“Anthropologists, long relatively comfortable bearing the mantle of studying humanity, today find themselves working in increasingly posthuman theoretical spaces.”
“Anthropos, as a unitary figure, had already began to crumble under the weight of postcolonial, feminist, and deconstructive critique during the eighties; lately, however, our empirical work is pushing us still further beyond the human.”
“What is peculiar about transhumanism, however, is that it takes anthropos quite seriously. It is profoundly preoccupied with precisely humanity as an object, and as an agent of its own transformation or evolution.”
“transhumanism approaches the human from a somewhat orthogonal direction with respect to other posthumanisms”
“the disruptive capacity and acceleration of Transhumanism as a contemporary phenomenon has very specific and relatively historically recent conditions of possibility.”
“The mid-century establishment of cybernetics as a metalanguage for both organic and non-organic complex systems paved the way intellectually; this theoretical possibility was later actualized through military industrial funding through bodies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA), which has spent considerable energy experimenting with ways to push soldiers far beyond the usual species capacities (Wolf-Meyer 2009).”
“These experiments have also been informed by a strange broth of speculative fiction, Silicon Valley capitalism, and libertarian strands of 1960’s counter culture, which has sutured the theoretical language of cybernetics and an influx of military investment with speculative, cosmic imaginings.”
“Inshort, we see transhumanism as both a material and an intellectual project”
“transhumanism as a robustly social phenomenon, rather than primarily a cultural one”
“The social — the real fabric of actually existing relationships between organisms, machines, energy, and signs — is where the ideological and technical meet.”
“We’d like to suggest here, provisionally, that the fundamental problem space of transhumanism and anthropology is the same: anthropos.”
“For both, the human is fundamentally inextricable from its status as maker and deployer of techne, and our shared questions turn on precisely this relationship: are the various forms of techne encountered in the ethnographic record merely the extension of the essential attributes, drives, and capabilities of anthropos?”
“Or is anthropos itself only knowable by and through the endlessly mutable production and deployment of techne?”
“That is to say, is techne one of the many products of a stable anthropos, or is anthropos merely that form of life adjacent to techne?”