Paula Palanco López

Posthuman Anthropology
KULeuven

MANIFESTO FOR THE IMAGINATION

Are we imagining?

“Our world is changing. And we have something to do with it. Technology has
always been part of human history, and we have been raising the bar to levels
that were hard to imagine before. Since we got control of fire we have passed by
stone technology, metals, steam, combustion engines and, more recently, the use
of silicon in electronics. Every step we took has been a game-changer, blowing
our minds and stepping up to the next stage. We won’t stop now. Today, our
revolution takes place in the biotechnological field.

As all revolutions bring joys and challenges, so does this one. The development
and use of technologies have brought about important issues that cannot be
ignored - inequality, pollution, scarcity of resources... but it also provides the
means to fix them. We have the tools to understand our environment, to engage
with it and cohabitate in harmony. We can make the world a better place to
live.”

Presentation brochure of the Madrid_UCM iGEM team.

Our imagination is riddled with ideas extracted from science fiction, ideas about
technology and the challenges that it brings. This goes beyond fiction – we have already
for some time been facing situations that were unimaginable a decade ago, such as
computers communicating within each other, prosthetics that can be controlled through
brain implants or the successful birth of human genome-edited twins. Rivers of ink have
flowed, with supporters and detractors engaged in a fierce debate about the suitability of
these technologies, and of these situations. Their safety and potentially disastrous
consequences have been analysed ad nauseum. The salvation and destruction of
‘Humanity’ - whatever we want to place under this denomination - has been repeatedly
announced.

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All these realities/imaginations have a common denominator: social debate is
completely subjected to sci-tech innovation. Not only among the general population, but
also within the most academic spheres, we surrender our minds to the widespread idea
that it is possible to modify the materiality of the non-human world, but not ‘human
nature’ itself. Whether there is or not a ‘human nature’ is a deeply philosophical
question that falls out of the scope of this manifesto, so I will not claim to have a
definitive answer. It is undeniable, though, that the way in which societies are shaped
influences the development - and further uses and meanings - of technology. And, as
someone did not so long ago in the field of communications resulting in the World
Wide Web, maybe we can try to re-imagine society. Who knows what results it could
bring.

What I intend to do here is not to cast aside bioethical concerns about cutting-edge
technologies, which are definitely relevant and necessary, but to enhance the
participation of social scientists within the field of innovation itself - to imagine a not-
yet-existing world that will be able to cope with not-yet-existing scientific advances.

What do we imagine?

On November 25th of 2018, He Jiankui, a biophysicist from the Southern University of

Science and Technology in Shenzhen (China), claimed through a YouTube video that
his team had carried out an unbelievable achievement: the birth of the first genetically
modified babies, Lulu and Nana, using the CRISPR/Cas9 procedure. The twins
appeared to be healthy, and the veracity of the experiment’s results was confirmed on
February 2019 by a specially established scientific commission.

Needless to say, the international repercussions of this event were immediate, and a
large number of voices rose to sharply criticise He’s research and call it ‘irresponsible’
(Meyer, 2018). A line had been crossed, a line that is a product of social, material and
political practices and that, as Meyer states, ‘brings to the fore issues of regulation and
control’ (Meyer, 2018). Discussions on biosafety and the unknown risks of human
genome editing grew, but so did those about its ‘enormous opportunities’ (Baltimore
et al., 2015). A generalised feeling has been growing stronger: ready or not,
bioengineering is here.

Throughout the last year, I have attended two debates that paid attention to the topic of
CRISPR babies from very different angles. One of them took place in the context of the

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Bonn Spring Meetup of the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition
(iGEM), and it was mainly composed of physicists, bioengineers and biologists. The
second one was situated in a university environment. Both groups of people reflected on
the challenges that come with the CRISPR/Cas9 technology for gene editing,
highlighting the danger of boosting social inequalities in society. But the general tone
was radically different. While the attendants of the iGEM conference were generally
worried but positive about the future, the humanities scholars were pessimistic about the
ability of humanity to not destroy itself with this kind of ‘irresponsible’ activity. The
two collectives were acknowledging the uncertainty that surrounds the further
management of gene-editing technology, but they were doing it from different
perspectives: seeing it either as a problem to solve or an apocalyptic destiny.

These concerns are not new, nor limited to inhabitants of academia - the general
population also tends to be sceptical about this matter (McCaughey et al., 2016). Donna
Haraway has already identified these concerns as two of the responses typically given
about the horrors of the Anthropocene1 (Haraway, 2016). Nevertheless, in the purely
technological side of the matter, it is possible to identify a tendency to accept that
human gene editing is both a reality and a useful tool for future societies (McCaughey
et al., 2016; Rose et al., 2017). The large amount of information available and the
insistence on public engagement of technical sciences are likely to play a crucial role in
the normalisation of technological progress. One clear example of this is shown in the
analysis of a human gene-editing panel displayed during Wisconsin Science Festival: it
was observed there that the panel “increased participants’ understanding of the
complexities of human gene editing, as demonstrated by increases in knowledge and the
moral acceptability of the technology among respondents, as well as the associated risk
and benefit perceptions” (Rose et al., 2017).

This tendency towards acceptance is almost non-existent, however, when we turn to the
possibility of building a society that is mature, fair and strong enough to cope with the
challenges that technology is already bringing. Those who work on this matter reject the

1“The first is easy to describe and, I think, dismiss, namely, a comic faith in technofixes, whether secular
or religious: technology will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but very clever children, or what
amounts to the same thing, God will come to the rescue of his disobedient but ever hopeful children […]
The second response, harder to dismiss, is probably even more destructive: namely, a position that the
game is over, it’s too late, there’s no sense trying to make anything any better, or at least no sense having
any active trust in each other in working and playing for a resurgent world. […] Some people who
describe themselves as critical cultural theorists or political progressives express these ideas too”
(Haraway, 2016).

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idea as ‘naive’ and ‘too complex’, and so reveal the lack of social imagination they
have.

Imagine another world

So far, humanity has proved more willing to hang on trusting techno-fixes or believing
in a hopeless future than to try to re-imagine the way in which we could cohabitate in
harmony with the rest of living and non-living beings around us. However, winds of
change have been blowing, faintly at the beginning, but increasing during the last
decade. This phenomenon can be observed in the most diverse places, from activism to
fiction, covering a wide range of knowledges and extending bridges to the imagination
of an alternative (or ‘experimental’, as Donna Haraway says) future.

Take the case of disability activists, and their claim to re-think disability from its
conception as a diminishing and undesirable condition to something that renders
individuals capable of experiencing the world in another way (Devlieger, 2016).
Designer and activist Liz Jackson states that “some things are not meant to be fixed”
and condemns the design of devices meant for disabled people made by able ones, and
their focus on “what we can or can’t do instead of on what works or not for us”
(Jackson, 2019). What Jackson and many more aim for is to get rid of inequalities and
achieve a full integration of disabled people and their diversity of functioning and
experiencing the world. By doing this, this movement directly engages with the
‘newgenics’ debate, warning about the eugenic dangers that it may entail (Wilson &
Pierre, 2016) and going one step further: imagining a society where techno-fixes will
not be a threat.

We have already talked about the role played by information and public engagement in
the prevalence of the ‘sci-tech imagination’ over the social one, but there is more than
that. Another factor that influences equally – if not more – the common imagination of a
matter is directly related to creativity: fiction. Science fiction is a genre of the broader
field of speculative fiction that is traditionally related to the imagination of a future
world. Science fiction, thus, is intimately linked with the cultural trajectory, as it sets
out paths and opens people’s minds to an almost infinite set of possibilities. Most of the
times this is restricted to the technological field, but otherwise possibilities are there,
and “science fiction properly conceived […] describes what is in fact going on, what
people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else” (Le Guin, 1989).

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Some authors have been conscious of this, releasing visionary works that try to address
these alternative futures. One of them is Ursula K. Le Guin who, through the creation of
fictional worlds, reflects on the present and the future, paying attention to the matter of
connectedness. Particularly, in her ethnography-like novel Always Coming Home (2000)
the author displays an ‘archaeology of the future’, an account of observations made
from the present towards a future society. There she describes a utopian co-habitation of
human and non-human beings with technology, exploring the ways in which this
develops and the problems and conflicts that may appear. Le Guin re-imagines science
fiction and makes it less andro-technocentric and more kind and human – in the
broadest sense possible.

Non-fiction writers and scholars have also contributed to this growing wave of re-
imagination, deconstructing narratives and concepts and driving their search beyond the
artificial limits imposed by Enlightenment-based rationality. One clear example is Anna
L. Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), the outcome of a multi-
sited research on matsutake, one of the most highly-valued mushrooms in the world. By
removing humans from the position of ‘the hero of the tale’, Tsing claims the re-
distribution of the attention and introduces other-than-human beings sharing spaces and
having agency. By doing this, she brings into the picture some hints of a way of living
that differs from the classical individualism and dives into the idea of survival as a
collaborative project. Through her work, Tsing depicts a ‘multi-species performance’
(A. Tsing, 2010, 2012) that can be made by trying to glimpse the common “ephemeral
and indeterminate” agendas of each one of these beings – and that, ultimately, would
lead to an exciting alternative world of tomorrow.

Donna Haraway, one of the most influential scholars within this field, proposes the idea
of ‘staying with the trouble’ as a way of “learning to be truly present” (Haraway, 2016).
This idea, despite being described as unrelated to the concept of a future – or precisely
because of that – constitutes another way of thinking towards the world, another social
imaginary that shapes a society where kin goes beyond bloodlines: a broad multispecies
community where Knowledge becomes knowledges and ‘we’ (beings) “require each
other in unexpected collaborations and combinations” (Haraway, 2016). The result is
not a better future nor even a safer one. The result is the enacting of patterns for
“inhabiting a wounded earth” (Haraway, 2016), something that forms a truly
revolutionary and creative understanding of the world.

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Imagine the future

All this said, to complete the picture it is necessary to observe where the current sci-tech
way of imagining has taken us so far. Going back to human genome editing, in 1975 the
Asilomar model was created as a way to contain and cope with the risks that may come
with bioengineering. And, even though it was soon criticised for being focused almost
exclusively on lab-safety concerns and for lacking any engagement with the public, its
legacy is still present in nowadays’ attempts to regulate biotechnological activities
(Jasanoff et al., 2015).

These attempts have evolved since the Asilomar model, trying to get rid of its
unidimensional character and involve the public in deliberations, but they are still far
from achieving a meaningful inclusion of traditionally voiceless social groups (such as
disadvantaged minorities, poor people, etc.) (Jasanoff et al., 2015). Social scientists
have made valuable contributions to the analysis of the overall impact of gene editing,
focusing, for example, on the controversies raised, on how to govern it or on
comparative historical analysis with similar past situations (Meyer, 2018). A good
amount of fruitful critical work has been done, yet this is still subjected by definition to
the prior appearance of the matter itself – in this case, the human genome editing
procedures. This is not a problem per se, but it becomes one when it subordinates the
vast majority of the contributions of social sciences to the field of ‘scientific progress’
arriving ‘too late’ to the debate – Jasanoff et al. (2015) point out very accurately that the
‘right to be forgotten’ emerged only after 20 years of uncontrolled and growing
information traffic on the Internet.

As has been already mentioned, there are some works already going on that may
provide helpful conceptual tools to re-think the role of social sciences in progress – and,
perhaps, apart from discussing the suitability of human gene editing, we can debate the
kind of society that we would need to cope with it, and how we could reach it.

The question of how science influences society has been widely asked and debated, but
there is more than that. Rendering social sciences able to ‘catch up’ with innovation
raises some more questions that revolve around the matter of imagination: could social
and technical scientists work-imagine together? Are we able to bring-imagine
something new to the picture? It is possible to suggest-imagine new shapes for social
structures? And, most important, how does society influence science?

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 “In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs,
in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild
oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and
watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and
room in the bag of stars” (Le Guin, 1989).

Bibliography

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