Transhumanism and/as Whiteness

1. Introduction

In a widely cited poststructuralist / anti-humanist critique of European humanism^[1], Badmington [1] argues that “there is nothing more terrifying than a posthumanism that claims to be terminating ‘Man’ while actually extending ‘his’ term in office.” (p.16) In this prescient statement, attention is drawn to the very real possibility of a posthumanist orientation that, while claiming to be ‘critical’, ends up re-inscribing precisely that very humanism – focused on the figure of ‘Man’ as white, male, European and anthropocentric – that it sets out to challenge (‘post-’ as dialectical-engagement) and overcome (‘post-’ as temporal / historical transcendence to a new ontological condition). In this paper, I want to explore Badmington’s statement in terms of a possible ‘entangled’ relationship between Transhumanism and posthumanism, with the latter considered in both its ‘critical’ and ‘techno-scientific’ or ‘popular’ manifestations, against the background of what is, ostensibly, a contemporary resurfacing – or re-iteration – of the historical phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’ with the aim of mounting a decolonial critique^[2] of the Transhumanist / posthumanist project.

Badmington argues that “apocalyptic accounts of the end of ‘Man,’ it seems to me, ignore humanism’s capacity for regeneration and, quite literally, recapitulation.” (p.11) Against this, I want to suggest that it is the very ‘apocalyptic’^[3] nature of the phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’ – that is, perceived threat to white supremacy under mounting contestation from the non-white ‘other’ – that contributes to^[4] engendering what I refer to as the ‘algorithmic’ transformation of humanism into posthumanism via Transhumanism as an ‘iterative shift’ within the historically-sedimented onto-logic of Eurocentric racialization. My point of departure turns on the ‘between-ness’ of the Transhuman^[5] vis-à-vis the posthuman, such that the former is engaged against the background provided by the latter as telos, irrespective of how this is ultimately realized in techno-scientific form, viz. augmented biological form, uploaded mind or synthetic, artificial intelligence – that is, ‘Mind Children’. Engaging Transhumanism as an ‘iteration’ within the ‘algorithmic logic(s)’ of race / racism / racialization^[6] associated with colonial modernity, I explore how ‘critical’ posthumanism lends itself to co-option into techno-scientific posthumanism, and the implications of this in terms of its contributing to deferral of the ‘decolonial moment’ – that is, decolonization of the world system. Crucially, I maintain that the emergence of the techno-scientific posthuman points to a transformation in the nature of humanism that maintains structurally-asymmetric power relations between ‘the (formerly) human’ (as white, Western, male etc.) and the subaltern ‘other’ even as the latter contests the Eurocentric terrain of ‘the human’^[7].

1. Methodological Precedents

In the context of exploring race ‘and/as’ technology, Chun [16] maintains that race as technology “shifts the focus from the what of race to the how of race, from knowing race to doing race by emphasizing the similarities between race and technology”; further, that “race as technology is a simile that posits a comparative equality or substitutability – but not identity – between the two terms.” (p.8) I am interested in exploring the implications of positing a similar ‘comparative equality or substitutability’ between two terms, however, one in which the ordering of terms is inverted somewhat in relation to that presented by Chun, viz. Transhumanism and/as whiteness^[8], thereby engaging the issue of how Transhumanism might be thought about in relation to processes of racialization – specifically, those associated with the largely tacit ‘background’ phenomenon of a hegemonic whiteness^[9]. Chun maintains that “by framing questions of race and technology, as well as by reframing race as technology, in relation to modes of media naturalization [we can] theoretically and historically better understand the force of race and technology and their relation to racism.” (p.8) Similarly, I want to argue that framing questions of Transhumanism and whiteness, as well as reframing Transhumanism as whiteness, in relation to historical processes of re-articulation of the latter (i.e. whiteness) enables us to theoretically and better understand how Transhumanism can – and arguably does – function as a techno-scientific articulation of whiteness during a period arguably marked by increasing contestation of other forms of this racial phenomenon^[10].

Drawing inspiration from Chun’s engagement with race and/as technology, and building on earlier work reflexively exploring other related ‘as/and’ configurations such as race and/as information [20] and Orientalism and/as information [21], informed by a critical race theory of information [22] and decolonial computing perspective [23][24] – that is, in terms of consideration of the ‘entanglement’ of race, religion, information, computing and related ICT phenomena with the body-politics and geo-politics (and theo-politics) of knowing and being – I critically interrogate Transhumanism as a techno-scientific response to the phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’ at least partly prompted by ‘critical’ posthumanist contestation of Eurocentrically-universal humanism.

1. Summary of Argument

I begin by briefly sketching the relationship of Transhumanism to Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism, and to ‘critical’ and techno-scientific posthumanism, drawing on arguments presented by Jotterand [25], Hughes [7], Ranisch [26] and Sombetzi [27] among others.

In framing my argument for Transhumanism and/as Whiteness, I draw upon the sociological exploration of the latter due to Garner [28][29] – in particular, (1) his ‘processual’ understanding of whiteness in dynamic relational-tension to other racialized identifies, (2) the function of whiteness as a tacit invisible ‘background’ standard, and (3) the socio-political structural manifestation of whiteness as continued, yet contested, globally-systemic white supremacy – a position he derives from Mills [30]. Concerns about the future of whiteness [31] are engaged against the backdrop of a purported shift to a ‘post-racial’ reality, the latter of which is subjected to decolonial critique by Sayyid [32][33]. Anxieties about the future (or otherwise) of whiteness can be shown to be related to the late 19^th and early 20^th century phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’ explored by Füredi [34] and Bonnett [35][36][37], the latter of whom refers to a ‘decline’ of overt discourses of whiteness and the concomitant ‘rise’ of a discourse about ‘the West’^[11]. It is suggested that the recent election of Donald Trump at President of the united States, the Brexit phenomenon in the UK, and the continued rise of Far / Alt-Right politics in the US and Europe can – and should – be seen as one response to the re-emergence of the phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’, almost fifty years on from the anti-racist struggles of the 1960s, and almost a century on from when ‘White Crisis’ was first being discussed in ‘the West’ (specifically, Britain and America); as Bonnett [37] states, “whiteness and the West ... are both projects with an in-built tendency to crisis. From the early years of the last century ...  through the mid-century ...  and into the present day ... we have been told that the West is doomed.” (p.25)

In terms of thinking more specifically about Transhumanism and/as Whiteness, I want to argue that Transhumanism / posthumanism should be viewed as a somewhat different response to the phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’, one that is techno-scientific and occurs in parallel with, albeit somewhat obscured by, the more overt phenomenon of conservative ‘White Backlash’ vis-à-vis socio-political phenomena associated with the response described earlier^[12]. In particular I want to argue that the shift described by Füredi and Bonnett from ‘white’ to ‘West’ is usefully framed in terms of the re-inscription^[13] – or rather, ‘algorithmic’ re-iteration – of whiteness under different signifiers including the techno-scientific signifier of Transhumanism associated with the convergence of GRIN/NBICS technologies; furthermore, that this shift in ‘whiteness’ needs to be situated within a longer historical frame than that going back to the late 19^th century, arguably one that commences with the Columbian voyages in 1492 CE and results in the emergence of a racialized world system [38]^[14]; moreover, a history involving other ‘paradigmatic’ shifts including those from ‘religious’ to ‘philosophical’ to ‘scientific’ and latterly ‘cultural’ expressions of race / racism / racialization, such transformations constituting re-articulations – or rather, ‘re-iterations’ – of the difference between the human (European) and the sub-human (non-European)^[15]. Insofar as such iterations might be seen as different manifestations of the same phenomenon – thereby pointing to a certain continuity through change – I want to suggest that they are usefully understood in terms of what has been described elsewhere as ‘algorithmic racism’ [41]^[16]. However, I argue that the contemporary moment is marked by a shift from the distinction between sub-human (non-European, non-white) and human (European, white) to that between human (non-European, non-white) and Transhuman (European, white)^[17], such shift being prompted, at least partly, by certain kinds of ‘critical’ posthumanist contestation of Eurocentric conceptions of the human against the much broader background or ‘horizon’ of a resurfacing of the phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’.

Against more optimistic – and, I would aver, somewhat naïve – postmodern, post-structuralist, postcolonial and feminist readings of the cyborg as an emancipatory figure championing the destruction of borders, boundaries and binaries, and the embrace of hybridity, multiplicity and socio-political ‘levelling’ under a ‘critical’ posthumanism, I want to argue instead for viewing Cyborgism / Transhumanism as a techno-scientific response by whiteness to the perceived phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’ and mobilized by whiteness for purposes of maintaining Eurocentrism via refinement / adaptation and expansion under subaltern contestation. Drawing on recent mounting criticism^[18] of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ towards a non-anthropocentric, post-dualistic ‘materialism’, yet conceding that such a turn was at least partly motivated by a concern to address legacy political and ecological injustices associated with modern/colonial projects by engaging with postcolonial and other forms of critique, I maintain that ‘critical’ posthumanism ultimately proves to be rather ‘brittle’ and ‘unstable’ vis-à-vis its commitment to emancipation of, and reparations towards, the ‘other’ and that this is due to a tendency to conflate different conceptions of the posthuman, including those that upon close inspection can be shown to be Eurocentrically rationalist. Going further, I argue that the hegemony of such Eurocentrically-rationalist conceptions of the posthuman, masked (or occluded) via their conflation with alternative variants of ‘critical’ posthumanism, enables the co-option and transformation of the latter into techno-scientific posthumanism, and that one means by which such transformation is facilitated is via their shared commitment to rather nebulous notions such as ‘information’ as ontologically basic^[19]. On my more pessimistic reading, the ‘entanglement’ of the ‘cybernetic’ – latterly, ‘computational’, ‘informational’, ‘algorithmic’ – ‘turn’ with the ‘ontological turn’ to the posthuman acts to facilitate Transhumanism as a means by which to retrench Western hegemony, especially under conditions of ‘White Crisis’ resulting from increasing subaltern contestation of Eurocentrism, and that ‘critical’ posthumanist endorsement of ‘flat’ ontologies functions discursively to occlude the continued existence of asymmetric hierarchies, and their algorithmic (re)production.

References

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© 2017 by the author; licensee MDPI and ISIS. This abstract is distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license.

^[1] Badmington’s argument is informed by various ‘critical’ currents within contemporary European thought including postcolonial theory and a commitment to the post-discursive, ‘new materialist’ embrace of boundary-disrupting ontological-affinity with the non-human (animal, machine etc.) associated with the ‘ontological turn’. It is also motivated by a concern to address the political and ecological implications of the anthropocentrism and subject-object dualism associated with dominant strands of Enlightenment thought.

^[2] By a ‘decolonial’ critique, I mean one that foregrounds considerations of the body-politics (who) and geo-politics (where) of knowing and being, and is preferentially disposed towards thinking through conceptual frameworks emerging from the margins / borders / periphery of the modern/colonial world system.

^[3] There is a secular Enlightenment rationalist tendency to dismiss ‘apocalyptic’ narratives as an irrational hangover from the ‘age of religion’; however, as Gray [2] convincingly argues, apocalyptic and utopian thinking derived from the Christian tradition informs secular frameworks, both those on the conservative ‘right’ and on the critical ‘left’. In addition, there is the need to consider Noble’s [3] and Davis’ [4] exploration of the long durée ‘entanglement’ of apocalyptic religious and occultist thinking with scientific and technological development in the European / ‘Western’ tradition.

^[4] By framing the issue in terms of ‘contribution’ rather than ‘causation’, I recognise that the Transhumanist / posthumanist project is over-determined in terms of its historical motivations and causes. Noble [3], Davis [4], Gray [2], Zimmerman [5, 6] and Hughes [7] trace some of these motivations to technological manifestations of Gnostic, millenarian / millenialist and apocalyptic currents within medieval Western Christianity, and drawing on recent scholarship at the intersection of critical race theory and critical theory of religion [8][9][10][11], I want to suggest that such ‘techno-millenialist’ currents feed into the emerging ‘technology’ of ‘race’ at the onset of colonial modernity which commenced with the Columbian voyages in 1492 CE. In short, insofar as ideas of leveraging technology to achieve utopian and/or apocalyptic purposes have a long history, I am not suggesting that the Transhumanist project is driven solely by a post-racial ‘crisis of whiteness’; rather, I argue that under contemporary conditions of ‘White Crisis’, the Transhumanist project gains a sense of urgency as a techno-scientific resolution – or ‘fix’ –to such an anxiety-ridden state of affairs.

^[5] According to Bostrom [12], “in its contemporary usage, ‘transhuman’ refers to an intermediary form between the human and the posthuman.” (p.4) Transhumanism is generally framed in terms of the application of GRIN (Genetics, Robotics, Information Technology and Nanotechnology) in the service of self-directed evolution – that is, enhancement of the human – towards a technocratic future. A related acronym is NBICS which refers to the combined resources of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive science and synthetic biology.

^[6] Bostrom [13] maintains that “transhumanists [consider that] murder and enslavement, whether of humans by posthumans or the other way around, would be a moral atrocity and a crime”, and points to their condemnation of “the racist and coercive state‐sponsored eugenics programs of the 20^th century” (pp.19-20). It is interesting to note, however, that a recent survey of the beliefs held by so-called ‘technoprogressives’ conducted by Hughes [14] revealed that only 35% self-identified as anti-racist. In addition to what this figure might indicate vis-à-vis relative lack of engagement with the issue of ‘race’ among Transhumanists, it is not at all clear how racism and anti-racism were understood in Hughes’ survey, by questioners and respondents alike: for example, was racism framed in tacitly liberal terms – that is, as something personal, irrational, transient and exceptional – or was it understood along critical race theoretical terms as a systemic, rational, persistent and pervasive structural phenomenon [15]?

^[7] As Badmington [1] states, “the seemingly posthumanist desire to download consciousness into a gleaming digital environment is itself downloaded from the distinctly humanist matrix of Cartesian dualism. Humanism survives the apparent apocalypse and, more worryingly, fools many into thinking that it has perished. Rumours of its death are greatly exaggerated” (p.11); in short, “the new now secretes the old then. Humanism remains.” (p.14)

^[8] In the context of the argument presented herein, ‘whiteness’ should be understood as referring to people of European descent. That said, it is important to appreciate that there are ‘shades of white’ among Europeans, the ‘intensity’ of whiteness tending to increase as one moves closer to its ‘core’ located in ‘the West’ – that is, Northern Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia. For a useful discussion of how whiteness came to be exclusive to Europeans, see [17].

^[9] In this connection, it is interesting to note that Bostrom [18] and other Transhumanists regularly invoke the notion of ‘technology races’, 20^th century examples of which includes races to build the first fission or fusion bombs, achieve satellite and human launch capability, build an artificial intelligence etc. While Chun [16] invites us to consider race as technology, I am interested in exploring technology as race, in both the metonymic / ontic sense of technology as a specific means by which to instantiate race, as well the metaphorical / ontological sense of technology as a general means by which to think about the series of iterative shifts in how race is articulated at different periods within colonial modernity.

^[10] Somewhat optimistically, Coleman [19] has argued that “technology’s embedded function of self-extension may be exploited to liberate race from an inherited position of abjection toward a greater expression of agency” (p.177); on her view, by “extending the function of techné to race, I create a collision of value systems. In this formulation, race exists as if it were on par with a hammer or a mechanical instrument; denaturing it from its historical roots, race can then be freely engaged as a productive tool. For the moment, let us call ‘race as technology’ a disruptive technology that changes the terms of engagement with an all-too-familiar system of representation and power [emphasis added].” (p.178) I would suggest that such assertions, alleged resistant rhetorical potential aside, are problematic on account of an ostensibly tacit assumption that technology stands separate from, rather than ‘entangled’ with, race. What appears to be missing from Coleman’s (and Chun’s) formulation is reflexive consideration of technology and/as race – that is, recognition of the racialized ontology of technology under colonial modernity, and I suggest that this follows directly from the ‘bracketing’ of the historical that Coleman is committed to embracing in her ‘technological turn’. Yet my critique of their position should not be understood as entailing support for the view that technology is necessarily, in the sense of trans-historically, racialized; on the contrary, a commitment to the contingency of technology’s racialization is maintained, yet one that requires us to consider more seriously how the field of technology / ‘technique’ is racially-inflected, such racial inflection contributing to a historical essence that in colonial modernity has a racialized underside, and which thereby constraints / limits scope for resistant action vis-à-vis affording non-abject possibilities for racial agency.

^[11] It is important to note that this ‘crisis’ literature appears at a time when proclamations of ‘white racial supremacy’ are made openly by various commentators belonging to the dominant Euro-American powers of the1920s and 1930s. Less than fifty years on, and whiteness under the signifier of ‘the West’ is plunged into further crisis as a result of the Civil Rights movement in the US and the increasing linkage of this struggle to global anti-colonial struggles. Formal independence from European colonial powers is achieved in the late 1960s, and the Civil Rights struggle achieves certain limited victories; however, structures of colonial domination persist in the ‘operating logics’ of the newly independent post-colonial states, decolonization as a project arguably being aborted under the transition from a liberal to a neo-liberal world order in the 1980s onwards. As neo-liberalism morphs into neo-conservativism, the ‘apocalyptic’ project of a ‘war on terror’ surfaces [2] and the historically-sedimented figure of the Muslim ‘other’ as threat / enemy re-emerges [38]. Yet concurrent with and at least partly due to this centring of the specifically Muslim ‘other’ as enemy and the actualization of war against it, ‘breathing room’ is provided in South America, South Asia and latterly South Africa for the gestation and development of a decolonial project – that is, re-engagement with the unfinished project of decolonization (to be contrasted with Habermas’ unfinished project of modernity). During the 2000s, the ‘decolonial option’ begins to be embraced by some members of ‘minority’ non-white groups located in the West, this tendency escalating in the ‘post-racial’ era under Obama, with increasing contestation of whiteness and Eurocentrism in the academy, activist mobilizations against anti-blackness and white supremacy in movements such as Black Lives Matter, and various contemporary ‘anti-racist’ responses to the rise of the Far / Alt-Right in the US and Europe against the backdrop of the continued rise of Islamophobia.

^[12] Such phenomena include the resurgence of strident and protectionist ‘strong-man’ nation-statism, racialized articulation and foregrounding of ‘concerns’ about border controls, immigration, citizenship and notions of ‘belonging’, along with the rise of cruder and more overt forms of white supremacy in comparison with what was arguably the more subtle, more refined and more covert operation of the socio-political logics of ‘racial liberalism’ [30] in Western nation state formations.

^[13] Bonnett [37] appears to concede the ‘iterativity’ of whiteness in referring to its ‘re-invention’, “well into the twenty-first century”, pointing out that “the history of whiteness is one of transitions and changes.” (p.17)

^[14] Hayles [39] argues that “we do not leave our history behind but rather, like snails, carry it around with us in the sedimented and enculturated instantiations of our pasts we call our bodies.” (p.137) Apart from the need to decolonially interrogate whose history needs to be considered (body-politics of knowledge) and from where (geo-politics of knowledge), it is crucial to note that it is not just bodies that are sites for sedimentation and enculturation, but rather regimes of governmentality which include but transcend the body to include institutions, land, discursive practices etc. [40].

^[15] What tends to be obscured, if engaged at all, in discussions of the relationship between the human and the Transhuman is the prior relationship between the human and the sub-human (which should not to be conflated with the broader category of the non-human), the latter providing the ‘ontological ground’ against which the former is constituted through a process of hierarchical negative dialectical opposition, viz. the human (superior) as the negation of the sub-human (inferior).

^[16] According to Coleman [19], “race as we know it is an ‘algorithm’ inherited from the age of Enlightenment.” (p.184) I want to suggest that not only is race an algorithm, metaphorically-speaking, but that following the ‘cybernetic turn’ of the 1950s, the continued rise of informational, computational and algorithmic logics (technical, social, cultural, economic, political etc.) has resulted in a metonymic situation wherein the racial algorithm has engendered algorithmic formations of race.

^[17] Notwithstanding the international nature of Transhumanist, Extropian and related techno-scientific movements, and granted the need to take seriously the ‘hybrid’ nature of these endeavours involving the contributions of various ethnicities, genders and nationalities, it is empirically demonstrable on demographic grounds, both quantitative and qualitative, that Transhumanism is hegemonically white, male and ‘Western’ (Euro-American); furthermore, it is a project whose trajectory is traceable, genealogically, to a specific historical and geographical experience, viz. the European Enlightenment – although arguments have been made that Transhumanism has much earlier antecedents within the European tradition going back to the twelfth, if not the ninth century CE [3][4]. On this basis, and in terms of its ‘entanglement’ with ‘race’, I want to suggest that Transhumanism is readily identified as a Eurocentric phenomenon.

^[18] Criticism of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ associated with ‘critical’ posthumanism pointing to its tendency to re-inscribe Eurocentric rationalism despite the emancipatory rhetoric allegedly associated with ‘flat’ actor-network schemes, speculative realism, procedural metaphysics and object-oriented ontology etc., has been mounted from various perspectives including indigenous cosmology [42][43], black thought [44][45] and postcolonial critiques of Orientalism [46][47].

^[19] I would suggest that such co-option occurs through a two-fold process of (1) ‘epithet transfer’ [48] – that is, simultaneous projection of subjective (mental) traits onto the objective (material) and vice versa, or a ‘double movement’ of anthropomorphization of the mechanistic and mechano-morphization of the anthropic – and (2) recourse to a de-materialized abstraction, viz. disembodied information, and its application to human and non-human (specifically, animal and artefactual) phenomena alike [49]. Ferrando [50] maintains that ‘critical’ posthumanism “does not turn technology into its main focus, which would reduce its own theoretical attempt to a form of essentialism and techno-reductionism” (p.28), however, I would suggest that framing ‘critical’ posthumanism against the background of what might be described, following Heidegger, as an onto-theology of ‘information’ (both totalizing and reductive), and the process of epithet transfer whereby objects-become-subjects (and subjects-become-objects), engenders precisely such a techno-reductionism; in short, ‘critical’ posthumanism, at least as framed against the Eurocentric backdrop of the ‘ontological turn’ towards objects, networks and informational flow, readily lends itself to such ‘techno-reductionism’. In this connection, and in the context of exploring the implications of the ‘ontological turn’ to objects within anthropology, Fowles [47] points to the emergence of “a kind of quasi-posthumanist anthropology in which objects freely assume the position of subjects [emphasis added]” (p.20); crucially, he goes on to assert that in such a shift “there is some sort of transference at work. Critiques of the Western colonial project and of the human sciences' contribution to this project have been deflected onto the world of things. Eurocentrism has been discursively reconfigured as anthropocentrism” (p.23) such that “anthropological philosophers now find themselves empowered not just to make claims about the basic entities of the world itself (or, as some would insist, of ‘the worlds themselves’) but also to develop schemes for ‘how things could be’ ... all by ‘thinking through things’ and without bothering much about the active political struggles of anthropology’s traditional human subjects, subjects who now quietly retreat into the blurred backdrop [emphasis added].” (p.24)