Glancing back at Prometheus: turning towards possibilities with trepidation.

1. This paper intends to perform a general introduction to a trend in contemporary cultural studies often denoted as ‘Prometheanism’, as represented within the context of technoscientific challenges posed to the conservative project of humanism and its modifications. We will explore how models of promethean comportment that have simultaneously offered contemporary left politics a conceptual resource, and have also made itself available to immediate revision and elaboration; most notably in the anti-naturalist, technomaterialist and gender abolitionist intervention made by xenofeminism, first emerging in 2015 from the international collective Laboria Cuboniks. Subsequently, an adaptive model of promethean comportment for future-oriented conceptual production will be presented, particularly in the context of a meaningful trepidation that processes any event that anticipates the future into a speculative labour based on collectivity, sympoiesis (Haraway), and an aim to participate into a world without assuming an necessary equilibrium or general mandate of givens.

2. We’ll begin by outlining what we mean by humanism and its various modifications. Firstly, insofar as the contentious concept of the human is understood as ‘human species-being is more than any other species and/or living arrangement’; the representation of ‘Man’ as rational animal, we can identify a humanism that is more or less perennial. However, there are four general movements incumbent to modernity that have modified classical humanism – natural sciences isolating the homo sapiens, thus destabilising the supra-animality of the human; academic humanities rendering universal reason as void, following the uncovering of various dogmatic retentions - the privileging of patriarchal, bourgeois, colonial, hygienist and logocentric philosophical reason; technoscientific development modifying, challenging and subverting the once sacrosanct biological, cognitive, and otherwise ‘natural’ properties of the human; and various environmental predicaments that have confronted the hubris of society with impermanence.

3. As such, several critical modifications to the classical project of humanism have occurred: transhumanism as an explicitly goal-oriented ideology aiming to overcome any putative human limitation; a vitalist posthumanism armed with the conceptual resource of continental antihumanism and postmodern philosophy to affirm a posthuman condition exceeding conservative humanism; a speculative posthumanism that undermines the continued reticence of the human given technoscientific advancement and natural tendency, and consequently affirms post- and anti-humanist intelligences as unbound from human reason.

4. Alternatively, theoretical edifices that maintain a promethean comportment – at least in how we are aiming to elaborate such a comportment here – do not perform sheer modifications or extensions of the project of humanism, but tendentially aim toward future-oriented interventions and labours that suspend the latter. The various modifications of humanism, while often posing adept critical and contextual confrontations, tend to renew the metaphysical edifice that axiomatises humanism in the first instance – whether it be with a universal vitalism, a priori assemblage-model intelligences or retained metaphysical dualistic norms (mind/body, culture/nature). These modifications re-perform what Foucault had identified in the ‘making of the man of nature’ a dual reduplication between what is empirical and what is transcendental, producing a dominating transcendentalism over what is empirical, and an empirical contents only capable of being understood by a naturalist principle of life or vitality (OOT 372).

5. Instead of maintaining the pretence of empirico-transcendental humanism, the promethean comportment, to quote Ray Brassier’s 2014 essay “Prometheanism and its Critics”, defends the ‘normative status that things are not as they should be and that things ought to be understood and reorganised… there is no reason to assume a predetermined limit to what we can achieve or to the ways in which we can transform ourselves and the world” (470). This definition clearly runs against the grain of conservative humanist propriety, and could be swiftly denounced as a confused and potentially dangerous hubris. For instance, contemporary philosopher of science Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his essay “Some Pitfalls in the Philosophical Foundations of Nanoethics” takes the transformative potential of NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science) to be a utilitarian compulsion that overlooks the epistemic, ethical limits and problems inherent to any invention in these fields. One must maintain a sense of human condition (in a sense reminiscent of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt), where, to quote Dupuy, “man can shape that which shapes him, condition that which conditions him, while still respecting the fragile equilibrium between the given and the made” (474). Brassier takes the ‘ought’ here to be the main criticism of prometheanism, which destroys this fragile equilibrium, a trespass that “resides in making the given” (478).

6. The criticism of prometheanism from Dupuy and likeminded critics is that it is danger of losing not only the meaning of what it means to be human, but to render the human as just another instance of being, thereby losing the resources to explain and orient ourselves. For Dupuy, this is a particularly relevant tension in considering transformative technoscience, or, the capacity to produce that which is given – life itself. The prospect of synthetic life, in all its conceivable variants, would introduce complete disequilibrium. But it is only due to Dupuy’s conservative retention of nature as an equilibrium; the assumption of a “ready-made world whose order is simply to be accepted as ultimately unintelligible – a brute given” (485). The promethean comportment challenges this assumption – “the world was not made: it is simply there, uncreated, without reason or purpose… this realization invites us not to simply accept the world as we find it” (ibid). Philosophers like Dupuy – working in the tradition of Heidegger’s critique of rationality – find the promethean comportment to be an irresponsible and epistemically shallow form of metaphysical voluntarism. Coming away from this tradition, Brassier intends to rehabilitate prometheanism and rationality as a mutual activity that can understand rules, make acceptances, make modifications or make new rules entirely. Prometheanism is then a program for the constructive coordination of heterogeneous phenomena, but not without understanding any rule whatsoever as inherently mutable – “The ways in which we understand the world, and the ways in which we change the world on the basis of our understanding are perpetually being re-determined” (486).

7. Brassier concludes his essay with a concession to the fact that promethean comportments and associated activity often harbour a phantasmic tendency, but does not take this as a license to completely neglect the imaginative – “reason is fuelled by imagination, but it can also remake the limits of imagination” (487). In this sense, the arena of promethean conceptual-production is as accessible as it is potential-laden. In an interview, Brassier renders this as an extension of “the Prometheanism of reason to becoming itself… the articulation of action and knowledge in the perspective of totality” (RMA 219). For the second half of this paper, we will be discussing the promethean conceptual production within what is called xenofeminism. Initiated in 2015 by the international collective Laboria Cuboniks, xenofeminism, “indexes the desire to construct an alien future… a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry than the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed… in the name of feminism, ‘nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever” (0x1a). Xenofeminism processes the phantasies of the promethean ilk into a complex labour; a folding of architecture, sex, poetry and technoscience, “where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom, extending to gender and the human” (0x11). Reason and rationality, instead of its typical dismissal as a masculinist mandate, is worked against its grain by xenofeminism, synthesising new mobilisations of technology and scientific attitudes concomitant with a feminist rationalism that employs reason as an “engine of feminist emancipation, and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular” (0x04). For instance, the idiosyncratic conceptual stance of an anti-nature naturalism, born from a rationalist obviation of normative givens, does not reject wholesale the notion of biological stratum as the ground for embodiment, but rightly disputes the sense of this stratum as immutable – the biological is always also historical, mutable and its operations are not predictable (Hester, Xenofeminism, 21). Here, xenofeminism is evocative of Donna Haraway’s distinctive vector: in the 1997 book Modest_Witness, Haraway remarks that “located in the belly of the monster… I find the discourses of natural harmony, the nonalien and purity unsalvageable… it will not help – emotionally, intellectually, morally or politically – to appeal to the natural and pure” (Modest_Witness, 62). Succinctly, Helen Hester positions Laboria Cuboniks as “Haraway’s disobedient daughters” in posing a strong rationalist model of anti-naturalism.

8. Modest_Witness also anticipates the promethean/anti-naturalist analysis of technoscience performed by xenofeminism. For instance, Haraway asserts that “technoscience engages promiscuously in materialized refiguration… an eminently solid process… [and] not some merely textual dalliance” (ibid). She projects an example from 1993 – a cartoon advertising the British biotechnology firm Quadrant. The cartoon depicts a variety of laboratory workers who have “stepped through Alice’s looking glass, and they have becomes very small indeed, so small that they are dwarves in a gigantic world of helical objects”. The laboratory illustrated here is one of anticipated commonplace labour and fantastic scale – “we see the simultaneously mundane and fantastic truth of technoscience, where a change of scale refigures fundamental relationships” (66). Haraway takes the laboratory as an “arrangement and concentration of human and nonhuman actors, action and results that change entities, meanings and lives on a global scale”, a cultural claim to presence, contingency, reality… “culture denotes not the irrational but the meaningful” (66).

9. The challenge to the promethean comportment is not to a putative utilitarian heroism – a conservative critique, nor to its ability to undermine the project of humanism – which is radically performed at the nexus of reason and imagination following the rejection of givens. It is instead in how the promethean is organised and classified – it is not only entities, but meanings, analysis and contingent events that can take on promethean roles, but how can this be anticipated, mitigated or appreciated by cultural critique; by artists and other modes of consideration? It is the who and the what of a promethean labour that a properly meaningful – that is to say, feminist and queer – left politics is tasked with developing, in and beyond technoscience, environmentalism, posthumanism and other challenges to idealistic, conservative modernist retention. Consider how models of cognitive capitalism – for instance Maurizio Lazzarato’s expanded model of subjective economy – takes the contemporary machine of social subjection to be a production of machinic assemblages that are a-signifying, most certainly nonhuman, where it is “never an individual who thinks… [they] are engulfed in a circulation of signs, ideas, tasks – that force him or her to think and create” (44). Can the phantastic force of promethean thought vis-à-vis xenofeminist models undermine, reconfigure and rescale such a situation, bending the pliable potency of thought, action and meaning beyond the boundary of institutional capitalism?

10. I would argue yes, but only with a sense of meaningful trepidation – as Helen Hester remarked in her 2015 essay “Promethean Labours and Domestic Realism”, “this kind of framing of emancipatory leftist politics repels and excludes… and is likely to give rise to precisely those boring and boorish militant masculinities… characteristic of movements like accelerationism”. Hester’s subject here is the mandate of the feminine domestic, and employs a meaningful trepidation that is closer to ‘care’ than it is to ‘fear’ – “The home can be reconceived of as a site of Promethean potentiality rather than as an example of stubbornly embedded material hegemony; that is to say, it is a space that can be mutated to facilitate a Promethean politics rather than a site of risk aversion inherently obstructive to the development of the solidarities that such a politics demands”. One is not compressing the phantastic potency of a promethean comportment, but is rather handling the fire with caution, care and attentiveness. As Hester concludes “in this truly promethean feminism, love, work, leisure, the family, science, art and sexual reproduction are all equally mutable, contestable, and available for species-wide re-engineering”. And with this positivisation of mutability that comes spilling over of this distinctly human list into a sympoietic, collective arrangement of scales, materials and entities; a naturalism sans nature that has never seemed so amenable, retaining only the dust of the human once drawn in its sand.