In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, as Zarathustra walks by a row of newly built houses, he exclaims:
‘Did a silly child perhaps take them out of its toybox? If only another child would put them back into its box! And these sitting-rooms and bedrooms: are men able to go in and out of them? They seem to have been made for dolls; or for dainty nibblers who perhaps let others nibble with them.
Zarathustra stopped and considered. At length he said, sadly: ‘Everything has become smaller. Everywhere I see lower doors: anyone like me can still pass through them, but - he has to stoop!’
There has yet been a consideration of the last man—or more generally nihilism—through the doll-ification of people; the morphology of humans into dolls. While many have pointed to say, Bryan Johnson, the billionaire, anti-aging practitioner who conducts his life around a whole set of neurotic health routines in order to slow down his natural aging process, nobody has yet framed this trans-humanist archetype of a vampiric class of rich, within the obvious: the man is turning himself into a doll.
The significance of transhumanism is always placed on the first half of the prefixed word ‘doll-house’. We view transhumanism as stemming primary from a self-consciousness which demands a never ending trajectory of technical ‘improvement’(of man). Yet, the signification ‘house’ is largely ignored. This is a disastrous misstep as it tends to enforce the assumption that transhumanism is primarily about humans and less about houses. A humanist will easily agree with my statement—that there is something almost primordially wrong about the turning of a human into a doll. Yet, they will have little to say concerning the auto-domesticating practices of human beings that lead to the morphology in question. After all, a child needs a toy house for her dolls? And why? Perhaps because a doll, as a playful emulation of ‘a good human’ needs a house; the two are psycho-genetically inseparable.
Very little has been written concerning the history of domesticity. One notable exception is Collen McDannel’s work ‘The Christian Home in Victorian America’. She notes that the Victorian era created a middle-class housing project whereby affluent urban living reflected far more than a practical living space for growing urban centres, but became the centre of moral and spiritual cultivation. The home produced subjectivities, character, morals and tendencies in a manner which was previously the role of the church or the military. While Calvinist and Catholic religion suited the pre-industrialized landscapes of rural and patriarchal life, a new liberal-Protestantism emerged within the affluent urban habitats whereby the ‘home’ became the new setting of the sacred. Children were now angels, mothers moral instructors and men became somewhat displaced outsiders, eventually being reduced to economic providers for said affluent-urban housing projects.
The implications we can draw from Victorian domesticity are vast. Yet, we can assume that dramatic shifts in the character of Western societies occurred during this time. In particular, a styling of the home as a centre of worship and as a producer of civilized ideals that reflected that era. The middle-class urbanizing forces of the time are naively assumed to be a reflection of civilizing. Yet, in reality they were the product of displacing civilizing spaces away from other places (church, military, agricultural towns ect.) and into a radically domestic one.
There is empirical evidence to clarify the morphology of the urban-affluent home. China dolls gained popularity during the mid-19th century. Nobody wondered why tiny plastic people suddenly infested the homes of those with young children. It is peculiar, after all, that children started playing with plastic versions of themselves. One might might even go so far to say that industrialization and domesticity (which the mid 19th century was defined by) can been perfectly ‘embodied’ in the mass production of plastic children.
What is key to note, regarding the 19th century, is what the sociologist Norbert Elias would call a ‘civilizing spurt’. A moment in history whereby particularly harsh forces of psychological and social constraint were applied to the members of that society. To domesticate, means to instil a certain internalized understanding conditioned by constraint (particularly of aggression) as a self-consciousness of ‘civilized.’ This civilizing spurt, which was initiated in the mid-19th century, was also one of modern urbanization.
To return to Nietzsche’s polemic and somewhat comical rhetoric quoted at the beginning of this piece, we can see a ‘moral universe’ as a housing project; and inseparable from it. The architectural emphasis is on small door-ways that are only fit for small people with ‘small virtues’. Big people with big virtues will have to stoop upon entry. Thus, the shrinking of mankind began. Not as a conspiracy overseen by a centralized governmental authority, but as a morphology that came about from an auto-domesticating impulse which attached itself to a various set of ideological and economic axioms; ones that have still gone largely unchallenged.
Let’s ask the obvious question: What are dolls? They are beings that are without nature and without transcendence. They are perfectly domestic, in the modern sense, as they express an era whereby urbanization and industrialization had alienated man from nature and disenchanted the transcendental.
Beginning our still unsettled feeling of increasing separation from nature, the move from rural to urban living began this, and the digital era has intensified it further. Secondly, a doll is mindless, without spirit or a connection to a transcendent. Again, fitting with the times, mechanistic, scientific and materialist tendencies have disenchanted the world (humans and other beings) to the point where by a strict positivist might argue that humans are in some sense not much different to dolls. Naturalists may argue that we still have instinct, but that instinct can be materially controlled and economically satisfied through another form of production. We can be healed by technical medicine — and can be understood by certain psychiatric, physiological and scientific principles.
The disenchantment of modernity is not particularly controversial to state. A humanist might agree and assert that scientific and economic forces have stolen from humans that ineffable sense of dignity and humanity by reducing our consciousness to something which fails to place any significance on a human perspective. Yet, what people may find more startling is the claim that the contemporary issues to do with transhumanism, or any form of technical control and adaption of the human body through science or industry, has its origin in the auto-domesticating impulses which were intensified in the mid 19th century.
Conservatives tend to look at this era nostalgically as they only consider the more aggressive technical controls of the human body (such as the birth control pill or transgender surgeries) as being something entirely separable from the affluent urbanization projects of the Victorian era. A quick look at the class and ethnic demographics of the peoples who tend toward forms of transgenderism, for example, will reveal that they are the inheritors, ancestors, class and social apostles of the urban middle classes that heavily grew during this time. There is no simple distinction or historical schism here; but a continued path — and coherent genealogy which has yet to be noticed or fleshed out.
Like a doll, Victorian domesticity placed the sacred ‘at home’. The social, militaristic, natural, celestial, or pilgrimaging notions of the sacred, common in earlier times, were expelled—and the practices of religiosity were housebound. (Perhaps worship at home was the ancestor of work from home).
The morphology of human-to-doll is disturbing in the sense that it expresses a certain sort of genderless and ageless being. Dolls don’t grow up, and are thus not the products of instinct or nature. Their morphology is without maturation as with organic beings. Human growth or maturation, which pharmaceutical companies have began to experiment in their control of, under the supposedly humanitarian guise of opportunistic psychiatry (transgender procedures ect.), are ultimately the doll-ification of humans. Instincts, perhaps unfitting for extremely urbanized and economistic environments, are implicitly seen as dirty, uncivilized and purely disruptive. While on the other hand, dolls don’t think, speak or engage in any sort of of disagreements. Uncomplicated, static—and in a perverted way , perhaps, ‘pure’— the doll has become the model of an urban-affluent civilized ideal.
One can also see a certain relationship between the domesticating of religious impulse in modern medicine(modern medicine which is usually the profiteer and technical overseer of these doll-ification procedures). Modern medicine, like Victorian domesticity, sees the comfortable and materially immediate, as rational goods, par excellence. Modern medicine, if we can distinguish it from previous forms of medicine, sees salvation in immediate forms of pain relief and comforting bodily management through pharmacology. Although, these technologies were less advanced and available in the Victorian era, their ethos is essentially the same: ergonomic—the pulling of the divine down from its lofty and tumultuous perch, and into the convenient households of the urban-affluent.
Hollywood has sometimes played on the implicit horror of doll-ification. For example, the 2005 film House of Wax, whereby a serial killer would form wax sculptures from living humans. Or, for example, Chuckie, a film about an evil doll that is possessed by the soul of a serial killer. This second one is noteworthy as it basically describes the failure of doll-ification as a civilizing principle; thus the contradiction of a serial killer and a children’s doll fused into one being.
This horror has somewhat become a reality, as an honest evaluation of health gurus like Bryan Johnson, or one of the many horror stories of de-transitioners, can reveal. One should attempt to frame this horror, not simply as a force of technical science, but the marriage of science, modern urbanization and a certain brand of domesticity. The doll, after all, is perfectly domestic. It contains none of the uncivilized or irrational motivation of humans (whether that be instinct or transcendental concerns).
Ageless, sometimes genderless beings, are as much expressions of stasis as domesticity. And the notions of domesticity which emerged through doll houses reaches for stasis above all else. Perhaps failing to find social, historical and moral stability within the rapid changes of modern urbanization and technological progress, the human becomes the new centre of stasis. Like a devouring mother who turns her children into dolls to stop them getting older, a morphology of stoppage begins to dominate. Frozen in time we domesticate ourselves into manikins. Perfectly hygienic citizens of urban-technologization, driven by self preservation and hygiene, it eventually leads to a self-perishing . The ‘successful’ create a social currency of permanent smallness.
Or as Nietzsche says: ‘
‘You will become smaller and smaller, you small people! You will crumble away, you small people. You will yet perish.’