What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears.
—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (5)
The same month I began research for this book (November 2004), the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority granted individuals with a family history of cancer the right to strategically select embryos free of these genes for fertilization.1 As expected, this action promptly reinvigorated public debates over genetic engineering and the possible mass production of “designer babies”; critics of the decision have claimed that such selection not only is an unethical encroachment of technoscientific practice on the “natural” process of human reproduction, but that it also anticipates a future where unaltered humans are outpaced by their genetically enhanced counterparts and where “gene races” develop between countries (and corporations) to create and control technologies for producing “better” humans.2 During the same month in the U.S., members of the National Academy of Sciences were working against a February deadline for their recommendation report on the legal and ethical status of trans-species chimeras, hybrid creatures created by implanting animal (including human) stem cells at the fetal stage into the member of a different species.3 The Academy's report, a series of advisory guidelines for the federal government, will make suggestions regarding the regulation of contemporary chimeras—such as mice with human brain cells or pigs bioengineered to produce human blood—as well as investigate speculative matters, such as which civil rights should be granted to a hypothetical (but genetically plausible) human/chimpanzee hybrid (or “humanzee”).4
Meanwhile, in Osceola, Wisconsin, legislation and contemporary technoscience were converging on a much more personal level as Elizabeth Woolley weighed options regarding a lawsuit recently threatened against the multinational Sony corporation.5 Woolley's son Shawn, who had been previously diagnosed with clinical depression and schizoid personality disorder, committed suicide on Thanksgiving Day 2001. What made Woolley's demise a topic of popular media attention as well as a potential civil suit was the combination of his psychiatric diagnosis and his primary pastime: twelve-hour stints participating in Sony's online role-playing game EverQuest. While the distribution of agency and culpability that would likely anchor a lawsuit is unsurprising—your video game killed my son— subsequent considerations of the matter provoked more complex questions. Insofar as such prolonged immersion in EverQuest would alter Woolley's dopamine levels, was his “obsession” a form of self-medication that eventually failed? Or did Woolley's intense engagement with a simulated reality hasten the acceleration of his neurochemical condition? In concert with coterminous research into the physiological effects of virtual realities and video gaming, speculations over Woolley's death left legislators, lawyers, and industry personnel scrambling to rethink legal and ethical guidelines to account for both the subjective and neurological impacts of electronically mediated experiences.6
Indeed, also in November of the same year, the potential affinities between narcotics and electronically mediated experiences were being considered in a congressional session sponsored by Kansas senator Sam Brownback.7 Senators taking part in the session listened to a variety of researchers, such as Mary Anne Layden, co-director of a sexual trauma program at the University of Pennsylvania, argue that the effects of prolonged exposure to Internet pornography could replicate both the addictive properties and physiological effects of opiates such as heroin. Although critiques of pornography along moral lines or based on its supposed connection with criminal behavior have a long history, the combination of a relatively new delivery system (the Internet) and contemporary research into the neurological affects of electronic media on the brain are reshaping these debates. In this novel arrangement, anti-pornography advocates critique the consumption of pornography not (or at least not only) in reference to its presumed negative social effects or its potential to “corrupt” the morality of the viewer, but also for its ability to impact the brain in a directly physiological fashion. Hence, the question of controlling or censoring pornography becomes not so much a confrontation between moral values and freedom or speech, but an issue of public health or a corollary sortie of the War on Drugs.
Finally, November 2004 was also the month of the 55th U.S. Presidential Election and concomitantly the occasion of another novel intersection of politics and information technology. This particular election is probably best currently known as having occurred between two other elections of historical importance—the bitterly contested 2000 election that prompted the first intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court into the electoral process, and the election of the first African American president in 2008. However, it is quite likely that it will take on its own historical importance as marking the first time that sophisticated data-mining and niche-media techniques played a significant role in political campaigning. While the use of Internet and social media technologies for fundraising and volunteer organization was a widely covered phenomenon in this election, the more novel and pivotal integration of computing technologies was taking place largely behind such scenes. Specifically, 2004 was the first election that witnessed the significant influence of a number of “microtargeting” and data-aggregating firms that leverage massive server power and the increased availability of demographic information to identify for campaigns incredibly minute categories of potential voters and the best messaging strategies for winning their support. As journalist Steven Levy reports, the “fuzzy cohorts” developed around such categories as “family values voters” or “pro-choice voters” gave way in 2004 to the much more specific categories based on documented ideological and affective investments: a cache of “education obsessed Hispanic” moms microtargeted by Republicans and one of “Christian Conservative Environmentalists” wooed by the Democratic National Committee.8 While there has always been a certain element of feedback between “polling and platform”—between what information a candidate obtains about voters' desires and what principles or causes they claim to be standing for—in political campaigns, the introduction of such sophisticated and precise methods for aligning these vectors seems to mark a more fundamental shift: mimicking in many ways the methods through which “just-in-time” or flexibly specialized production takes place in industry, it now seems possible for politicians to be dynamically and multiply shaped and presented in rapid response to the desires and investments of the populace they are addressing.
In this chapter I argue that these phenomena are representative of two broader shifts apparent in contemporary culture, both of which might be best initially grasped as extensions or intensifications of earlier and more recognizable cultural trends. The first is the way in which one of the constitutive qualities often attributed to the experience of modernity itself, the generally quickening pace of social change itself—what leads Paul Gilroy to refer to modernity as “the changing same” and Marshall Berman as “a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world” (6)—extends beyond social or experiential factors into more explicitly material and biological realms. In a certain sense, the idea of modernity is by definition something like a permanent condition; as numerous critiques of early theorizations of postmodernism were quick to point out, what made the idea of modernity “modern” was the very notion that societies were entering a kind of permanent transition or rearrangement of cultural commonplaces and traditions in response to processes of urbanization, industrialization, and globalization. While this general case may remain true, we might suggest that the stakes and mechanisms of transition and modularity have changed over the past few decades; the modernity of “today” is different insofar as it would appear that nature rather than culture, or technology rather than ideology, are the vectors most visibly open for alteration and that play decisive roles in contemporary political economy. While it has been suggested that the present is an era of hypermodernity insofar as it seems like a “faster” or more intense version of our earlier understanding of modernity, perhaps it would be better to think of it as a time of hypomodernity, with the prefix “hypo” indicating a movement underneath or beyond the typical boundaries of what is in flux or open to alteration. As seen in many of the instances above, in such a transition questions of ethics and social policy typically asked in reference to human identity and the use of human reason become repeated on another level on the basis of human biology and our embodied capacities.
Second, we see a corresponding change in the targets and resources of institutions of social power. If, as Michel Foucault taught us, what distinguished the peculiarly modern form of social power that he called discipline was the ways that human “potentiality”—the various possible identities and physical behaviors of an individual—were integrated into its functioning, we might say that contemporary social power is focused on a broader category of human and non-human vectors that we might refer to as capacity or capacitation.9 By this term I mean to emphasize the priority of not so much particular identities, or even what we might traditionally think of as categories of behaviors, but more general actions and tendencies of any type, such as the way in which consumer desires or political preferences of any stripe become grist for the mill of niche-marketing and niche-messaging strategies.
The following takes up these two tendencies as the appear within four features of contemporary culture that I take to be constitutive of what I am proposing to call “the transhuman condition” of the present, four different ways in which communicative or representational domains seem to have crucially intersected or become inseparable from more recognizably technological or physically material processes: a relatively recent change in the guiding objective of scientific research and production, one in which the epistemological pursuit of better understanding the natural world seems to have been overtaken by an emphasis on directly simulating or intervening in natural processes; new forms of capitalist production and marketing in which it is increasingly more dif cult to definitively imagine any human activity as taking place outside of the realm of commodification; the ways in which human affect, the precognitive domains of human disposition or “feeling,” have taken on new importance within political economy in conjunction with contemporary information technology and communicative media; and, finally, how a variety of related changes in contemporary politics and culture seems to have made the question of “humanism,” and its limitations as an ethical framework, newly relevant in the present.
I will additionally suggest that each of these four phenomena tend toward a specific anitimony, in Immanuel Kant's canonical use of the term to describe the contradictory conclusions that seem to be mutually apparent within a particular state of affairs. However, here too we might already be one step removed from Kant's situation; as we shall see, Kant's partial solution to this problem—a consistent skepticism toward transcendental schemes of representation or valuation—is very much already itself a commonplace within the contradictions of contemporary cultural life that will be under review here.10 As a continuation of the discussion of this antinomy of contemporary humanist thought in particular, I will end by suggesting how the kind of work usually performed via cultural theory that has been reliant on “representation” as a core category might be rethought for the demands of the present.
The penultimate decade of the twenty-first century saw the publication of two volumes jointly titled “The End of Science.” Though separated by only five years, these two texts contain very different rationales for making such a bold claim during a time in which science, or at least the industrial and technological products of scientific research, seemed to be having an increasingly larger impact on the daily lives of individuals in virtually every part of the world. Noted science journalist John Horgan's The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age forwards the argument that science has become, in a sense, a victim of its own success. Updating a 1960s prediction by molecular biologist Gunther Stent that we were on the precipice of a “golden age” of scientific discovery that would paradoxically result in an “end of progress” or rapid decrease in unexplored territory, Horgan suggest that this future has begun in the present across an increasingly larger share of scientific disciplines and fields of research. While the importance of existing scientific knowledge, to say nothing of its ubiquitous applications in contemporary society, remain prominent, the role of science as, in Horgan's words, “the primordial quest to understand the universe and our place in it” has ended, having become at its best an objective that promises “no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns” (6). The other text under review here carried the less certain (and much more agonistic title) The End of Science? Attack and Defense.11 Composed largely of the proceedings of a conference on its titular question held in 1989, the volume collects essays by both humanist academics and research scientists on what organizer Richard Q. Elvee describes as the ongoing re-examination of scientific disciplines “as a product of such things as paradigmatic focuses, ideological struggles and the basic instruments of power” (x). In place of the epistemological limit proposed by Horgan, here we have a political one: a greater understanding of the large variety of injustices promulgated under the guise of objective reason, the growing admixture of science's pursuit of knowledge with the goals of governments and corporations, and the emergence of “science” as a topic of research and critique by humanists, have led to both a new reflexivity within scientific representation and a growing suspicion of its post-Enlightenment role as a master discourse of legitimation.
The two different “ends” presented in these work are certainly distinctive; one might even think of them as oppositional. Horgan's claim for an “end” to science only makes sense if its previous discoveries remain sacrosanct, whereas the closure suggested by at least one side of the “attack and defense” named in The End of Science? would appear to suggest the opposite conclusion: because our faith in scientific objectivity has been shaken, its discoveries are at least reopened for amendment by a perhaps chastened, but definitely more reflective and politically sensitive, array of scientific disciplines. Nevertheless, here I want to pursue the possibility that at least the broad strokes of both of these claims about the near-future state of science have been proven prescient, and that our best opportunity for understanding the most significant changes in scientific enterprise over the last half-century or so resides in combining them in some way.
In doing so, however, I also want to complicate things a bit further by reading the “end” included in both titles as suggesting not only a conclusion or stoppage, but also a fundamental shift in objectives, a change in the “ends” or goals that seem to be most prevalent in scientific research and praxis (and, as we shall see, perhaps of contemporary “objective knowledge” itself on a larger scale). We might find a starting point for the first of these dual considerations in Horgan's qualification that applied science research has certainly not seemed to be under the same limitations as the more “primordial” quest for knowledge behind research in fundamental science (or what is often called “basic research” in the sciences). Indeed, on another reading, one might suggest that it is not so much that all of the major enigmas relevant to the vocation have been already “solved” by fundamental science at it is that there has been a shift in what “counts” as enigmatic, or what questions or challenges are worth pursuing within that domain. In other words, the case may be not that “fundamental science” reaches an “end” by answering all of its important questions, but rather that these questions have themselves become largely unimportant to the scientific, governmental, and corporate entities that increasingly prioritize direct intervention into the control of, rather than more accurate descriptions of, natural phenomenon and physical forces.
One could rather quickly account for—and if so inclined lay blame for— such a shift in the changes in funding priorities by governmental agencies following the heyday of so-called “Big Science” during and shortly after World War II and the allocation of private monies for the same pursuits. A 2008 study by the policy-setting body of the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Science Board, approximates that of the around $340 billion spent on research in 2006, only about 18% was dedicated to basic research ($62B), compared with 60% to development ($204B) and 22% ($75B) to applied research. The difference is even starker if one considers only research and development funded by private industry, wherein money devoted to basic research has largely hovered below 4% of total research expenditures since the late 1990s. In early 2012, international debates over the outpacing of public funding by private corporations erupted following proposals made by UK science minister David Willet for a new class of science-centered universities funded entirely by the private sector, and by Minister of State for Science & Technology Gary Goodyear for Canada's National Research Council to shift its traditional focus on supporting basic research to what he referred to variously as “the business end ,” “the applied end,” and “the commercialization-successful end” of scientific work.12 What is perhaps most interesting about such controversies, however, has been subsequent arguments made against such proposals and the general decline in funding for basic research; proponents for increased public funding of basic research were all too quick to remind us of how “blue sky” scientific investigations undertaken without specific applications in mind have quite often turned out to produce significant new technologies and novel medical and industrial procedures. In this sense, then, even recent defenses of fundamental science or basic research seem to highlight its value as the precursor to its ostensible competitor, positioning fundamental science as valuable only insofar as it aids or leads to applied science and the development of new technologies and techniques that are immediately valuable to business and industry.
What is most striking here is not that scientific work has become increasingly commodified or beholden to for-profit entities—a historical sequence that one could of course quite easily trace throughout a wide variety of domains during the same time. Rather, what is peculiar is the way in which this shift demonstrates a certain inversion of the historical priority of scientific epistemology (over its technical applications) that had largely guided the public face of science, and provided it most visible social role, for several centuries of Western culture. In other words, what might unite the two “ends” of sciences proposed in the texts with which we began is that while one emphasizes the ideological role of science as an enforcer of certain standards of normativity and the boundaries of what counts as objective knowledge, the other bears witness to the disappearance of this role and the prioritizing of direct application and intervention as the core goals of scientific research and knowledge production.
Indeed, we might posit at an even broader collapse in the boundaries between science's role as describing versus altering physical environments and elemental forces. Physicist and Science Studies scholar Evelyn Fox Keller notes, for instance, that contemporary molecular biology is becoming a field in which “the distinctions between representing and intervening, and more generally, between basic and applied science, are daily becoming blurred” through a kind of “conceptual instrumentalism” in which symbolic models of entities and processes are designed less for their representational accuracy or explanatory function and more for their pragmatic use in laboratory procedures and other concrete applications (S73). The pragramatic emphasis of such a shift, however, has by no means diminished the cultural, political, or ethical import of scientific work. As Keller, a veteran of the humanist critique of scientific epistemologies and practices, argues, it makes such questions perhaps even more urgent; the difference is perhaps that the blunt purposes behind desired “applications” for scientific research have now taken center stage as objects in need of interrogation, as opposed to the setting of normative standards for objectivity that were historically the focus of scientific discovery and discourse.
All of which brings us to the second dual consideration of “ends” introduced above; given such changes in scientific practices and priorities, what can we make of the other “end” of science proposed near the close of the twentieth century, the presumption that increased suspicion or criticism of science's claims to objectivity might terminate its social-epistemological function, or force it to assume another purpose in the cultural realm? Before too hastily concluding that all of these “ends” have ended up being the same—that the shift in scientific priorities from a normative or ideological function to a wholly pragmatic one may itself signal the end of science as culturally conceived through the majority of its history—we might do well to hesitate a moment over the recent history of the critical discourse that inaugurated attention to this second “end” of science, the sustained critique of science's ideological role within broader systems of social power. In other words, insofar as scientific epistemology became positioned as a synecdoche for a variety of ostensibly reductionist discourses and cultural commonplaces that came under attack by left-oriented academics and critics in the late twentieth century—and scientific objectivity served as both a counterpoint and a privileged target for the new critical tools of the social sciences and humanities—it seems worth asking after how the “withdrawal” of science from this role might be taken to reflect broader changes in social power or systems of cultural motivation and persuasion today.
Recall that the new politically charged and inherently skeptical attitude of such movements largely got off of the ground via distinctions between their own conceptual frameworks and that of the ostensibly disinterested theorizing performed in the “hard” sciences. Indeed, this is the path taken quite explicitly by what is undoubtedly one the founding documents of the enterprise, Max Horkheimer's manifesto-like essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.” Beginning with what functions as most people's default conception of “theory,” that of the natural sciences, Horheimer proceeds to show how the presumed ahistorical or objective nature of scientific theory leads it to collapse into a “reified ideological category” all its own, and then promotes a new kind of theory—“critical theory”—that might be a robust mechanism for mapping or revealing the very process through which history and social power is hidden behind the veil of transhistorical objectivity (194). In many ways this initial contrast—the definition of critical theory against the “traditional theory” of the sciences—would remain a constitutive feature of the enterprise; from “next generation” Frankfurt school theorist Jürgen Habermas' insistence that questions of the “good life” should remain the province of the humanities and of qualitative social science, to Foucault's critical historicization of the foundations or contemporary knowledge and power starting in sixteenth-century scientific discourses, the critical interpretation of scientific representation and its role in setting standards of objectivity has long been both an “acid test” for considering the range and power of critical theory's methods as well as a consistent target for its more explicitly political or pragmatic undertakings.
And it is in reference to this context that we might propose a distinct identity to the “political end” of science as considered in our source texts here, one that is certainly related to the triumph of praxis as science's primary driver, but perhaps poses its own dilemma about the social role of science today as well as the present purpose or “ends” of (critical) theory in the humanities and social sciences. More precisely, it seems that the displacement of science as the master discourse of veridicity or objectivity has been largely, and one would presume not purely coincidentally, coeval with a decline in the importance of “objectivity” itself as a central vector of contemporary political power. Indeed, it would even appear these days that the kind of negative hermeneutics pioneered by critical theorists around the mid-twentieth century—the very ones developed in part around the critique of the decontextualized objectivity traditionally identified with science—has in many ways taken on this role.
We can find a particularly appropriate example of the latter within a recent essay by Bruno Latour, one that reads in many ways like a pseudo-apologia for the discipline of Science Studies that Latour himself was largely influential in birthing and popularizing. Early in “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Latour provides a partial answer to his titular question by noting the recent appropriation of one of the discipline's major “moves”—the questioning of the objectivity of a scientific discourse in regard to the biases or ideological motivations of its proponents—for purposes far removed from those of the Latour and his colleagues. Detailing how (in)famous conservative pollster and political strategist Frank Luntz has challenged scientific studies of global warming as both uncertain and politically motivated, Latour ponders how such a scenario might have emerged from, and where it might leave, the left-oriented critique of science or epistemology in the humanities and social sciences over the past several decades. One the one hand, Latour notes, such a situation seems like a reversal of the one that provided the exigence of the critique of science many decades ago; the “the danger” at issue for the contemporary critical humanities and social sciences is “no longer coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases” (227). Given such an ironic reversal, and the very real risk posed by the appropriation of this kind of critique by retrogressive parties, Latour goes on to consider whether it might require something like an entire inversion of the critical enterprise as a whole: “while we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible fact hidden behind the illusion of such prejudices?”
Latour's ostensible mea culpa here is, of course, one of many entrants in a larger discourse around the “death of theory” or the need for a radical rethinking of the commonplaces and strategies of humanities and social science theory that have become prominent over the past decade or so. Latour's response is notable, however, for emphasizing both how larger concerns about the “death of theory” relate back to its origins in the critique of scientific objectivity, as well as for how it emphasizes that its ostensible decline—much like Horgan's reading of the decline of scientific discovery—is largely the result of its own success. Having been so persuasive for so long in its presentation of the ideological underside of scientific theory and the fragility of claims for pure objectivity of perspective, the critical left of the humanities and social sciences have found their tools now being taken and repurposed by the very “enemies” they were once designed to combat.
Taken together, then, these two “end(s)” of the traditional roles of science leave us with two distinct antinomies, both of which are bound up with important political and ethical questions. On the one hand, we may have to admit that the late twentieth-century critique of scientific objectivity— without retroactively depriving it of any of its achievements in foregrounding past and contemporary tragedies carried out in the name of science or alibied by the ostensibly disinterested search for objective truth—may have achieved its greatest success only when (or only because?) science was itself retreating from its role as the dominant provider of epistemology or normativity at the same time. If we, rightfully, I would think, consider that undertaking as only one of the most intense areas of a larger progressive agenda in critical thought and the analysis of modern social power, then we are left with a perhaps more thornier and more urgent question as well: if the broader challenging of normativity and the decontextualized commonplaces of dominant knowledges and practices—the action that more or less put the “critical” in “critical theory” from the mid-century onward—has now become equally at home in the rhetorical strategies of the most regressive and moribund movements of the present moment, then what now can play the role of “theory” today, what framework of analysis or contestation can act as a check on the more destructive or exclusionary systems of knowledge and power?
As alluded to above, changes in the teleological anchors of contemporary science research, to say nothing of such controversies such as those over possibilities for genetically altering human bodies addressed earlier in this chapter, can by no means be separated from a larger shift in contemporary capitalist economics, one in which scientific research and such technoscientific process as the creation of “designer babies” or radical life extension might be viewed as only instances of a wider variety of material phenomena that were previously considered unassimilable to processes of commodification but have recently been made available as a product or service to be “consumed” in contemporary economic exchange. While the actual com-modification of aspects or states of the material human body might be a fairly radical example, much recent work distinguishing contemporary capitalism from its earlier forms has emphasized the less extreme incorporation of a number of human cognitive or affective capacities into the realms of capitalist exchange. More specifically, if one of the key features of global capitalism of the 1980s was its emphasis on privatization and the expansion of commodity categories—notable, on the one hand, in the transfer of publicly held goods and services to private corporations and, on the other, in the general rise of a variety of “immaterial” goods and services for sale—the capitalism of the 1990s onward seems like something of a extension of this trend in the opposite direction—one in which the “labor” or “production” side, rather than that of consumption or commodities, seems to have undergone a similar transformation.
for these reasons analyses of these changes have tended to focus on the ways that what we might count as “labor” in the most general sense—human activity that produces recognizable “value” within a particular economy—has fundamentally changed shape during the past several decades. Recall, for instance, that two of the greatest buzzwords of ′90s management theory and economic forecasting were “knowledge work” and “symbolic-analytic work”; both terms attempt to encapsulate the value produced by activities that are largely cognitive, or based on competencies in analysis, problem solving, and strategic communication—tasks that seemed to be increasingly at the center of the so-called “New Economy” of the late twentieth century. Around the same time, a similar focus became dominant in much economic scholarship with a strong (post-)Marxist influence, but in this case expanded to include the ways in which “knowledge work” has increasingly become an additional responsibility of even manual laborers, as well as to chart how the “passive” contributions of knowledge or information by individuals not recognized (nor compensated) as workers are integrated into contemporary production processes. Here, a wide variety of terms have been proposed to name this new category of labor or the economic mode based on the intangible or passive “work” of individuals: affective labor, (Hardt and Negri), immaterial labor (Lazzarato), virtuous labor (Virno), linguistic labor (Marrazi), semiocapitalism (Berardi), spectacular-work (Beller), and cognitive capitalism (Moulier-Boutang). Whereas the more traditional analysis of market transformation named by the “knowledge worker” typically responds to the pragmatic questions of human resources management—how does one motivate and cultivate immaterial labor as opposed to the more apparent and quantifiable actions of workers? How do governments and other institutions better prepare their economies and their people to perform in these conditions?–these latter categories tend to update and extend Marx's labor theory of value, positioning cognitive work or immaterial labor as a new and frequently unacknowledged level of worker exploitation under capitalism. Thus, for instance, Hardt and Negri write of the increasing dependency of capitalist production on “a collective, social intelligence created by accumulated knowledges, techniques, and know-how,” but not one that has necessarily created a more egalitarian or collective share of wealth or power than in earlier stages of capitalism (Empire 364). Indeed, instead it seems to have led to an even greater level of estrangement from one's own labor, and an even further siphoning of such “value” away from its original producer.
There is, of course, a particular tension, or implicit contradiction, in analyses of these changes that take their cue from Marx's analyses of labor in tracking the novel ways that labor has become an increasingly dif use referent in the contemporary production of economic value. On the one hand, and as autonomist-influenced economic theorists in particular have been quick to point out, there is much in Marx that seems to anticipate or proleptically account for how modern labor has always involved a certain kind of recurrent exchange between the more subjective or affective capacities of the laborer and their actual “material” work. As Marx tells us early in the section of Capital specifically devoted to describing the “labor process,” through it a worker
confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. (283)
Similarly, while Marx's default examples of “laborers” largely remain field and factory workers, he quite consistently considers the rather different modes of production common to teachers, artists, and other prototypical “knowledge workers” of his own era.13
On the other hand, however, the fact that the immaterial or affective components of value production seem to be increasingly the rule, rather than the exception, within capitalist economies would seem to cause substantial problems for Marx's analysis of political economy in general, or of “value” as a whole. In other words, while Marx's interest in intellectual labor or in the nineteenth-century version of what we would today call the “service economy” is certainly prescient, the fundamental distinction between labor and other areas of social life and subjective experience largely remains the lynchpin of Marx's approach to everything from his theories of human consciousness, to his analysis of the internal contradictions of capitalism, to his suggestions for how political revolution can be planned and promoted. In particular, the ability to quantify labor, to evaluate how the surplus of value created by a laborer, that vector of her production that exceeds her renumeration and thus, as Marx writes, “for the capitalist, has all the charms of something created out of nothing” would seem to provide both the ethical and analytical core of his work: it is the fundamental distinction through which one can index the inequality of the capitalist system and anchor the entire hermeneutical sequence that would become known as historical materialism (Capital 325). Thus, while the centrality of labor in Marx's thinking would seem to make it a particularly appropriate framework for responding to a time in which “labor production” seems to bleed into ever more areas of everyday life, to do so would be to ignore how the value of that category is sustained by our ability to conceive it as recognizably separate from a variety of other domains of practice—consumption, leisure, the subjective experience of life “itself”—to which it might be opposed. All of which is to say, while extending our concept of labor to include cognitive and affective phenomena seems to concisely describe the various ways that labor has been disconnected from particular times and spaces as well as from immediately productive activities—from the middle-manager answering work e-mails from their home in the middle of the night, to the food services worker told, as I often was, that smiling is “part of the job”—it doesn't seem to adequately describe the full force of the changes subtending such processes, the broader distinctions between labor and almost every other category of activity that have been progressively undermined over the past few decades.
For these reasons, I want to pursue a somewhat different point of intervention here, one that similarly seeks to account for what is unique about the last several decades of socioeconomic exchange, but one that takes the broader admixture of epistemological or communicative capacities and of overtly material or technical forces, to be the primary, and perhaps even more vexing, focal point for these changes. In particular, it seems to me that the very same advances in, and increasing importance of, technologies and communicational media so apparent in the other areas under review in this essay are crucial considerations for any attempt to rethink the contemporary status of economics, let alone labor, in the present moment.
We might even locate the groundwork for such a technics-oriented analysis in the very same passage of Marx's Grundrisse that has inspired much current work on immaterial labor, the so-called “Fragment on Machines.” Here Marx extends his analysis of how machinery used in production serves as a reproduction and replacement for human labor to reflect on the ways other human capacities are absorbed by capital:
In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of the production of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself. The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically as fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper. (694)
In autonomist-influenced economic criticism, this observation is frequently cited as a prescient description of the situation under contemporary capitalism, one in which labor is no longer constricted to particular sites such as the farm field or the factory floor and is instead distributed across a wide range of social activity. In this sense, the emergence of what Marx calls “general social knowledge” as a direct rather than ancillary force of production in capitalism (706), what is often called, after Marx, “the general intellect,” is something like an extension of the ways in which physical machinery can be considered as “objectifi ed labor” (in this case labor quite literally “made” into a material object, with machines acting as replacements for human labor in the production process as well as also being the material of spring of knowledge and intellectual labor). As Paolo Virno glosses this transition, if the integration of physical machinery into the common production processes of capitalism is one in which “knowledge is objectified in fixed capital, transfused into the automatic system of machinery and granted objective spatiotemporal reality,” then the path traveled in the likewise integration of general social knowledge looks much like the same sequence without the mediating step that occurs when “knowledge” is embodied in physical machinery; instead communicational and representational schemas themselves, which Virno lists as including “theorems of formal logics, theories of information and systems, epistemological paradigms, certain segments of the metaphysical tradition, ‘linguistic games,’ and images of the world,” have become the modern-day “machines” of the contemporary economy in a fashion that parallel Marx's analysis of the industrial machines of his own time, and in fulfillment of his predictions for the increased importance of the general intellect into emergent modes of economic production (“Ambivalence” 22).
However, here again it is important to separate what we might call Marx's functional prediction—that abstract and socially shared knowledge would become a primary productive force—from his explicitly political prophecy about that process: that this process would form what he calls a “moving contradiction” within capitalist economies, that the novel admixtures of productive forces and social relations would short-circuit traditional capitalist structures built around their separation (Grundrisse 706). Yet it would appear that between Marx's time and the present, very much the opposite has been proven to be the case. As Virno suggests, “what is striking now is the complete realization of the tendency described in the ‘Fragmentₑ without any emancipatory or even conflictual outcome” (23); the potential conflict between these two vector has instead become a baseline principle of contemporary capitalist production as a whole, the “moving contradiction” formed by the intermingling of sociality and economic production is now a major mover of the economy.
I want to suggest here that the root of this issue is not so much an extreme ambiguity between what falls inside and outside of labor as a recognizable category, but a larger intersection or overlap of these forces of material production and of representation or communication as a whole, in other words, the specifically economic appearance of the larger phenomenon under review in this text—the general conflation of technical and epistemological domains that has taken place over the last several decades. More specifically, we might say that the strange intersection or zones of indistinction between (explicitly) economic activity and social or generically human activity is largely the result of the ways in which contemporary technology and media have made the active or passive co-creation of commodities an intrinsic component of general economic production.14
From this perspective the real shift in contemporary capitalism as compared with a traditional (post-)Marxist analysis of political economy, would be that it is increasingly more focused on the purely technical operation of keeping economic circulation of any type functioning and increasingly less reliant on the need for “superstructural” enforcements to produce this effect (and thus less dependent on maintaining particular ideological or representational forms that might foment desires for particular commodities). At the same time, however, the symbolic or cognitive forces that used to be taken as forming such superstructural elements take on a strange new materiality. For instance, while Virno still tends to consider such newly apparent forces of production as extensions of traditional labor—the subsumption of previously “social” or “private” capacities of the individual into the realm of work—his description of them seems to already presuppose a more global rearrangement of communicative and representational capacities, ones in which they tend to take on an almost physical force. He writes, for example, of how the general intellect is an abstraction, but one “equipped with a material operability”; similarly, the various capacities of “general social knowledge” being put into play as forces of production are composed by “axiomatic rules whose validity does not depend on what they represent. Measuring and representing nothing, these techno-scientific codes and paradigms manifest themselves as constructive principles” (23). The larger point of contention or seeming contradiction within contemporary political economy seems to be not so much the collapse between labor time and what Marx called the “disposable time” in which individuals are not directly producing value within capitalism (Grundrisse 208), but rather the convergence of the technical and representational into a series of generic technics or techniques that dominate both the recognizable field of capitalist economic production as well as whatever we might have taken to be the “non-economic” component of quotidian human life (or as we shall see, even the “anti-capitalist” activity of individuals).
In addition to labor, then, we might also trace the appearance of such a convergence in the overlap or functional similarity between production and consumption, as well as the full-scale integration of a variety of modes of “non-economic” collaboration into capitalism. In particular reference to the first of these, we might return, by way of example, to the vast expansion of demographic research and marketing techniques alluded to in the beginning of this chapter. If our default conception of consumer capitalism is one in which individuals must be convinced to purchase available commodities irrelevant to their essential needs, it would seem that if changes in the ability to produce goods—particularly increases in flexible specialization and “just-in-time” production at the level of manufacturing—as well as to determine existing consumer desires and interests (through complex methods for collecting and indexing demographic data and consumer dispositions) have not changed the core principles of this system of exchange, it has at least substantially reversed the burdens placed on “creating” versus “responding to” the dispositions and desires of consumers of all stripes. To use a rather prosaic example, if the challenge of a U.S. refrigerator manufacturer in the 1960s was to convince consumers that they needed to purchase or upgrade to the new mass-produced model currently awaiting shipment from strategically placed warehouses, the challenge for the individual in the same position today is increasingly to determine the precise attributes of a refrigerator that would automatically appeal to a large enough (though increasingly smaller) market to justify producing a cost-effective amount of them. To account for such changes, one would have to rephrase Adorno and Horkheimer's paradigmatic description of consumer capitalism as the system in which “something is provided for all so that none may escape” (Dialectic 123); today, it would be more accurate to state “everyone must provide something so that none may escape”: capitalist production and consumption does not work so much by providing a wide enough variety of options to project a fantasy of freedom of choice, but by the targeted response to almost any kind of desire near the moment of its very creation; and, for better or worse, declaring some kind of identity or desire is increasingly the cost of having any kind of participation in contemporary economics and politics, however quotidian (I have to allow my local grocery story to track my purchasing practices in order to take advantage of the “great deals” available through their membership card) or monumental (one must claim some kind of ideational or demographic position in order to be heard, or at least to “count,” in the public political arena). Indeed, one might even go one step further and state that “everyone must be something so that none may escape”: because everyone must have some kind, any kind, of subjectivity whatsoever, that subjectivity will be targeted and some economic value will be extracted from it.
Well beyond the realm of “traditional” manufacturing and marketing of this type, we might consider a much larger field of processes through which the distribution and organization of voluntary (and unremunerated) activity is incorporated into production processes on two other levels. First there is the relatively “active” participation that takes place in such processes as crowdsourcing (the outsourcing of portions of a larger task to an indefinite group of volunteers), presumption (a consumer's direct participation in the production of the good or service being consumed), and citizen journalism (the coverage, documentation, and public discussion of new event), as well as in participatory and social media of all types. Second, we might consider the relatively more passive contribution of demographic data, geographic location, and consumer dispositions used to generate niche- and proximal advertising and messaging strategies, ones that are increasingly driving the co-crafting of, as we saw in the start of the chapter, both products and politicians over the last two decades. Taken together, these phenomena constitute a significant reordering of economic and communication networks, as well as systems of social power more generally. The emerging configurations in each draw their value and function through, on the one hand, the flexible division of materials, processes, and tasks that might be shaped altered, or fulfilled by leveraging the individual contributions of ad hoc communities, and, on the other hand, the broadest possible inclusion of individuals of all backgrounds into such collectivities.
As alluded to above, the importance of collectivity and collaboration within such practices is perhaps worthy of special consideration here. If one way to look at the expansion of value production is to track the ways in which individual capacities and behaviors previously taken to be constitutively private—in the sense that are not in typically part of the public realm of exchange—have become commodified or “monetized,” then we might say this tendency has also been matched by a similar subsumption of collective and cooperative behaviors, in many cases precisely those that were taken to form the contrastive “outside” or edge of economics as the realm of the public exchange of value and the organization of cooperative activities. We can find a particularly salient description of this process in a recent work by business consultant and digital economy guru Don Tapscott (writing here with Anthony D. Williams). As Tapscott and Williams suggest, the “new forms of mass collaboration” such as crowdsourcing and peer production that “are changing how goods and services and invented, produced, marketed, and distributed on a global basis” are largely variations on the “old forms” of cooperation more common to ostensibly non-economic, and sometimes explicitly anticapitalist objectives and collectives:
In the past, collaboration was mostly small scale. It was something that took place among relatives, friends, and associates in households, communities, and workplaces. In relatively rare instances, collaboration approached mass scale, but this was mainly in short bursts of political action. Think of the Vietnam-era war protests or, more recently, about the raucous anti-globalization rallies in Seattle, Turin, and Washington. Never before, however, have individuals had the power or opportunity to link up loose networks of peers to produce goods and services in a very tangible and ongoing way. (10)
Though one might balk at the seemingly gleeful tone through which Tapscott and Williams seems to be celebrating new opportunities for businesses to exploit cooperative behaviors that used to be restricted to the “waste-fully” unmonetized activities that united families, friends, and political activists, there is much to suggest that it is this analysis, rather than the one implicit in much post-Marxist scholarship on new economic formations, that most adequately presents the kind of full saturation of capitalist com-modification within social life. Tapscott and Williams' reference to “the raucous anti-globalization rallies in Seattle” is particularly notable here, given how widely the so-called “Battle in Seattle,” the protests of the World Trade Organization Minsterial Conference of 1999, has been held up as a particularly promising example of collectivity and mass protest against the excesses of contemporary global capitalism (Hardt and Negri, Multitude 285; Pignarre and Stengers 3–9).
All of which brings us to our third antinomy pervading contemporary cultural life: the increasing appropriation of “non-economic” activity into capitalism is not so much something like a “triumph” of that system, but a bellwether of the ways in which more generic techniques of managed collaboration and social interaction have been set free from any clear mooring inside or outside of capitalism as a formal system. Another way to put it would be that capitalism isn't really capitalism anymore, or at least no longer takes the form that we usually associate with the concept. This, I take it, is one point on which the more typically left-radical analyses of immaterial or cognitive labor and the more traditionally conservative analyses of “knowledge work” seem to agree, though they tend to map the disappearance of the distinction between capitalism and its others in opposing direction. For Virno, the post-Fordist realization of many of the core tendencies that Marx associated with the eventual decline of capitalism (and concomitant emergence of communism)—the rise of the general intellect as a productive force, the widespread availability of opportunities for social cooperation, the increase in global communicative structures—without the actual occurrence of that decline, leads to something best phrased as “the communism of capital,” an integration of socialist practices and possibilities without the aggregative benefits that would presumably come along with them (Grammar 110–111). Moving in a different direction, the very same changes led to prominent management consultant and business guru Peter F. Drucker's declaration of an emergent worldwide “post-capitalist society”; for Drucker, writing in the early ′90s, “the real, controlling resource and the absolutely decisive ‘factor of production’ is now neither capital nor land nor labor,” but the more ethereal techniques associated with knowledge work and the post-industrial finance and “information economy” (Post 6). Going with it, Drucker goes on to suggest, is any clear consideration of capitalism as the “dominant social reality” of the time, its decline mirroring the end of socialism as a “dominant social ideology” in the Eastern Bloc states.
Viewed in this light, the emergent technicity of contemporary value production and social activity, its flickering state between the more formally solid domains of the purely representational and communicative and the more determinatively technical or “operational,” is something like the metaphysical parallel to the more concrete and site-specific changes that have eroded the distinctions between capitalism and socialism during the past few decades: socialist countries' investment of sovereign wealth funds into capitalist economies and the related enlargement of labor union and pension fund investment in capital markets (what Drucker famously called “pension fund socialism” in an earlier work), the purchase of large amounts or full-scale takeover of publicly traded and private corporations by capitalist governments during and in the aftermath of the recent economic “crisis” of 2008 (Unseen). While these phenomena are fairly specific harbingers of the newly murkier boundaries between formal economic systems—one in which many capitalist economies has lost much of what Erik Olin Wright calls their “capitalisticness,” while socialist economies have embraced many features of traditional capitalism (36)—they might be taken as only the more obvious signs of a growing parity between the techniques taken to be paramount to these forms, or more broadly as the emergence of “techiques” themselves, the largely neutral middle-state between explicitly representational and operational vectors, as the major force field through which contemporary culture finds shape and coherence.
All of which leads us with a number of pressing questions about how one seeks to either conceive of, let alone intervene in some oppositional way within, the economic in any way that would do something other than merely reproduce or further extend its already thick saturation of the social. Insofar as the economic has now come to encompass a variety of generic human capacities and quotidian social relations, then how can one attempt to withhold their value production from this expanded field? If one produces value of some sort every time they click on a link in a search engine or gaze upon an advertisement, then how does one opt out of such actions without removing themselves entirely from participating in any type of social exchange, or by refusing to exhibit any of an increasingly larger share of basic human capacities and behaviors? Indeed, for theorists who take the expansion of labor into immaterial realms, the question of “opposition” or “resistance” to such forces has often been met with what we might take to be equally absolutist strategies of negation or disassociation: considerations of how one might stage an absolute defection from current social conditions or rigid resistance to commonplace modes of behavior and interaction.
We might find a starting point for this tendency in Mario Tronti's influential early ′60s essay “The Strategy of Refusal,” which argues that “mass passivity at the level of production is the material fact from which we must begin” if we hope to develop anything like a viable resistance to emergent forms of capitalist exploitation (20).More recently, Virno has hypothesized resistance to the capillary tendency of labor around a series of references to more extreme or fantastical variations on the factory strike or “walk out,” a search for a form of “exit” or “exodus” from the matrix of capitalist value production as a whole (Grammar 70–71). Finally, in acknowledging the increasingly biopolitical nature of contemporary multinational capitalism—its abilities to extract value from almost any aspect of human functioning—Hardt and Negri suggest that any “will to be against” the increasingly larger enemy of global “empire” would require us to inhabit “a body that is completely incapable of submitting to command — a body that is incapable of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth” (Empire 216). While the diagnoses behind such suggestions can hardly be accused of understating the significance of the extension of value production from defined categories of labor to overwhelmingly common elements of generic social life, their prescriptions for redress or resistance share an overwhelming negative or passive tone—suggestions of what one should not do in order to inhibit their exploitation within this system, rather than what one could or should do in an attempt to redirect or ameliorate it in some way.
We might then all too hastily conclude this swerve through the economic valences of the technologic of contemporary culture by suggesting a more refined variation of the antinomy offered above, a paradox or constitutive tension less diagnostic than it is strategic. Insofar as the novelty of contemporary economic production and circulation seems to be the cleavage of techniques from the ideological or ideational domains with which they were previously associated (the socialist or the capitalist, the public or private, the competitive or the collaborative), the fundamental challenge of the present is not so much to discover some radical alternative to contemporary conditions—one that often circulates rather nebulously in notions of an absolute refusal or exodus—but to figure out how these same techniques already immensely immanent in contemporary capitalism can be made to produce different outcomes, to somehow ameliorate the immense inequalities or material damages that largely remain common to the system, despite its vast mutations in other areas. In other words, the real lesson offered by the citation of anti-globalization protests as a “business model” for contemporary corporate entrepreneurs is that the prevailing technicity of contemporary culture has made a large number of techniques up for grabs by partisans of diverse and conflicting agendas and objectives. Under the “communism of capital” or in “post-capitalist society,” the trick is to acknowledge and in some way leverage the fact that these techniques will always already be commodified or draw their value against the backdrop of mechanisms for modulating desire and motivation that we have traditionally come to identify with capitalism. This suggestion itself, of course, perhaps raises its own questions about both the pragmatics and ethics of such a strategy, one that might be at least provisionally approached around the consideration of affect, a force and concept that has itself often been invoked in relation to contemporary political economy, and one to which we now turn.
Indeed, we might also find a constellation point for all of the earlier discussions in this chapter—not only the changing role of economic value production, but also in relationships between technoscience and politics—in the increased attention to the central role of affective or sub-rational forces in contemporary culture, and what has been deemed the “affective turn” in contemporary cultural theory that has arisen in response to it. In both instances, the increased availability of technologies for measuring human physiological response has resulted in a fundamental reconsideration of the ways in which our embodied capacities and dispositions (perhaps even more so than our thought process at the level of consciousness) have become central to contemporary politics and culture. Here too we are faced with a situation in which ostensibly acultural or transhistorical properties (i.e., the human nervous system) appear to be taking on new forms or functions in response to novel changes in culture. Similarly, as I will argue below, this reformulation of the connections between the natural and cultural may present some particularly urgent questions about the intersections of rhetoric and ethics in the present moment.
The root causes for the turn to affect in contemporary cultural theory, or the more general feeling that it is affects rather than ideational content that seems to drive our contemporary experiences, might be mapped across a number of cultural domains. Perhaps most notably, renewed interest in affect in the humanities and social sciences has been largely coeval with the exploration of the role of affect in contemporary marketing research and practices. The widespread use of sophisticated diagnostic technologies for measuring individual's precognitive responses to advertising appeals, as well as the general affective associations consumers have for popular products, has been at the center of so-called “neuromarketing” over the last decade or so.15 The use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fRMI) and Electroencephalography (EEG) machines to measure brain activity in response to particular advertising images and appeals has, on the one hand, led to a greater awareness of the ways in which such appeals have always operated beneath the cognitive level and, on the other, made it much easier for those who design such messages to more strategically exploit these tendencies. If, as discussed earlier in this chapter, the “ideological” model of capitalist consumerism based on expectations of mass conformity has been replaced by niche and micromarketing that more flexibly targets small groups of consumers, then neuromarketing might be taken as a parallel movement—one in which even one's affective capacities are integrated into the production and selling of goods and services.
One might also, for instance, chart the rise of affect's perceived centrality to human experience against the increasing replication of other human capacities in mechanical realms; as we have witnessed a variety of capacities previously taken to be unique domains of humans produced within technological systems, affect has correspondingly been defined as property uniquely singular to humanity (or at least one restricted to certain set of “advanced” biological creatures). Similarly, one could index the turn to affect in relation to changes in technological resources and aesthetic styles of various media, such as cinema. In this genealogy, a line could be drawn tracing movement from the early “cinema of attractions” (e.g., Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1896), to the birth of narrative film proper (The Great Train Robbery, 1903), to the era of pastiche and narrative recycling (to keep with the train theme: Throw Momma from the Train, 1987), and, finally, to a number of more recent films that stage a return of sorts to the cinema of attractions by targeting viewers' affective responses explicitly through nonlinear sequencing and the prioritizing of emotionally intense images (e.g., Trainspot ting, 1987, clips of which have in fact been used in controlled experiments to prime particular affects in participants) (Lerner; Hall).
However, the shift that seems to be most pressing to the majority of researchers participating in the contemporary turn to affect might best be describe in reference to political economy, if we take the broad meaning of that term to encompass both how value is created within culture and the complicated mediations between individual and group identities within that process. This genealogy might begin with Adam Smith's paradigmatic gesture in theorizing “the invisible hand” of the market. It was Smith's invention that fascinated the young Hegel and inspired his conception of a “ruse of reason” to explain the complex interactions between the conscious and unconscious motivations of individuals and between the motivations of individuals and social collectives. This latter structure, and in particular its further transposition of Marx in his writing on ideology, is the one most commonly being worked through and against in contemporary cultural theory and criticism that suggest that our embodied and affective qualities significantly shape our political and ethical dispositions.16 As a source for contemporary (cultural, political) motivations or investments, however, affective processes can seem all the more elusive for having a material “location” in the human physiology; indeed, such a location often makes affect appear both ubiquitous and comprehensively unaccountable, a replacement of the “invisible hand” of rational choice with the “invisible gland” of affective processes now driving political economy.
Indeed, it seems to be this last vector in particular—the distinction between the embodied and preconscious forces of affective response and our more traditional conceptions of cultural norms as socially constructed or ideologically enforced—that has been a major selling point for theories of affect today. For example, in his immensely influential writings on affect, Brian Massumi argues that increased attention to the role of human physiology can help us pass through the “gridlock” created by cultural theory's recent emphasis on identity and an individual's position inside an “ideological master structure” of social norms; for Massumi, shifting focus to the precognitive capacities associated with human emotion might allow us to avoid both the “Scyllan of naïve realism” and the “Charybdis of subjectivism,” and thus capture more concretely the co-relation of human bodies and human culture (3–4). Similarly, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's equally prominent work on affect positions it as an opportunity to challenge what she calls the “antibiologism” of critical theory in the humanities and social sciences, and to think outside our tendencies, post-Foucault, to dedicate our scholarly efforts on categorizing social forces as either “repressive” or “liberatory” (101, 10). For both Massumi and Sedgwick, as for the majority of participants in the affective turn of contemporary cultural criticism, affective potentials are largely “hardwired” into human biology—the potentials for such affects as shame, joy, and so on, are fairly universal to human experience—so attention to its role in human behavior and identity is taken as a salutary way to rethink those categories outside of an emphasis on sociality as the prime shaper of human subjectivity and experience. In particular, focusing on the role of biological response in shaping human subjectivity and experience is forwarded as a way to complicate any notion that an “intellectual” understanding of sociality or the contingency of interpolative forces automatically provides some purchase on resisting them. In this sense, we might say that while the general interest in the role of affect is a response to changes in contemporary technology, communicational media, and aesthetic forms, the turn to affect theory is also an attempt to restage or reorient our more traditional methods of reflection and analysis: noting the increasing prevalence of “nonrational” modes of communication and persuasion helps curb our overly optimist, or one might say all too humanist, hopes that rational deliberation might somehow “free” us from its more negative influences.
However it would seem that there is an inherent or unavoidable paradox caused by how affect is positioned in such claims in relation to the work that making such claims—of taking up affect as an object of research or analysis itself—is presumed to perform for those of us interested in the ways in which social power or cultural conditioning takes place. As Ruth Leys concisely summarizes it, if there is one claim that unites recent critical work on affect recently in the humanities and social sciences, it is that
we human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensities and resonances that so decisively influence or condition our political and other beliefs that we ignore those affective intensities and resonances at our peril—not only because doing so leads us to underestimate the political harm that the deliberate manipulation of our affective lives can do but also because we will otherwise miss the potential for ethical creativity and transformation that ‘technologies of the self’ designed to work on our embodied beings can help bring about. (436)
As Leys goes on to suggest, there is certainly a kind of question-begging about intention taking place here—is affect the invisible force that interpolates me without my conscious knowledge, or a conduit through which I might make the conscious decision to transform myself?—that seems to repeat, at a level removed, the same “chicken or egg” conundrum that marked theories of social construction or ideological submission that affect was designed to remedy. More pressing, at least for our purposes here, is a disjunction that we might take be either broader or more specific, the contrast between how one balances what Massumi calls the “autonomy” of affect—its alterity to, and potential for freeing us from, traditional forms of social conditioning as well as of the critical analysis of culture—and the positing of affect as being at the same time central to contemporary social life.
On the one hand, affect is taken to be interesting precisely because of its overwhelming singularity or resistance to our traditional methods of quantification or description. Thus, for instance, Massumi describes affect and affective “intensity” using such terms and phrases as “unassimilable,” “outside expectation,” “in excess of any narrative or functional line,” and as an “irreducible excess” (85–87). Similarly, affect is often positioned to be most recognizable through its disruption of the more apparent or stable qualities of cognition or cultural experience. What Massumi refers to as the “state of suspense, potentially of disruption” (86) that characterizes affective intensity is echoed by Sedgwick, who refers to affect as
a kind of free radical that (in different people and also in different cultures) attaches to and permanently intensifies or alters the meaning of—of almost anything: a zone of the body, a sensory system, a prohibited or indeed a permitted behavior, another affect … a named identity, a script for interpreting other people's behavior toward oneself. (62)
Affect's autonomy from cognitive or conscious perception, or the “gener-alizable” in some abstract sense, is essential to its appeal as a resource for rebooting the critical analysis of culture that may have too narrowly focused on the ideological or psychoanalytic as “master” categories for studying contemporary sociality; as Claire Hemmings suggests, the most prominent work in affect theory in the humanities share an emphasis on “the unexpected, the singular, or indeed the quirky, over the generally applicable, where the latter becomes associated with the pessimism of social determinist perspectives, and the former with the hope of freedom from social constraint” (550).
On the other hand, it would also seem that the ubiquitous or even quotidian nature of affect—its saturation into contemporary culture as a whole— is equally essential to its potential for mapping contemporary culture and, in particular, emphasizing what may be new about systems of community, media, technology, and social power in the present. Even as affect names this particularly “intense” category of subjectivity-altering events and the locus of unmediated feeling within the human body, it also seems to be the very air and atmosphere of our mundane, if hypermediated, experience of life in the present.
One could, of course, dismiss this apparent contradiction as itself merely further proof of affect's ostensible centrality in human (cultural) experience: it's “both” the banal substance of our everyday experience and the charged interruption of the same; precisely because affect is something like a matrix for the formation of psychic associations and dispositions, it is also the same mechanism through which they might be altered. Perhaps, as Negri contends in another oft-cited description of the “immeasurability” of affect, “the Sublime has become the new normal” (“Value” 87). Such a conclusion may not be altogether inaccurate—and I will suggest something of the same below—but to too easily presume that affect can be a kind of privileged transformative force that might effect a more “authentic” or self-actualizing relationship to oneself, while also being the bread and butter of everyday social existence, seems to neglect a whole host of ethical and political contradictions that themselves might be taken to be lurking “just beneath the surface” of such considerations.
More specifically, if one senses a certain disjunction between these claims for affect's role in contemporary cultural domains, it might be caused not so much by its alternate positioning as either extremely rare or overwhelmingly common, but among or in between our consideration of affect as a uniquely human or least uniquely biological capacity and of its more “strategic” use as a method for motivating or manipulating individuals to perform particular actions based on their existing dispositions. As alluded to above, at least one significant driver of the recent turn to affect in contemporary criticism has been its positioning as a quintessentially human vector, an essential if often neglected component of human cognition and subjectivity that cannot be replicated in mechanical realms. Thus, for instance, N. Katherine Hayles joins many others in emphasizing the ways in which outsized claims made in the pursuit of “artificial life” or intelligence in computational systems can be debunked through emphasizing their historical disregard for the importance of affect (Posthuman 245–246). To give just one more example, some of the most prominent research into affect and emotional processing within political science and political psychology research has derived its central premises from Herbert Simon's emphasis on the role of emotion in human thinking, and the failure to consider it within debates over human and “mechanical” intelligence.17
However, subsequent research of affect has somewhat paradoxically underscored the similarities between at least some major parts of human behavior and “mechanical” processing. Take, to use an example that might play nicely of of Massumi's influential emphasis on the “autonomy” of affect, social psychologists John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand's study “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” a consideration of the ways in which “most of daily life is driven by automatic, nonconscious mental processes” that develop from “the frequent and consistent pairing of internal responses with external events” (464, 468). Among other research, the authors review a number of studies (by themselves and others) on the effects of stereotypes on behavior in support of their thesis. For instance, subjects “primed” with words relating to stereotypes of the elderly (“Florida,” “sentimental,” etc.) subsequently behaved in line with the stereotype (walking slowly down hallways, having difficulty with their short-term memory). In another series of experiments, participants were subliminally presented with the faces of young African Americans; their subsequent behavior was markedly more hostile (as opposed to the control groups in the experiments), presumably based on their conceptions of that group. Given this last example, some readers might take Bargh and Chartrand as being a tad blithe in their conclusion that we should consider “automatic” affective processes as “mental butlers” acting “in our service and best interests” and who “know our preferences … so well that they anticipate and take care of them for us, without having to be asked” (476). More generally, however, such descriptions of the “automaticity” of affective response should give us pause over both what Hemmings codes as the “theoretical celebration of affect” in left-oriented cultural theory as well as the common positioning of affect as a key contrast to the mechanistic or computational logic of contemporary culture and technology (550). Indeed, it might be just as easy to say that affective response, particularly in its baseline logic of adaptive response and dispositional orientations, provides our most intense functional overlap with contemporary technologies.18 In this reading, if the turn to affect is at least in part a response to anxiety over the replication of human capacities in non-human realms, or the more general integration of computational media and technology into ever more aspects of contemporary culture, it is a particularly paradoxical one: an embrace of the very qualities that are in many ways the most synthetic.
Perhaps more immediately pressing, however, is the disconnection that seems to lie between the association of affect with the most duplicitous and regressive of contemporary motivational strategies and its potential to be the basis for a revived political movement with progressive and liberatory objectives. As Hemmings details, the “optimism of affective freedom” that dominates contemporary humanistic research has often led us to neglect affective attachments with less desirable implications—“the delights of consumerism, the feelings of belonging attending fundamentalism or fascism”—introducing them only as either in contradistinction to the more intuitively “positive” affective dispositions or as the domain of actors with far less enlightened, if historically more successful, programs behind their use of affect in persuasive strategies (55).
Indeed, many humanists and social scientists with left-oriented political goals have underscored the greater acumen of political conservatives in affective political strategizing. For instance, Massumi concludes his “Autonomy of Affect” by noting that “the far right” rather than the “established left” have been far more attuned to the political potential of affect (105–106). Similarly, Lauren Berlant has somewhat gloomily argued that one of the lessons of Kerry's loss to George W. Bush in the 2004 U.S. presidential election was the importance of modeling “affective continuity” with the voting citizenship, one that was achieved much better by Bush and may be entirely unavailable to politicians that insist on foregrounding a “rational” approach to policy issues, or who prioritize complexity and nuance over certainty and “authenticity.” What is often unspoken in such calls is that the appropriation of “af ect-based” strategies from the right and for the left may require the adoption of practices often taken to be manipulative, deceitful, or contradictory to the values behind the objectives being forwarded—that the call for a “post-critical” or post-ideological perspective that breaks from critical theory's traditional concern with identifying what practices “enforce” or “resist” the dominant order of political economy, may require the sacrifice of a certain ethical clarity.
Given that our concern here is with a number of phenomena that seem to short-circuit well-worn distinctions between, on the one hand, the material and the representational and, on the other, that of the natural and the artificial, we might conclude by turning to a phenomenon that might be viewed as both our best example of existing attempts to address such changes in contemporary humanities and social sciences scholarship, while at the same time as also something of a “symptom” of this process itself: the various ways in which the question of “the human” as a material being (i.e., the precise determination of what is constitutive of the human as an organism or recognizable entity) has become tied to broader questions about ethics, justice, and the intersection of the biological and the political. While perhaps the most immediately urgent exigencies for these questions emerge from practices recently only available or imaginable due to advances in technosciences, such concerns have also become central to a wide variety of policy deliberations and public conversations over a host of subjects— from human rights issues, to animal rights, to end-of-life controversies, to debates over global warming and climate change—and the focus of an immense amount of work in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory that seek to either recuperate or refract humanism as a series of precepts for working through questions of ethics, justice, and (social) responsibility.
As suggested in the introduction to this book, Julian Huxley was perhaps the first to explicitly broach this concern through his writings on the transhuman. While in the intervening decades this specific title has primarily been invoked only in specific reference to the alteration of human genetics or the human body (of which, more in a moment), over the last decade or so there have been a variety of formal attempts to engage Huxley's broader argument about the need to reinvigorate and refine the tenets of humanism in response to the demands of the present. What is perhaps most notable about such attempts is how they come closely on the heels of what often seemed to be the popular acknowledgement of the obsolescence of humanism, its eclipse as a viable ethical or political foundation beginning in the tumultuous postwar period of international politics and intellectual thought that begin shortly after the time of Huxley's writing in the mid-twentieth century. Recall, for instance, that the growing suspicion of or outright opposition to post-Enlightenment humanism's presumed reliance on a too-easy notion of shared identity (one whose attempts to include as many people as possible into a single category seemed to actually function by excluding or making abject others), and the power of human reason (one that seemed to promise much more than it could deliver) in the early works of such writers as Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault led to the popular identification of their works as inaugurating an age of “antihumanist” thought.
This term may have rather quickly fallen out of fashion but served as a crucial precursor for the more long-lasting titles of “postmodernism” and “poststructuralism,” intellectual movements that were and are themselves frequently described in terms of their critique or dismissal of humanist touchstones. However, as many of the defining characteristics we use to associate with postmodernism seem to be falling by the wayside, contemporary critical thought seems to find more of a coherent identity around certain “neo-” or “post-” humanisms that draw their power not so much from some full-scale attack on humanism as a dominant cultural ideology or discourse (which is to say not so much from “negative” critique or acts of demystification in general) as they do from a more nuanced attempt to rebuild or retrofit many of its goals through less exclusionary or problematic means.
Perhaps most prominent among these discourses has been scholarship traveling under the rubric of “posthumanism,” work in humanities and social sciences disciplines that show a high degree of variability in their methodologies and approaches but share a focus on critiquing the more moribund legacies of Western cultural humanism as well as attending to how research in the “hard” sciences may (or should) be altering our understanding of the constitutive qualities of human beings. While the term “posthuman” has an interesting history (including appearances in horror and “weird” fiction of the early twentieth century), its popularization in cultural criticism is largely due to N. Katherine Hayle's use of the term to describe how work in early information theory and the thematic trends of contemporary science fiction jointly present an understanding of human being and human bodies as essentially “informatic” or “virtual”—able to be “captured” by genetic code or simulated by information technology or digital media. For Hayles, such a development is both undeniably modern—made possible by a number of entirely novel developments in scientific and aesthetic thought—while at the same time an intensification of a certain idealist and abiological conception of human consciousness that finds it roots in Platonic thought, a privileging of human reason over the messier domains of human biology and affect. The posthuman then becomes for Hayles both a description of this contemporary situation as well as the possibility of configuring its tendencies differently; we might do better, Hayles suggests, in continuing the development of biotechnology and digital media while still maintaining an ethical perspective “that recognizes and celebrates human finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity” (Posthuman 5).
More recently Carey Wolfe has provided an influential and nuanced program for posthumanism, one that expands its scope into a broader and more thorough rethinking of the work of the humanities to account for the “necessity of new theoretical paradigms … a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon” (xvi). Much as humanism was a robust content provider for Western ethical thought for several centuries, Wolfe proposes an equally wide-ranging posthumanist perspective that might, somewhat more humbly, and against the temptations of anthropocentrism, provide an orientation for rethinking human identity and ethical action within a rapidly changing natural and social world.
We might identify another category within current attempts to rethink or retrofit humanistic concerns around works that are responding to much the same concerns as Hayles and Wolfe but recommend much the opposite conclusion in response. In opposition to Hayles' or Wolfe's suggestion that recent scientific and social developments call for a thorough critique of humanism as a philosophical worldview, contributors to this perspective instead argue for the need to reinvigorate or recommit to fundamental principles of Western humanism as a corrective response to these developments. What we might call an emergent “neo-humanism” of this type is well represented, for instance, by the prominent American neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama's work on the (present and predicted) social impact of psychopharmacology and biotechnology. Fukuyama is perhaps best known for his 1989 declaration that the end of the Cold War and the spread of Western liberal democracy and capitalism marked the “end of history.” However, writing a little over a decade later, Fukuyama would revise his thesis to suggest that the process of “history” has begun again around competing struggles over the future of human nature rather than of human societies. Whereas the explicitly political conflicts over the best foundations for government certainly involved broad questions of the justice and the “good life,” for Fukuyama, new techniques of altering human genetics and the popularization of neuropharmacological agents such as antidepressants prompt dilemmas over even more basic questions regarding the natural condition of the human and the ethical limits that should be placed on human enhancement. Such challenges, Fukuyama argues, require something like a radical recommitment to normative protocols of human being and behavior as well as our collective investment in the belief that “human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species” (Posthuman 7). Though writing against the backdrop of a somewhat different political tradition, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has made strikingly similar claims in his recent work. Like Fukuyama, Habermas also contends that “new technologies make a public discourse on the right understanding of cultural forms of life in general an urgent matter” (Future 15). While particularly sensitive to the ways in which humanist philosophies or definitions of human nature have been deployed to the often brutal disadvantage of particular groups, he also follows Fukuyama in arguing for a generic and recognizable human nature or “anthropological self-understanding of the species” that is constitutive of humans as social beings, and which is in need of governmental protection in a time wherein it is possible to fundamentally alter the human germ line.
Finally, we might consider a more dif use but equally influential recuperation of central tenets of humanism that Bonnie Honig has referred to as a newly apparent “tragic” or “mortalist” vintage of humanist thought. As Honig suggests, participants in this movement take their cues from the turn to ethics that became prominent in critical theory of the humanities and social sciences near the end of the twentieth century, but in many important ways look much further backward to the “tragic sensibility” of early Greek philosophy and art. More specifically, Honig writes, recent work in political theory by such writers as Judith Butler, Nicole Loraux, and Stephen K. White carries forward the critique of humanism leveled by much poststructuralist philosophy, but “reprises an earlier humanism in which what is common to humans is not rationality but the ontological fact of mortality, not the capacity to reason but vulnerability to sufering” (73). In such a “tragic” humanism, we have what appears to be something like a compromise between, or hybridization of, the viewpoints of what Wolfe codes as posthumanism and the implicit neo-humanism of thinkers like Habermas and Fukuyama: while maintaining what we might take as a foundational humanist investment in a generic conception of human nature, in “tragic” humanism these qualities are explicitly embodied and material ones. Indicative of a vision that has learned much from the failures of more “triumphant” versions of post-Enlightenment humanism, tragic humanism also trends more toward identifying a fundamental fragility or of shared vulnerabilities of the human, as opposed to the more affirmative beliefs in the mastery of reason or in human supremacy over the rest of the natural world that is traditionally associated with historical humanism.
As theories of contemporary culture, all of these approaches are in a sense descriptive—they all respond to specific stimuli novel to the present moment, even if, in the case of a writer like Fukuyama, they end up reaffirming some fairly traditional notions—while at the same time bringing their own prescriptive charge to the phenomena under their shared purview. While much could be said about the differences between how Hayles or Wolfe conceive of or define posthumanism, or about, despite their mutual investment in entertaining certain primordial character traits as quintessential to humanity, the significant distance between the more general neoconservative politics of Fukuyama as compared to Habermas' moral liberalism, I want to focus here on a specific perspective that they all seem to share. Doing so, I think, will allow us to get rather quickly to the intersection of ethical frameworks and practical concerns within these discourses, as well as to perform some useful groundclearing around this text's interest in the “transhuman” as a conceptual category.
Despite their great divergence on other issues, the various post-, neo-, and tragic humanisms of contemporary critical theory come together in their mutual disaffection for what we might consider the more triumphalist or audacious vintages of historical humanism, the various ways in which humanist thought has manifested as either a determined anthropocentrism or the more general contention that humans have the right to alter the natural world, their own bodies, or (their) nature for their own purposes. This criticism is, of course strongest in the neo-humanist opposition to genetic engineering covered above, but equally informs the posthumanist views of writers like Hayles and Wolfe. Indeed, Hayles builds her analysis of the cultural implications of contemporary scientific research precisely around a fairly pointed critique of such supposedly hubristic pursuits as radical human life-extension or the transference of uniquely human capacities into mechanical realms, goals that she reads as emblematic of liberal humanism's overbearing confidence in the autonomy of human consciousness and reason; Wolfe likewise explicitly identifies his posthumanism as one pointedly oppositional to similar pursuits and the more general contention that human beings can transcend their animal or biological nature (xxi–xvi). Similarly, while the variety of writers that Honig identifies as taking part in a new mortalist or tragic humanism have not nearly as directly engaged with contemporary developments in science and technology, as the “mortalist” designation suggests, their focus has very much been on the privileging of a “the human” in a way that cuts starkly against humanism's more affirmative or assertive stances, emphasizing the “humble” or fragile core to our shared humanity, our essential finitude and generic vulnerability to the losses and suffering caused by war, disease, disaster, and death.
It is however the moments in which these discourse directly address questions concerning the use of biotechnology or genetic engineering that the ideological coherence of contemporary attempts to rethinking humanism for the challenges of the present is most apparent. In particular, we might locate a certain shared ethical or even normative perspective around these issues, one that operates well beyond the not insignificant pragmatic concerns that might be associated with such practices. In other words, while there is certainly reason to be concerned about what we might call “Pandora problems” in reference to practices of genetic alteration—that what appear to be relatively benign procedures might open the door to a variety of unforeseen dangers—it seems that criticisms offered by contemporary (post)humanisms up until this point have largely focused on the potential for what we might alternately code “Prometheus problems”—the concern that such events will either fundamentally disrupt the “natural order of things” and/or express an overwhelming arrogance in the right and power of humans to dramatically alter themselves and their environments at the expense of other humans, other non-human animals, or the natural world as a whole.
What interests me about this particular contrast—one between the pragmatic as opposed to normative vectors of contemporary work on (post) humanism—is the ways in which it seems to repeat a certain dynamic that would seem endemic to humanist thought of any era: the ways in which any attempt to position “the human” in relation to other species or natural phenomena, even those explicitly opposed to anthropocentrism or the “autonomy” of humans from the rest of the natural world, tend to end up reinforcing this very supremacy or autonomy, the position of the human as the one who “decides” to take on such a role. In other words, it seems to me that there is something of an inherent tension produced when, for instance, Hayles or the various “tragic” humanists identified by Honig suggest that humans might undercut their more promethean tendencies by embracing their essential mortality or finitude; we find the same tension, to give just one more example, in Wolfe, writing in the context of animal rights discourse, encourages ethically minded readers to acknowledge that humans do not have sole purchase on the cognitive and emotional qualities that we associated with subjectivity, and warns that failing to acknowledge the nonhuman subjectivity of animals in particular is an example of an inchoate speciesism subtending even a variety of otherwise progressive thought on ethics and justice.
On the one hand, such calls urge us to interrogate or reject the more arrogant or self-congratulatory qualities of historical humanism, the too-easy conclusion that humans are the center of natural life and have the privilege to remake the work in fulfillment of their own decisions and desires. In particular, as many of these writers are quick to mention, such presumptions of “human supremacy” or our implicit speciesism have at least significant conceptual overlaps with a wide variety of other “isms” and retrograde political and ethical positionings (including, most obviously, those that have led us to identify “other” humans as not, or at least not equally, worthy of the designation). On the other hand, however, these suggestions also seem to emphasize that very power or unique capacity that such calls are intended to undercut, the unavoidable position of “the human” as the species that gets to decide who or what can be classified in that category and the priority to be assigned other species. In this sense, then, even the most strident critiques of humanist hubris or anthropocentrism seem to end up at least implicitly reaffirming what Giorgio Agamben has recently called, after Heidegger, “the open”: the essential or constitutive power of humans to decide how the natural world is divided, one that makes even our sympathetic concerns for how worthy non-human animals or other phenomena are capable of thought, feeling, or sympathy itself an appropriative projection of “the human” into the nonhuman world (Open 57–62).
Consider for instance, an example of this dilemma as presented by Wolfe, the writer who perhaps more than any other has attempted to address the pragmatic challenges of thinking “beyond” humanism. Writing in regard to animal rights, Wolfe presents a qualified endorsement of the Great Apes Project—a movement to secure a United Nations guarantee of certain basic legal rights for non-human hominids (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans)—in a way that expresses sympathy for its mission, but concern about the ways in which the campaign leverages the genetic similarities between humans and the other Great Apes in its messaging and public awareness campaign. As one might expect, given that humans are also one of the species designated with the category of Great Apes, promotional material for the campaign has drawn heavily on appealing to potential proponents and campaign contributors by emphasizing the “human” qualities of these animals. While such calls seems to have much in common with Wolfe's interest in combating the historical anthropocentrism of Western ethics, he cautions that “the model of rights being invoked here for extension of those who are (symptomatically) ‘most like us’ only ends up reinforcing the very humanism that seems to be the problem in the first place” (Animal 192). We come to sympathize and support protections for the Great Apes not out of respect for their alterity or difference from us, but the ways in which they appear similar to humans as opposed to other, “lesser” animals, and thus even an animal-rights discourse such as this one ends up reproducing the logic of anthropocentric humanist ethics, simply one step removed.
However, allow me to turn the screw one more notch and suggest that, despite the inherent problems that occur when we depend on shared (human) qualities as a basis for ethical responsibility, it is dif cult to imagine any kind of ethics that does not rely on such a strategy of demarcation and communion, or, perhaps more problematically, that we encounter the same problem in reverse whenever we try to consider an ethics not based on shared qualities or capacities. Indeed, shortly after his discussion of the Great Apes Project, Wolfe consider a scenario somewhat like this in wondering whether there is a similar contradiction in humanist ethical thinking that judges the quality of ethical action around its degree of “selflessness,” the extent to which it is preformed without any guarantee or presumption of a personal gain or reciprocal action in kind from its recipient. By these standards, Wolfe suggests, would not the “supremely moral act” then be directed not toward another human who one could at least imagine as repaying it in some way, but rather toward “the animal other, from who there is no hope, ever, of reciprocity?” (Animal 199). While Wolfe goes on to imply that there is a certain problematic moralism in such thinking as a whole, we might seize on such a comparison to think about the possible “other ends” of the reluctance to base ethics on shared identity or capacities. There are, of course, additional categories other than the non-human animal that would stand even less of a chance of reciprocating our ethical behavior, or of appealing to our sense of shared identity: plants, machines, inanimate objects of all types. While it might be absurd to imagine ethical action devoted to, for instance, a rock, such a comparison is perhaps useful for thinking through what we might take as the parallel dilemma to ethical systems that demand some “human” qualities in order to be considered worthy of ethical consideration. Far from being an extraordinarily selfless, disinterested, or “nonhumanist” act, trying to act ethically in relation to a rock would only reveal how such activity was always about the doer herself, how the only objective involved in the undertaking was the “performance” of ethics itself, one without any pragmatic goal beyond a certain self-satisfaction. Taken together these two extremes form the bookends of what we might call “the humanist paradox”: any ethical system based on the recognition of shared qualities threatens to exclude others through a certain myopic series of self-identifications, but any attempt to eschew this procedure entirely also results in the revelation of a fundamental self-interested or solipsistic relationship to one's entire environment. Once could, of course, expand this paradox into a number of related directions, arguing, for instance, that calls in contemporary cultural and political theory that counter more promethean versions of humanist thought by urging us to embrace the essential “finitude” of humans, or those that urge us to increase our affective or communal ties around our shared vulnerability operate via similar logic: as strategies that leverage their audience's existing pretensions to a ethical or intellectual superiority under the guise of asking them to renounce or see beyond these traditionally “humanist” stances.
My interest here, of course, is not in suggesting that this tension or conflict leads to some kind of unavoidable contradiction within the various arguments made on behalf of new work on (post)humanism or in campaigns such as that of the Great Apes Project, not to mention the variety of human rights discourses, that explicitly invoke a “shared humanity” to in their arguments and appeals—indeed, I will end up suggesting that this is precisely what makes them persuasive and powerful. I am, however, for the remainder of this chapter, interested in thinking through a related question about the past and future of humanist thought. Specifically, I am interested in considering whether the turn to a more “materialist” version or critique of humanism—one that emphasizes the embodied and biological components of human experience and thought—has concomitantly emphasized what we might call the more “material” effects of humanism as a philosophy or code of ethics, what we might call the matter of what humanism does or the effects it has produced as opposed to what it has meant in its various historical variations, the ways in which humanist discourse “self-presents” or explicitly details the contents of its own thinking.
The antihumanist discourse of postmodern and poststructuralist thought certainly took humanist philosophy to task for its various contradictions or shortsighted perspectives—the ways in which particular conceptions of ostensibly essential and transhistorical human characteristics seemed significantly influenced by particularly cultural contexts, or how the humanist faith in human reason seemed to involve a denial of the role of social power in human cognition—such salvos were typically designed to show the superiority of a different theoretical perspective on human culture, or to encourage a more abstract skepticism of dominant modes of social thought ; insofar as humanism was taken to be something like a codeword for the various ways in which normative behaviors authorized by structures of social power had come to take on the appearance of being entirely “natural,” critiques of humanism found their power precisely through deflating the apparently incontestable commonplaces that had developed around such constructions. More recent engagements with humanism's legacies in contemporary cultural theory, however, seem to be after somewhat different quarry, particularly in regard to their relationship to normativity or what we might generally refer to as the prescriptive rather than purely diagnostic mode of criticism (the vector that has given much recent work in the critical theory wings of the humanities and social sciences its ethical character). More precisely, we might say that what distinguishes recent work in cultural and ethical theory from more recognizably postmodern or poststructuralist critiques of humanism is the ways in which these newer discourses have, on the one hand, extended the target of critique (from a retrospectively narrow focus on social conventions and institutions to one that includes questions of human embodiment and biology) while, on the other hand, still seeking to preserve the normative power that long associated with humanistic thought, but one now to be deployed in more egalitarian or socially ameliorative ways. If there is a tension between these two objectives, it is perhaps most apparent in the paradox mentioned above: any attempt to convince individuals to move “beyond” or “outside” of an anthropocentric or self-derived series of identifications with others seems to only be possible via a kind of implicit or even underhanded invocation of the same strategy.
Rather than contending that this paradox inherently short-circuits such attempts, however, I want to shift ground a bit and suggest instead that perhaps it is this very strategy—rather than any particular epistemological perspective or ideological content—that has long been the constitutive core of humanist thought throughout its entire history. In other words, the various contradictions that seem to rise immediately in attempts to either rethink or reject historical humanism may have not so much proven that it is impossible to abandon the enterprise—though this may also be the case—as it has revealed what has given it a coherent identity despite having taken a variety of forms in its several-centuries long history. Perhaps this suggestion—that we might have to reconsider humanism as something of a rhetorical strategy rather than a philosophical doctrine—is best unpacked via a distinction Foucault made several decades ago in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” While the popularization of poststructuralist and postmodern theory at the time during when Foucault is composing this essay tended to lump the implicit antihumanist tone of these writings alongside their more specific critiques of Enlightenment thought and post-Kantian philosophy in particular, Foucault here cautions us to avoid the “always too facile confusions” between these two (315). This confusion, Foucault goes on to suggest, is the result of not only the complex nature of both items under review, but also of our desire to in some way purify or modify our conceptions of them in order to more easily endorse or more fully reject them. Thus, as Foucault writes, one way people try to avoid what he calls the “the intellectual blackmail of being ‘for or against the Enlightenment’”—opposing or embracing it in the abstract—is to introduce the “dialectical nuances” of determining its good and bad qualities as if they could be separated and judged individually (314). In what would seem like a fairly clear gesture toward attempting to escape such a forced choice, Foucault somewhat famously associates Kant's response to the titular question (“what is Enlightenment?”) with a project of performing “a permanent critique of ourselves” that he will propose for contemporary philosophical thought, even if his earlier work was often read a condemnation of sorts Enlightenment discourses rationality, and of Kant's contributions, in particular.
Foucault's engagement with humanism is much briefer, even as Foucault seems to be suggesting it is the more vexed of the two concepts. Whereas the Enlightenment can at least be grasped as “an event, or set of events and complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the development of European societies,” humanism, Foucault writes, “is something entirely different … It is a theme or, rather, a set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions, over time, in European societies; these themes, always tied to value judgments have obviously varied greatly in their content as well as in the values the have preserved” (313). Foucault goes on to demonstrate this variety in “content” and “values” by mentioning that the seventeenth century witnessed a humanism premised on a critique of (Christian) religion, as well as a Christian humanism, and in the nineteenth century, humanisms both premised on and opposed to scientific thought, and later, humanisms that were Marxist and existentialist, a humanism aligned with National Socialism, and one claimed by Stalinists. From this trajectory Foucault concludes “the humanist thematic is in itself too supple, too diverse, too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection” (314).
Written against the backdrop of an upsurge in populist political movements, and the even more specific contexts of the rather pitched “theory wars” of the mid-1980s, Foucault's “What Is Enlightenment?” is often read as, if not a manifesto, then at least a significant groundclearing exercise. If the by then well-worn critique of postmodern or poststructuralist thought was that it seemed to be a largely negative or even parasitic movement—one that made its case by exposing the hypocrisies or inconsistencies of dominant beliefs or of institutionalized knowledge, and often via what at least appeared to be a critique of “reason” or of human agency in toto—then Foucault's intervention in “Enlightenment” was to illustrate how one could carry on the work of critique while still staying true to the progressive principles of the Enlightenment. Foucault argues that the urge to undergo a “critique of ourselves” is a not altogether unfamiliar update of the Enlightenment's ostensible goals of banishing superstition and reforming society— and this goal was itself not necessarily contradictory to a more dynamic, but still recognizable concept of human agency; the two are intertwined, in Foucault's word in “the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy” that he of ers as a modern-day inheritance of the historical Enlightenment (314). In other words, and to put things a little more pointedly, what Foucault accomplishes in this piece is a particular refinement, one might even say cleansing, of the school of late twentieth-century critical thought of which Foucault himself was an important originator, one that defends poststructuralism from any lockstep portrayals of it as “antirational” or purely de(con)structive. In doing so he issues a fairly strong endorsement of Enlightenment thought of at least a certain type, that complex of directives and objectives that was presumably the key target of postmodernism or poststructuralism and of which critics of these later movements sought to protect, while simultaneously attributing or transferring all of its exclusionary, imperialist, dogmatic or otherwise negative qualities to “humanism,” that phenomenon that Foucault tells us has always been consistently confused with the Enlightenment.
Given that Foucault took his own investigation into the histories of these terms to also, and more importantly, be a question about the present, specifically a way of repeating a question that he sees implicit in Kant's essay on Enlightenment—“What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?”—what can we make of Foucault's distinction today, over two decades since the composition of “What Is Enlightenment?” (305). What is the status of these two complexes—one, “Enlightenment,” based on the “principle of critique and the permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy,” and one, humanism, that finds its identity via reliance on notions of human constitution—in a time wherein an emphasis on critique and autonomy seem to be the basis of social, political, and economic discourses of all stripes, including the most retrogressive or conformist, and during which the “constitutive” elements of the human seem to be under the permanent threat of dissolution via their appearance in nonhuman realms?
Perhaps the answer, much like Foucault's own rereading of Kant's work as a reflection on the histories of Enlightenment and humanism, might be made apparent through a rereading of Foucault's own “updating” here, one informed by the other cultural changes engaged in this chapter. As we have seen, a wide range of novel phenomena occurring since the time of Foucault's writing might be identified around the rearrangement of our traditional divisions between the representational or ideational and the technical or purely strategic. This is the thread that unites a capitalism increasingly less dependent on the maintenance of ideological categories and cultural conformity, an understanding of human affective response that shows it to be the aspect of our experience that has the biggest correspondence with the behavior of animals and machines, and a new relationship between (scientific) knowledge and social power in which direct application and intervention crowds out the more traditional objectives of setting the boundaries of knowledge and objectivity.
Against this backdrop it is perhaps easier to perceive a different relationship between Enlightenment and humanism, or perhaps, to follow Foucault's gesture, understand something about the latter's historical identity that was up until now only obscure. If shifting grounds in what counted as knowledge and as autonomy in the time of Foucault's writing helped expose what was “essential” to Enlightenment and showed humanism to be “too supple and diverse” to have its own identity, the recent changes in technoscience and culture leading up to today—those that have shown “the human” to be itself a supple and diverse category—suggest a different distinction. It is not the construction of “knowledge” or “truths” that seem, pace Foucault's earlier inquiries, to be the major frameworks for social power in the present. Instead, it seems that political economy and contemporary culture as a whole is threaded by a logic of pure technique, or series of strategies for flexibly organizing and manipulating a variety of generic dispositions and inclinations present in the social field at any given time. In this sense, perhaps it is now humanism, particularly the strategies of the kind of “triumphant” humanism that has been under critique very much of late, rather than Enlightenment that becomes a particularly privileged discourse or pragmatic tool for responding to such a situation. After all, is it not humanism, as both its critics as well as the more material changes in contemporary technoscience and culture make clear, that has always been our name for the particularly strategy in which an individual's extant dispositions, particularly their most lockstep and self-interested ones, are directed toward or bundled together with particular goals or objectives?
This is, I take it, a quality visible in humanist discourse as early as the declaration that “man is the measure of all things,” the statement attributed to the Greek sophist Protagoras that is often positioned as the earliest statement of the humanist ideal. Because this statement became newly prominent among mid-twentieth-century epistemological debates for its supposed endorsement of cultural or subjective relativism, we have perhaps missed the ways in which it also presumes a certain, necessarily self-interested, responsibility on any one that would take it as truth. As Isabelle Stengers suggests, it of ers the mantle of being the one who “measures” as “a requirement and not a destiny,” a necessary obligation rather than an essential right (Invention 165). In doing so, such a declaration is both a description of a practical obligation and a fundamentally pragmatic endeavor on behalf of its author, one that, as Stengers suggests, also reveals, in the sophist's thinking, a desire to interrogate the breakdown between “human affairs (praxis) and the management-production of things (techne)” that were being divided in early Greek philosophy and politics. Far from being its own act of (counter-)Enlightenment—the revelation that all systems of measurement and verdicity are a social construction—it instead functions as a rhetorical strategy for bundling the more solipsistic or self-entitled tendencies of individuals with a particularly set of responsibilities . Foucault's concept ion of humanism as a phenomenon t h at is u n able to be its own “axis of reflection” is still (has always been?) accurate; rather, humanism has been a particular rhetorical strategy, but one whose functioning and component parts have perhaps only recently been made clear as the kind of veridical structures of identity often taken to be humanism's core have become less crucial to the operations of social power.
Similarly, to suggest a reorienting of priorities that might extend Foucault's gesture at another level, perhaps what these teaches us is that it is not the “permanent critique of ourselves” or the “creation of autonomy,” nor, for that matter the kind of “critique of our autonomy” that seems to drive at least much posthumanist discourse, that seems to be the most urgent or potentially useful endeavor for political and ethical thought in the present. Rather, it is likely that identification and mastery of these kind of strategic techniques focused on producing actions rather than altering identities, and that work with rather than against existing predispositions, techniques that have perhaps often been obscured beneath the name “humanism,” and the coming-to-consciousness of Huxley referred to as “tranhumanism.”
So, after all this, what does this attempt at periodization, this critical reading of the cultural effects of technoscience and contemporary media over the past several decades, offer us other than a mere description of the present? In a certain sense, the revelation that the central forces structuring whatever we might call culture and social power today—from the practical foundations of contemporary technoscience, to the operations of contemporar y capital ism, to the everyday experience of “being” in global mediated culture—have becoming increasingly less premised on epistemological or ideational vectors and more on the blunt application of particular generic techniques and strategies would seem to make the act of “description” itself one with diminishing returns. To compare it to one of the dialectical pairings we have had occasion to discuss here, we might say that such an analysis offers the comforts of neither humanism, as traditionally conceived, nor the “antihumanist” tendencies of postmodern and poststructuralist analyses of cultural and social life. If we take humanism, in either its vulgar sense as a essentialist and anthropocentric designation of the “proper” center of judgment and power, or in its more novel vintages based on the critique of such essentialisms and the management of human's “tragic” or “moral” nature, to be, as I have suggested here, more properly a rhetorical strategy than a epistemological foundation, then it seems to lose its normative power.
Similarly, if we take the opposite end of this dynamic—the more vulgarly postmoder n contestation of such foundations —we also seem to be left with rather weak tools for responding to dominant modes of contemporary culture; as all of the phenomenon detailed above seem to testify, at least the generic forms of critique, skepticism, or “resistance” have appeared to become basic operating principles of the institutions and discourses they were designed to combat. The situation might seem even more distant from that other pairing used as a point of comparison in this chapter, the periodization of post moder n ism as a cultural or historical moment distinct from the modern. After all, the key point that seemed to unite the disparate ways in which the postmodern was theorized in the latter half of the twentieth century was the general revelation that we were living in a time in which the representational, communicative, or otherwise “cultural” seemed to be emerging as the dominant logic of the socius, a relationship that seems to have been inverted in the present as technicity seems to become dominant, or become crucially mixed with the representational.
However, if we take this emphasis on technicity, the becoming-technical of culture and social power, on its own terms, we might find there is plenty of value in, and much work to do around, this kind of descriptive work or periodization. In other words, it would seem that a description of strategies is precisely what one would need to account for and respond to the present, as long as it is one that does not put its trust in the power of demystification or of new modes of representation, but dedicated toward assaying these strategies themselves as techniques with material effects, and seeks to find some other way to deploy them. To unpack this by way of comparison one more time, we might compare such a move with the methodologies proposed in two of the more canonical periodizations of postmodern culture. For Jameson, the highly mediated and seemingly vertiginous reality of postmodern culture was one that might be best met by what he called a “cognitive mapping” providing “the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system” (Postmodernism 54). For Lyotard, the recognition that postmodern culture was subtended by language games and shifting systems of social legitimation led him to suggest that our new objective was “not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented,” a mission that he famously described as a charge to “wage a war on totality” and “be witness to the unpresentable” (“What” 80).
The first distinction we might make in reference to the demands of the present is that we are not so much in need of “mappings” or new systems of representation today (or critiques of old ones), but in something more akin to a “user's manual,” a pragmatic description of the various strategies and techniques available for intervening in the functions of social power. Second, we might suggest, to repeat a point already made multiple times in this chapter, our key domain for thinking through such a mission is not likely to be that of epistemology or representation, but that of rhetoric and persuasion. As I will be suggesting in the following pages, it is this vector—the marshalling of dispositions in alliance with particular actions or goals—that seems to encompass the largest share of contemporary fields of politics, affect, and ethics in the present.
In the end, then, what we might learn from an analysis of present culture that emphasizes its increasing technicity, is that the very technical or technique-driven nature of contemporary social power suggest that the tools for ef ectively responding to, or redirecting, its functions are all around us and available for purposes very different from the ones currently dominating present formations. It is with that objective in mind that the rest of this book proceeds. After offering a genealogical analysis of the genealogy of technics and media that led up to the present condition, it then turns to examining how the work of cultural theory might be performed in this context, the complex sets of relations between affect and persuasion in the age of ubiquitous technology, the question of “resistance” in a moment when contemporary institutions of social power appear to run on opposition, and the possibilities for ethics in a world where all “value” seems to be immediately available as a capitalist commodity.