The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly over the Edge?

Abstract

‘The Transhuman Condition’ outlines the background for the work, motivations, areas of key contribution and an overview of the book’s structure. It illustrates the significance of detailing the intersubjective values, semiotics and narrative tropes evoked to both justify and promote the notion of Technological Human Enhancement Advocacy (THEA), an area which remains under-researched. Secondly, the thesis makes a theoretical contribution through its modelling of a non-spatially determined constant which recurs across sites associated with THEA: The Techno-centred Imagination (TCI). While The Techno-centred Imagination appears most pronounced in transhumanism—where it is acted-out in extreme, almost hyperbolic ways—it reflects deep-seeded concerns around the future of science, technology and human self-identity in the new millennium. Far from being new, these emerging social forms capture unresolved ambivalences which have long cast a shadow over late-modern society and culture. As such, it is deserving of further study.

“Historians and sociologists inform us that the West’s mystical heritage […] crashed on the scientific shores of the modern age. According to this vision technology has helped disenchant the world, forcing the ancestral symbolic networks of old to give way to the crisp, secular game plans of economic development, skeptical inquiry, and material progress.

But the old phantasms and metaphysical longings did not exactly disappear. In many cases they disguised themselves and went underground, worming their way into the cultural, psychological, and mythical motivations that form the foundations of the modern world.”

Erik Davis, Techgnosis [1998]