In the middle of internship applications, I have also just submitted an abstract for the upcoming National Conference on Undergraduate Research. Here it is. Thoughts?
Bensaude-Vincent and Newman (02007) offer an intellectual history of the division between the natural and the artificial. In their introduction, they insinuate that the pervasiveness of the dichotomy in culture and language prevents it from being discarded in the present day. This attitude, I posit, is symptomatic of a larger problem: Like many thinkers who are trapped in a binary as familiar as the air they breathe, their acclimation to history undermines the force required to leave the binary behind in favor of something fresher: in this case, a more politically progressive stance toward the human and toward the inherited and re-created world.
Writing with a commitment a priori to the principle of open futurity (as articulated by the futurist Jamais Cascio), I make a plea for an artificial future that learns from, yet transcends, natural history — a future wherein precisely the transcedence of the nature-art binary enables human flourishing anew. I begin with the individual human, a first site at which possibilities for emancipation from nature can easily be seen. Emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification technologies offer deeper self-determination. Bioethics and human rights discourses, in response, should shed their attachments to nature and artifice as discursive categories. Prospects of ubiquitous computing and planetary geoengineering provide, next, an opportunity to reconsider the status of the nature-art binary at the level of the biosphere. In material terms, the binary is converging; I suggest that its moral and semantic dimensions should also converge.
After countering various objections, the essay concludes with a discussion of other dichotomies of significance — such as that of democracy versus aristocracy and sustainable versus unsustainable development — toward which my thesis ultimately attempts to shift focus.