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- Convenors:
-
Gareth Breen
(UCL)
Nicholas Lackenby (University College London)
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- Discussant:
-
Jon Bialecki
(University of California, San Diego)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Recent popular techno-scientific visions of humanity's future have suggested that with increased capacities for prolonging, transforming and creating life we are on the verge of evolving into 'Homo Deus'. But are we being too quick to assume that becoming gods has the same significance for everyone?
Long Abstract:
Recent popular techno-scientific histories and visions of humanity and its future (e.g. Kurzweil 2005; Harari 2015; Pinker 2018) have suggested that, with increasing capacities for indefinitely prolonging, transforming and even creating life, we are on the verge of evolving from 'Homo Sapiens' into 'Homo Deus'. But are we being too quick to assume that becoming god(s) has the same significance for everyone? What it means and how it feels to be deified is surely socially, historically, and individually specific. This panel aims to investigate just this. On the one hand, it will engage and problematise the burgeoning popular and academic literature on the future of humanity and the role of technology within it by grounding the engagement in a comparative historical approach to human-divine relations which many such discussions relegate to the past and peripheries of human progress. On the other hand, the panel will seek a deeper ethnographic engagement with current techno-scientific feelings of becoming god-like. Not only a corrective to linear, Euro-centric thinking, the panel will aim to re-ground techno-scientific possibilities for becoming divine in the manifold forms and experiences of being god-like around the world. Rethinking the ways in which human beings might actually and metaphorically become 'divine' (or indeed resist deification through, for example, 'becoming cyborgian' (Haraway 2006; Parkhurst 2012; Puar 2012)), is to rethink the global cultural-political present from the horizons of its divine potentials.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 9 June, 2022, -Jacob Boss (Indiana University Bloomington)
Paper short abstract:
Cyberpunk resistance to 'homo deus' is jurispathic, law-destroying. Distinct from theological calls for humility and creatureliness, the liberatory cyberpunk telos of ‘no gods, no masters’ attacks both the nomos of technocrats and the networks of material dependencies they propagate.
Paper long abstract:
Cyberpunks resist technocratic ambitions to reengineer the human condition into an Olympian existence free from human limitations. Analyzing cyberpunk resistance using Robert Cover’s concept of the jurispathic shifts the conversation around homo deus away from technological boosterism versus theological objections grounded in humility and creatureliness. While technocrats take advantage of the nomos we inhabit and the laws that enforce it, they ultimately seek a divine existence beyond law. Working from ethnographies of anarchist, punk, libertarian, and anti-oppressive hackers, I argue there is a liberatory cyberpunk telos characterized by a ‘no gods, no masters’ approach that attacks both the nomos of technocrats and the networks of material dependencies they propagate. This liberatory telos is law-destroying in Cover’s sense; law is killed to make way for new law, reinforcing or contesting the nomos we inhabit. This is a generative pursuit, unlike the transcendence from law seen in the seekers of homo deus. Networks of material dependency funnel wealth, resources, and labor toward technocratic elites bent on manufacturing godhood, and are the nightmare obverse of our cybernetic reality. The reverse, the liberation-making and law-destroying cyborg, is best located not in Haraway, but in disabled organizing, activism, and scholarship. Cyborgs are developing extra-institutional alternative networks - biohackers working to make safe birth control manufacturable in every home, medical device hackers striving to make insulin and artificial pancreases widely available on open-source software - to undermine material and socio-legal systems of exploitation that feed the pursuers of homo deus.
Timothy Carroll (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the often ambivalent attitudes found in Orthodox Christianity toward technology and its role within the pursuit of theosis.
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides a close (if all too brief) reading of theological attitudes towards the body, its sensorium and various technologies that might aid or hinder the Orthodox Christian’s pursuit of holiness. This theological basis is then used to inflect and help interpret ethnographic data on how Orthodox Christians relate to technology within spaces of worship. Taken together, this paper addresses the ambivalence toward technology seen within a religious tradition that posits theosis as the ideal goal for each of its members. The paper examines how, in juxtaposition against trends towards ‘purification’ seen in Latin and post-Reformation Christianity, Orthodox’s emphasis on material as arising from the energies of God allows for a pragmatic approach toward the ethical valuation of technology as being helpful toward, or a hinderance toward, theosis. Thus, in unpacking the Orthodox axiom that ‘God became man that man might become god’, this paper explores the material dimension of God’s condescension to human weakness and the technological mechanisms of the human ascent to become like God.
Jeremy Cohen (McMaster University)
Paper short abstract:
The history of transhumanism is often situated in the computer sciences and science-fiction. I compare 19th and early 20th century metaphysical traditions to contemporary immortalist movements, revealing similar techno-scientific narratives and practices, including a telos of human perfectibility.
Paper long abstract:
The histories of transhumanism and adjacent techno-cultures are typically situated in the computer sciences and the realm of science-fiction. I argue that contemporary techno-cultural imaginaries reflect similar techno-scientific narratives and practices as those found within 19th and early 20th century Christian metaphysical traditions in North America and Europe. Scientific and technological progress in the 19th and early 20th centuries produced a telos of human progression towards godhood, while discoveries about the functioning of the brain, alongside growing societal reform movements and changing conceptions of the body and health, fuelled speculation about the inevitability of physical immortality. Christian tracts, New Thought health manuals, and physical culture magazines attest to the popularity of physical immortality within the metaphysical milieu. This genealogy of immortality focuses on shifting conceptions of the mind and body, the moral necessity of human progress, and the effects of new materialist foci. Combining ethnographic research and primary source analysis, I trace various continuities from metaphysical traditions, through to my research communities, and to the Silicon Valley start-ups focused on vitality and aging. While their future imaginaries are varied, movements of the past, present, and future are linked by the promissory discourses of techno-science, the desire for radically extended futures, and by narratives of potential and perfectibility.