New Literary History

Abstract:

The evolutionary drift of the concept of “the human” among transhumanists covers over the fact that white, masculine, capacitated, bourgeois identity continues to pass as universal at the expense of racialized subjects, sexual outliers, disabled people, and lower-class cast-offs from the age of colonialism. Black feminist materialists and disability posthumanists (neomaterialists) argue that the central transhumanist conceit of “the universe becoming conscious of itself” ironically avoids the problem of naturalizing biological essences rather than recognizing their beginnings in human autopoeisis (myths of origins that ground local and national identities). Unlike transhumanism, neomaterialism gives credence to the agency of bodies not as desirable/undesirable, but rather as agentive creative forces bringing about alternative ethical maps of becoming. The post-Darwinian concept of natural selection/dysselection avoids the question of social order and ideology as molding forces on ability, cognitive normativity, and racial stratification. Thus, the more transhumanism misrecognizes biology for discursive production, the less one is able to rewrite the terms of “the human” as a limiting, exclusionary discursive category at the base of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and, I would add, ableism. This critical work on denaturalizing biocentric approaches intends to accelerate, to every degree possible, the failing project of “the human” as an exclusionary relic of liberal humanism. Transhumanism’s arguments are fully “biocentric,” and thus stand exposed at their eugenicist foundations as attempting to direct dynamic “becoming” for humans and nonhuman animals alike with exterminatory results.