What Are Humans For? Art in the Age of Post-Human Development

Abstract

If the development of mass media utterly revolutionized the situation of art in the 20th century, current research into the technological reconfiguration and replacement of the human organism promises an even more radical disruption of art's cultural status. As engineers contemplate the creation of artificial life, artistic creation again finds its traditional values and procedures called into question. How will artists respond to the challenges posed by cyborg culture?

...you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Post-human development will likely proceed rapidly in the coming century. Research in genetic and medical engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, and computer science will no doubt soon be translated into applications within the human body, with the integration of information systems and the brain, at the neural level, forming the horizon of possibility. Conceived as a machine whose every process is amenable to intervention, reconfiguration, and replication, the organism beckons to research and development units with the promise of a vast new market to divide and conquer, a frontier zone whose outlines are drawn now in science fiction.

While the genetically-engineered human, the cyborg, virtual consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the autonomous robot are still in primitive, exploratory stages of development, their appearance on the cultural agenda portends, if not the completion, then the closure of the modern West's historic project of self-description. To "understand" a phenomenon, whether in nature, society, or the mind, has meant to be able to construct for it a corresponding symbolic machine; and in this manner, everything, at one level or another, has been described—that is to say, represented by a set of symbols combining themselves according to a finite set of algorithms that allow for a certain statistical predictability, a neutralization of future uncertainty. What arises now, however, is the question concerning the import of this procedure for contingent and mortal creatures like human beings, and what this accumulation of descriptive models entails; as Don Byrd points out, "if the model corresponds precisely to the original, it is not clear what has been gained. The locus of the object is changed." [1]. Today, as the human object fades into the statistical blur of the post-human, the strategy of simulation that has long constituted our self-knowledge reaches its ironic reductio ad absurdum. The vertiginous space opened is a model with no earthly referent, no common location of "thereness." As Jean Bau-drillard writes, "It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational" [2].

Of course, for many purposes traditional modeling procedures will continue to prove immensely productive or as the engineers say, robust. Although one may find fault with the sterility of suburbs and shopping malls, the blandness of fast-food, or the puerility of Hollywood, these represent the historically unprecedented material success of a certain model of human production—of the very idea of taking production as an end in itself, and modeling its processes solely in terms of efficient input-output ratios. And while one may be dismayed by environmental degradation, saddened by extinction of species, maddened by automotive congestion, or frightened by ultra-destructive weaponry, these too are driven by the same logic. The all-consuming cultural task of the 20th century has been to translate this principle of operativity into models suitable for assimilation to the family, the community, the psyche, sexuality, politics, education, art, and most other aspects of social existence, and if this is now being brought to bear on the very structure of the human organism—the "meat machine" of William Gibson's cyberpunk—vision, we might see in this a sort of applied humanism whose most immediate realization is the "managed care" of industrialized medicine.

Herbert Marcuse writes: "The historical achievement of science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks... the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in technical progress" [3]. The values we have brought into the 20th century, and now the 21st, may...