The sense of the end of an epoch hangs strongly over our times, whether in the hegemonic notion of the end of a Hegelian world history, the culminant rational godhood of the Enlightenment or the exploding apocalyptic millenarianism claiming sectarian fulfillments from every direction of the earth. The age of science and technology uniformalizes the world today under the sign of neo-liberal globalization. Multinational capitalism streams through nation-states constructing its control apparatus, a omniscient panopticon, poised to fulfill the prophecy of the modern knowledge academy – the human sciences dictating a universal anthropology and psychology based on behaviorism and the market, configuring world populations as standing reserve and increasingly as appendages of fantastically efficient machineries, meshed together in finer and more invisible systems aspiring to the condition of integrality.
Against this, singularities of all kinds revolt, in suicide missions of mutual destruction in the name of god’s will and its universal claim on world history. Origin myths, blood cleansing rites, control societies of historical purity raise their shrill voices in a discordant cacophony – or is this rather the ambiguous harmony of a new subjectivity? Is it possible anymore to talk of humanism, when human consciousness is physically and metaphysically thought of and described in terms of platforms for running machine-codes of Darwinian algorithms; or when a tangle of human destinies contest the future and in the thick of this contest, human agency is forcibly hybridized in incalculable ways? Who and how many are the seen and unseen contestants slouching towards Bethlehem to be born? Our technologies are increasingly the ubiquitous environments of our Lifeworld. Will humanity disappear in technology or will technology disappear in the human? In this the age of comparative-culture-gone-crazy in which the digital commodity forms of hyper-modernism assault consciousness mercilessly at almost every waking moment, are there a set of inexorable options or alternate modernities that can grow rhizomatically from our present orientation to promise a future free from the terror of code, the horrors of consumerism, and the death wish of fundamentalism?
And what kind of human would remain to live such a future – what universal anthropology redeemed as the collective body of poesis and techne? Is this the possibility held out by purnayoga that, as Sri Aurobindo articulates it, deterritorializes human consciousness in terms of stripping it from its subjugation to the desiring codes of prakriti (nature) yet also languages a reconstruction of the sacrificed body of purusha (soul) in terms of tapas and shakti? How can a practice that cultivates a Foucauldian care of self, in its aspect of facilitating subjective freedom, wield its inner technologies to harvest attention and sublimate desire facilitating the reversal of the equation of purusha and prakriti, freedom and control? Given the blind play of word forces kneading an unpredictable chaos is the epic imagination or self-discipline conceivable to the liberal humanist subject who suffers the painful memory traces of a long history of failed metaphysics?
If man is ropewalker between beast and overman we are suspended above a species aporia vacillating in a present in which the soul’s history has become tightly bound to its destining as technological artifact, its individuation a process of binary abstraction from networked circuits of global collectivization. The question that confronts the human future is not simply one of inevitable change or endings but whether the last man whimpered or not before succumbing to its post-human destiny. But can a transitional vision and volition (prakamya, aishwarya) play some role in the ruptured arrival of the post-human? At what we consider a temporal bifurcation point of not one but many post-human destinies we stand poised before we the editors of this webzine engage with theoria to negotiate these questions to explore the fashioning of new tools for a praxis of individual and social contemplation of l’avenir.
Philosophically posthumanism assumes an existential stance that interrogates the claims of Humanism, a view of humanity derived from the European Enlightenment. Humanism assumes that human nature is constituted by possessive individuals intrinsically unified around a free willing rational essence that expresses its agency in a world in which social relationships are determined by a liberal political economy.
The premises of Humanism has been challenged for perhaps at least a hundred years or more when representational art began its abstract expressionist turn in the first decades of the last century, at a time when the most cherished assumptions that Humanism held about rationality and human nature were shattered by the First World War. For the past several decades the premises of philosophical humanism have been thoroughly challenged by postmodern theorist. Most recently assumptions underlying what we think of as the “liberal humanist subject” (Hayles 2005) have been challenged through advances in cognitive, neural, information and complexity sciences that conceive human nature as resultant from the emergence of multiple autonomous biological programs running in complex parallel sequences. Rather than imbuing it with the quality of individual personality these new sciences quantify human nature in terms of cybernetic information or reduce it to Darwinian algorithms.
Coupled with the cybernetic perspective that the new sciences view human nature through, our understanding of cultural history has radically shifted. In the dromospheric vision of philosopher Paul Virilio “we are passing from the extensive time of history to the intensive time of an instantaneity without history made possible by the technologies of the hour”. (Virilio 2000)
The compression of time through exponential processing advances in transferring data at light speed is disorientating for those who have historically conceived identity in reference to a spatial environment fixed in time. As time accelerates along with is it evolutionary co-efficient of increasing virtual space we find ourselves inhabiting mental environments that serve to erase traditional referents for constructing identity.
The advent of the posthuman is also facilitated by the desiring machines of the global market place whose technological will works us over constantly by harvesting our attention for the consumption of its ever increasing digital commodity forms.
The posthuman condition is therefore predicated not only on a new cybernetic view of the human but also is a product of economic subjectivity in the early 21st century as well as resultant from the collapse of human identity as something rooted in nature and separate from the machine, network or circuit.
Another genealogy of the posthuman that is central to our concerns we trace back to the last pages of Michel Foucault’s Order of Things (1970), in which he proclaims the death of man and the discursive vanishing of the rational/irrational trace under the sign of reflexivity.
Foucault’s late discourse on the technologies of the self also serves as an organizing principle for posthuman destinies in that we focus on inner technologies of self knowledge and self-governance and their co-evolution with ethical stances appropriate to the ubiquitous technological environments we increasingly populate.
In cultivating an awareness of these technologies of self we follow another trail along the cross-cultural trajectory of the post human that leads to Sri Aurobindo the philosopher, seer and resistance fighter of colonialist Empire in early 20th century India. His visionary works conceive the potential for post human consciousness to integrate its physical, vital and mental dimensions of being through meditational techniques that facilitate inner quietude and self-awareness in order to stabilize mutations of consciousness that serve to open the human to new ranges of experience and to fix these “supramental” realities (1949) into the very cells of its evolving embodiment. The dialog with Foucault and Aurobindo is often mediated through an understanding of the posthuman as if envisaged in the Zarathustraian parables of Friedrich Nietszche in terms of the last man or the overman.
Posthuman Destinies also conspires to explore the creative tension between the remotely utopian vision of the evolution of consciousness held by such early and mid 20th century philosophers from both East and West, as Aurobindo, Tagore, James, Bergson, Whitehead, de Chardin, McLuhan and juxtapose these discourses with contemporary dystopian accounts of humanity as its co-evolves with the relational technologies of networks as theorized by philosophers such as Deleuze, Baudrillard, Virilio and represented in the fiction of writers such as Pynchon, Dick, Gibson, whose works recognize the radical global inequalities that destabilize any universal claims of progress that maybe couched within evolutionary narratives of consciousness or of the future. In this spirit we also attempt to engage with matters of global inequality, subjugation and alternate modernities posited in the post-colonial scholarship of theorist such as Said, Guha, Chakrabarty et al. Finally, our articles and discussions are all backgrounded by the realization that contemplating the uncertain fate of the future be it in humanity or nature can only lead to aporia.
references:
Hayles, K. My Mother was a Computer, Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2005
Virilio, P. Polar Inertia. London: Sage Publications, 2000.
Foucault, M. The Order of Things, New York Random House Press, 1970
Aurobindo Sri, The Life Divine Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1949
Manifesto (and supplemental manifestoes)
The sense of the end of an epoch hangs strongly over our times, whether in the hegemonic notion of the end of a Hegelian world history, the culminant rational godhood of the Enlightenment or the exploding apocalyptic millenarianism claiming sectarian fulfillments from every direction of the earth. The age of science and technology uniformalizes the world today under the sign of neo-liberal globalization. Multinational capitalism streams through nation-states constructing its control apparatus, a omniscient panopticon, poised to fulfill the prophecy of the modern knowledge academy – the human sciences dictating a universal anthropology and psychology based on behaviorism and the market, configuring world populations as standing reserve and increasingly as appendages of fantastically efficient machineries, meshed together in finer and more invisible systems aspiring to the condition of integrality.
Against this, singularities of all kinds revolt, in suicide missions of mutual destruction in the name of god’s will and its universal claim on world history. Origin myths, blood cleansing rites, control societies of historical purity raise their shrill voices in a discordant cacophony – or is this rather the ambiguous harmony of a new subjectivity? Is it possible anymore to talk of humanism, when human consciousness is physically and metaphysically thought of and described in terms of platforms for running machine-codes of Darwinian algorithms; or when a tangle of human destinies contest the future and in the thick of this contest, human agency is forcibly hybridized in incalculable ways? Who and how many are the seen and unseen contestants slouching towards Bethlehem to be born? Our technologies are increasingly the ubiquitous environments of our Lifeworld. Will humanity disappear in technology or will technology disappear in the human? In this the age of comparative-culture-gone-crazy in which the digital commodity forms of hyper-modernism assault consciousness mercilessly at almost every waking moment, are there a set of inexorable options or alternate modernities that can grow rhizomatically from our present orientation to promise a future free from the terror of code, the horrors of consumerism, and the death wish of fundamentalism?
And what kind of human would remain to live such a future – what universal anthropology redeemed as the collective body of poesis and techne? Is this the possibility held out by purnayoga that, as Sri Aurobindo articulates it, deterritorializes human consciousness in terms of stripping it from its subjugation to the desiring codes of prakriti (nature) yet also languages a reconstruction of the sacrificed body of purusha (soul) in terms of tapas and shakti? How can a practice that cultivates a Foucauldian care of self, in its aspect of facilitating subjective freedom, wield its inner technologies to harvest attention and sublimate desire facilitating the reversal of the equation of purusha and prakriti, freedom and control? Given the blind play of word forces kneading an unpredictable chaos is the epic imagination or self-discipline conceivable to the liberal humanist subject who suffers the painful memory traces of a long history of failed metaphysics?
If man is ropewalker between beast and overman we are suspended above a species aporia vacillating in a present in which the soul’s history has become tightly bound to its destining as technological artifact, its individuation a process of binary abstraction from networked circuits of global collectivization. The question that confronts the human future is not simply one of inevitable change or endings but whether the last man whimpered or not before succumbing to its post-human destiny. But can a transitional vision and volition (prakamya, aishwarya) play some role in the ruptured arrival of the post-human? At what we consider a temporal bifurcation point of not one but many post-human destinies we stand poised before we the editors of this webzine engage with theoria to negotiate these questions to explore the fashioning of new tools for a praxis of individual and social contemplation of l’avenir.
Rich Carlson
Debashish Banerji
supplemental manifestoes:
Philosophically posthumanism assumes an existential stance that interrogates the claims of Humanism, a view of humanity derived from the European Enlightenment. Humanism assumes that human nature is constituted by possessive individuals intrinsically unified around a free willing rational essence that expresses its agency in a world in which social relationships are determined by a liberal political economy.
The premises of Humanism has been challenged for perhaps at least a hundred years or more when representational art began its abstract expressionist turn in the first decades of the last century, at a time when the most cherished assumptions that Humanism held about rationality and human nature were shattered by the First World War. For the past several decades the premises of philosophical humanism have been thoroughly challenged by postmodern theorist. Most recently assumptions underlying what we think of as the “liberal humanist subject” (Hayles 2005) have been challenged through advances in cognitive, neural, information and complexity sciences that conceive human nature as resultant from the emergence of multiple autonomous biological programs running in complex parallel sequences. Rather than imbuing it with the quality of individual personality these new sciences quantify human nature in terms of cybernetic information or reduce it to Darwinian algorithms.
Coupled with the cybernetic perspective that the new sciences view human nature through, our understanding of cultural history has radically shifted. In the dromospheric vision of philosopher Paul Virilio “we are passing from the extensive time of history to the intensive time of an instantaneity without history made possible by the technologies of the hour”. (Virilio 2000)
The compression of time through exponential processing advances in transferring data at light speed is disorientating for those who have historically conceived identity in reference to a spatial environment fixed in time. As time accelerates along with is it evolutionary co-efficient of increasing virtual space we find ourselves inhabiting mental environments that serve to erase traditional referents for constructing identity.
The advent of the posthuman is also facilitated by the desiring machines of the global market place whose technological will works us over constantly by harvesting our attention for the consumption of its ever increasing digital commodity forms.
The posthuman condition is therefore predicated not only on a new cybernetic view of the human but also is a product of economic subjectivity in the early 21st century as well as resultant from the collapse of human identity as something rooted in nature and separate from the machine, network or circuit.
Another genealogy of the posthuman that is central to our concerns we trace back to the last pages of Michel Foucault’s Order of Things (1970), in which he proclaims the death of man and the discursive vanishing of the rational/irrational trace under the sign of reflexivity.
Foucault’s late discourse on the technologies of the self also serves as an organizing principle for posthuman destinies in that we focus on inner technologies of self knowledge and self-governance and their co-evolution with ethical stances appropriate to the ubiquitous technological environments we increasingly populate.
In cultivating an awareness of these technologies of self we follow another trail along the cross-cultural trajectory of the post human that leads to Sri Aurobindo the philosopher, seer and resistance fighter of colonialist Empire in early 20th century India. His visionary works conceive the potential for post human consciousness to integrate its physical, vital and mental dimensions of being through meditational techniques that facilitate inner quietude and self-awareness in order to stabilize mutations of consciousness that serve to open the human to new ranges of experience and to fix these “supramental” realities (1949) into the very cells of its evolving embodiment. The dialog with Foucault and Aurobindo is often mediated through an understanding of the posthuman as if envisaged in the Zarathustraian parables of Friedrich Nietszche in terms of the last man or the overman.
Posthuman Destinies also conspires to explore the creative tension between the remotely utopian vision of the evolution of consciousness held by such early and mid 20th century philosophers from both East and West, as Aurobindo, Tagore, James, Bergson, Whitehead, de Chardin, McLuhan and juxtapose these discourses with contemporary dystopian accounts of humanity as its co-evolves with the relational technologies of networks as theorized by philosophers such as Deleuze, Baudrillard, Virilio and represented in the fiction of writers such as Pynchon, Dick, Gibson, whose works recognize the radical global inequalities that destabilize any universal claims of progress that maybe couched within evolutionary narratives of consciousness or of the future. In this spirit we also attempt to engage with matters of global inequality, subjugation and alternate modernities posited in the post-colonial scholarship of theorist such as Said, Guha, Chakrabarty et al. Finally, our articles and discussions are all backgrounded by the realization that contemplating the uncertain fate of the future be it in humanity or nature can only lead to aporia.
references:
Hayles, K. My Mother was a Computer, Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2005
Virilio, P. Polar Inertia. London: Sage Publications, 2000.
Foucault, M. The Order of Things, New York Random House Press, 1970
Aurobindo Sri, The Life Divine Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1949