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Benjamin M. Schacht – What can Walter Benjamin teach us about transhumanism?

Transforming our nature? Is this not, from the start, a dangerous idea? If nature signifies something essential, something fixed, then transforming it, if not impossible, smacks of a hubris captured in literary and artistic expression from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to Andrew Niccol’s 1997 film Gattaca, in which the dream of a genetically perfected humanity turns out to be nightmare. Reality appears to teach us the same lesson: are not the ecological catastrophes currently confronting humanity the result of defying nature, of interrupting and transforming its inherent harmony?

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Everything hinges on the meaning nature. For an insight into the “nature of things” is an insight into their eternal and lawful workings, a discovery of the most profound importance. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, not known for his modesty, promises that a proper conception of human nature, “can provide insight into language, thought, social life, and morality and…it can clarify controversies on politics, violence, gender, childrearing, and the arts.”[1] By discovering what human beings essentially are, we would finally be able to put to rest the various debates over the relative roles of nature and culture in the development of human behavior. Moreover, knolwedge of human nature would enable us to target social problems such as crime and poverty with the utmost precision, sorting out those things we might change from those that are here to say, or, more ominously, abolishing them forever. Revolutions in technical and scientific knowledge have played an incaclulable role in advancing our understanding of human nature. Through fMRI, for example, we can now locate the parts of our brains responsible for different feelings and cognitive processes, and our progress in the field of genetics promises the eradication of the undesirable mutations that cause disease and disability. The flipside of such hopes is the moral fears they raise—increased opportunities for control, the emergence of new forms of inequality along genetic lines, and perhaps most hauntingly, the disappearence of humanity altogether as it becomes indistinguishable from technological modification, its sacred flame snuffed out.


The hopes and fears of human progress have given birth to new forms of ethical reflection, notably, bio-ethics, which seeks to orient our moral compass as we stride into uncharted territory. But despite the rapid scientific and technological progress (and their concomitant ethical and philosophical dilemmas) characteristic of our present age, the question of nature and its potential techno-scientific transformation had already undergone considerable examination in the work of early 20th century cultural critic Walter Benjamin. Many of Benjamin’s writings—from his youth until his untimely death fleeing the Nazis in 1940—are preoccupied by the question of a new, constructed humanity. But it is not his explicit reflections on a technologically enhanced humanity that are most revealing; rather, it his oblique approach to these issues, formulated in his celebrated 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” which may take us furthest in addressing the questions raised by transhumanism today. In drawing out the consequences of reproductive technologies such as photography and film for art, Benjamin simultaneously interrogates categories such as authenticity and origniality, lending his analysis a scope far wider than art alone. And the power of Benjamin’s analysis enables us to pierce through many of the specters raised by ethical debates today. Benjamin shows us that there is no reason to fear the future transhumanism represents because, in a way, we were always transhumans.


The work of art, Benjamin notes, has always been reproducible, at least in principle. Nothing prevents a skilled artist from imitating the work of another, so well, perhaps, that any superficially noticeable difference is indiscernable. But certainly we do not attend musueums to view reproductions, and the revelation that the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre is an imitation would cause an uproar. There is name for this sort of thing—it is a fake. But whence this distinction? What makes the original Mona Lisa inappreciably more valuable than a perfectly good copy? The value of the original Mona Lisa is, according to Benjamin, tied up in its uniquness and originality, in its authenticity, which Benjamin calls its aura: “What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.”[2] A work of art’s aura, therefore, is its singularity, it’s ineradicable uniquness and irreplacable existence. Benjamin writes, “In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place.”[3] The aura, in turn, provides an explanation for the peculiar reverence people hold for great works of art–the need to be in their presence, to see them, as it were, in the flesh.


But the work of art’s aura is precisely what “withers,” as Benjamin puts it, in the age of technological reproducibility. Though works of art have always been reproducible in principle, it was not until relatively recently that technological reproducibility became prolific, and it is precisely the proliferation of technologies of reproduction that dissolve the aura. Consider the example of a photograph: what sense does it make to ask for the “original”? Or compare the experience of attending the theater to watching a film: when I view a play, no matter how precisely it has been rehearsed and no matter the continuity between one performance and the next, I see a unique production every time I sit before the stage, something that can never be reproduced. A film, however, does not possess this unique quality. Whether I watch it in New York or Berlin, today or ten years from now, it is the same film. Thus, the “uniqueness” of these art forms does not exist; they are incapable of occupying the “here and now” and consequently possess no aura.


Benjamin is no sentimentalist, however, and technological reproducibility’s disintegration of the aura is no cause for nostalgia. Reproducibility, “emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual.”[4] For, after all, “the unique existence of the ‘authentic’ work of art always has its basis in ritual.”[5] The destruction of the work of art’s aura prompts a profound revelation: authenticity—aura’s constituent characteristic—is always already the effect of reproduction! The progressive introduction of photography and (not to mention to the presence of television and digital media today) compel us to recognize that aura’s key ingredients are products of tradition, which is to say, products of the transmission (reproduction) of cultural values. Thus, Benjamin asserts that “The uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embeddedness in a context of tradition.”[6] What Benjamin shows, in a sort of proto-deconstructionist gesture, is that the “presence” that characterized the work of art’s auratic existence is the result of the technology of reprodution called culture. Thus, in becoming a revered, indeed fetishistic object, the work of art already had to be placed within a specific cultural and religious framework, that was already there, waiting for it and reproduces itself as it reproduces the aura of the work of art. Consequently, technology appears in a new light. It is not merely a sufficiently complex physical creation, what we commonly refer to as “machines.” Technology is a mode of relating to ourselves and the world; indeed, it is the primary mode of human relation. From the use of primitive tools in the service of hunting and gathering to recording information in books, humans have consequently participated in practices of self-modification. Language itself, comprised, as it is, by a series of arbitrary signs that constitute meaning through their differentiation, represents one of humanity’s most important technological achievements. And while the binary language of computers—strings of 1s and 0s—may differ from human language in degree and application, it certainly does not differ in kind.


Benjamin was well aware that the consequences of this insight stretch “far beyond the realm of art.”[7] Indeed, with advances in our ability to understand and manipulate our genetic code, we too should realize that our “substantial nature,” our “authentic human existence” is subject to technological intervention. If, to take a slightly different biological example, we are able alter those who are predisposed to feelings of anxiety with medication, would this represent an extension of our nature, or a transformation of it? The question is unanswerable because, precisely as Benjamin deconstructs the notion of aura, recent and contemporary scientific and technological advances problematize the category of human nature. To those who would wring their hands over the “loss of freedom, dignity, and autonomy” these advances entail, we must reply that the very concepts being lamented were already the products of a certain kind of technology—the technico-cultural transmission and reproduction of values. Undoubtedly, one explanation for people’s fear of a technologically modified humanity is the erasure of difference such modifications might bring about. Differences are, as the cliché goes, what make us beautiful. The ascendance of computer technology, then, represents the mathematization and scientification of the world where mathematics and science are to be taken “in the pejorative sense of operating like optimized clockwork.”[8] There is no shortage of critics ready to lambast technology for its “flattening” effect, as a recent experience of mine testifies. At a conference panel on technology and the notion of “the commons,” an audience member complained that binary code reduced issues to simple oppositions, and he lamented the loss of complexity this reduction implied. But do we complain about the relatively “limited” genetic sequence that underlies our very existence? Do we object to the twenty six letter Roman alphabet that gives rise to an effectively unlimited number of words, sentences, and thoughts? The mistake here is the quasi-religious conviction that human beings are something over and above their concrete practices. We are what Freud called, in Civilization and its Discontents, prosthetic gods, constantly transforming ourselves, constantly expanding our possibilities.


In a particularly poetic passage on the French utopian Charles Fourier, composed during the final days of his life, Benjamin remarks,




According to Fourier, cooperative labor would increase efficiency to such an extent that four moons would illuminate the sky at night, the polar ice caps would recede, seawater would no longer taste salty, and beasts of pray would do man’s bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, would help her give birth to the creations that now lie dormant in her womb.[9]


In invoking Fourier, condemned in his time as a hopelessly fantastic thinker, Benjamin encourages us to take his vision seriously—in cooperation, humanity unlocks innumerable possibilities for itself. This ought to be our dream for the future as well—a humanity united in its self-improvement, a humanity brought together by the promise of a technologically liberated tomorrow. But this dream can only become a reality if the ideals of transhumanism are extended to include the whole of humanity. The real danger in the transhumanist vision, as Benjamin was well-aware, is not the surrender of our humanity but the inhuman abuse of our powers. The unequal distribution of progress’ desserts threatens us all, and whatever technological or scientific enlightenment we achieve will leave “the wholly enlightened earth…radiant with triumphant calamity.” [10] Even now we behold the loss of our humanity in the use of technological knowledge for the creation of precision guided bombs, and we watch in horror as the best medical science is deployed in the form of new biological weapons; we suffer blow after blow to our dignity as billions are left behind, crushed by the scourges of malnutrition and curable disease. For as Benjamin warns, “Instead of deploying power stations across the land, society deploys manpower in the form of armies. Instead of promoting air traffic, it promotes traffic in shells. And in gas warfare, it has found a new means of abolishing the aura.”[11] If humanity has always been technological, then technology has not liberated us yet. Liberation will require something more than technology; it will take the truly democratic distribution of our technological wealth.


Notes

[1] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 3.

[2] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 3: 1935-1938. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006), 104-5.

[3] Ibid., 103.

[4] Ibid., 106.

[5] Ibid., 105.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 107.

[8]Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996), 129.

[9] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938-1940, (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006), 394.

[10] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1.

[11] Selected Writings Volume 3, 122.

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Special issue: transhumanism
Tags: Benjamin Schacht, evolution, transhumanism, walter benjamin

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