Genesis Offensive: Virilio's Eugenics and the Mythology of the Human
Transhumanism - Part II
Paul Virilio spoke of flesh-eating prosthetics. By flesh-eating prosthetics, he refers to hard technological additions to the human body: bionics. This was the primary concern of my previous essay on transhumanism.1 However, there was another aspect of transhumanism I did not cover. Virilio describes this as the second offensive of the third revolution in speed: genesis.
Hunting Replicants
The central conflict of Blade Runner (1982) is the search for escaped replicants. Replicants are artificial humans. They are synthetically lab-grown by Tyrell Corporation to perform military duties or do grunt work. Four replicants revolted against their human masters on an off-world colony and escaped to Earth. As a failsafe, Tyrell Corporations designed the replicants with a 4-year lifespan.
The replicants look and act like people. Although synthetic, they have flesh and bone that is nearly indistinguishable from a regular human. But their emotional capacities are purposefully limited. The Voight-Kampff test determines if an individual is replicant or human. The test measures physiological responses to emotionally sensitive questions. The subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) differences in the physiological response reveal the subject as replicant or human.
The test is imperfect, however. During his investigation into the escaped replicants, Deckard, the protagonist and blade runner, tests a woman who does not know she is a replicant. The test takes longer than usual. This forces Deckard and the audience to acknowledge the increasingly blurred line between man and machine.
The Genesis Offensive
In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer titled “Eugenics,” Virilio describes three revolutions in speed. The first is the transportation revolution. Travel became faster, culminating in supersonic speed. The second was transmissions, which began in the twentieth century. This was the cybernetic revolution, in which communication and information transfer accelerated its velocity and expanded its scope. The third revolution is the transplant revolution. Man and machine are melding into one. Information is transferred between man and machine at faster speeds than ever.
Virilio describes two primary offensives against the body, launched by technology during the third revolution. The first is the above-mentioned flesh-eating prosthetics. The second offensive "is genesis: the possibility of industrializing the living organism, industrializing the species itself."2 This is a different kind of transhumanism. Rather than changing humans on the outside, the Genesis Offensive aims to crack open the book of life and change humanity on the inside.
Virilio is concerned with transhumanist eugenics. He argues that biogenetics is about total eugenics to perfect creation itself. It will culminate in the creation of multiple human races. Not races like we mean today. Multiple distinct human species. This is the natural consequence of science’s pursuit of a full understanding of human DNA. New humans could be created (and not necessarily through breeding) with astoundingly high IQs, extreme strength, total emotion control, etc. Eugenic superhumans born from the Genesis Offensive would look at us as the conquistadors looked at the native South Americans. It would be the advent of super-racism: "In super-racism one would find all over again the foundations of both colonialism, racism and xenophobia, but on a cosmic level."3
There will be living robots. These robots are organisms robotized through the manipulation of genetics. The human being that stems from the sperm and the egg would look like a primitive ape. This results in the contraception of the human species: not contraception as we mean today, but the extinction of the human species as a singular entity. New human types need not be super. Humans could be produced lobotomized from the outset, with severely limited minds, only to serve as livestock for organ harvesting or grunt work.
Virilio emphasizes that the ethics of super-racism are beyond our current understanding of ethics. Ethical questions tend to be about humans with equal dignity and some shared essential aspects. Today, we are all born from a mother, and all have a father. What happens when this thin layer of commonality is shattered?
He also speaks of science reinventing myths: "Science is becoming myth again. Instead of enhancing reason, it is welcoming unreason and magic, a factory for anything at all: the demiurgic, centaurs...Alchemists helped originate science, and then we moved beyond alchemy..."4 The scientist becomes an alchemist again. The scientist idolizes his ability to crack open the genetic code and edit the book of life. Surpassing the living organism requires a re-evaluation of "what is human."5
The Myth of the Human
What is the human? This question has plagued human beings for millennia. Science is unable to tell us what a human being is. If science creates new types of human beings, it will only get harder to answer. When Plato defined man as a featherless biped, Diogenes the Cynic plucked all the feathers from a chicken and presented it at Plato’s Academy. Defining the essence of the human is not simple. If it were, there would not be thousands of hours worth of reading to figure out if man is anything more than a brain in a vat.
What we define as human is defined primarily by myth. In Blade Runner 2049, the protagonist, Joe, states, “To be human is to have a soul, I guess.” This is illustrative of the hazy definition of humanity, especially in a world where synthetically created humans exist. The Blade Runner series has a somewhat optimistic ending, however, with a replicant giving birth serving as the central plot point of the sequel. In this way, synthetic and normal humans are harmonized, once again sharing the common thread of being born (or, at least, able to be born). Virilio’s outlook is more pessimistic. He foresees a future where real and synthetic humans will not share in being born through natural means.
This is not a new state of affairs. The definitions of human and non-human have changed regularly. Virilio and his interlocutor repeatedly bring up the Holocaust, both as an example of eugenic efforts as well as a moment in which some humans were reduced to bare life. The same has always been the case for slavery. Some humans are categorized as non-human and viewed instead as commodities. These outlooks rely on a widely shared narrative for acceptance. Most of those in power must first agree on what is and is not human. Today, we face the same question regarding abortion. Is a human being still a human being before it is born? An unborn baby does not share that common aspect of being born, as I mentioned above, but I did not mean that being born is what makes humans human. The divide over abortion is broadly religious, once again pointing to the necessity of myth in understanding the essence of humanity.
Scientific and technological reality must be understood in spiritual terms. Solely materialistic terms are not enough. Science cannot discover what a human is. If these eugenically produced super-humans come about through the Genesis Offensive, as Virilio predicts, attempts to define human versus non-human by hypothesis testing will only provide for secondary identifiers for human-ness (such as with the Voight-Kampff test). As science and technology advance, we are required to face issues well outside the bounds of these academic domains. They must be faced with spiritual, mythic, and religious terms to gain a proper understanding.
Paul Virilio, “Eugenics,” interview by Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Mike Taormina, in Crepuscular Dawn, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2002), 103.
Ibid, 106.
Ibid, 126.
Ibid.
I’ve read a bit of Virilio, including Negative Horizon where he lays out Dromology. I’ll have to check this interview out, I’m very excited. We need a cyberpunk book or anime called “Genesis Offensive” so bad
We must speak in mythic terms, but who's myths? Are we to be Prometheus, cursed forever by the gods for the crime of gifting humankind with power over nature? Or Icarus, slain by his own hubris and naivety of the awesome might of the technology at his disposal? Perhaps we will be Daedalus (the so-often forgotten second member of that story) who took his own advice to avoid the excess and deficiency and instead flew the Golden Mean between the heat of the sun and the spray of the ocean. Those of us who seek to make humanity shapers of the development of life, rather than simply spectators, must select the myths we use carefully.