Lyotard and the Inhuman (Postmodern Encounters) - Softcover

Sim, Stuart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840462353 ISBN 13: 9781840462357

Publisher: Icon,Totem Books, 2001

Synopsis

For Jean-Francois Lyotard, the cyborg is a symbol of fear, Mankind already inhabits a world which views machine implantation in humans as normal and necessary. It implies a future, Lyotard warns, which may dangerously negate the value of humanity itself.

About this title

About the Author

Stuart Sim is Professor of English Studies at the University of Sunderland. He has published various works on postmodern thought, including Derrida and the End of History in the Postmodern Encounters series.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Death of the Universe

We live in a universe with an expiry date: between 4.5 billion and 6 billion years from now (estimates vary, but 6 billion appears to be the upper limit) the sun will have suffered a heat death and life on earth will be over. Dramatic (and even melodramatic) though this may sound on first hearing, in the early twenty-first century few of us are likely to lose too much sleep over such a projected scenario, given a time-span which is all but unimaginable to us as individuals surviving for only a few decades each. There seems little sense of urgency about such a prospect from where we now stand, and, for the time being at any rate, life goes on as normal.

One recent exception to such apathy about the ultimate fate of the universe, however, was the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who towards the end of his life (he died in 1998) became somewhat obsessed with the topic, speculating in The Inhuman (1988) as to what the projected death of the sun might mean for the condition of humankind now. The human race is already in the grip of the necessity of having to evacuate the solar system in 4.5 billion years , he informed us, attempting to inject a note of urgency into the debate. Lyotard is best-known for the positive message of The Postmodern Condition (1979), an enquiry into the status of knowledge in late twentieth-century culture, which announced the decline of oppressive grand narratives in effect, ideologies and the rise of a new cultural paradigm based on scepticism towards universal explanatory theories in general. According to Lyotard, humanity now had the opportunity to pursue a myriad of little narratives instead, returning political power to the individual and threatening the power base of the authoritarian state (and states in general are authoritarian to the postmodernist thinker). The postmodern era he pictured promised to be one of liberation from ideological servitude. In The Inhuman , however, less than a decade later, a much darker tone prevails, that suggests humanity has acquired a new set of enemies to replace the grand narratives of yesteryear.

We shall consider Lyotard s argument in The Inhuman in more detail at a later point; suffice it to say for the present that he expresses the fear that computers eventually will be programmed to take over from human beings, with the goal of prolonging life past the point of the heat death of the sun. It will not, however, be human life that survives, and Lyotard is deeply opposed to any shift towards such an inhuman solution, which, he claims, has the backing of the forces of techno-science (technology plus science plus advanced capitalism, the multinationals, etc.). Lyotard s response is to call for a campaign against techno-science and all its works: What else remains as politics except resistance to the inhuman? , as he puts it, inviting us to join him in opposition against the planned eclipse of the human by advanced technology. His task as a writer and philosopher, as he sees it, is to ensure that we bear witness to such a process, so that techno-science does not succeed in imposing its programme on us by stealth an outcome which, given the power and prestige enjoyed by techno-science in our society, is only too likely. The feminist theorist Donna Haraway s remark that science is the real game in town, the one we must play , captures the general perception well.

Lyotard s reflections have a wider significance than the particular problem he is addressing, however, and these do merit closer attention. Whether we are aware of it or not, the inhuman has infiltrated our daily existence to a quite remarkable degree in the sense of the supersession of the human by the technological. For the remainder of this study we shall be considering a range of arguments on the topic of the inhuman, running from critics such as Lyotard to enthusiasts such as the feminist theorists Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant; taking in excursions into medical technology, computer technology, computer viruses, Artificial Intelligence and Artifical Life, humanism, and finally science-fictional narrative (William Gibson) along the way. The infiltration of the inhuman into our everyday concerns demands such a wide range of reference. After engaging with the arguments we may decide it is more appropriate to fear, resist, welcome, actively encourage, or perhaps just simply tolerate the inhuman; but one thing is certain we cannot avoid it.

Edition details

• Publisher: Icon,Totem Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1840462353
• ISBN 13: 9781840462357
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80