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Ollivier Dyens – The inhuman condition

We are disappearing. The worlds depicted ahead of us today are so magnificent, so peculiar, so astonishing that the very structure of what we are is being questioned. Spotted by technologies, by infinite levels of the real, by non human, sublime readings for the universe, these new spheres of the pragmatic oblige us to think what the human being is.

[Read the French language version]

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This thought is the most fundamental challenge of our era – the subversion of the alive, intelligent and the conscious lies in the heart of questions, conversations and furies that overwhelm the modern world. Long before the political, sociological or economic turmoil, long before the battles and the frictions among continents and civilizations, long before the corrosions between religions and supermodernity, there was the definition of the individual. How to be, how to be described, how to say that you are a human being today against the infinite stratifications of the real? Against the revision of intelligence, conscience and uniqueness of the being? Against the machines that literally vibrate inside us?


Every day in the West, and soon in the whole world, human beings are born, survive, grow up and die thanks to machines, next to machines and through machines. Machines, today, give life and breath to our world. They are the first to see unborn children (in ultrasounds), to take care of them (endovaginally), to attend them. Machines are the first to hatch our children, touch them, and see them. They protect them, help them and soothe them. They feed their fantasy world, develop their optical cortex. Real sexual relations are developed with them. Machines, literally, bring our children to this world. And by this act, they allow the emergence of a new ecosystem, a new species: since little less than a century, we owe more and more our lives, our therapies, our anxieties, our successes and our despairs to the machines that take care of us.


The man, the woman, the child of our era are only human beings through their relationship with machines.


Could this revolution, this transformation, and the paradigmatic commotion for which we talk so much, concern us so much? We don’t live in a world that is controlled by machines, but in a universe that is born by them, in a culture that is created more and more according to their image, according to their needs. We are submerged in a world in full transmutation, where its flesh, its essence, its meaning become inhuman (with the literal sense of the word, lacking humanity, looking like it does not belong to nature or the human condition). Attention though, I do not use this term in a negative sense. The contemporary inhuman condition is that of the man, the woman and the child, who need to be redefined, to accept that their situation, their existence, their essence are only possible through the coexistence of the bipedal mammal with the tools, the machines and the technologies that surround it. It’s that of the man, the woman and the child who suddenly realise, through research and science, the layers of the realities that emerge from the belly of the machines. Through the inability to clearly define the notion of the individual, to delimit the principle that regulates it, to locate its ontology – they realise that they are intelligent and conscious exactly because of and thanks to the tools, that without those they would merely be evolved mammals, that the homo sapiens revolution hasn’t got to do with his brain (hardly bigger, by merely 6%, than the one of his ancestors homo habilis and homo erectus, and smaller than the one of his Neanderthal cousin)[1], but with the fact that his/her brain is entangled with tools and technologies.


Of course, living creatures exist, initially, in what the French biologist Francois Jacob calls biological reality. Since the time, though, when man discovered the tool and mainly, during the past century or so, the human being also lives in a technological reality. This reality deeply questions the ecumenical values that form the base of our conception of the real, the conscious and the intelligent. Through this doubt, innumerable questions concerning the living are raised.


Today, in the dawn of the new millennium, in this era that was born the day civilization was conquered by machines (if there is a lesson we learned from the year 2000, is that we do no longer control the world that surrounds us. On the 31st of December 1999, the whole humanity was expecting, breathlessly, the verdict of the machines),[2] we are entering a civilization that, more and more, is inclined to the machines, a civilization that is built and expanded according to their measures, a civilization for which man is neither an enemy or a parasite or a stranger, but merely a ghost, made more and more invisible and absent. Or at least man, as we define him, imagine and depict him/her. Because this is the key to this intriguing situation in which we find ourselves today: In order to reconquer the universe, we have to rethink the human status, the essence of the human being, of this bipedal mammal, capable for prejudice, thought, lies and generosity.


Our world today is a world that produces new forms, new dynamics, and new bodies. We are penetrating into a world that answers to new evolutionary tensions: those of information, machines and technology. We are sunk in a system that, through the richness of information, through the intenseness of transmission, through the multiplication of the channels of dissemination, allows the appearance of countless new morphologies.


What Marc Augé called supermodernity holds a good example. What is supermodernity? It’s the search for meaning against exaggerations – incidental and temporal exaggerations. Supermodernity is those spaces that do not correspond to human, historical needs but to technological needs: airports, shopping centers, highways, train stations, all those spaces where we get lost, not because they are poorly constructed or planned, but just because they exist in order to cover needs that are beyond us. Mass transportations, flights, fleets of vehicles, trains, transfer of products, seasonal transports – dynamics of which the human being cannot grasp their scale (1.200 daily flights, 415.000 flights annually, only in Heathrow, for example), that do not exist only to serve man but also to correspond to new technological needs.


The plasticized, mechanized bodies also form a good example. What is the reason behind this wave of radical metamorphoses of the body (it surely has to do with fashion, but this does not suffice as an explanation). What is the reason for those plastic surgeries, taking anabolic drugs, the violent and often extreme exercises, with which the bodies are stretched, grow away from their human shape (huge breast implants, outrageous athletic accomplishments,[3] bodies with unnatural muscular mass, piercing of the mouth, the genitals, underneath the skin, extraction of healthy organs etc.) if not in order to correspond to an inhuman environment, where the legitimacy of the organic is constantly questioned? Isn’t it a reaction to those subversions? What is the reason for all those metamorphoses if not to sculpt the body, confirm and negate its presence? What are all those experimentations, those quasi-metamorphoses, if not the result of a world that more and more abandons the organic?


So what can we propose? How can we adopt a stance against these changes? How can we approach the issue of transformation of humanity without falling into the trap of a political or other polarization? How can we examine the close coexistence of man and technology without falling in the fantasy of utopia or revelation?


By modifying the viewpoint of the analysis and approaching the relationship of human being and technology, not starting from a political program but from the relation and the differences between biological and technological realities. Why is man so concerned today with technologies? Why is man under the impression that technologies are threatening him in an ontological and metaphysical way? Why so many worries when the relation between the living being and technologies exists before the appearance of homo sapiens[4] and the appearance of human civilization depends on it? Why? Because modern technologies do not just question our comprehension of the world, but also the ecumenical truths that helped us, through the millennia, to make this world a composed place and rationalize our presence in it. We are not stressed by the fact that technologies are present everywhere, but the readings of the world that oblige us to accept (where the world is not, perhaps, nothing else but a string of fine ropes that leap, where time and space are warping under the weight of the stars, where every sense of beginning, end, boundary is diminished, where there are horizons beyond which the laws of nature are knocked down). We are not concerned by the fact that technologies are omnipresent, but with the readings of the world that they question, as well and especially, the form, the structure, the essence itself of the living and the human being (how can we be speaking about men and women when technology depicts the person as an ephemeral figure made of instable, moving and infected layers?). Technological reality makes us discover a universe that is not irrational but its sense does not correspond to our biological concept. Technological reality shows us that the universe is totally alien to the concept we have, that the information we receive about the world that surrounds us through biology is, at the best case, partial, in the worst case, a parody. This lack of compatibility gives way to a discontent, a deep anxiety: what we feel, see, touch, love, is not, as it seems, a construction. This discontent is what I call the inhuman condition.


Although this inhuman condition leads, some times, to frightening conclusions (the human being is a mechanism, art is an algorithm, the development beyond control of technologies pushes us to a singularity), it also proposes a new way of understanding the world, relieved from biological, cultural and political tensions and polarizations, that are, very often, stupefying. The inhuman condition obliges us to rethink the human one. If our millennia-old concepts about man and woman are in danger of perishing, the animalistic, violent battles that humanity has been giving all along might become obsolete too. In the inhuman condition, hope and despair, human being and machine, intention and mechanism are interwoven. The inhuman condition is a cocoon.



Notes

[1] The Economist, ‘If this is a man’, p. 8. In a strange manner, recent studies also show that the mind of the first homo sapiens was bigger than the one of the modern man, 1650cm3 for the first sapiens against 1350cm3 for the contemporary man.

[2] The year 2000 was supposed to bring such a terrible informatics disaster that would sweep with it the whole human civilization? The machines could adapt to it, to a secondary mistake, after all, of the first programmers or would they collapse, ruining a big part of the human civilization? For a whole day, we were waiting for the machines and the technologies to decide our destiny, our future. Our civilization did not belong to us anymore. Nothing changed since that day but very few reached any conclusions from this fact.

[3] “There are already artificially enhanced beings that are circulating among us. The bigger the competition, the more visible it is. The domain of sports is a good example. Contemporary stress that is connected with doping”, says John Hoberman, assessor of the University of Texas for the substances that dope “it is a kind of a very confused referendum concerning then future of perfection of the human being”. Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution (Doudleday, New York, 2005), p. 5.

[4] The first tools appear two million years before the homo sapiens. See Mathias Osvath and Peter Gardenfors, ‘Quand les hommes inventerent l’avenir’ Les Grands Dossiers des Sciences Humaines, no 1, pp. 58-63

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Special issue: right-front, transhumanism
Tags: Ollivier Dyens, transhumanism

2 comments »

2 comments

1. Ο/Η Justice De Thézier :
   April 10th, 2009 at 04:43

   Ollivier Dyens is a posthumanist poet…

   
   
2. Ο/Η SniffCode.com :
   April 21st, 2009 at 22:56

   I used to be worried about the relationship that humans have with machines. Yes, I’ll even admit that I had my share of anxiety about “The Rise of the Machine” against man. But I worry no more on this matter. The machines take care of us, yes. But we have something that the machines need even more: Tech Support. And believe me when I say that it will be Tech-Support and the apathy and incompetence of this human species that will win the war of man against machine. When the machines break down and call 24 hour tech-support for emergency repair or even just assistance…they will be put on hold for 10 minutes and trouble shoot with a confused tech rep for another 50 minutes. Within that precious hour much damage can be done and humans will again prevail.

   Long live Tech Support!

   
   

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