THE FRAMELESS LIFE

Abstract

In recent years, a future in which humans have attained Immortality by means of technology, and yet, this miraculous achievement remains a luxury of the rich, has become a staple not only of speculative fiction, but also of respectable assessments of the direction in which current technological trends are headed. In what follows, I want to advance a simple thesis, in three stages. The thesis is that more than anything else, the contemporary quest for immortality is a quest for a new form of distinction, which sheds some light on the crisis of the old. As such it should be understood as a symptom of a broader trend, to replace symbolic frameworks with real techno-scientific processes. In the first part of the article, “frameless,” technological immortality will be analyzed as displaying the logic of a luxury commodity. Immortality, in this scheme, is no longer a symbolic status attained, a place in the afterlife, but an advantage that has to be continuously produced. Inquiring after the ontological conditions of such an ethics, points to the significance of immortality now being conceived as a real possibility, signaling an ontological shift in the “distribution of the possible.” The possible, in this configuration, is not a mere option, but comes to occupy the place of the preordained. Second, to understand this shift, we turn our focus to the traditional significance of death as an intergenerational, symbolic pact. Finally, we take a look at how contemporary technological trends and the narratives that accompany them affect a shift in the symbolic performativity traditionally associated with death. The vision of ontological and technological “framelessness” utilizes a new kind of narrative structure, which is no longer bound to an intergenerational pact, or trust in posterity. While it is grounded in mistrust it is nonetheless capable of enlisting the commitment and fervent activity of its subjects.