YS 139 | Yoga Machine: 
Technology, Transhumanism, and Transcendence

If you look at Sanskrit dictionary definitions of yoga, you see a wide range of mundane technologies with little to do with yoga as we understand it today. Like the Ancient Greek techne, does yoga in its broadest, most ancient sense simply mean “technology”? And are the kinds of mind/body practice we tend to associate with yoga also to be understood in the sense? This course tries to make the case that they should. If yoga is originally a technology, what can we say about premodern yoga’s apparent common ground with technological transhumanism, with its shared goals of augmentation, enhancement, “morphological freedom”, immortality and so on? Is yoga transhuman?

If we want to understand yoga as it manifests in the world today, we have to understand its relationship to modern technology. This course argues, in fact, that “modern yoga” is, almost by definition, technological yoga. Tracing its evolution from the 19th to 21st centuries, we see a new kind of yoga emerge into the world, one defined by its intimacy with coloniality and “techno-science”, and characterised by an alignment with many of the same the ideologies that underpin today’s transhumanism (“spiritual Darwinism”, eugenics and so on). We also examine the ambiguous, double role commonly accorded to yoga in the modern age: itself a particular, special, ancient kind of technology that can save us from the ravages of modern technology.

Here we turn to various technological devices that are being developed to improve your yoga. Among them are devices that claim to guide your body into the ideal form of the posture, promising to provide a level of attention and authenticity that human yoga teachers can never reach. What happens to yoga when it is plugged into the “Internet of Bodies”, and how does the techno-yoga uniform portend an ever-increasingly intimate management of our existence through devices, up to and including ‘spiritual’ practice and erotic life? We then turn to neuroscience and brain devices for yogis. This course contends that neuroscience is a kind of new default framework for understanding what yoga is and does, one that will have profound repercussions for yoga’s future. Again, what is gained and what lost in this new turn? What of the radical quantification of yoga through brain devices? And how should we think about VR and brain stimulation technologies that claim to automatically reproduce advanced yogic states?

In the never-ending magic show of technological innovation, the political is obscured. How should we understand techno-yoga within its political context? What is revealed by situating technological devices within the history of neo-liberal capitalism, and how should that guide our alignment with yoga in/as technology? With particular attention to the Digital Yoga initiatives of the current Indian government, the course will ask how yoga-as-technology merges with the religious and ideological goals of an ethno-nationalist surveillance state. Finally, we will engage with the urgent question of what an anti-technological yoga might look like, passing through Heidegger, Vivekananda, postcolonialism, posthumanism, and feminist archaeology.