Introduction: Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures

Author(s): Bart Simon

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 53, Posthumanism (Winter, 2003), pp. 1-9
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354621
Accessed: 28-01-2016 10:45 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354621?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cultural Critique.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:45:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

INTRODUCTION
A CRITIQUE
OF POSTHUMAN
FUTURES
TOWARD
Bart Simon

Francis Fukuyama's latest book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, 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 contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature
and 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 defense of liberal humanism against contemporary cultures of laissezfaire individualism and unregulated corporate technoscience. While
scientific progress is needed and desired for the good of all, if unchecked that progress threatens to alter the conditions of our common 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 Regents of the Universityof Minnesota

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:45:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

1 BARTSIMON
human beings, the return of human nature in Fukuyama provides
fresh reinforcement for the crumbling humanist barricades in the
rising tides of posthumanity. Fukuyama's arguments are also emblematic of the contradictions that arise when a historically humanist
public culture confronts contemporary corporate technoscientific fantasies 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 daily
basis 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]e
are 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 destiny. 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 transhumanist) discourse structures the research agendas of much of corporate
biotechnology and informatics as well as serving as a legitimating 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 (Terranova 1996; Thacker,
in this issue). While extreme versions of this discourse, such as the
writings of Max More (founder of the California-based extropian
movement), 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 The Matrix, 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 this
issue) calls a critical posthumanism, an interdisciplinary perspective

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:45:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

13

INTRODUCTION

informed by academic poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminist

and postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies. It is on
the 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 posthuman futures without resurrecting human nature or promising to be
blindly faithful to seemingly postmodern ideologies of infinitely malleable 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 crossdisciplinary collective engagement, probing the limits and possibilities
of posthumanist discourse for theoretical and political intervention in
the humanities and the sciences.
The essays for this special issue grew out of two sessions on the
politics and theory of posthumanism organized by Jill Didur and Teresa
Heffernan for the Third Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference,
held in Birmingham in June 2000. The mutual interaction of participants at those sessions made it clear that all the authors brought
together for this issue share a basic commitment to critical posthumanism 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 and
informatics, and threads of critical and anti-posthumanist cultural
theory. Taken collectively these papers produce a tapestry that captures 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 technoscientific
developments that inform much of what counts as posthumanist
This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:45:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

| BART SIMON

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. The
revolutionary Enlightenment narratives that challenged an oppressive 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, "Understood as local, fluid, contingent, and as contesting and rending the
hierarchies of nature/culture, self/other, male/female, human/nonhuman, 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 mixture without discernable origins; a hybrid, a cyborg.
Given the humanist complicity that invited the critique of subjectivity that led to the postmodern model in the first place, the question
now is whether that model is equally and unwittingly complicit. As
Heffernan observes, the proliferation of hybridizing practices in biotechnology 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 situation for those invested in the political promise of the postmodern
franchise. How does one disentangle the critical potential of hybrid
subjectivity from the corporate technoscientific practice of producing hybrids so well suited to the needs of global capitalism? Fukuyama'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 these
human(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" operates on the terrain of contemporary cultural theory to work through
the idea of posthumanism in terms of an inescapable tension between

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:45:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

INTRODUCTION | 5

humanism and antihumanism. Drawing on the latent critique of

Cartesian humanism present in Descartes's own writing as well as
humanist 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 posthumanism" as well as the popular posthumanism of the extropians and
biotechnological discourse. It stands to reason that "if 'Man' is present at 'his' own funeral, how can 'he' possibly be dead?" For Badmington, 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 humanism 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 We BecamePosthuman. Bartlett and Byers's
close 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 fragmented subjects of TheMatrix. Across the central figure of the character 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 production of a contemporary style," where "the subject may exhibit a sexy
patina of postmodernism while still not differing in any fundamental
way from its liberal humanist predecessor."
This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:45:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BART SIMON

Bartlett and Byers's deconstruction of liberal humanist values

masquerading as posthuman critique is pursued along a different
route 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 the
wholistic 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 postmodern 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 materialism
that fetishizes "the body as components" by "reify[ing] the objectification of the body in terms of denying its formative role and by
affirming it as irreducible atomic matter." For Burfoot the technologies 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: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman." Thacker's analysis extends the work of Hayles on the history and discourse of cybernetics
into the sphere of bioinformatic practice, showing that materialization is at the heart of understanding bodies in terms of information.
Indeed, bioinformatics has less to do with the disembodied human
consciousnesses of The Matrix and more to do with a rematerialization of bodies in accordance with what Thacker calls an "informatic
essentialism" 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 technology 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

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:45:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

INTRODUCTION | 7

programmable informational pattern with real effects" that suit the

needs of global capitalism in a manner similar to Burfoot's technologies of biopleasure.
The "real effects" of biotechnological practice in light of posthuman critique form the subject of Jill Didur's "Re-embodying Technoscientific 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 Monsanto Corporation's genetically modified foods research as a form of
popular posthumanism producing an eerily humanist understanding of genes as disembodied and dematerialized entities that is both
contested and contestable within the frame of critical posthumanism. Further, when Didur looks to representatives of the anti-GMO
(genetically modified organisms) movement for a rejoinder to Sloterdijk's neo-eugenics and Monsanto's capitalist imperative, she finds
an equally problematic position where "Genetic engineering in the
lab ... is represented as a violent assault on nature and a form of contamination 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 posthumanism certainly share a distrust of the rhetoric of "pure" nature deployed 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 reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Heffernan's essay picks up
directly on the horror implied by the posthuman through an examination of the public discourse around the ethics of developing transgenetic organisms like the cow-human. While resonating with many

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:45:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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 thinking
through 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 technoscientific practice. For Heffernan, Frankenstein's monster provides
a means for working through the residual humanism of biotechnological discourse. "The biotech companies mobilize hybridity as if
humans were safeguarded from it; hence nature is merely an instrument designed for 'our' disposal in the pursuit of immortality. Critical 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 into
focus by providing an afterword that ties the main themes and arguments 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 popular posthuman discourse. Further, we are reminded that the posthuman 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. Last Flesh: Life in the TranshumanEra. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998.
Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequencesof the Biotechnology
Revolution.New York:Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, 2002.
Haraway, Donna J. Simians,Cyborgs,and Women:TheReinventionof Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We BecamePosthuman:VirtualBodies in Cybernetics,
Literature,and Informatics.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993.

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:45:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

INTRODUCTION | 9

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

Subcultures."In FutureNatural:
Nature,Science,Culture,ed. George Robertson
al.
et. London: Routledge, 1996.
Waldby, Catherine. The VisibleHuman Project:InformaticBodies and Posthuman
Medicine.London: Routledge, 2000.

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 10:45:49 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions