From Reza Negarastani's blog:
It
is through this operative fog that some of the more insidious mechanisms of
neoliberal capitalism are directly plugged into the cognitive infrastructure
under the guise of a world that appears determined to extend the plasticity of
imagination and expand frontiers of action. But this is a world in which the
financial closure of capitalism is cloned and grafted onto a cognitively maimed
economy for accumulating false alternatives in the name of liberation of
imagination and action. A suture of different overambitious vocations and
driven by the wealth of waste it generates, the resulting beast is a prophetic
vision of a tightly connected and controlled society with a single closed
alimentary circuit, the human centipede. Those who scheme to infiltrate this
world in order to militantly or cunningly liberate it from the inside are
locked into the compactly segmented structure of the metameric organism. At
once necessary for the growth yet expendable, every insider is a new addition
to the iterated sequence of mouths and rectums through which the art world
bootstraps itself - a miracle made possible by a simple but efficacious
financial and cognitive algorithm. Dreams of acceleration or deceleration,
speculative enthusiasm for the outside or critical self-reflection are revealed
to be simply changes of frequency in the rate of the said iteration.
This is actually a very
Land-ian (i.e. Nick Land) take on art, in that it critiques the institutionalization
of art (although I like to believe that Land and Negarastani have radically
differing political visions). I
basically read this as a fancy way of saying that all art has become
commodified; but “commodification” is still a drastically human concept. Instead of seeing this institutionalization
as a process that continues to benefit the privileged and exclude the
disenfranchised, perhaps we need to redefine (or recreate) our terms. Or, if we want to remain somewhat loyal to
the “scientific” version of Marxism, we need to resist the lure of the
hypothetical puppet-master; that is, we have to resist the illusion that there
is a master actor, or agent, pulling the strings and making a secret killing
off all commodification while the rest of us shiver in our hovels and eat Ramen
noodles. Of course, there are those who
make unfathomably large amounts of money while others make unfathomably little;
but, if we adopt Negarastani’s posthuman machinic view (which might coincide
with a version of scientific Marxism), nobody is manipulating the machine. The machine manipulates everybody.
There is nothing particularly new or groundbreaking in
such an analysis, but let me push a bit further. Another post by Negarastani that I find
interesting:
The Labour of the Inhuman
Inhumanism
is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent
commitment to the project of humanism. A universal wave that erases the
self-portrait of man drawn in sand, inhumanism is a vector of revision, it
relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposed evident
characteristics and preserving certain invariances. At the same time,
inhumanism registers itself as a demand for construction, to define what it
means to be human by treating human as a manipulable and re-orientable
hypothesis. Inhumanism is in concrete opposition to any theoretical paradigm that
seeks to degrade humanity either in the face of its finitude or against the
backdrop of the great outdoors. The force of inhumanism operates as a
retroactive deterrence against anti-humanism by understanding humanity
historically - in the broadest physico-biological and socio-economical sense of
history - as an indispensable runway toward itself. But what is humanism, or
precisely speaking, what specific commitment does 'being human' represent and
how does the full practical elaboration of this commitment to humanity amount
to inhumanism?
I've been thinking a
lot lately about the conflation of posthumanism, inhumanism, and anti-humanism;
what these terms mean and how they relate.
I have recently completed a paper that investigates posthumanism’s
relationship to modernism, and how posthumanism is less of a push toward actual
human-machine hybrids and more of an epistemological
shift. I believe this holds some
kinship with Negarastani’s excerpt immediately above. If we want to preserve the benefits and
practical applicability of posthumanism, we need to distance ourselves from the
purely speculative and hypothetical. And
by “distance ourselves,” I do not mean retreat from such speculations; I mean embrace and push beyond them.
Contemporary British novelist Tom McCarthy, co-founder of
the International Necronautical Society, describes posthumanism as an “intellectual
folly”:
The
desire, as expressed, for example, in the novels of Michel Houellebecq, to
leave behind the fury and the mire of human veins, thereby achieving some
imagined “freedom” or “autonomy.” This is not post-anything: it is merely
Humanism 2.0. To rid the self of its contingency, its meshing in desire and
networks of relationships, was humanism’s aspiration in the first place. It’s a
reactionary aspiration, one that forecloses any type of genuine agency or
ethics.
McCarthy argues that
these types of fantasies do nothing to think beyond the human, but merely
perpetuate the ideology of an essential, pure component of humanity that might
be preserved through various material embodiments (computers,
transubstantiation, as it pertains to the concept of the accident, Saṃsāra, etc.). I agree
entirely with McCarthy on this point, and it is for this reason that I believe
posthumanism is in dire need of revision (and similar suggestions have been
made by numerous posthuman critics, such as N. Katherine Hayles and Cary
Wolfe). Posthumanism must enable itself
to think beyond human essence without abandoning the human entirely (that
material organism that has certain biological needs); posthumanism is not
anti-humanism, but the latter is required (to some extent) to think the
former. We have to resist the centrality
of the human – its universality and, most importantly, its eternal quality
(i.e. that “the human” is a permanent essence that will persist in some form or
other).
Ironically, McCarthy may have identified one of the most
effective means of doing so in the manifestos for his International
Necronautical Society (INS). In its
platform, which we can find inscribed at the bottom of its manifestos, McCarthy
and co-founder Simon Critchley proclaim the purpose of the INS: “the INS
constantly reiterates (or reenacts) its First Manifesto commitment to “map,
enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit” spaces that open up around the sign
of death.” Death, for McCarthy and Critchley, is the ultimate field of the
nonhuman (perhaps McCarthy would be happier with this terminology…), and he
claims that it should be the role of art to thrust humanity toward its own
death, toward death’s immanence. This is
also not entirely original, as it draws from certain strands of speculative
thought going as far back as Freud’s Beyond
the Pleasure Principle. But it is
worth noting for its resistance toward the coincidence of art with the human. For McCarthy, art must purge itself of
humanity as it nears the realm of death; the obliteration of the human. Even this should not be read as “anti-humanist,”
in my opinion; instead, it should be read as something radically posthuman,
despite McCarthy’s distaste for this term.
Posthumanism, as an epistemological shift, heralds a new organization of
knowledge as it relates to matter;
pure organic, and inorganic, matter, void of subjectivity or selfhood.
Throughout the twentieth century, modernist literature
has increasingly come into contact with the posthuman as it brushes up against
the consequences of death. And through
this contact, it has gradually developed its own posthuman epistemology, which
philosophy as well as science have subsequently pursued. In the terrifying world of the unliving (is
it any wonder we today find pop culture fascinated with images of monsters,
zombies, and aliens, all of which continually challenge our conceptions of life?) we must confront that the abject
and the alternative, that the Other, might, in fact, exist entirely in that
unthought space of our own nonexistence.
This is not an argument for human extinction, and the
practicality might seem far-off; but it is, in fact, quite near, and its
applications are presenting themselves more each day; in the fields of animal
studies, cybernetics and information technologies, emergence theory, assemblage
theory, and physics, not to mention countless others. While it remains true that our Western
ideology (indeed, most modern ideologies as they have been subjected by the
ubiquity of a global modernity) is still entrenched in the human, it is also true that our profound engagement and concern
over what it means to be human is opening up doorways and possibilities for
what it means to be nonhuman. And this, I believe, is the true import of
Negarastani’s quote on the inhuman as the “extended practical elaboration of
humanism.”
We’re still working out the chinks in the armor. We’re still figuring out how exactly
posthumanism fits into our worldview. We’re
still managing the differences between what it means to be human and what it
means to be inhuman, since our knowledge of objects remains circumscribed by
the materiality of our perceptions. But
the mere possibility of the implacable Other, which did not present itself
until very recently (the eighteenth century, I would claim – as early as Robinson
Crusoe’s mysterious footprint…), has now gestured to us, from the unfamiliar
outside, that our sciences, our philosophies, and our literatures, might
provide us with very real means of
negotiating a posthuman existence.
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