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2005 Abstracts Stage 3

Becoming Neurochemical

The Transhuman. For Deleuze we should understand reality as an acentered system of forces. Becoming has no fidelity to distinctions of species or genus, but should be understood as the complex movement of non-linear flows. To think in this way is to pass beyond the human to the transhuman. The Return of Human Nature. DNA boosted Darwinian theory by enabling it to explain the process of heredity.The study of populations using statistics enabled us to posit species-typical behaviour. Biotechnology and the Transhuman. The new human sciences which underpin our understanding of human nature also allow us to change that nature. But are we not already Transhuman? How might we understand our emerging ‘pharmacological society’? Therapy or ‘enhancement’? The genotype determines the phenotype? How far does the phenotype extend? What about our social, cultural and technological relations? ‘The coils of the serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a mole hill’ How did we become neurochemical selves? How did we come to understand our sadness as a chemical imbalance in the brain, able to be corrected by psychopharmacalogical products? What is ‘natural’ for us must also be manufactured We posit what is natural once we are able to manufacture it.