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Transhumanism: The Final Outline (please?)

People Who Need To Find a Place Here:

• Wyndham Lewis, America & Cosmic Man

The Outline

1. Introduction: The Death of the Future?
   • What the Fuck, Francis Fukuyama?
   • Spider Robinson
   • The No-Future (Jameson, Edelman, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
   • Timothy Leary’s Exo-Psychology and actual, existing futures
     • Gibson’s two future-present novels
     • Web 2.0 (?)
   • Situate transhumanism as the creation of science fictional concepts within the real-world. Provide a sketch of the concept’s history and rhetorical transformations.
   • The Four Transhumanisms
     • Tension between posthuman / transhuman
     • Discuss Posthumanism in Hayles, as well as in Haraway.
2. The Logos & You: Heraclitus and Transhuman Rhetoric
   • Heraclitus’s theory of language and its history.
   • Include the prolepsis stuff here?
3. An Untitled Chapter on Teilhard de Chardin and H.G. Wells
   • Transhumanism as Open Conspiracy:
     • Black Helicopters
   • Tension between Utopian Ideology and Utopian Science (?)
4. The Vedic Imagination: Aurobindo, et al.
   • This one needs work, but Aurobindo is too important to leave out.
5. He Called It “Utopia”: Jameson and The Social
   • From the Political to the Social in Jameson’s work.
   • Compare to Logos in Heraclitus: suggest that Utopia is the Omega Point for J.
6. The Three Stigmata of Raymond Kurzweil: the Consumerist Singularity of Stuff
   • Read The Singularity Is Near against The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
   • Discussion of how posthumanism became transhumanism and what happened to Teilhard?
     • Rapture
     • Pinchbeck’s 2012
7. The White Lodge and the Black Lodge: The Utopian Parallax Gap and the Future of the Future
   • Twin Peaks
   • Star Trek: TNG
8. Conclusion: The Cognitive Turn: Beyond Language in Post-structural Thought
   • The ghost of Teilhard & Heraclitus within post-structuralism:
     • Lyotard, The Inhuman
     • Deleuze & Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
     • Derrida, “Differance”

Transhumanism: Radical Evolution and the Rhetorical Constructions of the Future of the Human

1. Introduction: The Death of the Future?
   • Spider Robinson
   • The No-Future (Jameson, Edelman, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
   • Timothy Leary’s Exo-Psychology and actual, existing futures
     • Gibson’s two future-present novels
     • Web 2.0 (?)
   • Situate transhumanism as the creation of science fictional concepts within the real-world. Provide a sketch of the concept.
   • Introduce two singularities:
     • Machinic
     • Spiritual
2. Part 1: The Singularity of Machines
   1. Chapter 1: The Three Stigmata of Raymond Kurzweil: the Consumerist Singularity of Stuff
   2. Chapter 2: Voodoo Capitalism: Postmodernism, Cybernetics, and Zombie Economics
      • Regan’s economic free market ideology as an early machinic singularity
      • Haraway and Jameson’s anxiety over same.
      • Risky Business and the microcosm of a transhuman singularity
   3. Chapter 3: Live Forever or Die Trying: The Immortality Pill and the Long 20th Century
      • Survey immortality rhetoric
      • Mention Arrighi
      • 2012 as possible conclusion of long 20th century
3. Part 2: The Singularity of Spirit
   1. Chapter 4: A Brief History of Everything: Radical monism and the transhuman universe of life
   2. Chapter 5: They Call It Utopia: the Transhumanism of Marx, Adorno, & Jameson
      • Marx and the remapping of the human: trace bits of Marx where ideas of remaking the human for post-capitalism is juxtaposed with images of how the human is remade for and by capitalism
      • Trace out Adorno’s equation of bestial existence with Utopia (negative dialectics). Show that this response stems from a lack of faith in human overcoming of capitalism
      • Jameson’s Utopia as remapping the social, the question of the human is off the table. For Jameson, remapping the social, and radicalizing social interactions, will open the possible space of a post-capitalist world. This dehumanized humanism is transhumanism.
   3. Chapter 6: Ecstatic Evolution: 2012 and the Liberation of Mind
4. Conclusion: The Future as Nightmare, the Future as Miracle
   • Talk about Star Trek as a possible resolution of this impasse.

Transhumanism: A Genealogy of the Future

• Introduction: Discuss origins of transhumanism in experiences of communicative militarism during WWII and “positive” eugenics during the early 20th century. Show how these “bad” things suggest affordances that may produce something “good” (or at least different). Stage the conversation in terms of Marx’s dialectical materialism, the negation of a negation. Additionally, establish the dangerousness of transhumanism
  • Wyndham Lewis
  • H.G. Wells
  • Haldane
  • Lind
  • Forever War
  • Starship Troopers

Section 1: Origins of the Transhuman

• 1. “They Called it ‘Utopia’: Transhumanism and the Dialectical Imagination”
  • “Spectres of Transhumanism in Marx”
    • Reading of the Grundrisse in terms of transhumanism
    • Establish that the monstrousness of transhumanism, in Stross (for instance), results from our first encounter with a transhuman entity: capital.
  • Adorno and animism
    • Negative Dialectics as a problemitizing of the possibility of revolutionary humanism
  • Jameson’s Utopia
• 2. Self overcoming: the religious valences of transhuman thought
  • Teilhard De Chardin
  • Sri Aurobindo
  • Document an encounter between Hegelian dialectical thought and religious doctrine.

Section 2: The problem of the transhuman

• 3. “Enlightenment as Commodity Fetish: the Three Stigmata of Raymond Kurzweil”
  • The Singularity Is Near
  • Nova Express
  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
• 4. “Beyond Simulation: Baudrillard, Tipler, Moravec, Dick, and Reality”
  • The Man in the High Castle
  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  • Lies, Inc.
• Conclusion: The Transhuman Salvation Narrative & the New Sincerity
  • Joe Haldeman on the self-actualized divinity of the transhuman (the transhuman “miracle” novels).
    • The Coming
    • Forever [[War|Peace|Free|]]
  • The New Sincerity as a commitment to the survival of the species and a survival of the Earth.
    • Burroughs’s cut-up trilogy (nova mob)
    • Octavia Butler
  • Merit as the new revolutionary marker. Species consciousness.