50 theory
In what follows, I want to suggest that we think and act everyday, un-
avoidably and increasingly, by means of technoscientific systems whose oper-
ation does not simply open access to an independent, objective reality “out
there” but rather plays a fundamental role in constructing and sustaining what
we see and know as reality. Furthermore, I want to argue that by means of this
technoscientific construction of the worlds we inhabit, we continually shape
and reshape not only what counts as nature or reality “out there” but also, at
the same time, what it means at bottom to be “human.” Indeed, in our tech-
noscientific thinking and practice today, we are engaged concretely and at bot-
tom in a project of human self-creation. Such a project, as I’ll suggest, remains
necessarily open, incomplete, and always to a certain degree blind—and for
this reason it engenders both our greatest hopes and our deepest anxieties
concerning technoscience, whose promise and danger can indeed seem to
grow in direct proportion.
We can quickly gain a sense of the logic and the stakes of such human
self-creation if we think for a moment about the ways that technoscience re-
shapes our relations to life and death “themselves,” which it does, for example,
by means of bioengineering and the thermonuclear bomb. As French philos-
opher Michel Serres puts it, in the second half of the twentieth century, we
managed in some new and decisive sense to assume responsibility for “the
end and the beginning, creation and annihilation”:
Through the double mastery of DNA and the bomb, we ourselves
have become actively responsible for our birth and our death. Where
will we come from? From ourselves. Where are we going? Toward
an end prescribed by ourselves....This sudden hold that we as-
sume over the two poles of our destiny, that of the species as well as
the individual, changes our status. Remaining human [hommes], but
becoming our own works, we are no longer the same humans
[hommes].^1
To change fundamentally the way that we humans experience even life
and death, Serres rightly asserts, is to alter the “human” “itself.” Thanks to
technoscience, the nuclear bomb concretely forms a new, global humanity—
insofar as August of 1945 undeniably transposed the global extinction of hu-
manity from the realm of apocalyptic myth to the realm of material possibility.
Likewise, with our mapping of the genome and related achievements in bio-
technology and bioengineering, the generation and manipulation of human
(and other) life promises to fall within our grasp. A kind of destruction and
creation that remained previously the sole privilege of gods or, even more, of
God Himself become more and more our own responsibility—and we thereby
become, like that God, our own cause (HM, 50).^2
As these examples should suggest, our technoscientific redefinition of hu-
manity signals enormously complex and far-reaching questions about the re-