Originally presented at the Nexus Contemporary Arts Center in Atlanta

"...at the extreme limit of pain, nothing remains but
the conditions of space and time."

Holderlin

by: Robert Cheatham

The very origins of electronics (in some sense coterminous with the origins of the human) are infused with attempts to see past the human or rather to peer past the LIVING human. One could well propose that a dead human is a post human-at least in inherited terms of a deferred relay system that the term 'post' often demands of cemetaries and pyramids --but also in terms of certain other 'sending and receiving' systems:
postcards, post office, the post modern, ex post facto and of course
technology. The question will always be: is a post-human a dead human or a 'sent' human? and sent where? Of course for many moderns these coincide. (the claustropobia this implies can be read in this quote from Samuel Weber:

...death now leads nowhere, and least of all, toward any sort of (transcendental) beyond. Death remains, as it were, enclosed in the world of immanence: the dead do not depart, or if they do so, it is only to return as revenants, as ghosts. Instead of defining identity, death returns as the shadow that splits life into a life that consists largely in passing away, and a death that has nowhere to go but back to the living. Living and dying tend to overlap. Mourning...responds to this confusion with the theatrical reanimation of a world emptied of meaning.


Samuel Weber in Genealogy of Modernity: History , Myth , and Allegory in Benjamin's Origin of the German Mourning Play)

This collapse into each other of two seemingly very different systems (and then modernist critical refusal) is echoed by Adorno and Horkheimer when they write in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: "The body cannot be made into a noble object: it remains a corpse however vigorously it is trained and made fit." And while issues of power and desire are sometimes absent in Extropian discussions of the posthuman, power and control make themselves felt in Michel de Certeau's statement that "...the law would have no power if it were not able to support itself on the obscure desire to exchange's one's flesh for a glorious body, to be written, even if it means dying and to be transformed into a recognized word."

The question will become: is the posthuman even human?

Thomas Edison invented something called the Spiritphone in an attempt to communicate with the dead. Thomas Watson, friend and confidante of Alexander Graham Bell, said, speaking of the early telephone: "The apparatus sometimes seemed to me to be possessed by something supernatural, but I never thought the supernatural being was strictly angelic when it operated so perversely." The early history of radio is similarly penetrated by secret, occult histories with Marconi thinking he had contacted martians and a whole mythology of Otherness developed around Nicola Tesla as an ascended being from Venus. (and also perhaps in his attempts to establish a new industrial standard of transmitting power through air rather than wires--amounting to what the uncanny Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis called "touching at a distance" -- Beruhrung in distans -- or "actio in distans", action at a distance.) Slipping down the timestream just a bit we find Albert Einstein, late industrial unsettler of the frontiers of space and time chastisizing Neils Bohr for his quantum goofiness, calling Bohr's notion of quantum reality "spukhafte funverkungen" or spooky action at a distance. In the same boat we find Sigmund Freud trying to distance himself from his old friend Jung for similar reasons. After a certain point, Freud never ceased trying to distance himself from secret histories, even to the paradoxical point of setting up his own secret group to further the goals of psychoanalysis; for Freud, the post human could only be the past human, always defined by the limits of a bobbin on a string thrown -- and retrieved -- from the human cradle: fort/da.. And of course it is well known that Freud intentionally did NOT read Nietzsche for fear of that very 'action at a distance' called contamination of ideas. And surely the standard bearer for at least one form of the post-human is Frederich Nietzsche's Ubermensche. ...and perhaps even the culture of German Romanticism itself. (Max More, founder of the Extropian Institute dedicated to pursuit of the post human quotes Nietzsche favorably from Thus Spake Zarathustra : " I teach you the overman. Man is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?")

Leon Theremin, the inventor of the first electronic musical instrument, called appropriately enough the Theremin, also tried to investigate electronically the beyond. It is perhaps not insignificant then that the instrument invented in 1920 found its most widespread use in scores for early horror films, always denoting a glissandic, quavering break with ordinary reality, its almost operatic vocal quality turning to a shreik as X the Unknown approaches closer and closer. Significantly enough, Theremin was enscripted -- we should say 'encrypted' into the KGB--kidnapped from the USA actually --- to create devices to decode secret messages from overseas, leaving the movies to open channels to the dead via soundtracks provided by comrade Theremin.

Our avatars leading us here in our search should perhaps be Count Dracula and the wolfman, exemplars of morphing and voluntary (as opposed to evolutionary) genetic code manipulation that extends the body past the human and into the realm of the animal, the anorganic, and the livingdead. (or not forgetting that the original Dracula by Bram Stoker -- as well as Frankenstein by Mary Shelly-- was written as a series of letters or posts as we would say now on the internet) Here, desire and mind slip past the mesh of matter, then coil back on itself to bootstrap the body past the sticking point of death, turning death into a porous boundary, lifedeath, deathlife. How perfect that the cinematic apparatus proleptically introduces us to our future, the 'soul stealer' of the early camera becoming body theft in special effects, almost as if we are in training as a species for the great adventure of a mechanical Bardo Thodol, the chanting of the priests over the dead in the Book of the Dead, guiding us into the light--even if it is now only the light of a projector thrown onto our cave wall.

Let's leave our post here with just this note: the early history of media structures is penetrated with thoughts of the dead, or more specifically and horrifically, the Undead or the livingdead, and also entities other than either a dead OR living human. [and of course the arrival of seamless special effects has only deepened the relationship of media, death, mourning, and the living dead. One has only to look at recent movies. for example, What Dreams May Come...] The continual struggle of modernism is to reconcile the discourse of the mythological 'postal' sendings and receivings (often called by the way, paganism, mythology, magic, the occult, etc., in general what the early Greeks called the daemonic) with the pragmatism of life constrained to surface effects. We might echo Avital Ronell's thought that "We are trying to establish an expedient talking path between the legacy of an acknowledged history and its secret account; for within the discourse of acknowledgement some repressed elements seek a form of expression, as if an original mouthpiece has been covered by the film of a technosphere that has since forgotten its source." The Telephone Book, A.R We might also cite approvingly Lawrence Rickels thought that "The Technological and the cryptological are the parallel fast tracks along which the techno-future unrolls." The Case of California.)
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If this paper were a hypertext, at this point we would branch off into several directions: the hidden conflicts in western society between what passes as the 'bare life' of paganism and the sacrificial economy of judeochristianity as it finds its life/death in techne; other early attempts to concatenate the senses with non-human forces, for example the history of paranoia beginning with Daniel Paul Schreber's Nervous Illness and the genesis of Freud's own concept of paranoia, or consciousness beside itself; the history of trance, mesmerism, hypnosis and Jean-Martin Charcot's explorations of the body's attempts to contort itself beyond itself, otherwise known as hysteria; and the peculiar fact that the early history of images transmitted over space, as opposed to sound, seems to be absent this concern with otherness and the dead.

(as a side note, I would point out that althought the early history of television seems to lack these concerns, there are now groups of experimenters who claim that through a certain arrangement of video camera, vcr and monitor, they are able to contact the dead. The same is true of the computer. It is only a matter of time, if it hasn't happened already, until similar claims are made for the worldwide constellation of computers and telephones called the internet. In terms we will be discussing later on, the first influencial fictional attempt has been through some of the writings of Wiliam Gibson, the first to garner the somewhat dubious label of 'cyberpunk'.)

I also would note in closing this particular post office and before moving on to chip-brained geeks that Nazi Germany was the first to publically transmit televised images of the Berlin Olympics. This hyper link explodes in another direction but rounds back on itself with Nietzsche and his notion of Ubermensch; the German Romantic problematizing of the relation between health, illness and contagiousness; and then Heidegger, deconstruction und so weiter. You'll be pleased to know that I won't pursue all of this link. HOWEVER. recognition of the necessity of the linkages between prostheses, dismemberment, and an always approaching radical re-consideration of the notions of 'health' (as a kind of wholeness) and illness (or a kind of daemonic pluralism, contagion--or action at a distance we remember--, or radical de-centering of organismic functioning) unlie all of my scurrying from pillar to post- as the saying has it. The other line of enquiry which I will pursue later is that the 'concentration camp' provides a focus to ideas of radical exposure and experimentation that have become the bete noir of techno-modernism.

So. Rather than engaging in further 'hocus-pocus' (and keeping in mind that as a compressed form of the Eucharistic Christological 'Hoc est enim corpeus meum' or a problematized sacramental 'here is my body' -- fort/da again-- and the whole range of the postmodern and poststructuralist discourses of presence/absence, truth/fiction, etc), we can say that with the Posthuman is the very question of the de-localization and locus and re-focus of the body : hocus pocus locus maybe.
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Rather than becoming-dead, the posthuman is more popularly now thought of as becoming-human, or sent, in a series of stages, all the way to infinity; that is, a sort of superhuman, or, in its early stages, a bionic six million dollar man or woman with greatly extended senses and abilities which are still based on the human frame and scale of values, encompassed in a sort of hybrid eugenics program. In this first instance (an instance which actually encompasses the history of science and technology), noise is filtered out of the system. Noise, although apparently inherent in the functioning of all systems, can exceed certain thresholds and diminish efficiency and functioning. The new extended phenotype of this suprahuman relies on the concept of all knowable reality as extendable and cleanable code and that even Goedelian recursiveness eventually bottoms out at a certain point short of the quantum level. To put it simply, that we can examine and alter human genetic material and that biological and mechanical structures can be merged at a certain point in their structure and that the human community will be able to manipulate both orders to a 'human' advantage. We might call this the 'humanist' version of the post-human.

There are those who believe this is as far as we should go and even as far as we CAN go in reconstructing the human. Greater health and progress would mean becoming more human by 'simply' cleaning up the arenas that foster discord and disease, and by procuring the ability to put up and maintain rigid barriers between what would be considered a 'pure' human and the contagious effects of the in-organic and a contamination from any feedback from our electromechanical environment. From this ur-conservative approach, this first step would not be a 'step' at all in any extended program of human development. When all is said and done, from this point of view, the human phenotype is rigid, even if we don't know the full extent of that typology. From this view, there are (and should be) constraints that limit how far and how fast the human can be extended. (for example the first brain implants have been announced by a researcher at Emory University which would allow the disabled to control computers which would in turn let them resume normal human activities. Since it is based on a disease model of RESTORATION of the human and not exceeding it--whatever that may mean--this first position would no doubt find it acceptable.) [Roger Penrose has advanced the thesis that consciousness is possible because of a quantum event that would be difficult perhaps to replicate in mechanical systems.]

Certainly many traditions and religions, especially but not only, the judeo-christian believe that life and consciousness is informed by a divine spark unique to the human. How far these forms can be adjuticated by the technical and still remain within the human sphere is perhaps a question for theologians--or maybe with the help of technicians. [many of the mythologies of assault by the demonic are informed by these questions. In this tradition, over-represented by judeo-christiantity, evil is the arrival of of a radical de-centering, the dispersion of one core meaning into many meanings, a situation which thereby conflates truth and falsity, reality turns into realities, fact and fiction mingle. The daimonic, both as the ancient greek concept as the middle range between humans and gods, and its later conversion by judeo-christianity into the evil of de-centering, I would align with the forces of techne, as the greeks called it; and here also is the weakly held boundary layer separating dis-ease, contagion/contamination, the pharmaceutical and prosthesis from the technological. ) At the next, most fully developed and radical stage of the post-human, this boundary limit becomes fully porous, even osmotic, pulling the human across the borders...but pretty well chopping us up in the process.

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Advocates of the most radical form of the posthuman often speak of a technological singularity, its most widely known expression in the essay of the same name by Dr. Vernor Vinge. Much like the singularity we know as a black hole, this would be the arrival of an event or series of events in rapid succession of a technological nature, which would act to sever all previous human history from the old baseline. The main catalyst of this singularity would be the arrival of true artificial intelligence, or AI, a conscious machine intelligence; basically the creation of another entity (It's doubtful that one could call it a species). [This would necessarily be in conjunction with various other technologies in materials science such as nanotech assemblers] This arrival could come about either through some singular invention whereby the machine becomes aware or through the large-scale networking, on a planetary basis perhaps, of machines tied together which 'awaken' once sufficent complexity and density of organization occur. Human organizations and forms become a reflection of technical, info-matic structures and not the other way around. Nature itself, or even AS an 'in itself', recedes in importance except as a modeling agency from which a technical culture can bootstrap itself to a higher level of functioning. Once relegated to the most speculative of science fiction and even mythology, the idea of the landscape coming alive, of objects taking on qualities of subjectivity, while subjectivity itself becomes more object-like, has now become a standard in some theoretical and scientific circles. In this most radical formulation of the posthuman, we find it very difficult to see over the event horizon into this maelstrom of merging of flesh and metal and melding of the characteristics of one species to that of another.

Max More, the founder of the Extropian Institute has put the post human (which is also called the transhuman) challenge in the following terms: "...to champion the Promethean use of science and technology to make ever deeper and broader improvements in the human condition: to eradicate biological aging and involuntary death; to augment intelligence beyond the capacies of our natural brains; to elevate personal vitality; to give us the ability to choose our physical and psychological identity, rather than acquiescing to the identity we are born with." (internet page, "From Human To Posthuman"). Such thinking relies on the idea that technology will continue making progress at about its current level and that even if it does begin to flatten out we are still nowhere near that flat spot in the various research programs that are underway. [ SIGMOID CURVE] I subscribe to various science notification services and every week I hear about new advances in computing and materials sciences that will allow nanotechnology, or the construction of molecular level machinery; or quantum computing, that is using the very strange characteristics of the quantum level of matter to allow simultaneous and instantaneous processing of information; and advances in the abilities to map and alter the human genetic code. [even so, it becomes very difficult if not impossible to navigate the flood of pertinent information much less information which simply MAY be pertinent]

Partisans of the singularity theory of technological history point to Moore's Law in computing wherein computing power doubles every 18 months, as regular as clockwork. I would then point to the parable of the lily pad which goes like this: assume you have a pond where you have a single lily pad and that the pond will be completely filled with lily pads after 30 days, where the lilies are doubling every day. At what point will the pond be half full? On the 29th day. Many would contend that we are ramping up to the 29th day, up on to the cusp of the singularity. And unlike a purely logrhythmic progression, the lily pads act to alter the environment to ensure their own survival, so that the more lily pads the faster the changes. And the thirtieth day is the day everything changed. The Extropians are still operating to a large degree under the auspices of the assumptions of the humanist credo that I first delineated and to which frankly most people in this room would subscribe: technology is our servant, merely a tool that we can take up or put down or modify at will. As we approach the event horizon, as this weedy technological (rhizomatic in certain techno-theories) growth is beginning to visibly fill our little human pond here on the surface of the earth, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the attitude of an autonomous human sphere and increasingly EASIER to see an autonomous technical sphere. All that is required is the thirtieth day for the sky to disappear and to see nothing but lily pads.

I would suggest that much of the furor around the so-called Y2K problem is the first glimmering throughout the world population of the extent of the technological rhizome. And also that what we call the Asian economic problem is mostly the becoming-visible of the global infrastructure that is being born or cultivated or created or however one wishes to put it, as the venous system for the transport of the singularity. And such also is the case with the increasing numbers of dislocated humans worldwide and, the distaff side of that dislocation, the massive rise of tourism.

And for those who would claim that all this is simply a form of hysteria which happens every so often in human history, millenium fever: I would say that catastrophe and collapse and wars are the very life blood of technological development, have been throughout human history and forms part of the nature of the technological itself and are the quickening agents of the singularity. One could maintain that in fact we live in a culture of emergency on a daily basis, as Walter Benjamin pointed out--even, or especially, if its most powerful form is what we might call 'vacuous emergency' (the highwater mark being the global popularity of Baywatch -- One could contend that a society of the simulacrum prefers the idea of empty emergencies since they don't threaten the basic structure of that society.)

The singularity also represents the 'state of exception' that the German philosopher and legal theorist Carl Schmitt discusses as an increasingly global state (He was also the prime legal philosopher in National Socialist Germany). Without going into the intricacies of Schmitt's positioning here, it's of some interest to show how the idea of this radical discontinuity has permeated all areas of discourse. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben phrases this collapse thusly:

"The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topological process in which what was presupposed as external [the state of nature] now reappears, as in a Mobius strip..., in the inside [as state of exception], [giving rise to] this very impossiblity of distinguishing between inside and outside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. The state of exception is thus not so much a spatiotemporal suspension as a complex topological figure in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another." Homo Sacer, p 37, G. Agamben )

In a media intensive society, one in which our very circulatory system consists of images pumped world-wide, 24 hours a day, in this system images, symbols, icons, the whole apparatus of our representational machinery in other words--this IS our reality now and becomes more so everyday. The truth may indeed be out there--but which television program will tell you where that 'there' is??!! Hysteria, addiction, 'transgression', emergency, speed, collapse are all necessary for the functioning of our psychic economy now; they do not escape or critique it but fulfill its requirements. Both the Singularity and the Imaginary occupy the state of exception so that to dismiss anything nowadays with the epithet, "But you made that up!" accounts for nothing since that is precisely the point. With the advent of the singularity, the first slope upward I see as beginning thirty thousand years ago, we begin to see the radical literalization of symbolic processes, a filling in and 'acting out' of bio-disciplinary pressures. And as Eric Santner has pointed out, "such a literalization has the effect of reversing the most fundamental processes whereby humans are initiated into a world of symbolic form and function." (p.91, My Secret Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of modernity) This reversal also leads us into more archaic myth-like formations. As Heidegger alluded to, we are perhaps seeing the return of the gods, since the most powerful expression of the literalization of mechanical processes would seem to be the mythological, the most banal example being the way that motor companies name their cars.

Let's assume however that we are still at the 29th day (perhaps a rash assumption). We begin to see odd shadows and shapes floating in our little lily pond since the lilies will begin to alter the ecology of the pond, allow certain things to flourish which will enhance the lilies survival even more, changing the balance of nurients, replacing one population of bugs and little beasties with another, more conducive to their reproduction. The metaphor of the pond as a state of exception will morph shortly into a more ominous development.

The posthuman has perhaps always been approaching (even when it was the prehuman). Nevertheless, if we were to do a diagnostic of the changing ecological conditions of our pond, the most salient characteristic of this latest '29th day' could be labeled as boundary disorders (and subsequent reorderings): immunodeficiencies and discourses of the 'viral'; poststructuralisms and its philosophers of the uncanny; the arrival of psycho-analytic type discourses for the masses as mediated by television and the net; the collapse of the distinctions between public and the private, the normative and the deviant; the confusions of the global and the regional; and preeminently, from the posthuman point of view, the growing indistinction between life processes and death processes, between the corpse and living body.

Earlier societies had the mythological character of the Trickster, for example Hermes, Legba, Loki, and so on, as the caretaker for some of these boundary conditions. I would submit that one of the modernist west's most powerful figure of these borderlands on the 29th day is Dracula and his "children of the night". (The figure of the werewolf
is also not un-germane here. However, it's peculiar morphing quality retains an oscillation between the animal and the human. As Giorgio Agamben puts it, the werewolf represents the "form of the survival of the state of nature at the very heart of the state". p. 106) Vampiric morphologies, though, seem more allied with the radical instrumentality which has come to be known as the posthuman as well as its global capitalist circulatory system. We shouldn't forget Marx's own formulation of capitalism as vampiric in that it sucks value from pre-existing formations and in killing them endows them with an eternal afterlife. To quote Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is the 'motley collection of everything that has ever existed.'

The radical instrumentality of the Singularity, radical in this instance because it exists for itself and not necessarily for humanity, creates also a radical hunger, which, in the shredding vacuum it creates ( a paradoxical vacuum since it is composed of processes of coding and decoding), turns all human life into Heidegger's standing reserve or into 'bare life' as Agamben calls it, the abandonment of life to the arena where one may be killed but not sacrificed; a holiday weekend creates more victims on our highways than many wars yet we could hardly call it sacred. Just the hypothetical approach of the Singularity shows us life as raw material, the collapsing together of life, politics, information. (by the way, Agamben shows that the very concept of 'sacred' life is itself an ambiguous concept in that regard, that is, "The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally expresses precisely "life's subjection to a power over death and life's irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment." p. 83. In other words, there is no refuge from, say, cloning, by expressing abhorence based on the 'sacredness of life', since that very sacredness is based on the king's, so to speak, life of power over death or, as it is bequeathed to us moderns, as the bio-political. To again quote Agamben, "Sacredness is a line of flight still present in contemporary politics, a line that is as such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological life itself of citizens.")

The vampiric process is one of gaining more life, purchased by, paradoxically, the dead from the living. Dracularity is pure desiring machinery--the power of circulation is that it circulates, doesn't matter what the 'it' is-- and the Singularity would seem to represent the approach of the Grand Master itself...which would mean the final 'politicization' of life, the fusion of bio-, thanato-, and info-politics. (In this fusion of the technical and the political, it may be that one can hardly speak of the 'political' as such--and certainly not as statesmanship]. It would also be the final literalization of the symbolic history of human kind, much like it is claimed that one who is dying re-enacts her whole life history in the blink of an eye.

Agamben's figure for this fusion is the concentration camp, what he calls the "hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity". In a sense the Singularity would be the final step in the instituting of this space of exception.

A lengthy quote from Agamben:

"One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. [....] Once zoe [which is how the Greeks characterized one's personal life as opposed to bios. rc] is politicized by declarations of rights, the distinctions and thresholds that make it possible to isolate a sacred life must be newly defined. And when natural life is wholly included in the polis --and this much has, by now, already happened -- these thresholds pass, ... beyond the dark boundaries separating life from death in order to identify a new living dead man, a new sacred man." p131, op. cit.

The approach of the singularity is the final conversion of the bio-techno-thanato- political, the last step initiating and literalizing all the symbolic processes to which the human species has access. Unlike the biblical 'all flesh is grass', this latest, and perhaps last, morph is flesh and matter into information. Perhaps the secret of the secret occult histories of technology alluded to at the beginning of this presentation is the collusion of techne with the de-cryption process, always a matter of linguifaction becoming liquidity, mutability, all that is solid becoming air as Marx wrote--or rather, all that is solid becomes information, transmission.

Is it any wonder then that at the end of the Christian era, 2000AD that even the scientific enterprise, in cahoots with the christos, sees collapse everywhere and that it has produced it's own version of the messianic return, one which it has colluded in bringing about, starting in ernest twenty five hundred years ago. The difference now is that western culture can gerrymander reality to start bringing about the desired eschatological effects.