it" (32).

The question becomes much more complex when transhumanists start talking about changing human "nature" in radical ways. Among their most sought-after changes are radical life extension, increased intelligence, and the digitization (and thus indefinite preservation) of mind and consciousness. Futurologists such as Ray Kurzweil also imagine that we can use nanotechnology to clean and restore the environment.


I don’t necessarily wish to advance an argument for or against transhumanism here. Rather, I want to comment briefly on how H±: Transhumanism and its Critics, as its title suggests, does a wonderful job of presenting both sides of the issue.  The book is divided into four parts:

I. A critical historical perspective on transhumanism
II. H+ proponents of transhumanism
III. H± point-counterpoint
IV. H- critical perspectives on transhumanism

In Section I, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson presents a thoughtful and thorough overview of the intellectual and scholarly terrain surrounding both "transhumanism" and "posthumanism." Like transhumanism, there is no singular posthumanism, and Tirosh-Samuelson enumerates the differences between transhumanism as a social movement and posthumanism as a postmodern philosophical critique of the human subject.

Section II offers six essays that present the transhumanist project and defend it against detractors. Perhaps the most interesting feature of transhumanism is that, in a certain sense, it operates against the notion of an essential human self. Precisely because there is no natural or innate self, because we cannot derive a human essence from Nature, transhumanists argue that we can and should use science and technology to improve the human condition as well as individual human beings. It’s very difficult to argue against this position without resorting to what Nick Bostrom calls "bioconservatism," or a critique of human modification based on an appeal to a fixed biological nature.

Section III offers three chapters that argue against transhumanism while seeking to avoid essentialist trap. Each chapter is immediately followed by a rebuttal from an advocate of transhumanism. I must admit, the critics of transhumanism are often guilty of creating rhetorical strawmen and mischaracterizing their opponent’s positions, and the transhumanists miss no opportunity to point this out.  One particularly interesting justification for transhumanism comes from Max More, who insists on "morphological freedom," or, the ability of “each of us to alter and improve (by our own standards) the human body” (143). It seems as if at least some transhumanists would then be sympathetic to the varying "permutations of the human" advocated for by Judith Butler. In fact, at least one transhumanist in the volume presents transgender people as pioneering transhumans.

Section IV features critical perspectives on transhumanism, including Katherine Hayles essay, "Wrestling with Transhumanism." The problems with transhumanism discussed are numerous, but in general focus on the neoliberal ideology that underlies the movement and its insistence on individual freedom divorced from social, political, and ecological contexts.

In short, I found the rich and contested definition of "transhumanism" presented by the text incredibly useful in continuing to explore the topographically-varied terrain of the posthumanities.

Two proposals

I thought it would be a good idea to create a blog in order to commit some of my ideas to writing. For my first posting, I'll share two proposals I've recently written for academic projects. The first is for the 33rd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The second is for a book on "learning for sustainability in times of accelerating change." Both proposals originate from my interest in asking critical questions about how we conceive of and represent "Nature," especially in light of emerging sustainability movements and the urgency of developing viable cultural alternatives to globalized consumerism.

"The Eden that Beckons Us" is an examination of Paolo Bacigalupi's "biopunk" novel The Windup Girl (2009). In the proposal below, I try to develop a sympathetic reading of the text, but I'm not sure if it'll hold up after I reread it. In other words, there are a few images in The Windup Girl that might be somewhat difficult to make sense of, especially the character Gibbons, a genetic-engineer who is depicted as a gay, syphilitic pedophile. I'm not sure whether the novel perpetuates or unravels the "queer against Nature" myth...




Paper proposal for The 33rd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts: “The Monstrous Fantastic”

“The Eden that Beckons Us”: Unraveling Organic Wholeness in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl

The globalized production, distribution, and consumption of food constellate a series of interrelated ethical and political concerns such as cultural autonomy, social and economic justice, animal rights, biodiversity, and ecological integrity. The negative consequences of the current agribusiness food system include the intense confinement and unnecessary suffering of animals, massive expenditure of energy and material resources, exploitation of labor, genetic monoculture, and erosion of community. In response, consumers increasingly demand organic, locally grown, fairly traded, and humanely produced foods.


Like many strands of environmentalism, however, the emerging food counterculture often employs a lapsarian narrative of humanity’s fall from an imagined state of organic wholeness. (Consider for example the simulacral images of pastoral scenes and edenic farmlands that adorn organic products on supermarket shelves.) While a powerful imaginative device, this mode of thought reveals its limitations when confronted with the difficult choices involved in responsibly marshaling technological and scientific resources to feed a burgeoning global population that has already diminished Earth’s life support systems. This dilemma is dramatized in Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl (2009), which depicts a biosphere irrevocably altered by “calorie companies” using genetic engineering to gain a stranglehold on the world’s food markets. The novel’s protagonists inhabit an environment ravaged by bioengineered plagues against which the only defense is to genetically-engineer foodstuffs resistant to mutating diseases – there is no turning back the clock to a prelapsarian food system.


Bacigalupi’s text is at least part cautionary tale against the marriage of corporate agribusiness and genetic engineering, but with its emphasis on human relationships with artificial and engineered life forms, The Windup Girl asks its reader to take up what Donna Haraway calls the “skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life.” The proposed paper will investigate how the novel critiques the current global industrial food system while simultaneously challenging binary categories of thought such as organic/inorganic and natural/artificial. Moving beyond the rhetoric and politics of “Frankenfood,” The Windup Girl presents artificial life forms outside of antagonistic dualisms, and, if “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion,” the novel demands we reconsider our stance toward the artificial in a finite and fragmented world.




Chapter proposal for Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change

"Welcome to the Anthropocene": Ecological Ontology in Times of Accelerating Change

The proliferation of digital media and information technologies, coupled with the expansion of our built physical and virtual environments, creates a crisis for traditional understandings and representations of "Nature," even as nature itself exists in a state of ecological crisis. Humans, especially in the world's most technologically-developed countries, inhabit ambiguously natural and crafted environments in which intact or unappropriated ecosystems are either non-existent or have been pushed far outside the possibilities of immediate lived experience. As Timothy Morton observes, "We're losing the ground under our feet. In philosophical language, we're losing not only 'ontological' levels of meaningfulness. We're losing the 'ontic,' the actual physical level we trusted for so long. Imagine all the air we breathe becoming unbreathable" (31).


I do not contest what Katherine Hayles calls the "fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced" (49), a finite biophysical world within which we and other organisms are enmeshed and upon which we ultimately depend for our flourishing. However, informed by a growing chorus of scholarship that questions the ontological utility of our predominant conception of Nature, I contend that the traditional lapsarian narrative of humanity's fall from an imagined state of organic wholeness, as well as the anti-technological politics associated with this cultural myth, reveals its inadequacy when confronted with the complexity of our current social reality.


The fiction of a return to organic wholeness fails to provide the imaginative and analytical tools to make sense of the ecological crisis, which is ultimately a crisis of failed relationships between humans, between humans and other organisms, and between humans and machines. Our work then is not to restore the Garden, but to understand and care for the asymmetric relationships with near and far-flung people, places, organisms, and things in which we are instantiated. As Morton writes, "Ecology is about relating not to Nature, but to aliens and ghosts."


The proposed chapter will argue that our present moment necessitates new ecological ontologies that "must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness," but about the "power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world" (Haraway 175). The proposed chapter will explore a heterogeneous array of efforts to develop new ecological ontologies appropriate to our current moment of accelerating change, including Deleuze and Guattari's "rhizome," Donna Haraway's "cyborg," Bernard Stiegler's "epiphylogenesis," and Timothy Morton's "dark ecology."

Works Cited

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.


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


Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009. Print.


Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010. Print.