Why the MLA does not speak for me

I’ve been a member of the MLA (Modern Language Association) for over ten years. It has rarely spoken for me. The only publication I truly look forward to is the annual Profession magazine, which is a collection of essays on the state of the profession. So I was excited to see that there were several essays on the role of the intellectual in the 21st century, including one by Julia Kristeva.

Students of mine know that I take psychoanalytic theory such as that discussed by Lacan and Kristeva seriously. But every now and again I’m reminded that I take them perhaps more seriously than I should. In a piece entitled “Thinking in Dark Times” she writes:

“Contrary to what we’re led to believe, the clash of religions is in fact merely a surface phenomenon. The problem we’re facing at the beginning of this new millennium is not one of religious wars but rather the rift that separates those who want to know that God is unconscious and those who prefer not to, so as to be pleasured by the show that announces he exists” (16).

The rest of the paragraph clearly indicates (though it’s debatable that Kristeva is ever clear) that the only place to be in this dichotomy is with those who “want to know that God is unconscious” and not with those who “prefer not to”. Now, what kind of choice is this, really? What does it mean to want to know that God is unconscious? Best I can make out, it is to believe, contra gut instincts maybe, that God is only a force in our psyches, not external to us, a force we made up that is powerful nonetheless. The second choice is to know this (perhaps in your unconscious) but to prefer not to believe it, to choose an unenlightened state, so as to receive a kind of sexual pleasure from consumer capitalism’s promise of goods “guaranteed by the promise of superior good” in an endless Lacanian god-is-the-phallus-in-the-box deferral. Quite simply, this is ridiculous. I pulled out this paragraph to discuss it with my husband (who is a philosopher), and it reminded me how often I just let this kind of reasoning sneak by me, because of the way people like Kristeva write. The fact that the MLA would publish this without hesitancy is not surprising to me. Nor am I surprised that no one in its upper echelons can see (or care about) how truly contemptuous this kind of thinking is to the “other”---in this case, people with genuine belief. We have been reduced to self-pleasuring infants who never want to grow up. And because we are infantile, it is also our fault that things like 9/11 happen. If the MLA wants to be relevant, it needs to back away from this kind of self-serving contempt.

Science, technology, and the promise of liberation

“Scientific progress can at most be liberation from; it can never constitute or provide the thing that it is a liberation for.”

These memorable words are from Albert Borgmann's insightful book: Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Though this quote is about the notion of scientific progress, this book is much more about the way technology changes our lives. Borgmann draws a distinction between science and technology in order to argue how technology is changing the way we deal with the concrete world, which has enormous ramifications. Specifically, technology tends to commodify our lives by transforming things into devices. A violin is a thing; it requires mastery to play it, it is more of a focal point for us; in other words, it is not just about the music it produces. A stereo, on the other hand, is a device that produces only the commodity of the music it plays. While we seem to be getting the "freedom" from the burdens of our lives, Borgmann warns us that the transformation of things into devices can thin the quality of our lives.

Rudolph, Peter Singer, and the question of dignity

Blogs are excellent for completely random thoughts, and here's mine for the day. I was changing my son's diaper this morning, a task that requires constant singing if you don't want him to cry. So for some reason I was singing Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, and I was stuck on the part when Santa asks Rudolph to guide his sleigh tonight. "Then all the reindeer loved him, and they shouted out with glee, 'Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, you'll go down in history.'" And it occurred to me that this little song nicely demonstrates the problem with the rule of technique in society when it comes to others. Rudolph was a misfit, unloved by the others until his nose became useful. Then he was lauded as a hero. The lesson can only be that you will be valued only if what others perceive as freaky proves to be valuable. Forget about inherent dignity in this world. It is a Peter Singer paradise. It's pull a sleigh exceptionally well, or don't expect to participate in our reindeer games, chump.

Radical Evolution

It is refreshing to read a book that accurately and interestingly names the various responses to "the singularity" that is an inevitable part of our future. That book is Joel Garreau's Radical Evolution. He lays out different scenarios predicted by people who care about posthumanism. They are: Heaven; Hell; Prevail; Transcend. The best thing about the book is his introduction to the personalities that are behind the scenarios. It is well worth your time to read, if only to learn about the nerds who will call the shots of all of our futures.

"Proficient delayers"

I just finished reading Brent Waters' book From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology and Technology in a Posthuman World. In my opinion, its greatest strength lies in its analysis of the language of posthuman theology that tries to replace God with creativity. The creativity that posthumanism worships is one of infinite self re-creation that knows (it thinks) no limits. The holy grail of that pursuit is immortality, but Waters shows clearly how that immortality is not to be equated with eternity.

"Even if we grant that the posthuman dream of virtual immortality is feasible rather than fanciful, its twofold strategy of radical transformation fails, for the problem of finite and temporal necessity is not overcome, but merely displaced and denied. In the first instance, independence from ecological processes is achieved by shifting human dependence from nature to artifice. In deploying technology to become progressively less dependent on natural processes, humans will be using artifacts of their own design, and therefore subject to their control. Yet the eventual success of the posthuman project is predicated on the evolution of artificial life that is superior to humans, and therefore not under their control. Dependence is not so much overcome as displaced; natural necessity is exchanged for an artificial counterpart. [. . .] posthumans are ultimately not the masters of their own fate, but only proficient delayers."

This is so very true. And although Waters does not go on to argue this point, it strikes me with a new force (as it did Jonathan Swift and many other writers) that immortality on human terms (vis a vis human control) is not necessarily good, and may even be fundamentally bad. And yet our technophiles go on working for it, freezing their heads and hoping to live into the future that they think is going to be so very luminous.

Do individuals have a telos?

Have humans been created with a specific purpose? The more I think about the issue of the human in the posthuman world, the larger this question looms for me. One of the ways to begin to think about the question would be to make a distinction between Aristotelian telos and a Christian one. As far as I know (and I'm no philosopher), Aristotle believed that each species of creature has within in it certain potentialities, and the goal of an individual's life would be to reach the highest potential for your species. For humanity, it would be measured by the attainment of virtues. Christians (as St. Thomas pointed out) would agree a great deal with Aristotle, but it does change things to begin with a personal God. I believe that being created by such a God would mean a few things for certain: we are not the creator; we are, therefore, limited; and our relationship to God constitutes who we are fundamentally. But what does that mean exactly when it comes to the issue of purpose? Is it right to speak of God's specific purpose for my individual life? Or are his purposes general, with a wide range of possible outcomes? The reason why it matters is that if I were born with mental deficiencies, would my purpose be different? Is our telos so general (the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever) that any human person could fit it? I think it is essential for us to make room in our definition of the human for every person, from the child with Down's syndrome to smallest embryo. Clearly, God allows suffering; he also allows a wide range of abilities and disabilities in humanity. Do all of these exist for a purpose?

Ontological hygiene and The Bluest Eye

In my class the other night, we discussed Elaine Graham’s concept of “ontological hygiene”. Graham’s book: Representations of the Post/Human, borrows from Foucault’s critique of western definitions of “normal” to discuss how representations of monsters, cyborgs, and so on operate in our culture.

It struck me again how Morrison’s brilliant novel The Bluest Eye displays ontological hygiene in action; in this case, in an African American community that internalizes white standards for beauty, and in the process, destroys much of its unique beauty by devaluing it. The story is about a little black girl, Pecola, who wants blue eyes, thinking that it will solve the problems that have come from her family’s failure (and everyone else’s failure) to love her. The sometime narrator of the novel, Claudia (a bit of a rendering of the young Toni Morrison) concludes her story by noticing how Pecola, now moved to the edge of town (itself symbolic), has pretty much lost her mind and is just wandering like a ghost. “The birdlike gesture are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew here—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength” (205).

Can you be you without a stable body or memory?

When the question of what it means to be human in an increasingly protean society comes up, the discussion almost always involves the body and memory and their place in constituting the self. And the novel Glasshouse (by British novelist Charles Stross) is interesting if only for the way it handles these issues. It takes place in the 25th century, where nanotech and biotech have advanced so far that there are “A-gates” that can assemble everything, and “T-Gates” that can transport you everywhere. People can live forever as long as they “back up” their consciousness so that it can be re-embodied if they are killed. And so you can become any kind of being you want: you can take on an “orthohuman” body of a traditional male or female, or a “xenohuman” body of other types (say, with four arms). You can also become a tank, made specifically for war—which we find out is one of the embodiments of our protagonist, Robin/Reeve. We start out with Robin, whose memory has been selectively erased, and we quickly discover that this seems to happen a lot in this world, where identity theft is taken more seriously than anything else. But I’m still left asking, what does constitute your identity in such a world? The only answer in this world is your neural map with its memories. But if those memories can be deleted, or altered, how can you ever count on your memories being accurate? I ask these questions because in the future that Stross creates, it seems to be a good thing to be so protean. Although he does not ring the liberty bell as often as some transhumanists sympathizers might, this world is nonetheless consistently contrasted with the “dark ages” of today’s time. The human interest of the story (I think) depends upon our believing that there is a “real” Robin, with a certain personality, a certain sense of humor, certain ways of looking at the world, and so on. But the question still remains for me: is it cheating even to give him those things, if the world in which he lives those things are up for grabs by anyone in power? The world of the future, as Stross sees it, is not utopian; it endures war after war, faction after faction trying to take over, the most powerful of these doing so by infecting the A gates (or T gates, can’t remember) with a virus called Curious Yellow, which basically creates a kind of chaos in what it touches. So can people truly survive that with any sense of themselves at all?

Another interesting thing about the novel is the role of love. As in many novels whose interest lies primarily with the tech and the plot, the definition of love is underdeveloped. Not to give anything away, there is a kind of happy ending love relationship here, but I find it only partly believable, and the ironic thing about it is that I do not think it could have developed at all if the two people (Robin/Reeve and you will see) were not stuck in the glasshouse experiment that is the novel’s plot device. The experiment is for the people to live in the “dark ages” and not be able to change their bodies or back themselves up and so on. So I find myself asking: is it possible to truly love if your memories can be erased, and have been erased, and you can’t know which you is here? Is it an act of loving self sacrifice to blow yourself up to save your lover, if you had backed yourself up before you did it? That I do not know. The meaning of acts of self-sacrifice seem to me, at least, to be on a sliding scale anyway. People in the western world today do not sacrifice much when they do sacrifice things for loved ones. Maybe this is just the next inevitable level.

By the way, I loved the novel--it was a lot of fun to read!

Need help with the bigger picture?

If you are looking for an accurate, readable, and useful summary of intellectual history as it pertains to the modern era, I have the book for you. Albert Borgmann's Crossing the Postmodern Divide provides all that and more. The "more" is his own critique of postmodernism's thin offerings in response to the crisis of modernism. He is especially interested in our individualized culture and in how our public celebrations are impoverished thereby. An enjoyable read.

The rule of technique

Although he is often careless and bombastic, Jacques Ellul is provocative. This book, The Technological Society, should not be missed by anyone interested in posthumanism. Ellul defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” His thesis is that in the modern world, technique rules everything. He even says that science is a slave to technique. This is an argument worthy of consideration; perhaps Ellu is right that scientists do not pursue knowledge for its own sake, but only for applicability. This idea certainly seems to jive with America's love affair with pragmatism. Check it out for yourself.

Whatever Happened to the Soul?

I've been reading an amazing collection of essays by this title. These essays are written by scientists, psychologists, and philosophers who are trying to understand the implications of contemporary science for Christian belief. It prompts me to ask, what is at stake for the Christian when it comes to the belief in a soul that is separable from the body? This view is sometimes called "substance dualism", or the idea that the body and the soul are separate substances, though they may be inexorably interrelated (in other words, this is not Gnostic dualism, or the belief that mind and body do not substantially affect each other).

Right now I agree with Malcolm Jeeves, who writes that it does not lessen the significance of the mind, soul, spirit (or whatever you want to call it) to argue that it is necessarily dependent upon, but not reducible to, the brain. Read these essays and see what you think.

Great life-affirming novels

I'm often asked which novels affirm human existence in the face of posthuman technology. I would only choose those that do so without being sentimental, and this is not an easy task. I cannot think of any right now that deal with posthuman technology as directly as the dystopias do. The novels below describe redemption as something that comes from embracing who we are--not from expecting to become someone else. Marilynne Robinson's book is Gilead. Nicole Mazzarella's book is This Heavy Silence.

Fiction and the Posthuman: recommended readings

An inquiry into fiction's response to posthumanism must begin with Mary Shelley's classic work Frankenstein. A lot of people think they know what this book is about, but if you haven't read it, you don't really know. The best example of enduring dystopic fiction is definitely Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It is remarkably relevant today, especially in the discussion of germline genetic engineering. If you want to read a wide selection of excerpts chosen by the president's council on bioethics (Leon Kass was chairman at the time), read the anthology Being Human. You can find Hawthorne's story "The Birthmark" in this anthology. My favorite contemporary vision of the world that genetic engineering may bring us is Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

Non-fiction resources

These books are invaluable to anyone interested in learning more about posthumanism. The first, Bill McKibben's Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age is a well-written critique of some of the problem with technofuturism's holy grail goals. Second, I find Albert Borgmann to be indispensible; the book Power Failure is a good read.