Legally, we are already in the posthumanist era. Corporations have long been considered persons in certain jurisdictions, despite not facing the same potential limitations on their freedom as actual people. A couple of years ago, a stretch of the Magpie river in Canada was also granted legal standing as a person, as part of an attempt to provide it with environmental protection.
Don’t feed the cocaine hippos – even though they’re people now.
Ordinarily we understand posthumanism to be some sort of utopian merging of man and machine, but perhaps it might also, and better, be understood as a way of treating non-human entities with the same respect generally extended to humans.
Of course, I feel that implementing human rights (and responsibilities) for all humans might be required as a priority. We’re at risk of stratifying the world into a place where non-humans have more rights than some humans.
Which is the fundamental problem with posthumanism as a utopian ethos. Like all utopian ideals, it is utterly blind to the stratification it ushers into being, even while denying it is doing so.
Temporary decloaking continues apace, in order to acknowledge the existence of David Graeber’s final meisterwerke, which is no less than a history of everything. Alas, it’s only volume one, and he is no longer with us on this plane of existence to expand into the envisaged volumes two and so on. This makes it all the more valuable, in a sense, and there remains the faint hope that his co-writer will assume the mantle.
In short, I’d like Graeber to be right. It might offer us some routes (roots?) out of the post-Enlightenment “progress”-ratcheting one-way road to Hell we are now quite advanced along. And I think the politics of the time (and Graeber’s untimely death) mean this book will be enormously welcomed, in itself probably a net good, whether his theory is true, half-true, or not at all.
You Are Here ———————————————————————————————–^
I suspect, though, that the established big histories, as popularised by the likes of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and of course Yuval Harari, are far from entirely defunct just yet. Furthermore, the undoubted impact of those existing grand narratives gives them a certain momentum which will hardly be slowed by the late intervention of Graeber.
(Full disclosure: I am complicit in such momentum, which I consider to be a positivist intervention/disruption in the current thanatocentric vector of humanity, as I am working with Sapienship, Yuval Harari’s educational vehicle. From what I can discern, the great insight of Homo Sapiens – that humanity’s tendency to collective fictions brought about an explosion of mass collaboration – does not appear to be challenged by Graeber’s work.)
Does Graeber offer us something new? He appears to be offering us a more complex picture, crucially one that suggests a greater sense of choice and agency for humanity writ both small and large. Is this itself a net good? Probably yes, even if his arguments transpire ultimately not to hold much water. We need hope, goddammit. Choice, even the illusion thereof, is a form of hope.
I’ll know more when I read the book, of course, which is all I want for Christmas (apart from world peace, an end to hunger, climate stability and Irish reunification.) Or let me rephrase – I look forward to reading the book and finding therein some antique answers to current questions with the same degree of utopian optimism that I apply to resolving war, climate change and the intractable identity politics of the island of Ireland.
We exist today in coercive macro-societies afflicted by gross inequality and inhuman scale, which limit human potential and freedom. It will come as little surprise to know that, at times past, Graeber was all over that too – see his work on the perniciousness of debt or his theory about “Bullshit” jobs. If our macro-history was a series of choices rather than some kind of inevitability, the Whiggish ratcheting ever forward towards an often illusory or treacherous progress, then perhaps we still have the chance to choose otherwise. That’s why I hope he’s correct.
Big history always brings us, or at least me, back to a futurist perspective of course. What can we learn from the past to arm us in the face of the existentialist threats currently facing humanity? One of the most evident and positive truths in narratives like Harari’s Homo Sapiens is the miraculous similarities we share as a species, being the ingenious survivors of a series of genetic bottlenecks and previous existential crises.
Perhaps in identifying some roads not taken, or insufficiently taken, Graeber’s last sigh may prove to be a singular intervention we can apply to our own approach to the future. Perhaps. I’ll find out at Christmas, if Santa Claus is good to me.
It would of course have been more useful had I told more people about this in advance. Nevertheless, I’m a firm believer in the principle that people who need to know things find their way to that knowledge somehow. So it’s more as a marker of record, a waystone en route to the actual publication of an actual book, that I note the passing of this particular conference and my particular contribution.
So firstly, this was the conference, co-organised by my co-editor (of the forthcoming Religious Futurisms volume) Sumeyra Buran Utku and her colleagues.
I really wish I’d been able to attend more of the conference, not least because Francesca Ferrando is always box office, and I was especially intrigued to see what she had to say about violence and posthumanism, or alternatively posthumanism AS violence. (OK, she was unlikely to take that angle, but I must question her along those lines some day.)
Anyhow, as I said, as mark of record and waystone on the winding path to publication, here’s what I was talking about, nicked wholesale from the book I wrote last year and this on A Clockwork Orange:
So, yes, as you may have gathered, it featured some examination of women as victims (and as subalterns) in ACO, considered the novella as an anti-carceral text in the wake of the BLM calls to end incarceration (spoiler: ultimately it’s not, of course), and explored the extent of Alex’s psychopathic tendencies, and whether they can indeed be rehabilitated, and whether they are indeed rehabilitated in chapter 21 of the published novella (aka Schrodinger’s last chapter, the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t chapter which materialises and dematerialises depending on which edition of the text you read), in which Alex waves goodbye to his misspent youth and embraces a life of banal domesticity.
I’ve probably said too much. But I will say more in the book. I just need to find the time to edit it first. More, as they say, anon.
Postscript: Apparently it was recorded and the stream is now on YouTube. If I’d known that, I’d have scrubbed up a bit more.
The abstract for his last book starts like this: “A blab droid is a robot with a body shaped like a pizza box, a pair of treads, and a smiley face. Guided by an onboard video camera, it roams hotel lobbies and conference centers, asking questions in the voice of a seven-year-old. “Can you help me?” “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?” “Who in the world do you love most?” People pour their hearts out in response. This droid prompts the question of what we can hope from social robots. Might they provide humanlike friendship?”
Campbell thinks not. He has a philosophical reason, and it’s very plausible.
Bless me, blab droid, for I have sinned…
But I got stuck at this intro. WHY do people pour their hearts out to the blab droid? Do we, as the Catholic church discerned, have an inate desire to confess? Or are we all such egotists that we can’t help talking about ourselves? And like social media, the blab droid raises an ethical question. What happens to the answers it receives? What happens to the DATA? If you tell the blab droid/confessor your secrets, where do your secrets go? Who gets to access them, and what will they do with them?
Forget the droid, and its fascinating ability to expose the universality of both human egotism and loneliness. Social media is the real blab droid, and it doesn’t even need to ask us questions in little girl voices to make us confess. But the same issues apply. Where does the data go? What happens between me posting this on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg banking his next billion? Shouldn’t we know?
