VIROID LIFE ‘This volume offers a trenchant account of the transhuman condition. The author thoughtfully considers the extent to which humankind is poised on the threshold of a transhuman future, and demands that we radically rethink our assumptions about the human animal in order that biology and philosophy might join forces in order to rid Western thought of its pernicious anthropocentric prejudices. Daniel W. Conway, Pennsylvania State University ‘A post-critical toUT de force which leads the reader to reconsider the boundary between the human and the inhuman. An essay which ranks alongside those ofDeleuze and Baudrillard.’ Mike Gane, University of Loughborough Jliroid Life presents a bold ^allenge to existing conceptions of biotechnol^ogy and artificial life through Nietzsche’s thinking of the ‘overman’. Arguing that current debates are lodged in a historical and insufficiently machinic framework, Keith Ansell Pearson insists that artifice must be seen as an integral feature of nature. Far from being able to stand outside and control developments in bio­ technology, the human being is bound up in a very becoming that is implicated in the inventions of te^nics and machines. Resisting uncritical contemporary interpretations in thrall to biotechnology, Jliroid Life reinstates Nietzsche’s ^^^ng on life — and death — to make us confront the nature of the human and move beyond the anthropocentrism of technics acknowledge the more complicated conceptions of evolution. Offering insights into Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, the new paradigms of contemporary biology and the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, Keith Ansell Pearson shows how viral developments in science create new. rhizomatic ways of thinking in philosophy. Essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of philosophy, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Tramhuman Condition provides a fascinating new starting point for any discussion on the future of evolution and will interest students of continental philosophy, social theory and cul^tural studies. • Keith Ansell is Senior ^^toer and Director of Graduate ResearA at the University of W^arwick. He is the author of Ni^zsche contra Rousseau and An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker, VIROID LIFE P e r s p e c t i v e s on N i e t z s c h e and t h e T r a n s h u m a n C o n d i t i o n KEITH ANSELL PEARSON LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1997 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge :,- 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1997 Keith Ansell Pearson Typeset in Perpetua by Keystroke, Jacaranda ^Lodge, Wolverhampton Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print and Design (Wales), Ebbw Vale All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for book is available from the British Ubrary Library Congres Cataloging in Publication Data Ansell P^^wn, Keith Viroid life: perspectives on Nietzsche and the transhuman condition I Keith Ansell Pearson. p. ^ . Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18^H ^90. 2. Superman. 3. Philosophical anthropology. I. Title. B3318.S8A57 1997 128—dc21 96-49700 ISBN 0-415-15434-0 (hbk) 0-415-15435-9(pbk) F o r f r i e n d s d o w n u n d e r To open us up to the inhuman and superhuman ... to go beyond the human condition is the meaning of philosophy, in so far as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites, and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves. (Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism. 1966) Sometimes he wondered what zone of ^transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance. (1. G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962) Man is such a hive and of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs t^M his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all. May not man himself become another sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid? (Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872) C O N T E N T S Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 i Loving the Poison The memory of the human and the promise of the overhuman 9 2 ToWards the Overhuman On the art and artifice of Nietzsche’s selection 37 3 Dead or Alive On the death of eternal re^turn S 7 Nietzsche contra Darwin 85 5 Viroid Life On ma^chines, technics, and evolution 123 6 Timely Meditations on the T^ranshuman Condition N^^^, entropy, and beyond 1 S 1 Bibliography 191 Index 199 A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S Five of the chapters which make up this volume have appeared, or ^wil appear, in a number of publishing projects. I ^ grateful to the editors and publishers listed below for their permission to reproduce this material. Chapter 1 is an extended version of a chapter due to appear in John Uppitt (ed.), Nietzsche and the Future tf the Human, Ma^cmillan. Chapter 2 is a modified version of an essay that first app^eared as ‘Toward the Ubermeruch: Reflections on the Year of Nietesche’s Daybreak’, in Nietzsche-Studm 23 (1994), Walter de Gruyter. Chapter 3 is a modified and extended version of an essay entitled 'The Re^turn of Death1 that appear in Journal tf Nietzsche Studies, 1997 in a special issue devoted to the ete^rnal re^turn edited by David Owen. Chapter 4 appear in modified form in D. W. Conway (ed.), Ni^^Ae: Critical <Asssments, Routledge. Chapter 5 is a mo^fied and shortened version of a cchapter that ^wil appear in Keith ^Ansell P^son (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy, Routledge. ^This book might never have reaped stage were it not for the encouragement, provocation, and critical intervention of several people. Serious are due to Daniel W. Conway, Adrian Driscoll, Mike Gane, Gr^^m Parkes, Paul Patton, and John Protevi. My debt to Dan Conway in particular for his support for what I ^ to accomplish in book is incalculable. Catherine Dale played a role in the book’s co^^^mation, inspiring the end, and continues to play a ‘minor' role in the involution of my and I N T R O D U C T I O N ‘All truth is simple’ — is that not a compound lie? ‘There are more idols in this world than realities: that is my ‘evil eye’ for this world, that is also my ‘evil ^ear. (Nietzsche, Twilight of the /do/s). In volume of essays I question, problematize, over^turn, revalue, ^mounce, renounce, adv^^te, interrogate, ^^ro, deny, celebrate, critique, the ‘transh^nan condition’, exploring the h^^an as a site of con^^^ution and abduction by alien forces and rendering, in the process, the phenomenon polyvalent and polysemous. I resist attempts to foreclose the condition by those who would d^m to have defined it and d^onstrated it once and for al. In recent years the ‘^^hwnan’ has ass^raed a life, becoming a cultural meme. But condition does not spread na^^^y; it requires critical and cultivation if it is to possess any genuine se^rc or ‘meaning’. By treating condition I realize I place myself on perilous and treacherous ground, ope^ning myself up to cont^amination by ^^ge forces of ^various kinds and guises. But philosophy is not rimply a tribunal of reason; it is also a battleground of infections and acknesses. My response to the predi^cament I find myself in has been to adopt a ‘perspectival’ position on the phenomenon. V^^^y al of the essays in volume confront the same ‘problem’, ^namely that of the future of the h^^an, with the result that some repetition is inevitable. However, it is my genuine hope that the more eyes, various eyes, that ^ employed to treat the tr^shnmm condition, the more complete and objective the treatment he. It is impor^nt to resist attempts to reduce the ‘^transhuman condition’ to an^^^ obviously empirical, su^ as a ‘biological’ condition or a ‘technological’ VIROID LIFE I 2 one (neither of these are, in fact, simply ‘empirical’). Current teclmo-theorizing contends that evolution - not human evolution but evolution in- and for-itself - is now entering a bio-teclmological phase, with biological life becoming more and more teclmological and teclmological Me becoming more and more biological. But the rise of this dubious neo-Lamarckism, which demands that we give ourselves ‘over’ to the future as an act of blind faith and in terms of a quasi-Heideggerian destiny (only a machine save us), rests on a highly anthro­ pomorphic conception of life’s beco^ming, positing a straightforwardly linear and perfectionist model of evolution. The promise of a genetic take-over by mac^nes that is predicted by many, a threat that goes back to S^uel Butler and his writing in the 1860s in the wake of D^win, must be treated with suspicion, ifnot derision. It would not be difcult to expose the anthropocentric conceits informing much of the discussion and celebration of the coaming of inteUigent robots and machines. In fact, Baudrillard has already done so — in his The ffl^on cjthe End (1994) and now in The Peyect Crime (1996). In this conception of life's evolution leading in the direction of non-affective machines, in which thought exists without a body, there is no future of, or for, invention, since al is given. The future is no longer virtual: indeed it no longer exists; it no longer 'is’. Instead what we are being presented with is a paranoid and phobic anthrop^xntritrism that is bent on imperiali^cally and entropically colon^ing the entire kno^ and ^unknown universe, al for the ^sake of immortal life. is the ul^mate Platonic fantasy. So today we find that it is no longer Christianity that is ^^^ing the role of a Plato^^ for the people, but rather a cyberspace cult. In the age of irreastible, endo-colonistic capitalism never has such an unintelligent hybrid — that of‘bio-technological' — been more suspect and in need of‘critique'. We find ourselves in an ironical situation — what other si^ituation would we expect to find ourselves in at the end of the ^milenni^m? — in whi^ cyber-celebrations of the ^^uh^nan, or even more dubiously, of the posthuman, condition, ul^mately be sho^ to rest on a (non- dialectical) ^cancellation of this condition. It is not a question of ‘self-overco^mingj’ rince there is no^fog to overcome. The process of evolution is uatm^rad and reified, a new theology of capital emerges to cavalierly and legi^^ue the ^^uties of the commodified postmodern present, a legi^^ration which rests on the vicious re^turn of outmoded grand naratives, and there is a complete lack of any appreciation of what it is that has made, and continues to make, the human such an intere^ing ^animal, an ^animal and a machine in need of revaluation and transvaluation. The h^^rn and its genealogical past are simply not being taken ‘seriously’. The result, it seems to me, is a vacuous, peernicious, and politically naive conception of our condition and of our ‘fate' at the end of the INTRODUCTION I 3 twentieth century. Affirming the inhuman and demonic powers of the future is not equivalent to a biological or technological manipulation of the future: it is not to arrive at a radical conception of the time of the future but to nullify its demonic becoming. The writing in this volume can be interpreted as offering a resistance to the postmodern/ posthuman if these are taken to imply what Fredric Jameson has described as a systematic effacement of all the supposed anachronistic traces of our recent historical past. The reader of this volume, however, should be forewarned that my advocacy and problema^tizing of a genuinely ‘Nietaschean’ conception of the transhuman condition do not desire to preserve anything about the human in terms of notions of its integrity, inviolability, or supremacy. The reading is decidedly ‘supra-moral’ in this regard. Neither do I adhere to fantasies of historical revolution in which we humans will reclaim our rightful control and mastery over nature and society. desire for complete historical immanence, which has i^nspired the major critical theorists of this century from Marcuse to Debord and Vaneigem, and continues to inspire major contemporary theorists like Fredric J^eson, Ms me with as much dread and loathing as do the articles of faith promulgated by our contemporary cyberspace gurus. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that these days I find myself out on a limb. In 1979 Lyotard defined the ‘postmodern condition’ as ‘incredulity’ in the face of those grand or meta-^^ratives which have served to provide h^nan existence with teleological m^^ing and si^gnifi^nce, so that the ^ment of the loss of meaning in postmodernity boils down to mo^^ing the fact that knowledge is now no longer principally ^ffrative. The ‘stories’ the West has told of itself to itself and to ‘others’ — such as that of emancipation through rational e^nlighte^ment and progress — ^turn out to have been a great conceit and deceit. Now that myth has come to waste and ^ruin, and, so Lyotard wanted us to believe, the period of mo^^ing is over. Little did Lyotard kn^ at the time of his -writing that the grand n^ative of the E^^fote^nent would soon become replaced by another one, equally ^^dious in its vapid gene^^red charter and undemo^nstrable universal­ ization. Although Lyotard acknowledged that he was ‘simp^^^ to the extreme’, his definition and ^^raation proved highly influential, rise to a whole series of l^en^ting, and lamentable, crisis-reflections on the end of history, the end of politics, the end of time, and so on. A genuine of‘critical theory’ ^as perceived as place, since if the subject of critique was dead (the prole^riat, man as the p^urpose of ^histry, and a seif-^^^ormative humanity as the goal of history), ^what rem^ed of the force and pur^chase of the critical intent? However, Lyotard’s declaration of the end of grand ^^ratives has proved premature since