The reactionary character of transhumanism
The reactionary character of transhumanism
On contemporary ideological superstructure
For all societies, classical Marxist theory posits both a material base, and an ideological and institutional superstructure that develops from the former.
Contrary to what one might assume, there isn’t anything particularly esoteric about this.
Any sort of society has to develop in a particular physical environment, circumscribed by such things as access to resources, climate, legacy infrastructure, geographical boundaries and so forth.
To navigate and hopefully make efficient use of this environment, human beings then develop social arrangements which over time crystallize into the more stable things that sociologists call “institutions”. Language. Legal systems. Family structures. Organized militaries et.c.
And in recreating and operating these institutions, we establish certain ways of thinking and speaking about the world. To facilitate the persistence of an institution over time, you namely need to establish a set of ideas that can be communicated and internalized by new generations. Hence ideology.
Classical Marxism holds that these ways of thinking and speaking about the world are downstream from the basic material reality around which the institutions develop. I.e. that our ideas as “superstructure” are more or less inconsequential and for the most part just reflect the material base.
Being a Thomist, I disagree with regard to this causal one-sidedness, but that’s entirely beside the point.
That point, which I intend to make in what follows, is that contemporary transhumanism, and a certain set of related ideological positions, is precisely one such superstructure that effectively project an underlying set of institutions and serve to reproduce a key set of social arrangements.
Transhumanism as reification
So in essence, I’d argue that transhumanism reduces what’s essentially and intrinsically human into abstract exchange value within a framework of artificially generated wants and needs.
There’s perhaps a lot to unpack here, but one way to approach what I’m trying to get at is to consider transhumanism as an emblematic case of reification. This is yet another useful Marxist concept, which in the original German reads Verdinglichung, Swe. förtingligande, i.e. the reduction of something to a mere object. The process, for instance, of turning social relationships such as that of being a worker, police officer or a mid-level manager, into socially constructed, perceived attributes of the actual living person. Commodity fetishism is another primary example, where an object like a brand sneaker is perceived as having intrinsic value in and of itself, while the key part of this attributed value really resides in the surrounding network of social relations and arrangements. These are then being reified in the commodity.
This is relevant to transhumanism for a number of reasons. First of all, transhumanism as a set of positions basically entails the rejection of the natural limits of the human being. It’s a type of radical anti-essentialism that posits the freedom of the pure Cartesian subject to determine and shape its own nature in relation to its own preferences.
What then happens in a capitalist framework is simply that reification becomes totally unfettered. In practice, you eliminate the sociological presence of our actual underlying natures and immediate tangible relationships, which removes most of the remaining obstacles for the radical commodification of the human being and her lifeworld of immediate experience.
This obscuring of nature will in other words inevitably open us to be shaped by the structure of the surrounding system. Giving us “freedom” to determine our own wants, needs and desires is simply going to leave the field open for the strongest determinant in our cognitive environment.
Paradoxically, in this seeming radical affirmation of liberty, lies an equally radical submission. Left to our own devices in this social environment, our desires will inevitably be directed by the immensely powerful machinery of the capitalist order.
Not necessarily, not completely and not always. But to such an extent, and with such force, that the space of our own agency and free will must shrink away much farther lacking the protective barriers of the institutional manifestations of an immutable human nature.
In other words, if we don’t cling to the ideas of such a nature, we’re going to be naked in the face of the system’s propaganda and ideological reproduction.
Woke ideology in a chaotic social environment
And I think this paradoxical tendency towards submission through an extreme ontological lawlessness (marketed as liberation) is the very same thing being made manifest in the authoritarianism of "woke” ideology. One can also see it in the globalizing anti-statism of the contemporary neoliberal technosphere, in the soft tyrannical freedom to conform and consume inherent to Facebook’s or Instagram’s suffocating architecture.
An old friend of mine from high school (now a physician) recently expressed gratitude for our "adult" decision-makers taking the terrible responsibility of political participation our of their hands. At the same time, they’re celebrating the ostensible freedom and popular agency inherent in our glorious liberal democracy (Swedish election coming up). Same pattern of purported liberty and actual submission.
Noteworthy is that this juvenile adoration in our contemporary situation is directed towards the mother-figure. Never towards the father.
In Bly’s analysis of the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk, the Giant is the United States. Bly is working from a very early version of this tale. A version that includes a salient conversation between the ‘old woman’ and Jack. In it the old crone explains how the Giant murdered Jack’s father, in his own library and in his own house, and then burnt the library to the ground.
“We can take the Giant to stand for our archaic, brutal underpinning. On our human plane, we live among sunlit windows with red geraniums on them; we live surrounded by cows and milk and kindness, by conversation and codes of politeness, by loving parents and cared-for children.
But on the second and older plane, which is firmly ensconced at the top of the beanstalk, at the base of the skull, there are stones that have never been shaped, piles of dirt loosely thrown together, and, most of all, appetites on a scale that is not human; there are immense hungers, and gigantic angers, and cages where people are kept to be eaten a little later.
Children are especially favored as food there. And if a human being should wander into that instinctive plane, he or she had better be ready to hide. That is what Anne Frank did; that is what we all do” Robert Bly (The Sibling Society).
…
Bly notes that looking at photos of Americans from the 1920s reveals teenagers with the aura of adulthood. Today one sees faces of Americans (and this true in much of Europe, too, as I see it in vintage photos of Norwegians) that appear preternaturally young. Not young but immature. Adolescence is prolonged (largely due to marketing needs). But this means that often twenty five year olds are still half children. And they are taking teaching jobs.
(John Steppling, “The Savage Judge”, 2022.
Never towards the lawgiver.
This tendency towards an unfettered and unreasoned superego in this particular historical context is probably one of the most important factors for the entire societal trajectory ahead.
For the internalization of the society’s and culture's norm structure in the contemporary (postmodern?) condition certainly must be violently incoherent, not only since society lacks an anchoring in a rational discourse predicated on actual reality and discernible principles, but since mass culture so strongly and relentlessly projects a contradictory jumble of opposing narratives that basically obliterates any coherent framework of meaning apart from the raw power and authority of the system.
No wonder people my age call for mommy and want to run away. Yeah, they don't have quite that “aura of adulthood” from their mid-teens onward, do they?
And in relation to the above, I think the contemporary superideology serves a very specific function of protecting the integrity of the subject's basic sense of self, or however one should express it. It namely emphasizes raw, autonomous agency as a basic reality deeper than the evidently collapsing anchor points for any coherent identity formation (the body, the culture, traditions, physical reality, religion &c), and so serves to re-assert the subject’a psychic integrity in some sort of Nietzschean fashion through a performed ontology of will and desire.
Yet this "bare and raw" re-assertion of the subject is really anything but. Again, it inevitably reproduces the dominant social structures that surround us, yet now without almost any balancing input from the self's rational agency, and re-packaged as a fruit of our autonomy.
“The individual who identifies with fascism does so because he has failed to develop the capacity to test and engage reality: Thoughts, beliefs, and conformist activities are thoroughly disconnected from the possibility of independent identity and self-formative practice. The cost of fascistic answers to the unsurmounted danger situations of development is thus the flight from the basic duty to attain individuality and autonomy. What is projected on the other cannot, under any circumstances, be accepted “as parts of the self.” Experience can only speak to conscientious principle and understanding, moreover, where the individual has the “capacity for individuated experience.” Where this aptitude is lacking, the world can only be encountered in reified and reifying ways, and “new social experiences are likely to lead, not to new learning and development, but merely to the mechanical reinforcement of established imagery” (Amy Buzby, Subterranean Politics and Freud’s Legacy (internal quotes from Adorno’s Minima Moralia) 2013).
And transhumanism is of course joined at the hip with the institutional manifestation of the contemporary LGBTQ+-movement, which at its core is predicated upon the very same, more or less neo-Gnostic, affirmation of the purified human will’s capacity to determine reality according to its sovereign wants.
The marketing of transsexualism and the political appropriation of the pride movement are clearly auxiliary ideological mechanisms in relation to the radical lawlessness at the heart of postmodernism’s marketplace liberty. At the same time, they function as this easily identifiable, black & white affirmation of the virtue and goodness of the dominant authority structure, all framed with the bold colours and contours of the familiar Disney aesthetics.
There's a married couple celebrated all over the local media up here right now (in relation to the local Pride week), where one of the parties have transitioned.
And the aesthetics he's moving into is so explicitly that of the mass-marketed, parody-feminized porn star. The icon of a commodified simulacrum of the female form, which seems to take precedence over any attempt at expressing or affirming the complex lived reality of an actual female human being. Of a woman.
The fruits of a perfectly free choice.
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