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Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman FuturesAuthor(s): Bart SimonSource: Cultural Critique, No. 53, Posthumanism (Winter, 2003), pp. 1-9Published by: University of Minnesota Press

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INTRODUCTIONTOWARD CRITIQUE F POSTHUMANUTURES

Bart Simon

FrancisFukuyama's latest book, Our Posthuman Future: Conse-

quences of the BiotechnologyRevolution, 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 natureand 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

CulturalCritique53-Winter 2003-Copyright 2003 Regentsof the Universityof Minnesota





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2 1 BARTSIMON

human beings, the return of human nature in Fukuyama provides

fresh reinforcement for the crumbling humanist barricades in therising 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 dailybasis 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 TranshumanEra: [W]eare 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 (Terranova1996;Thacker,

in this issue). While extreme versions of this discourse, such as the

writings of Max More (founder of the California-based extropianmovement), remain on the margins of public culture, less extreme

versions can be found in the pages of Time magazine and the New

YorkTimes,popular films such as TheMatrix, 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 thisissue) calls a critical posthumanism, an interdisciplinary perspective





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INTRODUCTION1 3

informed by academic poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminist

and postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies. It is onthe 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 beblindly 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 inthe humanities and the sciences.

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

politics and theory of posthumanism organized by JillDidur 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 andinformatics, 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 technoscientificdevelopments that inform much of what counts as posthumanist





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4 | BARTSIMON

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. Therevolutionary 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 aslocal, 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 questionnow 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 postmodernfranchise. 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 thesehuman(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 ofcontemporary

culturaltheory

to workthroughthe idea of posthumanism in terms of an inescapable tension between





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INTRODUCTION 5

humanism and antihumanism. Drawing on the latent critique of

Cartesian humanism present in Descartes's own writing as well ashumanist 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 andbiotechnological 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, TheMatrix. 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 WeBecamePosthuman.Bartlett and Byers'sclose 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 TheMatrix. 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 fundamentalway from its liberal humanist predecessor.





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6 I BARTSIMON

Bartlett and Byers's deconstruction of liberal humanist values

masquerading as posthuman critique is pursued along a differentroute 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 thewholistic 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 materialismthat 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 TheMatrix and more to do with a rematerializa-

tion of bodies in accordance with what Thacker calls an informaticessentialism 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





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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 ofpopular 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 thelab ... 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





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8 1 BARTSIMON

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

theory to the table and argues for an analytic frame for thinkingthrough 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 intofocus 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.LastFlesh:Lifein the TranshumanEra.Toronto:Harper-

Collins, 1998.

Fukuyama, Francis. Our PosthumanFuture: Consequencesof the BiotechnologyRevolution.New York:Farrar,Straus,and Giroux,2002.

Haraway, Donna J. Simians,Cyborgs,and Women:TheReinventionof Nature.Lon-

don: FreeAssociation Books, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We BecamePosthuman:VirtualBodiesin Cybernetics,

Literature,ndInformatics.Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1999.

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





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INTRODUCTION 9

Terranova,Tiziana. Posthuman Unbounded: Artificial Evolution and High-Tech

Subcultures. InFutureNatural: ature,Science,Culture, d. GeorgeRobertsonet. al. London:Routledge, 1996.

Waldby, Catherine. The Visible Human Project:InformaticBodies and Posthuman

Medicine.London:Routledge, 2000.

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