Words&Dirt

“Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean––make sure they know what they mean!”

––A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, pg. 572

“Life expansion, in terms of biology, is mostly concerned with existence now, not prior to birth or after death’s biological finality. And it is this ‘now’ of being alive that forms the motivation for defeating death, as passionately summed up in the Dylan Thomas poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and its refrain ‘…rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Thomas 1951).

Thomas’ rage, however vocally expressed or silently confirmed by transhumanists, reflects, in part, the biopolitics of human enhancement. The culture of new-agers, life extensionists, feminists, cyberpunks, posthumanists, transhumanists, grrrls, avatars, transsexuals, bio-hackers, geeks, and others, has displayed a vocal and/or silent rage over body and gender diversity. The transhumanist rage against the dying of the light is largely fostered by an urgency to change dictums of ‘normal’ and ‘normalcy’ that prescribe not just what a man and woman are, and their respective gender and genitalia, but also what life and death are. Gender choice, body image, ownership of body, and certain rights of bodily modification are impassioned by an insistence for certain transhuman rights. Extending life, prolonging personhood, and morphological freedom are certain transhuman rights.

But let me clarify that the issue is not just about body enhancement and life expansion. It concerns the larger environment in which enhancement takes place and the idea that humans might and can append their bodies and expand their lives. If our ancestors augmented the body for millions of years, since the Homo habilis and the Oldowan people and their tools, then the phenotype of appending the body is an innate and/or a learned expression. This interrelationship between the organism, the appendage, and the environment is an evidenced observation that needs to be understood, whether accepted or not, by all sides engaged in the socio-economics and biopolitics of body enhancement issues.”

–– “Life Expansion Media,” by Natasha Vita-More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More, pg. 75