POST/HUMANISM

posthumanism is consistent with perspectives in animal ethics that seek to diminish the meaning and value of claims that species boundaries should have any bearing on our moral commitment to other life forms. This broad understanding also offers insights into how contemporary visions of posthumanism are informed by conversations on cyborgs or automata, which have often involved a reflective stance on humanity’s distinct and special place in the world. In this fashion, a crucial premise of posthumanism is its critical stance towards the prominence afforded to humanity in the natural order. In this sense, the ‘post’ of posthumanism need not imply the absence of humanity or moving beyond it in some biological or evolutionary manner.

Rather, the starting point should be an attempt to understand what has been omitted from an anthropocentric worldview, which includes coming to terms with how the Enlightenment centring of humanity has been revealed as inadequate."

Miah, Andy "Posthumanism: A Critical History." in Gordijn, B. & Chadwick, R. (2007) Medical Enhancements & Posthumanity. New York: Routledge.

What is Post Humanism?

De-Centering Old Narratives

Application

Encounters

• Also called trans (short for transitional)-humanism
• A theory that looks at the increasing interaction between technology and humans as the creation of new ways of existing in the world and interacting with others
• Katherine Hayles writes that the post human:
• Privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life.
• Considers consciousness as an epiphenomenona, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow.
• Thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.
• Configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals..

Dr Eva Giraud is a member of the Centre for Critical Theory and lecturer in the Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham. As part of our series of interviews ‘On Theory’, Samuel Grove discussed with her the ‘posthumanist’ thought of Donna Haraway.

Donna Haraway is known as a posthumanist thinker. What is posthumanism and what does it mean politically to be a posthumanist?

Firstly, I’ve just got to say that posthumanism is a heavily debated and contentious term: so much so that Haraway herself has distanced herself from it slightly in her more recent work! However, the fact remains that she is an incredibly influential thinker who is still generally thought of as posthumanist. What this means in the context of her work, is that she challenges the series of dichotomies that have tended to structure modern thought: such as nature/culture, human/animal, man/woman, western/non-western, human/machine… the list goes on!

These distinctions have framed how we understand and interpret the world, but are intensely problematic due to the way that each pairing is hierarchical: one term is always privileged over the other and this is used to justify the exploitation of the other category in the opposition. So nature is somehow lesser than culture (which legitimises human mastery over nature), or animals are lesser than humans (which makes it somehow ethically acceptable to use animals any way we want), or man is privileged over woman (which legitimises patriarchy). These oppositions are therefore deeply problematic and justify racist, sexist and anthropocentric world-views. For this reason, Haraway tries to move beyond these oppositions in her work and develop an ethics that doesn’t rely on this sort of logic and to do this, she draws on a series of what she describes as ‘figurations’: real entities that also embody important concepts or metaphors. Her most famous figuration is the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid that both literally messes up distinctions between humans and machines and challenges the epistemological integrity of these categories.

• What do posthuman figures suggest about our conceptions about what it means to be human?
• In what ways might a "human exceptionalism" depend upon a relation of domination and subjugation to externalized others: animals, machines, nature, the environment, nonindividualistic cultures and – in the case of the ambiguously generic ‘man’– women?
• What is perceived as the "center" and what does it try to understand as "different" from itself?
• What mediates between this "center" and its "peripheries"?
• What material objects do humans interact with? How do they form subjectivity?

we may conclude with two speculations on literature’s continuing engagement with the posthuman. First, in the critical domain, if ‘we have always been posthuman’, then the potential to deploy the posthuman thinking of the human as a means of rereading the literary tradition still seems relatively unrealized. Current approaches seem constrained to the selection of authors whose work appears amenable to a philosophy of posthumanism – the lauded William Blake Archive, for example, a digital source which seems perfectly appropriate to the complex materiality of Blake’s work, or the studies of D.H. Lawrence by Chaudhuri and Wallace – leaving more opportunities for the application of posthumanism as a heuristic device to the wider literary field. Second, what might we expect from the domain of imaginative print literature itself? Recently, both Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway have reflected on the urgent cultural need to address the reality of cloning. Baudrillard (2000) asked whether a species that synthesized its own immortality could still be called ‘human’, while Haraway, impatient of the questions posed by bioethics (because cloning already happens in ‘emergent naturecultures’– Haraway makes no distinction between natural and artificial selection, for example), demands to know ‘what is the probable lived experience of cloned and cloning human subjects?’ (2008, 137). The novels Atomised (1999) by Michel Houellebecq and Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro are told from the perspective of human clones, but Ishiguro’s in particular, with its sustained, curiously flat and recursive focalization through Kathy H, raises all the questions of interiority, variety and authenticity of experience that we would expect to ask of the human clone. It subtly suggests yet withholds from the reader the easy conclusions, either that Kathy is human like us, or that she is ineradicably other; the humanism of the ‘kind old world,’ embodied in the guardians’ intense pity for Kathy’s fate, is found wanting, as cliché-ridden and ethically inadequate to the new life-form of the clone. Ishiguro revitalizes the print novel, precisely in the testing-out of its humanistic legacy and assumptions. In each of the above kinds of development in the literary field, posthumanism is seen to be reducible neither to a dystopian trend of futuristic thought that might be humanistically circumvented nor to the development of digital textualities alone.

Wallace, Jeff. "Literature and Posthumanism." Literature Compass

Volume 7, Issue 8, pages 692–701, August 2010

http://www.academia.edu/4225716/Literature_Review_Becoming_Posthuman_Subjectivity_and_Contemporary_Fiction

Post Modernist/ Post Colonial Roots

• Remember that post modernism sought to dismantle master narratives, while post colonialism sought to dismantle the western perspective as the only/best way of viewing the world. We can also think about the ways that feminism, animal studies, sexuality studies, and race studies led to post humanism
• "Posthumanism is often defined as a post-humanism and a post-anthropocentrism it is "post" to the concept of the human and to the historical occurrence of humanism, both based, as we have previously seen, on hierarchical social constructs and human-centric assumptions. Speciesism has turned into an integral aspect of the posthuman critical approach. The posthuman overcoming of human primacy, though, is not to be replaced with other types of primacies (such as the one of the machines). Posthumanism can be seen as a post-exclusivism: an empirical philosophy of mediation which offers a reconciliation of existence in its broadest significations. Posthumanism does not employ any frontal dualism or antithesis, demystifying any ontological polarization through the postmodern practice of deconstruction.
• Not obsessed with proving the originality of its own proposal, posthumanism can also be seen as a post-exceptionalism. It implies an assimilation of the "dissolution of the new," which Gianni Vattimo identified as a specific trait of the postmodern. In order to postulate the "new," the centre of the discourse has to be located, so that the question "New to what?" shall be answered. But the novelty of human thought is relative and situated: what is considered new in one society might be common knowledge in another Moreover, hegemonic perspectives do not explicitly acknowledge all the resistant standpoints which coexist within each specific cultural-historical paradigm, thus failing to recognize the discontinuities embedded in any discursive formation. What Posthumanism puts at stake is not only the identity of the traditional centre of Western discourse—which has already been radically deconstructed by its own peripheries (feminist, critical race, queer, and postcolonial theorists, to name a few). Posthumanism is a post-centralizing, in the sense that it recognizes not one but many specific centers of interest; it dismisses the centrality of the centre in its singular form, both in its hegemonic as in its resistant modes. Posthumanism might recognize centers of interests; its centers, though, are mutable, nomadic, ephemeral. Its perspectives have to be pluralistic, multilayered, and as comprehensive and inclusive as possible.
• As posthumanism attracts more attention and becomes mainstream, new challenges arise. For example, some thinkers are currently looking to embrace the "exotic" difference, such as the robot, the biotechnological chimeras, the alien, without having to deal with the differences embedded within the human realm, thus avoiding the studies developed from the human "margins," such as feminism or critical race studies. But posthumanism does not stand on a hierarchical system: there are no higher and lower degrees of alterity, when formulating a posthuman standpoint, so that the non-human differences are as compelling as the human ones. Posthumanism is a philosophy which provides a suitable way of departure to think in relational and multi-layered ways, expanding the focus to the non-human realm in post-dualistic, post-hierarchical modes, thus allowing one to envision post-human futures which will radically stretch the boundaries of human imagination." (http://www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/volumes/Vol.8-2Ferrando.html)

POST/HUMANISM