“… learn to remember that we might have been otherwise, and might yet be …” Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseâ„¢
“Let us be transformed!” Artist Jean Tinguely
We are sometimes told that “the future is now,” or informed that there is nothing we can do about our information-driven economy and inevitable technological transformation. I am profoundly skeptical of any statements stressing that the future is a done deal with no viable alternatives, because these attempt, through foreclosure, to undermine agency and political efficacy. Rather than giving in to the inevitable, an engagement with the monstrous future, as defined by Jacques Derrida, is much more significant, radical, and
productive. This approach also respects the alterity of any future(s).
A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be a predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange, but also, one must add, to try to domesticate it, that is, to make it part of the household and have it assume the habits, to make us assume new habits. This is the movement of culture. Texts and discourses that provoke at the outset reactions of rejection, that are denounced precisely as anomalies or monstrosities are often texts that, before being in turn appropriated, assimilated, acculturated, transform the nature of the field of reception, transform the nature of social and cultural experience, historical experience. All of history has shown that each time an event has been produced … it took the form of the unacceptable, or even of the intolerable, of the incomprehensible, that is, of a certain monstrosity. [Jacques Derrida, “Passages – from Traumatism to Promise”]
Significant art often produces such unacceptable or initially incomprehensible events. Returning to the original question: what are the cultural, political, and aesthetic roles of artists working with advanced technologies, such as bioengineering? In the best scenarios, the roles are to expand art-making practices and possibilities; to stage interventions; to critique; to provoke; to transform; to startle us out of our complacency; to reveal the conflicted and contradictory impulses implicit in complex cultural investigations; to jar us out of ineffectual and anachronistic dichotomies which privilege one term over another (male/female, culture/nature, flesh/metal, human/animal, self/other); to push forward a politics other than what currently exists; and never to be blindly complicit in, or indifferent to, those workings of late capitalism and liberal humanist rhetoric that privilege individual interests over communal ones.
Biotech is not automatically Biopower Inc.; it does not have to be a handmaiden to capitalism and globalization. There is nothing innately liberatory or oppressive about biotechnologies themselves. They are motivated by, facilitated by, or embedded in, modes of thought and action that determine their applications, their uses/abuses. Technological development, according to professor of political science Langdon Winner, begins with the recognition that as technologies are being built and put to use, significant alterations in patterns of human activity and human institutions are already taking place. New worlds are being made … The construction of a technical system that involves human beings as operating parts brings a reconstruction of social roles and relationships. [The Whale and the Reactor. A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1986), 11]
Artists are “operating parts” in this reconstruction. Can they uncover more productive options than unbridled individualism and wealth? Can they promote options that evoke promises of integration and kinship with all matter? To escape entrenched ways of thinking about bodies, one must come to terms with the fact that “genomes are constantly changing, the taxonomy of living things cannot be rigid, and boundaries between its objects cannot be sharply defined, including the definition of Homo sapiens.” [Pierre Baldi, The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 24]
Artists speculate about future embodiment through representation. Future bodies are frequently imaged as cyborgs or hybrids, biological-digital entities commingling various genders, sexualities, ethnicities, nationalities, classes, species, abilities, and intelligences. These are anxious bodies, alien others, posthumans. These are the ghost-haunting alarmist visions of biotechnology (when scientists are accused of “playing God” or introducing “unnatural” life forms into the environment). The posthuman body is also the promising stranger embraced by the transhumanist movement, and groups such as the Extropians, who believe in taking charge of and directing our own evolution.
Transhuman means a human in transition. The World Transhumanist Association reports on scientific research regarding all topics related to the improvement of human capabilities and the extension of life. [Transhumanists publish the online magazine Better Humans] The Extropians, once a little known California-based organization, have formed the Extropy Institute. Their central goal is to achieve immortality through technology. The Extropians published Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought from 1989 to 1996. Spokesperson and president of the institute, Max More, writes in “The Extropian Principles, Version 3.0, A Transhumanist Declaration,” 1998:
We challenge the inevitability of aging and death, and we seek continuing enhancements to our intellectual abilities, our physical capacities, and our emotional development. We see humanity as a transitory stage in the evolutionary development of intelligence. We advocate using science to accelerate our move from human to a transhuman or posthuman condition. [Also see “Transhumanism: The Most Dangerous Idea?“, Reason Magazine (August 25, 2004)]
The Extropians seem oblivious to the political and economic implications of their manifesto. What is not mentioned is the fact that the inevitability of death and obstacles to emotional development for most of the earth’s human population are not the result of aging or infirmity, but of famine, extreme poverty, lack of clean water, absence of medicines to treat disease, the lack of access to an adequate education, and civil war. The Extropian blindspot is their unstated awareness that they are speaking from a position of economic, educational, western privilege. The promotion of self-transformation falsely affirms the singularity and denies the heterogeneity of bodies.
Privileging the individual and individual “choice” is a central tenet of capitalist free enterprise, market expansion, and consumerism, all things that generally interfere with equality among peoples and nations. It denies recognition of how an individual is produced within a social matrix; everything becomes a matter of personal choice, and the limitations placed on individuals by social and political circumstances are rendered opaque. Any dynamics of transformation will likely be tempered by economic, class, racial, ethnic, gendered, and sexual realities, as well as by age and ability. These are the differences that must be taken into account, and that responsible postmodern theorists value as indicative of human diversity, as illustrative of systemic inequalities and injustices, and as instructive regarding the social operations of power. There have been expansions to Extropian and Transhumanist agendas which do take politics into account; see James Hughes, “Democratic Transhumanism 2.0.” Attempts to whitewash such differences should be viewed with extreme caution.
Posthumanism describes a state of awareness that “human” is no longer an adequate description of what we are becoming. Social democratic posthumanism, as an ontology and phenomenology, could allow us to experience the world differently, open our corporeality and subjectivity to co-mingling, co-evolution, and a more equitable co-existence. What is required, are ways for a group to be a “constant generator of de-individualization.” [This expression is borrowed from Michel Foucault, in his preface to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1983), xiv]
In terms of a biopolitics of biotech art, is it possible for there to be new fusions of organisms, machines, and systems concerned not with individual self-enhancement, but rather with the proliferation of difference and the creation of innovative systems that can foster cross-cultural and cross-species alliances with the goal of benefiting all matter? If people have affinities with others based on an understanding of the world as a series of differential yet interconnected systems, all of which are effected by a negative change in just one, then perhaps liberal humanist notions of autonomy can be sabotaged with a more social democratic vision. The situational solidarity and social justice promoted by non-technologically determinist approaches in cyberfeminism and queer theory can help here, because they describe agendas regarding oppressed or socially marginalized bodies involved in a process of struggle for difference recognition, while also promoting equality, dignity, access to resources and education as the right of all (in other words they advocate a real rather than an ideal equality and thus unsettle the dominant order). This vision can be extended to incorporate non-human intelligences and non-human species, bypassing the human-centrism that has been so destructive to the planet and its inhabitants. I am not suggesting that all biotech art producers are interested in promoting social justice. Rather, how artists who incorporate biotechnologies positions them, whether they like it or not, in relation to certain debates regarding the role of technology in human experience.
We are embodied, and biotechnology reveals that this embodiment, rather than being about how we are distinct from other entities, demonstrates the degrees to which we are compatible, adaptable, permeable, and modifiable, especially in view of proposed integrations of organic and digital technologies (wetware and direct human-to-computer communication). Xeno-transplantation investigates the possibility of human recipients of transplanted pig organs that have been genetically modified to resist rejection. How many species will need to be incorporated within the human body (through xeno-transplants or the ingestion of GMO foods) before we consider ourselves transgenic and give up the notion of species superiority and species integrity?
Such investigations tweak our recognition of the Others crowding out the archaic yet hardwired notion of a singular separate unique self, a conscious boundaried autonomous being (the diehard myth and illusion that has so frequently legitimized rampant individualism, and class and racial hierarchies leading to exploitation and prejudice).
The thought of becoming part of a fusion of organisms, machines, and systems is terrifying to many, as is making genetic modifications that are passed to subsequent generations. Whereas formerly evolution, a messy and haphazard process, happened over thousands of years, the purposeful alteration of genomes (particularly in organisms grown on a commercial scale such as industrialized agriculture) may result in dramatic changes within a short time period. How do we (re)define ourselves in light of these mind-boggling possibilities? The panic implicit in bodily instability is profound, raising fears of “contamination.” What if, instead of encouraging empathy, egalitarianism, and symbiosis, viral hostility or totalitarianism infiltrate these hybrids?
What we make of this bodily instability will determine how we negotiate our mutation into something other than our current human condition. To embrace this indeterminacy, this collapse of boundaries, would be the ultimate outcome of that strand of thinking that views all life, energy, and invention as interdependent and contingent. We do not evolve (whether biologically or culturally) in isolation. The stress is placed not on an outmoded “survival of the fittest” paradigm, but on our symbiotic interactions with other species and with the environment. Some challengers of Darwin posit this view of evolution. For an example, see Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (NY: Basic Books, 1998).
The ultimate outcome of such views has variously been described as a networked consciousness, a hive mind, or a global brain; life becomes a massive parallel processor. It is tempting to label this view holistic in a (Gaian new-age) way that diminishes its appeal, import, or shock. However, it is a prevalent view, one promoted by the interconnectedness of biology, cosmology, and systems theory, and the desired outcome of proponents (physicists, biologists, chaos and systems theorists) of a Theory of Everything (TOE).
The audacious human quest for a Theory of Everything would supposedly resolve all the contradictions between quantum, biological, and cybernetic approaches to the world. It would be the final explanation and demystification of how the universe works, an event horizon beyond which nothing would ever be the same again. The veil of ignorance lifts as intelligence goes supernova, or so the story goes (as usual, humanity could use less hubris and more humility).
Biotech art, like the genre of science fiction, prepares us for the unforeseen changes to come by negotiating treacherous terrain, exploring both the seductive appeal of biotechnologies and strategies for bioresistance. Biotech art engages us in a dialogue about the challenges, promises, and perils of biotechnology today, as well as its aesthetic dimensions. I use the term “aesthetics” not in reference to a detached objective view of art, wherein values are falsely argued as implicit in the artworks themselves, but rather to describe an ideologically informed approach to the visual that acknowledges the social construction of values. In other words, an awareness that some types of bodies or forms are privileged to the exclusion of other types, an approach that has real consequences.
Tobin Siebers, when discussing “the body aesthetic,” states, “the making of any object, out of any substance, by a human being is also in some way a making and remaking of the human.” [Tobin Siebers, “Introduction: Defining the Body Aesthetic,” The Body Aesthetic from Fine Art to Body Modification (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2000), 3] In light of this assertion, the political, corporeal, and psychic dimensions of our engagement with biotech art and its aesthetics are crucial. In the balance hangs nothing less than a stake in the redefinition of “the human.”
What would a bioaesthetics entail? Entering the culture of advanced genetic technologies requires an extreme experimental attitude, the breaching of boundaries, and the transgression of established rules.
Bioaesthetics needs to be excessive as well as critical. It must be wasteful, extravagant, and non-utilitarian. It must be ready, at any moment, to turn back upon itself, experiment upon itself, and put itself at risk … It must try to imagine the unimaginable, to ask questions that are not supposed to be asked, and to transgress the limits of positivist understanding. [Steven Shaviro, “Genetic Disorder: Bioasthetics,” Artforum XLII, no. 5 (2004): 42]
Serious art, as always, is burdened with a hefty social responsibility.
Rather than submitting to the dystopian mantra of Star Trek’s Borg, “resistance is futile,” or buying into the Telus assurance that, “the future is friendly,” we would do well to remember that the term utopia, derived from Greek, literally means ou ‘not’ plus topos ‘place,’ in other words, “nowhere.” The future is not a pre-mapped destination, but an imaginary realm up for grabs (after all, it never occurs, all we ever have is now). The fear of this nowhere seeps through our protective yet vulnerable membranes. This is a necessary fear; in the words of artist Gregg Bordowitz, “utopian potential always risks proximity to horror.” [“Tactics Inside and Out: Gregg Bordowitz on Critical Art Ensemble,” ArtForum XLIII, no. 1 (2004).] The monstrous future looms.
To avoid the twin dangers of technophobia and technophilia requires ongoing visual inquiry and an informed critical stance. Biotech artists, in their efforts to expose for public perusal what they see as the underlying implications of genetic technologies, operate as if there remains an opportunity to expand current dimensions of thought (and they will attempt to do so without any guarantee of success). Mergings of biotechnology and art have the potential to challenge ideologies of human “progress” that are entrenched in anthropocentrism. Some of the most subversive weapons against dominant biomedical and corporate ideologies of human “progress” (which often dangerously elevate egoistic initiatives or profits over egalitarian impulses, or value human life over other life forms) include appropriation, manipulation, refusal, irony, satire, and skepticism. Fortunately these are modes in which a great deal of biotech art excels.
Sandra Seekins / Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art
other islands in this text-fed stream
