Abstract

If in every era, certain urgent questions set the agenda for thought and the arts, the impending questions today might be posed as follows: What are humans for? What are machines for? How shall we distinguish their differing "purposes" or "uses"---assuming we must---as humans and machines grow increasingly intertwined? With the advent of a First World cyborg culture which is increasingly integrating humans and machines in the articulation of its life-ways and ethos, many of the social, political, and pedagogical institutions structuring industrialized societies are becoming obsolescent. The humanities, which have long prevailed as a sort of artistic-philosophic metonym for the Western cultural tradition, have felt this acutely, as the social value of their disciplinary objects has been radically transformed under an ascendant regime of applied technoscience and electronic mass media. What shall be the role of the humanist in a culture gearing up for posthuman, postbiological development? ;The four essays collected under the title "What are Humans For?" are each inquiries into various facets of the crisis of the humanities in a cyborg, posthuman world. United by the conviction that, as Gregory Bateson insisted, "we are our own best metaphor," and that the qualities we most prize in our humanness are derived from and dependent upon our embodiment in a mortal coil of flesh-and-blood, my work explores the implications of our growing alienation from these bodily sources of value and meaning. The estrangement Marx describes as the situation of the industrial worker is now a generalized condition---human self-replacement has revealed itself as the teleology of modern technology. It is beginning to become clear that as technologies of thought, the disciplines of the humanities have long functioned as silent partners in this cultural strategy, a partnership that is made self-apparent in structuralism and its aftermath, where Western rationalism reaches its reductio ad absurdum. If we are to redefine the humanistic project so we may respond more vitally to the thanatological trajectory of our civilization, a more ecological perspective on the human accident---and all the other accidents inhabiting this planet---must ultimately prevail