Few can have failed to notice that, historically speaking, the so-called universal accomplishments celebrated under the banner of humanism from the Renaissance to the present day have rarely been enjoyed by more than a privileged group of men, and occasionally a few women, within strictly limited socioeconomic positions.
And even at its most capacious and inclusive, it is hard to shake the worry that any purely humanist and hence anthropocentric and hence human-racist grounding of ethics will likely stand perplexed in the face of the demand of Great Apes, dolphins, and other nonhuman animals (let alone trees, or for that matter biospheres) for some measure standing and respect.
Honestly, the celebrated category of "humanity" seems rarely to have provided much protective cover for even fully sane, mature, "exemplary" human beings caught up in the sometimes genocidal technoscientific dislocations of the modern era.
A number of "post-humanist" discourses have emerged to register these dissatisfactions with the limitations of the traditional humanist project.
It is important to recognize that the "post-human" does not have to conjure up the frightening or tragic spectacle of a posthumous humanity, an end to the best aspirations of human civilization, or even a repudiation of humanism itself, so much as a new effort emerging out of humanism, a moving on from humanism as a point of departure, a demanding of something new from humanism, perhaps a demand that humanism actually live up to its ethical and democratizing self-image for once.
To be sure, the “post-human” is not one kind of imaginary or idealized prostheticized person of the future, soliciting our identification in the present and facilitating our dis-identification with our peers. Nor is “post-humanism” a singular response to a particular current of prostheticized personhood -- whether involving digital network immersion, peer-to-peer Netroots democracy, post-Pill feminism, transsexual queerness, non-normalized post-"disabled" prosthetic different-enablements, open source biopunks and copyfighters, or what have you -- nor certainly is it a matter properly of the more fantastic identifications with robots, or eugenicized superhumans, or artificial intelligences, or aliens that seem to come up so often when “post-humanism” is discussed as a topic in hyperbolic popular futurism or sub(cult)ural technophilic discourses.
"Post-humanism," properly so-called, names the ethical encounters of humanism with itself, the confrontations of a universalism with its historical and practical limits and contradictions. And the ethical visions that emerge either out of ("post" in the sense of "after") or in resistance to ("post" in the sense of "over") that confrontation are themselves ethical terms.
This post was adapted from material excerpted from two longer pieces, one of them my Technoprogressivisms essay, the other Posthuman Terrains, in answer to a request from Vladimir de Thezier for a brief statement on Posthumanism as a keyword in contemporary critical theory.
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Dale wrote:
> Honestly, the celebrated category of "humanity" seems rarely
> to have provided much protective cover for even fully sane, mature,
> "exemplary" human beings caught up in the sometimes genocidal
> technoscientific dislocations of the modern era.
Framing "human":
"Man," writes [Ayn] Rand, "has to be man by choice" ["The Objectivist Ethics,"
in The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 27]. As we shall see shortly, Rand seems
to mean exactly what she says: human beings must perform an act of
choice, not only in order to remain, but perhaps even in order to become
human. And yet it would surely seem (as we have noted before) that,
since on Rand's view only human beings possess a conceptual,
volitional consciousness in the first place, in order to become human
one must already be human. This odd contradiction vitiates her entire
philosophy. . ."
http://home.att.net/~sandgryan/essays_on_objectivism/ocr/chapter13.html
"[G. Gordon Liddy's] _Will_ is a page turning memoir of a sickly child
who, transfixed and mesmerized by Hitler and the cult of the Alpha-Male,
transformed himself into a self made (and self described) Nietzschean
(and Machiavellian!) Superman. After all, this is the man who made his
entire office staff watch Leni Reifenstahl's Valentine to the Nazi Party
_Triumph of the Will_ as inspiration."
"G. Gordon Liddy is, to my mind, one of the few living embodiments
of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. This may seem strange to
leftist college profs, to whom the great iconoclast of the nineteenth
century is a hero for his debunking and (to use a modern word)
deconstruction of so many traditional modes of thought, and who
wish to carry on his work in the name of democracy and justice.
But Nietzsche was in truth a right-wing aristocrat, and his destruction
of the old "myths" was certainly not done to pave the way for the
banality of a Starbucks coffee hour. G. Gordon Liddy knows this;
and whether or not he has actually read any of Nietzsche is, for this
astute and articulate defender of the old order of things, quite
beside the point. Liddy's book is an account of a man who
believes that he has cracked open the secret of life, and decides
to live accordingly, on his own terms and by his own lights."
-- Reviews of G. Gordon Liddy's _Will_ at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312924127/
"There's a wonderful scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia.
Lawrence holds his hand over a candle's flame for far too long
to be comfortable (G. Gordon Liddy reportedly did the same
feat at a party during the Watergate era). In the film, someone
asks, 'What's the trick?' Lawrence, played by Peter O'Toole,
calmly replies, 'The trick is not to mind.'"
http://home.earthlink.net/~elundegaard/nf-lbjascent.htm
------------------------------------------------
“See this?” she asked. From the folds of her gown, she lifted a
green metal cube about fifteen centimeters on a side. She turned
it and Paul saw that one side was open--black and oddly
frightening. No light penetrated that open blackness.
“Put your right hand in the box,” she said.
Fear shot through Paul. He started to back away, but the
old woman said: “Is this how you obey your mother?”
He looked up into bird-bright eyes.
Slowly, feeling the compulsions and unable to inhibit them,
Paul put his hand into the box. He felt first a sense of cold
as the blackness closed around his hand, then slick metal
against his fingers and a prickling as though his hand
were asleep.
A predatory look filled the old woman’s features. She
lifted her right hand away from the box and poised the
hand close to the side of Paul’s neck. He saw a glint
of metal there and started to turn toward it.
“Stop!” she snapped.
Using the Voice again! He swung his attention back to
her face.
“I hold at your neck the gom jabbar,” she said.
“The gom jabbar, the high-handed enemy. It’s a needle
with a drop of poison on its tip. Ah-ah! Don’t pull away
or you’ll feel that poison.”
Paul tried to swallow in a dry throat. He could not take
his attention from the seamed old face, the glistening eyes,
the pale gums around silvery metal teeth that flashed as
she spoke.
“A duke’s son must know about poisons,” she said.
“It’s the way of our times, eh? Musky, to be poisoned in
your drink. Aumas, to be poisoned in your food. The
quick ones and the slow ones and the ones in between.
Here’s a new one for you: the gom jabbar. It kills only
animals.”
Pride overcame Paul’s fear. “You dare suggest a
duke’s son is an animal? he demanded.
“Let us say I suggest you may be human,” she said.
“Steady! I warn you not to try jerking away. I am old,
but my hand can drive this needle into your neck
before you escape me.”
“Who are you?” he whispered. “How did you trick
my mother into leaving me alone with you? Are you
from the Harkonnens?”
“The Harkonnens? Bless us, no! Now, be silent.”
A dry finger touched his neck and he stilled the
involuntary urge to leap away.
“Good,” she said. “You pass the first test. Now, here’s
the way of the rest of it: If you withdraw your hand from
the box you die. This is the only rule. Keep your hand in
the box and live. Withdraw it and die.”
Paul took a deep breath to still his trembling. “If I call
out there’ll be servants on you in seconds and you’ll die.”
“Servants will not pass your mother who stands guard
outside that door. Depend on it. Your mother survived
this test. Now it’s your turn. Be honored. We seldom
administer this to men-children.”
Curiosity reduced Paul’s fear to a manageable level.
He heard truth in the old woman’s voice, no denying it.
If his mother stood guard out there...if this were truly a test....
And whatever it was, he knew himself caught in it,
trapped by that hand at his neck: the gom jabbar. He
recalled the response from the Litany against Fear as
his mother had taught him out of the Bene Gesserit rite.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the
little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face
my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to
see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be
nothing. Only I will remain.”
He felt calmness return, said: “Get on with it, old woman.”
“Old woman!” she snapped. “You’ve courage, and that
can’t be denied. Well, we shall see, sirra.” She bent
close, lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “You
will feel pain in this hand within the box. Pain. But!
Withdraw the hand and I’ll touch your neck with
my gom jabbar--the death so swift it’s like the fall of
the headsman’s axe. Withdraw your hand and the
gom jabbar takes you. Understand?”
“What’s in the box?”
“Pain.”
He felt increased tingling in his hand, pressed his lips
tightly together. How could this be a test? he wondered.
The tingling became an itch.
The old woman said: “You’ve heard of animals chewing
off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick.
A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning
death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat
to his kind.”
The itch became the faintest burning. “Why are you doing this?”
he demanded.
“To determine if you’re human. Be silent.”
Paul clenched his left hand into a fist as the burning
sensation increased in the other hand. It mounted slowly:
heat upon heat upon heat...upon heat. He felt the
fingernails of his free hand biting the palm. He tried to
flex the fingers of the burning hand, but couldn’t
move them.
“It burns,” he whispered.
“Silence!”
Pain throbbed up his arm. Sweat stood out on his
forehead. Every fiber cried out to withdraw the
hand from that burning pit...but...the gom jabbar.
Without turning his head, he tried to move his eyes
to see that terrible needle poised beside his neck.
He sensed that he was breathing in gasps, tried to
slow his breaths and couldn’t.
Pain!
His world emptied of everything except that hand
immersed in agony, the ancient face inches away
staring at him.
His lips were so dry he had difficulty separating them.
The burning! The burning!
He thought he could feel skin curling black on that
agonized hand, the flesh crisping and dropping away
until only charred bones remained.
It stopped!
As though a switch had been turned off, the pain stopped.
Paul felt his right arm trembling, felt sweat bathing his body.
“Enough,” the old woman muttered. “Kull wahad!
No woman child ever withstood that much. I must’ve
wanted you to fail.” She leaned back, withdrawing
the gom jabbar from the side of his neck. “Take your
hand from the box, young human, and look at it.”
He fought down an aching shiver, stared at the lightless
void where his hand seemed to remain of its own volition.
Memory of pain inhibited every movement. Reason
told him he would withdraw a blackened stump from
that box.
“Do it!” she snapped.
He jerked his hand from the box, stared at it astonished.
Not a mark. No sign of agony on the flesh. He held up
the hand, turned it, flexed the fingers.
“Pain by nerve induction,” she said. “Can’t go around
maiming potential humans. There’re those who’d give a
pretty for the secret of this box, though.” She slipped
it into the folds of her gown.
“But the pain--” he said.
“Pain,” she sniffed. “A human can override any nerve
in the body.”
Paul felt his left hand aching, uncurled the clenched fingers,
looked at four bloody marks where fingernails had
bitten his palm. He dropped the hand to his side, looked
at the old woman. “You did that to my mother once?”
“Ever sift sand through a screen?” she asked.
The tangential slash of her question shocked his mind
into a higher awareness: Sand through a screen.
He nodded.
“We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”
------------------------------------------------
Frank Herbert, _Dune_
http://another_protestgroup.tripod.com/Dune.html
"...[T]hese writers were writing fiction that moved susceptible
readers deep within their. . . unconscious. . . They were feeding
back murky adolescent longings for power, strength, peer-group solidarity,
and mystic transcendence, and by doing so were drawing together tribal
cults around their works, creating pocket universes of which they
were little gods and thereby altering reality itself."
-- SF author Norman Spinrad, quoted in "The Narcissism, Scapegoating
and Leftism [sic!] of Ayn Rand_ by Bob Wallace
http://home.att.net/~bob.wallace/rand1.html
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