I shall continue to insist that Kenny is crazy.

Because it was young Arnold, well before Mr. Bonds, with his weaponized physique and better living through chemistry and, it turns out, a far greater humanist charm than Barry despite his own posthumanity.That's the ticket. First really major posthuman: Arnold, not Barry.

Aside from that, I suspect Kenny's right.

Aren't humans already machines? Built from flesh and blood, sure, but a network of cause-and-effect structures that respond to stimuli.

Define "human," please.

I hope posthuman poets will earn as much as Mr. Bonds!

Merriam-Webster presents "human" as "a bipedal primate mammal," a definition sure to send Objectivists and the religious into possibly defensible fits.

I think that's Kenny's working definition, and a posthuman like Bonds (in Mr. Goldsmith's view) is one enhanced by chemicals, machines, etc.

While it's a fun mental exercise, I don't quite see how it flies in the face of Humanism.

Regardless, the tangent from this that I wish to see Mr. Goldsmith address is whether being "posthuman like Bonds" requires being a criminal, if indeed his indictment holds. How far does the "Bonds-as-posthuman" metaphor go?

Merriam-Webster has some issues, then, since by that reckoning gorillas are human. So, by the way, is Bonds. So am I, and I drink a lot of coffee. Lots and lots of it. And it's a drug.

I've always thought that the ability of certain computer programs to pass for human poets (pass Turing tests) in certain styles of poetry made the styles questionable, rather than the category of "human." I imagine that Kenny would disagree.

Why is he so "Post-Human" instead of an unrepentant human being? Has he been chemically enhanced, yes? But, what do you call people who survive on copious amounts of coffee or sugar? Where was this "Post-Human" converstion when Flyod Landis was found doping to win the Tour-De-France? Aren't you by dubbing Barry Bonds' "Post-Human" falling into the classical stereotype of athelets being inhumanity? Maybe the more critcally expedient course of action would be to analyze your definition of what humanity is,namely, flawed? Barry Bonds is just an unrepentant man like any other and I take offense to you looking upon him as if he is some horrible amalgam? Isn't that the normal trap that people fall into when the see an unrepentant man of color(especially a black one)? It this a post-modern guise for standard race dubbing of black men as below humanity. No matter, if your argument use another word for stripping him of his humanity or the polite poiltical term "post".

-Yours

Jacob T. McCall

I don't believe that Mr. Goldsmith cares whether Barry Bonds is guilty or not. Reread his post and you'll see that Goldsmith is pointing out that Bonds is a symbol, an inevitability, for what is already a decided issue: in the future all athletes will be enhanced. And if I'm reading him correctly, he is saying that the Bonds issue is a non-issue, one whose outcome has been pre-determined via Baudrillardian theory. To further debate his guilt or lack thereof is a waste of time.

In terms of race, I don't think race has anything to do with it. Landis didn't break the most sacred record in the history of his sport; nor did Mark McGwire. Bonds did, which is the reason we're discussing him. I see his non-repentant attitude as being somewhat visionary. He knows that his folly is just a blink of an eye toward the day when the culture must accept chemical enhancement as inevitable.

Just as we accept various addenda to the flawed human condition -- eyeglasses and Viagra, for example -- we must embrace steroid use in athletics as a logical development in the human narrative, a phase of which is now known as Posthuman. But as we now view what was once called Postmodernism as an extension of Modernism, in hindsight, the Posthuman will be seen as an extension of Humanism.

I think Goldsmith is pointing out that the arts are no different today than professional athletics. Indeed, our artists are often paid as well as our athletes. We make equal demands that they outperform prior incarnations of what we once knew as artists, poets. etc. I think he is saying that we get what we deserve and what we deserve is superhuman, even robotic perfection in all humanist endeavors; and we're willing to accept a robot doing our bidding to that end.

Goldsmith, by the way, is not celebrating this circumstance, he is simply shining a light on it. And for that I congratulate him for having the courage to speak what so many of us fear, yet know to be true.

Steve,

Just to be a science geek, gorillas walk on two legs and on all four, depending on the situation.

I don't think we'll ever stop writing poetry for humans, unless we're committing an equivocation fallacy. Bonds (and Steve with his coffee, me with my cigarettes and herbal tea and eyeglasses) is an enhanced human. If computers ever begin appreciating poems instead of just generating them, then they'll be human in the sense of "What seperates us from the animals." Sure, Bonds seems juiced and enhanced. But he can read poetry and appreciate the deeper meanings. If computers ever do that, it's because we'll have made them human in terms of consciousness.

Also, it does seem like Goldsmith is celebrating this. He's built his career on celebrating the "mechanical." It's part of his charm and paradox.

I always get irritated when older folks say "kids these days are so...wild...disrespectful...irresponsible...etc..." It originates from the same cultural arrogance that one's religion is the best...that we are the only life in the universe...that our current science is the most accurate... In many ways, the argument that humanity is eroding is very similar. You say "the future"...I say "history repeating itself". The fall of the super-human is as old as Hercules.

Jacob,

Please refer to the earlier version of this post some months back, and you'll see a number of black writers responding to this post, raising many of your same concerns.

Goldsmith isn't hearing you, dude, nor did he really hear what they were saying then. Clearly he's above your petty, pre-post-modern, passe arguments about race. (SARCASM MODE OFF)

Thank you Mr. Maitland. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Kenneth Goldsmith

Interesting how Black people in America, for centuries, were depicted as
the symbols of subhumanism (3-fifths a human, no more, maybe less) and now,
because of a "sacred" baseball record and the sorcery of the legal drug czars
a Black man is being monsterized as the first symbol of posthumanism. And
some wonder why minorities tend to stomp all over symbols.

That said, I fail to see what posthumanistic feat Bonds has performed.
It's not like he has hit twice as many homers in half the time.
What is posthuman about breaking the homerun record? Aaron did it.
And while racists threaten his life and called him names, none of them,
I bet, threw posthuman at him. Or maybe they did.

"In terms of race, I don't think race has anything to do with it."

Unfortunately, in America, race has everything to do with anything.
It's the prism through which America views her world.

Also, before we define Bonds as super-human, we need to consider all the facts... No one is talking about the expansion of MLB and the dilution of pitching talent... If performance enhancing drugs were the sole reason for broken records, this would have happened years ago. Sometimes, the real answer to a question is right there on the surface.

I am thoroughly sick of male poets talking about baseball.

Damn. "Lynn Behrendt" -- and others here: some big assumptions you're making about gender on this masked internet. Same goes for race.

The debates on race and gender here tend to be completely subsumed in terrestrial fixed notions of identity. I'm shocked that you can make assumptions about identity in a forum where identity is altered, falsified and deliberately hidden. You don't know who I am, where I am, what race I am, what gender I am, and to the point of this discussion, if I am even human. You don't know if I "wrote" this or if it was "programmed" or "cut-and-pasted" into this box. In fact, for you to make such traditional authorship assumptions is staggeringly naive, unsophisticated and quite frankly, stupid. The Bonds issue brings up complex issues of identity, hence this discussion. To drag it all back to humanist / terrestrial notions is backpeddling.

C'mon folks, you can do better than that. Can we at least pretend to be a tad sophisticated instead of falling back into our knee-jerk accusatory / victim roles?

A sonnet I wrote in 1976 supports Kenneth Goldsmith's thinking.
It uses the term Machina sapiens to suggest the
Posthuman direction in which we are heading.
See yd202 at 2007/08/26
in the August 2007 archive of my Sprintedon Hollow.