Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (6 page)

Facing the problem of culture’s natural roots squarely, Roberto Esposito writes, “Anything but the negation of nature, the political is nothing else but the continuation of nature at another level and therefore destined to incorporate and reproduce nature’s original characteristics.”
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It is tempting but insufficient to argue that something like the general violence that war for us epitomizes is a contingent peculiarity of human history that we’ve prematurely naturalized in concepts like immunity and survival of the fittest. We need not paint with as broad a brush as Nietzsche: “Every moment devours the preceding one, every birth is the death of innumerable beings; begetting, living, murdering, all is one.” But Spencer had a point. “Now that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the secularization of morals is becoming imperative.”
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This paves the way for religionists to contemplate the moral vacuum that threatens them with “fear” and “dread.” On the other hand, it emboldens political movers and shakers, not to mention sociopaths, to seize the opportunity in a world without moral law. However, I would add that it’s much harder to break natural laws than human ones.

In the gruesome feast at the end of Zarathustra, Overman sets fire to his texts and dances. This is
aktiv Vergesslichkeit
—active forgetting. I think we actively forget when we are confronted with life’s ethical abyss. The presence of this abyss reminds me of the Sun for Georges Bataille. In 1929 in Paris, in translation, Bataille read Vladimir Vernadsky’s
La Biosphère.
Vernadsky, as famous in Russia as Darwin is in the West, argued that we are children of the Sun, that life is a solar phenomenon, that the Earth system is really the Earth–solar system. Accumulating light energy in green material through photosynthesis, life creates problems, especially for itself. I would liken life’s ethical abyss to the Sun as described by Bataille: Although it is real, our great source of excess and possibility, we tend to abstract it or look away, because we cannot gaze on it too long without going blind.

CHAPTER 3

THE POST-MAN ALREADY ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

THE FUTURE TIMES

“Today” I received this strange news item, but it had no address on it, so I am passing it on to lucky you. By post-man I will have meant (mostly) posthuman. And he (so to speak) rings twice. At least.

The first ringing is literal and refers to what comes after humans in evolution. The first ringing announcement that the posthuman has arrived has to do with speciation, guesswork, machines; with loose predictions that fall off a cliff of accuracy as we extrapolate physically nonextrapolatable trends into the future. The classic example of such a trend is the graph of human transportation modes over time. I discovered this in John Platt’s futurism class at Harvard, which I audited in the 1980s (after 1984, before 2001). Extrapolated, the hyperbolic curve of increasing velocity made by peripatetic pedestrian philosopher, horse-drawn carriage, automobile, airplane, and rocket ship does not take long to exceed the speed of light, a progression that is impossible under Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Another example—more pertinent and potentially horrible—is an extrapolation of human population growth. I committed the “fact” of total world population to memory in grade school. It was three billion. Now it’s more than doubled. We know from the fossil record and observation of bacterial growth in petri dishes that the greatest species abundance sometimes occurs in generations immediately prior to population collapse. The first ringing of the posthuman is thus linear or literally futuristic, and as such speculative, most readily explorable by the science fiction imagination.

Unfortunately for us as humans, the majority of fictive posthuman realities are characterized by the total absence of Man, except of course as the imaginer. (I mean “Man” in the old, general, sexist sense of the term. Of course, some futures include men without women and women without men. In some futures there will be only women, cloned lesbians more satisfied and less ecologically destructive without the Y chromosome. Perhaps they will replicate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s disembodied pectoral muscles for white breast-meat in annual Thanksgiving to their triumph. Nonetheless, my meaning of posthuman is inclusive.)

THE FUTURE UNTIMES

The second ringing or meaning of the posthuman is for me both more interesting and more accurate with regard to the posthuman, the after-Man. Because I take it as axiomatic that linear time may be (sometimes is) an illusion, the second, nonlinear or metaphysical aspect of the posthuman operates not in the science fiction future but in the present. Logically, of course, the future is a construct. As Saint Augustine of Hippo reportedly said, “I know what time is until you ask me.” The future is always to come; we never get there except in our imaginations, as with the past. It is always now. Mystics and ecodelic-ingestors sometimes report the experience of seeing time “end-on,” although the word
experience
here is inadequate insofar as it connotes precisely that duration in linear time that is being called into question. Alan Watts has stressed that while ecologists, biologists, and physicists
know
that the organism and the environment are not two things separated by a subject–object relationship—but are rather a single process, a unified field—they don’t necessarily
feel
that this is so. This argument is similar to the idea that time is possibly illusory or insubstantial, a conclusion that can be logically arrived at by, say, asking you to point in the direction of the future. According to Benjamin Whorf, the Hopi locate time behind them, because it cannot be seen. The past is solid, visible, because we can see what happened (think of “hindsight”); the future is liquid, open, black, and frightening, but wonderfully full of potential. Outside time, such differences blend or further differentiate. Glossing Martin Heidegger in a footnote, Jacques Derrida describes how, in the nonvulgar or “Greek” conception of time, times past, present, and future converge and diverge; they are at once touching and infinitely distant. Perhaps the founding example of such posthuman nonlinearity is Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of the last man and the
Übermensch
(the “Overman”) in
Thus Spake Zarathustra.
The last man, the overcoming of man, and the superman are, clearly, not just literal (as in Adolf Hitler’s interpretation) but allegorical. On the one hand, Nietzsche, thinking of Charles Darwin, complains how these English are no philosophers. On the other hand, Zarathustra—his prophet up in the mountains who talks to the animals and informs humanity that God is dead (but the news has taken a long time to reach us)—espouses the theory of eternal recurrence as his most important doctrine. At the very least, the idea that everything that can happen will happen, and not once but an infinite number of times, does not go along with simple, linear, evolutionary scenarios.

So we have then a double meaning, a double entendre, of the future: one linear, one nonlinear. The post-man’s first ring announces the future of man; the second is uncannily silent, more a buzz or a beep. This is the human future that never arrives because it is already always here.

There are problems with both ringings. But in the end I think the nonlinear, atemporal or polymorphically temporal posthuman version is the more resonant. Ironically, the playful and metaphorical view of the human future is not only broader but more literally true than what Heidegger calls the received or “vulgar” view of orderly, progressive, linear time.

But before I veer off into unreconstructed mysticism, let me say that the fragmentary, the fallen, and the derivative do not belong only to the present age—as Derrida argues, against Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in
Of Grammatology.
Language itself, the splintering of things into signs, into alphanumeric representations, calls into question our idealized image of the past: the golden age, our happy childhood, or, cosmologically, the unity of the singularity at the big bang. This seems to be the same absent sense of wholeness, of the halcyon, that we project into the future: heaven, merging with light, a dissolution into the ecstasy of the sexual or the neural that relieves our constitutive sense of loss. Sigmund Freud’s student Otto Rank located this loss in the original trauma of birth,
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the loss of the womb—the experience of which might, if we could remember it, be compared with floating in space or lying on a raft on opiates in a sunlit pool. To be alive is to be deprived of this Edenic yesteryear for which we long, and this utopian future for which we strive. Jacques Lacan suggests that both are based on the illusion of the uncoordinated, wobbly toddler looking in the mirror, or at its mother, and hallucinating its own unity. Locating the mirror stage in the register of the Imaginary, Lacan marks it as the gateway into language, into the splintering of signification. The idea of wholeness in the past as well as in the future is thus a narcissistic illusion.

One familiar way to illustrate this doubleness, this insistent and split entity arriving at our threshold with the news that never quite comes but is already always here, is to look at radical science fiction scenarios for the far future and to see how they stack up against the present. A visitor from humanity’s future is projected back in time, landing, for example, in lower Manhattan, in the middle of rush hour. “Ah, what peace!” he sighs. The witty geneticist J. B. S. Haldane said the universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we
can
suppose. Truth, or what Lacan calls the Real, is stranger than fiction, including science fiction. (Granted, not all agree. The fiction guru and Cornell professor Paul West scoffs at the idea that anything is stranger than fiction.
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But I guess that, for me, fiction is a subclass of nonfiction, just as the linear is a subset of the nonlinear.)

There is a branch of science fiction concerned with the idea that life will evolve into robots, that consciousness will be based on silicon or metal rather than carbon. If an MIT graduate student could build such a silica-based robot—one that could make more of itself, a real nanotechnological von Neumann machine—he or she would get a Nobel Prize. But these nanobots already exist. We call them diatoms and radiolarians, and they build their beautiful tiny skeletons from silica, which they take from the ocean. With regard to metal, magnetobacteria have tiny magnets in them that they use to orient themselves to Earth’s magnetic poles, and chitons scrape corals with their iron teeth. Life is ahead of the human game of fiction.

Or take Isaac Asimov’s novel
The Gods Themselves.
Asimov depicts an alien world with three sexes, which join together at maturity into permanent union. Members of each sex are attracted to members of the other two. At the end they transform from ethereal beings that can move through each other into “hard ones” that are physically solid. In fact, something very similar has already happened in evolutionary history, when the ancestors of mitochondria penetrated archaea to make amoeba-like cells ancestral to your own. Another lineage was joined by cyanobacteria to make the cells ancestral to all algae, seaweed, and plants. Even the fluidity of bacterial movement, their ease of penetration and genetic transfer, was stalled with the evolution of the real “hard ones”—the eukaryotic ancestors to animals.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE of scientific truth being stranger than science fiction: In a story by the golden-age (1938–1946) science fiction author A. E. van Vogt, two spacecraft rendezvous. They link hulls, breed their human inhabitants, and, having accomplished their mission, continue on their interstellar way. Literally, this is a far-futuristic posthuman scenario. The spacecraft has become the skin or exoskeleton of the human. The mode of reproduction has radically altered, and the phenomenology of human existence, too. How strange. Yet this is, I would argue, an allegory for what has already happened to people. When we look at these lonely, far-future descendants who have forgotten their past but occasionally link up for some quality time in the depths of space, we have to think of ourselves. We are constructed partly of hard parts (e.g., the skull encasing cranial software) and have “forgotten”—lost touch with—the deepest parts of our biological history. The events that induce us to seek each other out and regenerate new beings that grow from amoeba-like cells are part of a bizarre microbial past compared with which our ape heritage seems positively flattering. Insofar as “we” remain cells, the “spaceships” of our bodies are at once glorious crafts carrying us across dry land and cyborg extensions of our soft and slippery inner core.

Moreover, we must assume that the Vogt crafts, in order to avoid needing to restock themselves with food, to be truly space-faring rather than merely “camping out” in space, they must be jointly a recycling, self-sustaining ecosystem. And if they continuously recycle bio-elements to support their symbiont-like humans, then we have not just an allegory but a literal description of present ecological relations on what Buckminster Fuller called Spaceship Earth. A human being feeds collectively on its external ecosystem; one is not a Platonic island separate unto oneself. Thus the posthuman lesson from van Vogt’s story (as I choose to interpret it, imagining the necessary details of the life-supporting craft) is that what we call “human” really includes the bacteria, the protists, the plants, and fungi—everything we need both within and outside our bodies to be what we are. The meeting of the human-containing spacecraft in the depths of space reinaugurates the pattern of interconnecting, thermodynamic flows, exposed only partly to conscious control, that established our cellular forms in the first place. We naturally gravitate toward repetition of those processes that allow for the genetically safeguarded repetition of our pattern of metabolic cycles in new, inevitably aging entities. It is instructive to think of machine and organic evolution together. Although, for example, we like to distinguish conscious mechanical creation from unconscious genetic evolution, modern devices such as color televisions depend for their manufacture on so many globally distributed processes that eventually these decentralized functions become self-perpetuating or “unconscious” at the level of individual worker or company. A woman does not make a baby consciously, yet her conscious choices can influence embryogenesis. Similarly, mechanical production processes that were once consciously engineered become more automated and “physiological” as consciousness, moving on to new and more pressing tasks, forgets its former triumphs.

The machine craft imagined by van Vogt are no less strange than our dependence on agricultural machines and cell phones, laboratory-made antibiotics, and factory-made automobiles. A true space-faring ecosystem requires not just ecologically complementary life-forms but also the mechanical “shell” necessary to protect life from astronomic insults, from radiation and collisions. We are open thermodynamic systems simultaneously using high-quality-energy sunlight (through the intermediary of food) to organize our environments, even as we inevitably degrade that energy, adding heat and entropy to our surroundings in a high-stakes process. Technology has appeared on Earth, while many species of mammals, and other animals and plants, have disappeared. We are already cyborgs packed with prostheses—although the prostheses are usually outside, not inside, our bodies. Yet even this may not be true. For, from a deep-ecological standpoint, we ourselves can be seen as spaceships made by massive populations of intermingling cells. Instead of an exoskeleton protecting us from cosmic rays, we have an endoskeleton protecting us from gravitational strain. Instead of sparsely colonizing space from a base on Earth, we celled organisms have densely settled the land from a base in the ocean. The calcium extruded by cells to make bones in our bodies was, for our ancient cell ancestors, a poison. Eukaryotic cells shed calcium ions, and this ancient marine waste was stockpiled; eventually it became involved in the metabolic processes of cell communication and growth, and evolved, in our animal ancestors, into muscle movement and, in us, into thought. The inevitable thermodynamic pollution resulting from life’s growth was shaped by and incorporated into life’s structure. And this appropriation of calcium was not an isolated incident. The same thing happened with free oxygen, which also began as a toxic waste. Over time, the outside becomes the inside, the house a body.