The Imperium of Man routinely lobotomises and augments criminals and heretics to create “servitors” who then serve as soldiers, labourers, and even computers. For the Imperium, this is an enhancement and a repurposing of supposed ‘undesirables’ into helpful tools. This talk engages with the figure of the servitor in Warhammer 40,000, and explores how it might do useful philosophical and political work by being brought into the discourses of transhumanism and human enhancement. Transhumanism is a philosophy that argues we can and should improve the human condition through technological interventions (Bostrom, 2005). Treating the servitor as an enhanced human, however, forces a confrontation with the ideological nature of ‘improving’ the human. By examining the servitor, I seek to demonstrate how both real and speculative transhuman enhancements can be coopted by dominant ideologies to their own ends.
This paper builds off the original meaning of the term ‘cyborg’ as an organised system of humans and technology which can enable humans to survive in otherwise unliveable environments (Clynes and Kline, 1960). It also draws on Foucault’s discussion of ‘biopolitics’, the system of political control over the human body (Foucault, 1978). I argue that the Imperium’s model of transhuman enhancement is inseparable from its dominant ideology, concerned with the survival of the human race at any cost. In this discussion, transhumanism is revealed as an overly-mutable philosophy which relies upon (often hidden) value judgements, and the servitor helps us to understand how differently ‘enhancement’ can be interpreted.
With the rising prevalence of the discourse of transhumanism, and the increasing role that technology plays in the human condition, it is vital to see that enhancement isn’t a fixed concept. The servitor acts as an extreme, and very grimdark reminder that philosophies of “improvement” rely on normative notions of both the human and the good.
Author bio
Thea Hatton is a PhD Candidate at the University of Birmingham. She works in the fields of trans- and posthumanism, engaging primarily with the idea of human enhancement. Her thesis is called “Beyond Human Consumption: How Trans- and Posthuman Media Imagine Futures Under and Outside Neoliberalism”
