@book{braidotti2013posthuman,
title={The Posthuman},
author={Braidotti, R.},
isbn={9780745669960},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=WZASAAAAQBAJ},
year={2013},
publisher={Polity Press}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
Some of us are not even considered fully human now, let alone at previous moments of Western social, political and scientific history. And yet the term enjoys widespread consensus and it maintains the re-assuring familiarity of common sense. We assert our attachment to the species as if it were a matter of fact, a given. The concept of the human has exploded under the double pressure of contemporary scientific advances and global economic concerns. What exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet.
The posthuman provokes elation but also anxiety about the possibility of a serious de-centring of ‘Man’, the former measure of all things.
Nature–culture continuum posits a categorical distinction between the given (nature) and the constructed (culture). Currently being replaced by a non-dualistic understanding of nature– culture interaction. Stresses instead the self-organizing (or auto-poietic) force of living matter.
The task of critical theorists should be to provide adequate representations of our situated historical location. The post-theory’ phase, registers the new opportunities as well as the threats that emerge from contemporary science. However, the lack of suitable critical schemes to scrutinize the present. Anti-intellectualism is especially hard on the Humanities because it penalizes subtlety of analysis by paying undue allegiance to ‘common sense’ – the tyranny of doxa – and to economic profit – the banality of self-interest. Theory has lost status and is often dismissed as a form of fantasy or narcissistic self-indulgence. A shallow version of neo-empiricism – which is often nothing more than data-mining – has become the methodological norm in Humanities research. Is the posthuman predicament not also linked to a post-theory mood?
Critical thought rests on a social constructivist paradigm which intrinsically proclaims faith in theory as a tool to apprehend and represent reality,
Is such faith still legitimate today?
A spectral dimension has seeped into our patterns of thinking, boosted, on the right of the political spectrum, by ideas about the end of ideological time (Fukuyama, 1989) and the inevitability of civilizational crusades (Huntington, 1996). On the political left, on the other hand, the rejection of theory has resulted in a wave of resentment and negative thought against the previous intellectual generations On this context of theory-fatigue, neo-communist intellectuals (Badiou and Žižek, 2009) have argued for the need to return to concrete political action, even violent antagonism if necessary, rather than indulge in more theoretical speculations.
Posthuman theory as a term to explore ways of engaging affirmatively with the present, accounting for some of its features in a manner that is empirically grounded without being reductive and remains critical while avoiding negativity. Posthuman theory is a generative tool to help us re-think the basic unit of reference for the human in the bio-genetic age known as ‘anthropocene’. It can also help us re-think the basic tenets of our interaction with both human and non-human agents on a planetary scale.
What Nietzsche asserted was the end of the self-evident status attributed to human nature as the common sense belief in the metaphysically stable and universal validity of the European humanistic subject. Importance of interpretation over dogmatic implementation of natural laws and values.
How to develop critical thought, after the shock of recognition of a state of ontological uncertainty, how to reconstitute a sense of community held together by affinity and ethical accountability, without falling into the negative passions of doubt and suspicion.
Bertrand Russell: has Man a future indeed?
Advanced capitalism and its bio-genetic technologies engender a perverse form of the posthuman. Globalization means the commercialization of planet Earth in all its forms, through a series of inter-related modes of appropriation. Animals provide living material for scientific experiments. They are manipulated, mistreated, tortured and genetically recombined in ways that are productive for our bio-technological agriculture, the cosmetics industry, drugs and pharmaceutical industries and other sectors of the economy. Animals have become partly humanized themselves. In the field of bio-ethics, for instance, the issue of the ‘human’ rights of animals has been raised as a way of countering these excesses.
The posthuman aspect of contemporary warfare: the tele-thanatological machines created by our own advanced technology. Contemporary death-technologies are posthuman because of the intense technological mediation within which they operate. As a result of this state of insecurity, the socially enforced aim is not change, but conservation or survival.
We need to learn to think differently about ourselves. Think critically and creatively about who and what we are actually in the process of becoming. The classical ideal of ‘Man’, formulated first by Protagoras as ‘the measure of all things’, later renewed in the Italian Renaissance as a universal model and represented in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. An ideal of bodily perfection which, doubles up as a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values. A specific view of what is ‘human’ about humanity. The emblem of Humanism as a doctrine that combines the biological, discursive and moral expansion of human capabilities into rational progress.
This model sets standards not only for individuals, but also for their cultures. Which shaped a certain idea of Europe as coinciding with the universalizing powers of selfreflexive reason. This self-aggrandizing vision assumes that Europe is not just a geo-political location, but rather a universal attribute of the human mind that can lend its quality to any suitable object. Eurocentrism into more than just a contingent matter of attitude: it is a structural element of our cultural practice, which is also embedded in both theory and institutional and pedagogical practices. This Eurocentric paradigm implies the dialectics of self and other, and the binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal Humanism. Difference as pejoration.
Subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality, and selfregulating ethical behaviour, whereas Otherness is defined as its negative and specular counterpart. As difference spells inferiority, it acquires both essentialist and lethal connotations for people who get branded as ‘others’. The sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, who are reduced to the less than human status of disposable bodies.
Humanisms, until now, have been imperial. They speak of the human in the accents and the interests of a class, a sex, a race, a genome. Differences of location between centres and margins matter greatly, especially in relation to the legacy of something as complex and multi-faceted as Humanism. Complicitous with genocides and crimes on the one hand, supportive of enormous hopes and aspirations to freedom on the other, Humanism somehow defeats linear criticism. Partly responsible for its longevity.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s an activist brand of anti-Humanism was developed by the new social movements and the youth cultures of the day: feminism, de-colonization and anti-racism, anti-nuclear and pacifist movements. They challenged the platitudes of Cold War rhetoric, with its emphasis on Western democracy, liberal individualism and the freedom they allegedly ensured for all. Whereas fascism preached a ruthless departure from the very roots of Enlightenment-based respect for the autonomy of reason and the moral good, socialism pursued a communitarian notion of humanist solidarity.
Marxist-Leninism rejected the emphasis on the fulfilment of the human beings’ potential for authenticity (as opposed to alienation). It offered as an alternative ‘proletarian Humanism’, also known as the ‘revolutionary Humanism’ of the USSR and its ruthless pursuit of universal, rational human ‘freedom’ through and under Communism. The period of Fascism and Nazism enacted a major disruption in the history of critical theory in Continental Europe in that it destroyed and banned from Europe the very schools of thought – notably Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School and the disruptive charge of Nietzschean genealogy (though the case of Nietzsche is admittedly quite complex) – which had been central to philosophy in the earlier part of the twentieth century.
Most of the authors which Michel Foucault singled out as heralding the philosophical era of critical post-modernity (Marx, Freud, Darwin) are the same authors whom the Nazis condemned and burned at the stake in the 1930s. Communism, played a pivotal role in defeating Fascism and hence, to all ends and purposes came out of the Second World War as the winner. This clashes with the almost epidermic anti-communism of American culture and remains to date a point of great intellectual tension between Europe and the USA.
Antihumanism took hold on the United States intellectual scene partly because of widespread revulsion with the Vietnam War. Up until the 1960s, philosophical reason had escaped relatively unscathed from the question of its responsibilities in perpetuating historical models of domination and exclusion.
Both Sartre and de Beauvoir, influenced by Marxist theories of alienation and ideology, did connect the triumph of reason with the might of dominant powers, thus disclosing the complicity between philosophical ratio and real-life social practices of injustice. They continued, however, to defend a universalist idea of reason and to rely on a dialectical model for the resolution of these contradictions. Sartre and de Beauvoir consider humanistic universalism as the distinctive trait of Western culture. They use the conceptual tools provided by Humanism to precipitate a confrontation of philosophy with its own historical responsibilities and conceptual power-brokering. de Beauvoir’s emancipatory feminism builds on the Humanist principle that ‘Woman is the measure of all things female’ and that to account for herself, the feminist philosopher needs to take into account the situation of all women. This posits a common grounding among women, taking being-women-in-the-world as the starting point for all critical reflection and jointly articulated political praxis.
Humanist feminism introduced a new brand of materialism, of the embodied and embedded kind. The theoretical premise of humanist feminism is a materialist notion of embodiment that spells the premises of new and more accurate analyses of power. These are based on the radical critique of masculinist universalism, but are still dependent on a form of activist and equality-minded Humanism.
The new forms of philosophical radicalism developed in France and throughout Europe in the late 1960s expressed a vocal critique of the dogmatic structure of Communist thought and practice. Their radicalism was expressed in terms of a critique of humanistic implications and the political conservatism of the institutions that embodied Marxist dogma. Later were to became world-famous as the ‘post-structuralist generation’. They stepped out of the dialectical oppositional thinking and developed a third way to deal with changing understandings of human subjectivity.
The ‘death of Man’, announced by Foucault formalizes an epistemological and moral crisis that goes beyond binary oppositions and cuts across the different poles of the political spectrum. What is targeted is the implicit Humanism of Marxism, more specifically the humanistic arrogance of continuing to place Man at the centre of world history. Anti-humanism consists in de-linking the human agent from this universalistic posture, calling him to task, so to speak, on the concrete actions he is enacting.
Different and sharper power relations emerge, once this formerly dominant subject is freed from his delusions of grandeur and is no longer allegedly in charge of historical progress. Feminists like Luce Irigaray (1985a, 1985b) pointed out that the allegedly abstract ideal of Man as a symbol of classical Humanity is very much a male of the species: it is a he. Moreover, he is white, European, handsome and able-bodied; of his sexuality nothing much can be guessed, this Humanist universalism is objectionable not only on epistemological, but also on ethical and political grounds.
Anti-colonial thinkers held the Europeans accountable for the uses and abuses of this ideal by looking at colonial history and the violent domination of other cultures, but still upheld its basic premises. Frantz Fanon, for instance, wanted to rescue Humanism from its European perpetuators arguing that we have betrayed and misused the humanist ideal. Post-colonial thought asserts that if Humanism has a future at all, it has to come from outside the Western world and by-pass the limitations of Eurocentrism. The feminist philosophies of sexual difference, through the spectrum of the critique of dominant masculinity, also stressed the ethnocentric nature of European claims to universalism.
The human of Humanism is neither an ideal nor an objective statistical average or middle ground. It rather spells out a systematized standard of recognizability – of Sameness – by which all others can be assessed, regulated and allotted to a designated social location. The human is a normative convention, which does not make it inherently negative, just highly regulatory and hence instrumental to practices of exclusion and discrimination.
The human norm stands for normality, normalcy and normativity. It functions by transposing a specific mode of being human into a generalized standard, which acquires transcendent values as the human: from male to masculine and onto human as the universalized format of humanity. This standard is posited as categorically and qualitatively distinct from the sexualized, racialized, naturalized others and also in opposition to the technological artefact. The human is a historical construct that became a social convention about ‘human nature’
My anti-humanism leads me to object to the unitary subject of Humanism, and to replace it with a more complex and relational subject framed by embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy and desire as core qualities.
Power formations are also expressed in systems of theoretical and cultural representation, political and normative narratives and social modes of identification. If power is complex, scattered and productive, so must be our resistance to it. Discourse, the political currency that is attributed to certain meanings, in such a way as to invest them with scientific legitimacy; there is nothing neutral or given about it. This approach of discourse analysis primarily aims at dislodging the belief in the ‘natural’ foundations of socially coded and enforced ‘differences’ and of the systems of scientific validity, ethical values and representation which they support.
Feminist anti-Humanism, also known as postmodernist feminism, argued that it is impossible to speak in one unified voice about women, natives and other marginal subjects. The emphasis falls instead on issues of diversity and differences among them and on the internal fractures of each category.
The reduction to sub-human status of non-Western others is a constitutive source of ignorance, falsity and bad consciousness for the dominant subject who is responsible for their epistemic as well as social de-humanization.
One touches humanism at one’s own risk and peril.
The anti-humanist position is certainly not free of contradictions. Apocalyptic accounts of the end of “man” [. . .] ignore Humanism’s capacity for regeneration and, quite literally, recapitulation’ Antihumanism is a position fraught with such contradictions that the more one tries to overcome them, the more slippery it gets. Not only do anti-humanists often end up espousing humanist ideals – freedom being my favourite one – but also, in some ways, the work of critical thought is supported by intrinsic humanist discursive values .Somehow, neither humanism nor anti-humanism is adequate to the task.
Across the political spectrum, Humanism has supported on the liberal side individualism, autonomy, responsibility and self-determination. On the more radical front, it has promoted solidarity, community-bonding, social justice and principles of equality. Profoundly secular in orientation, Humanism promotes respect for science and culture, against the authority of holy texts and religious dogma. It also contains an adventurous element, a curiosity-driven yearning for discovery and a project-oriented approach that is extremely valuable in its pragmatism.
The assertion that Humanism can be decisively left behind ironically subscribes to a basic humanist assumption with regard to volition and agency, as if the “end” of Humanism might be subjected to human control, as if we bear the capacity to erase the traces of Humanism from either the present or an imagined future’. Cary Wolfe attempts to strike a new position that combines sensitivity to epistemic and word-historical violence with a distinctly transhumanist faith in the potential of the posthuman condition as conducive to human enhancement.
I prefer to take a more materialist route. Human emancipation in the pursuit of equality, and secularism through rational governance. Humanism is the transformation of the Christian doctrine of salvation into a project of universal human emancipation. The idea of progress is a secular version of the Christian belief in providence. One of the side-effects of the decline of Humanism is the rise of the post-secular condition at the end of the 1970s. As the revolutionary zeal cooled off and social movements started to dissipate, conform or mutate, former militant agnostics joined a wave of conversions to a variety of conventional monotheistic or imported Eastern religions.
The feminist belief-system is accordingly civic, not theistic and viscerally opposed to authoritarianism and orthodoxy. It has historically produced various alternative spiritual practices alongside and often in antagonism to the mainstream political secularist line. Audre Lorde (1984), Alice Walker (1984) and Adrienne Rich (1987), acknowledged the importance of the spiritual dimension of women’s struggle for equality and symbolic recognition. Mary Daly (1973), Schussler Fiorenza (1983) and Luce Irigaray (1993), to name but a few, highlights a specific feminist tradition of non-male-centred spiritual and religious practices. Feminist theology in the Christian (Keller, 1998; Wadud, 1999), Muslim (Tayyab, 1998) and Judaic (Adler, 1998) traditions produced well-established communities of both critical resistance and affirmation of creative alternatives. The call for new rituals and ceremonies makes the fortune of the witches’ movement, currently best exemplified by Starhawk (1999) and reclaimed among others by the epistemologist Stengers (1997). Neo-pagan elements have also emerged in technologically mediated cyber-culture, producing various brands of posthuman techno-asceticism.
Black and post-colonial theories have never been loudly secular. High secularism is essentially a political doctrine of the separation of powers, which was even historically consolidated in Europe and is still prominent in political theory today. Introduces a polarization between religion and citizenship, which is socially enacted in a new partition between a private belief system and the public political sphere. Public–private distinction is thoroughly gendered. Secularity therefore reinforced the distinction between emotions or un-reason, including faith and rational judgement. Women were assigned to the pole of un-reason, passions and emotions, including religion, keep them in the private sphere.
A post-secular approach, posited on firm anti-humanist grounds makes manifest the previously unacceptable notion that rational agency and political subjectivity, can actually be conveyed through and supported by religious piety and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality. Belief systems and their rituals are perhaps not incompatible with critical thought and practices of citizenship.
My monistic philosophy of becomings rests on the idea that matter, including the specific slice of matter that is human embodiment, is intelligent and selforganizing. Matter is not dialectically opposed to culture, nor to technological mediation, but continuous with them. Subjectivity is rather a process of auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values and hence also multiple forms of accountability.
The posture of Western ‘exceptionalism’ has taken the form of self-aggrandizing praise of the Enlightenment Humanist legacy. This claim to an exceptional cultural status foregrounds the emancipation of women, gays and lesbians as the defining feature of the West, coupled with extensive geopolitical armed interventions against the rest. To be simply secular would be complicitous with neo-colonial Western supremacist positions, while rejecting the Enlightenment legacy would be inherently contradictory for any critical project. The vicious circle is stifling.
Leaving behind the tensions that surround Humanism and its self-contradictory refutation is now a priority. Posthumanism as a move beyond these lethal binaries. Posthumanism is the historical moment that marks the end of the opposition between Humanism and anti-humanism and traces a different discursive framework, looking more affirmatively towards new alternatives. The structural others of the modern humanistic subject re-emerge with a vengeance in postmodernity. The women’s rights movement; the anti-racism and de-colonization movements; the anti-nuclear and pro-environment movements. Sexualized, racialized and naturalized differences, far from being the categorical boundary-keepers of the subject of Humanism, have evolved into fully fledged alternative models of the human subject.
The reactive approach to the posthuman is defended, by contemporary liberal thinkers like Martha Nussbaum acknowledge the challenges presented by contemporary, technology-driven global economies, but responds to them by reasserting classical humanist ideals and progressive liberal politics. Need for universal humanistic values as a remedy for the fragmentation and the relativistic drift of our times, also presented as an anti- dote against nationalism and ethnocentrism. One of the effects of globalization is a sort of re-contextualization induced by the market economy. This produces a new sense of inter-connection which in turn calls for a neo-humanist ethics. Providing solid foundations for moral values such as compassion and respect for others, which she firmly attaches to the tradition of American liberal individualism. She embraces universalism over and against the feminist and post-colonial insights about the importance of the politics of location and careful grounding in geo-political terms. There is no room for experimenting with new models of the self.
A second significant posthuman development comes from science and technology studies. Contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today. The Humanities continue to ask the question of the epistemological and political implications of the posthuman predicament for our understanding of the human subject. They also raise deep anxieties both about the moral status of the human and express the political desire to resist commercially owned and profit-minded abuses of the new genetic know-how. Contemporary science and technology studies, have developed an analytic form of posthuman theory. Panhumanity, a global sense of inter-connection among all humans, but also between the human and the non-human environment, including the urban, social and political, which creates a web of intricate inter-dependences. A great deal of its inter-connections are negative and based on a shared sense of vulnerability and fear of imminent catastrophes. This new global proximity does not always breed tolerance and peaceful co-existence; on the contrary, forms of xenophobic rejection of otherness and increasing armed violence are key features of our times.
Rose has developed an effective, empirically grounded analysis of the dilemmas of the posthuman condition. A Foucauldian brand of neo-Kantian normativity. The return to a notion of Kantian moral responsibility re-instates the individual at the core of the debate. Verbeek hints at the need for a post-anthropological turn that links humans to non-humans, qualified by a profoundly humanist and thus normative approach to technology itself. Technologies contribute actively to how humans do ethics. This results in shifting the location of traditional moral intentionality from autonomous transcendental consciousness to the technological artefacts themselves. The pride in technological achievements and in the wealth that comes with them must not prevent us from seeing the great contradictions and the forms of social and moral inequality engendered by our advanced technologies. Not addressing them, in the name of either scientific neutrality or of a hastily reconstructed sense of the pan-human bond induced by globalization, simply begs the question.
A focus on subjectivity is necessary because this notion enables us to string together issues that are currently scattered across a number of domains. The complexity of our smart technologies lies at the core of the post-anthropocentric. Humans will increasingly operate not ‘in the loop’ but ‘on the loop’, monitoring armed and working robots rather than fully controlling them. As they become smarter and more widespread, autonomous machines are bound to make life-or-death decisions and thus assume agency. A new ethical approach needs to be developed by active experiments. They should focus on three areas especially: firstly, the rule of Laws to determine whether the designer, the programmer, the manufacturer, or the operator is at fault if a machine goes wrong. To allocate responsibility, a detailed logs system is needed so that it can explain the reasoning behind the decision-making process. This has implications for design, with a preference for systems that obey predefined rules rather than decision making systems. Secondly, when ethical systems are embedded in robots, the judgements they make need to be ones that seem right to most people. Thirdly, new interdisciplinary collaboration is required between engineers, ethicists, lawyers and policy-makers, all of whom would draw up very different rules if left to their own devices.
A transversal inter-connection or an ‘assemblage’ of human and non-human actors, forward-looking experiments with new forms of subjectivity. Critical Posthumanism, my own variation. No conceptual or normative ambivalence towards posthumanism. Develop affirmative perspectives, sustained commitment to work out the implications of posthumanism for our shared understandings of the human subject and of humanity as a whole.
Edward Said: take into account the colonial experience, its violent abuses and structural injustice, as well as postcolonial existence. Ideals of reason, secular tolerance, equality under the Law and democratic rule have not been, mutually exclusive with European practices of violent domination, exclusion and systematic and instrumental use of terror. Gilroy holds Europe and the Europeans accountable for our collective failure in implementing the ideals of the human-Enlightenment. Micro-fascisms as the epidemics of our globalized times.
Diasporic mobility and the transcultural interconnections up against the forces of nationalism. A theory of mixture, hybridity and cosmopolitanism that is resolutely non-racial. Environmental theory stresses the link between the humanistic emphasis on Man as the measure of all things and the domination and exploitation of nature and condemns the abuses of science and technology. A new holistic approach that combines cosmology with anthropology and post-secular, mostly feminist spirituality, to assert the need for loving respect for diversity in both its human and non-human forms. Reverence for the sacredness of life, of deeply seated respect for all that lives.
What matters for Mies and Shiva is the reassertion of the need for new universal values in the sense of interconnectedness among humans, on a worldwide scale. Thus, universal needs are amalgamated to universal rights and they cover as much basic and concrete necessities, such as food, shelter, health, safety, as higher cultural needs, like education, identity, dignity, knowledge, affection, joy and care. These constitute the material grounding of the situated claims to new ethical values.
My position is in favour of complexity and promotes radical posthuman subjectivity, resting on the ethics of becoming, as we shall see in the next chapter. The focus is shifted accordingly from unitary to nomadic subjectivity, thus running against the grain of high humanism and its contemporary variations. An affirmative bond that locates the subject in the flow of relations with multiple others. A theory of subjectivity as both materialist and relational, ‘naturecultural’ and self-organizing is crucial in order to elaborate critical tools suited to the complexity and contradictions of our times. The subject allows us to take into account the elements of creativity and imagination, desire, hopes and aspirations without which we simply cannot make sense of contemporary global culture and its posthuman overtones. The posthuman predicament encourages us to undertake a leap forward into the complexities and paradoxes of our times.
The roar which lies on the other side of the urbane, civilized veneer that allows for bound identities and efficient social interaction is the Spinozist indicator of the raw cosmic energy that underscores the making of civilizations, societies and their subjects. Monistic universe, matter, the world and humans are not dualistic entities structured according to principles of internal or external opposition. Matter is one, driven by the desire for self-expression and ontologically free. The main idea is to overcome dialectical oppositions, engendering nondialectical understandings of materialism itself. Define matter as vital and self-organizing. This approach rejects all forms of transcendentalism, relocating difference outside the dialectical scheme, as a complex process of differing which is framed by both internal and external forces and is based on the centrality of the relation to multiple others.
The post-anthropocentric turn, linked to the compounded impacts of globalization and of technology-driven forms of mediation, strikes the human at his/her heart and shifts the parameters that used to define anthropos. Post-anthropocentrism enlists also science and technology studies, new media and digital culture, environmentalism and earth-sciences, bio-genetics, neuroscience and robotics, evolutionary theory, critical legal theory, primatology, animal rights and science fiction. This high degree of trans-disciplinarity alone adds an extra layer of complexity.
I will always side firmly with the liberatory and even transgressive potential of these technologies, against those who attempt to index them to either a predictable conservative profile, or to a profit-oriented system that fosters and inflates individualism. The machines are so alive, whereas the humans are so inert!
Advanced capitalism is a spinning machine that actively produces differences for the sake of commodification. It is a multiplier of deterritorialized differences, which are packaged and marketed under the labels of ‘new, dynamic and negotiable identities’ and an endless choice of consumer goods. The global circulation of goods, data, capital, bits and bytes of information frames the interaction of contemporary subjects on a daily basis. The most salient trait of the contemporary global economy is therefore its techno-scientific structure. Nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. Advanced capitalism both invests and profi ts from the scientific and economic control and the commodification of all that lives.
Why is matter so intelligent, though? Because it is driven by informational codes, which both deploy their own bars of information, and interact in multiple ways with the social, psychic and ecological environments. Subjectivity becomes an expanded relational self, engendered by the cumulative effect of all these factors. The relational capacity of the posthuman subject is not confined within our species, but it includes all non-anthropomorphic elements. Living matter – including the flesh – is intelligent and selforganizing, but it is so precisely because it is not disconnected from the rest of organic life. Life is posited as process, interactive and open-ended.
Zoe as the dynamic, selforganizing structure of life itself. The transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains. Zoe-centred egalitarianism is, for me, the core of the post-anthropocentric turn: it is a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism.
A posthuman theory of the subject emerges, therefore, as an empirical project that aims at experimenting with what contemporary, bio-technologically mediated bodies are capable of doing. These non-profit experiments with contemporary subjectivity actualize the virtual possibilities of an expanded, relational self that functions in a nature–culture continuum and is technologically mediated.
Life as surplus. Data banks of bio-genetic, neural and mediatic information about individuals are the true capital today. Data-mining includes profiling practices that identify different types or characteristics and highlights them as special strategic targets for capital investments. Visibility, predictability and exportability as the key criteria. The global economy is post-anthropocentric in that it ultimately unifies all species under the imperative of the market and its excesses threaten the sustainability of our planet as a whole.
Universal ‘Man’, in fact, is implicitly assumed to be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognized polity. The political economy of bio-genetic capitalism is post-anthropocentric in its very structures, but not necessarily or automatically posthumanistic. The posthuman dimension of post-anthropocentrism can consequently be seen as a deconstructive move. What it deconstructs is species supremacy, but it also inflicts a blow to any lingering notion of human nature, anthropos and bios, as categorically distinct from the life of animals and non-humans, or zoe. Once the centrality of anthropos is challenged, a number of boundaries between ‘Man’ and his others go tumbling down, in a cascade effect that opens up unexpected perspectives.
Animals, insects, plants and the environment, in fact the planet and the cosmos as a whole, are called into play. This places a different burden of responsibility on our species, which is the primary cause for the mess. Becoming-animal, displacement of anthropocentrism and the recognition of trans species solidarity on the basis of our being environmentally based, that is to say embodied, embedded and in symbiosis with other species. The planetary or becoming-earth dimension brings issues of environmental and social sustainability to the fore, with special emphasis on ecology and the climate change issue. Becoming-machine axis cracks open the division between humans and technological circuits, introducing biotechnologically mediated relations as foundational for the constitution the subject. The oedipal relationship between humans and animals is unequal and framed by the dominant human and structurally masculine habit of taking for granted free access to and the consumption of the bodies of others, animals included. It is saturated with projections, taboos and fantasies. Supreme ontological entitlement. Metaphorization.
Animals have long spelled out the social grammar of virtues and moral distinctions for the benefit of humans. Moral glossaries and cognitive bestiaries that turned animals into metaphorical referents for norms and values. The noble eagles, the deceitful foxes, the humble lambs. Companion species have been historically confined within infantilizing narratives that established affective kinship relations across the species.
As a nature cultural compound, a dog – not unlike other products of techno science – is a radical other, albeit a significant other. It is as socially constructed as most humans, not only through genetic screening, but also via health and hygiene regulations and various grooming practices. We need to devise, therefore, a system of representation that matches the complexity of contemporary non-human animals and their proximity to humans.
Since antiquity, animals have constituted a sort of zoo-proletariat, in a species hierarchy run by the humans. Exploited for hard labour, as natural slaves and logistical supports for humans prior to and throughout the mechanical age. An industrial resource in themselves, animal bodies being primary material products starting from milk and their edible meat, but think also of the tusks of elephants, the hides of most creatures, the wool of sheep, the oil and fat of whales, the silk of caterpillars, etc. Animals providing living material for scientifi c experiment, for our bio-technological agriculture, the cosmetics industry, drugs and pharmaceutical industries and other sectors of the economy. Genetically modified to produce organs for humans, tradable disposable bodies, inscribed in a global market of post-anthropocentric exploitation.
Post-anthropocentrism displaces the dialectical scheme of opposition, replacing well established dualisms. The vitality of their bond is based on sharing this planet, territory or environment on terms that are no longer so clearly hierarchical, nor self-evident. Away from species-ism and towards an ethical appreciation of what bodies (human, animal, others) can do. As nature–cultural compounds, these animals qualify as cyborgs, that is to say as creatures of mixity or vectors of posthuman relationality.
A copy made in the absence of one single original, Dolly pushes the logic of the postmodern simulacrum to its ultimate perversion. Both archaic and hyper-modern, Dolly is a compound of multiple anachronisms, situated across different chronological axes. Haraway also stresses the need for new images, visions and representations of the human–animal continuum. As the first patented animal in the world, a transgenic organism created for the purposes of research, the oncomouse is posthuman in every possible sense of the term. It has been created for the purpose of profit-making trafficking between the laboratories and the marketplace, and thus navigates between patenting offices and the research benches.
My deep-seated anti-humanist leanings show in the glee with which I welcome the displacement of anthropos. My posthuman enthusiasm, however, does not blind me to the cruel contradictions and the power differences at work in contemporary human–animal interaction. Animals are caught in a double bind: on the one hand, they are more than ever the object of inhumane exploitation; on the other hand, they benefit from residual forms of reparative humanization. Animal rights activists defend the end of ‘anthropolatry’, the assumption of human superiority, and call for more respect and priority to be given to the interests of other species and life forms. A new dialogical interspecies ethics based on decentring human privilege.
For radical eco-feminists, both utilitarianism and liberalism are found wanting: the former for its condescending approach to non-human others, the latter in view of the hypocritical denial of humans’ manipulative mastery over animals. Connected to male privileges and the oppression of women and supports a general theory of male domination. Meat-eating is targeted as a legalized form of cannibalism by old and new feminist vegetarian and vegan critical theory. Speciesism is therefore held accountable as an undue privilege to the same degree as sexism and racism. The corrective influence of feminism is valued because it emphasizes both the political importance of the collectivity and of emotional bonding. The emphasis on empathy accomplishes several significant goals in view of a posthuman theory of subjectivity.
Communication as an evolutionary tool. In emotions, rather than in reason, the key to consciousness. Moral values as innate qualities. Moral goodness is contagious. It is a bit too easy to project our aggressive tendencies onto the animals and reserve the quality of goodness as a prerogative of our species. Empathy as an innate and genetically transmitted moral tendency. Selfish genes and greed are definitely out.
The compensatory efforts on behalf of animals generate what I consider as a belated kind of solidarity between the human dwellers of this planet, currently traumatized by globalization, technology and the ‘new’ wars, and their animal others. It is at best an ambivalent phenomenon, in that it combines a negative sense of crossspecies bonding with classical and rather high-minded humanist moral claims. Humanism is actually being reinstated uncritically under the aegis of species egalitarianism. Extending the privileges of humanist values to other categories can hardly be considered as a selfless and generous, or a particularly productive move. Is it not the case then that the humans have spread to non-humans their fundamental anxiety about the future? It confirms the binary distinction human/animal by benevolently extending the hegemonic category, the human, towards the others. It denies the specificity of animals altogether, because it uniformly takes them as emblems of the transspecies, universal ethical value of empathy.
See the interrelation human/animal as constitutive of the identity of each. Explored as an open experiment, not as a foregone moral conclusion about allegedly universal values or qualities. Allow for new parameters to emerge for the becoming-animal of anthropos. Intensive spaces of becoming have to be opened and, more importantly, to be kept open. We need new genealogies, alternative theoretical and legal representations of the new kinship system and adequate narratives to live up to this challenge.
My situated position as a female of the species makes me structurally serviceable and thus closer to the organisms that are willing or unwilling providers of organs or cells than to any notion of the inviolability and integrity of the human species. I am a she-wolf, a breeder that multiplies cells in all directions; I am an incubator and a carrier of vital and lethal viruses; I am mother-earth, the generator of the future. My sex, historically speaking, never quite made it into full humanity, so my allegiance to that category is at best negotiable and never to be taken for granted.
The starting point for me remains the nature–culture continuum. We actually inhabit a nature–culture continuum which is both technologically mediated and globally enforced. Develop a dynamic and sustainable notion of vitalist, self-organizing materiality; enlarge the frame and scope of subjectivity along the transversal lines of post-anthropocentric relations. Subjectivity is not the exclusive prerogative of anthropos. It is not linked to transcendental reason; it is unhinged from the dialectics of recognition; it is based on the immanence of relations. We need to visualize the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language. The imagination, as well as the tools of critical intelligence, need to be enlisted for this task.
We also need to reconceptualize the relation to the technological artefact as something as intimate as close as nature used to be. The issue of geo-centred perspectives and the change of location of humans from mere biological to geological agents calls for recompositions of both subjectivity and community.
Philosophers of freedom were mainly, and understandably, concerned with how humans would escape the injustice, oppression, inequality or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems. The social constructivist approach of Marxist, feminist and post-colonial analyses does not completely equip them to deal with the change of spatial and temporal scale engendered by the post-anthropocentric or geo-centred shift. Deep ecology, ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, proposes a return to holism and to the notion of the whole earth as a single, sacred organism. It is based on a social constructivist dualistic method. This means that it opposes the earth to industrialization, nature to culture, the environment to society and comes down firmly on the side of the natural order. Its technophobic aspect is not particularly helpful in itself, considering the world we are living in.
It paradoxically reinstates the very categorical divide between the natural and the manufactured which it is attempting to overcome.
I am suspicious of the negative kind of bonding going on in the age of anthropocene between humans and non-humans. The trans-species embrace is based on the awareness of the impending catastrophe: the environmental crisis and the global warm/ning issue, not to speak of the militarization of space, reduce all species to a comparable degree of vulnerability. In fl agrant contradiction with its explicitly stated aims, it promotes full-scale humanization of the environment. A regressive move, deep ecology misreads the earth–cosmos nexus and merely expands the structures of possessive egoism and self-interests to include non-human agents. Deep ecology is therefore spiritually charged in an essentialist way. Because there are no boundaries and everything is interrelated, to hurt nature is ultimately to hurt ourselves. Thus, the earth environment as a whole deserves the same ethical and political consideration as humans. A well-meaning form of residual anthropomorphic normativity, applied to non-human planetary agents.
I see Spinozist monism, and the radical immanent forms of critique that rest upon it, as a democratic move that promotes a kind of ontological pacifism. Species equality in a post-anthropocentric world does urge us to question the violence and the hierarchical thinking that result from human arrogance and the assumption of transcendental human exceptionalism. Monistic relationality stresses instead the more compassionate aspect of subjectivity. A Spinozist approach, re-read with Deleuze and Guattari, allows us to by-pass the pitfalls of binary thinking and to address the environmental question in its full complexity. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) also use the term ‘Chaos’ to refer to that ‘roar’ of cosmic energy which most of us would rather ignore. They are careful to point out, however, that Chaos is not chaotic, but it rather contains the infinite expanse of all virtual forces. Critical theorists need to strike a rigorous and coherent note of resistance against the neutralization of difference that is induced by the perverse materiality and the tendentious mobility of advanced capitalism.
Socially embedded and historically grounded changes require a qualitative shift of our ‘collective imaginings’, or a shared desire for transformations. The conceptual frame of reference I have adopted for the method of de-familiarization is monism. It implies the open-ended, interrelational, multi-sexed and trans-species flows of becoming through interaction with multiple others. A posthuman subject thus constituted exceeds the boundaries of both anthropocentrism and of compensatory humanism, to acquire a planetary dimension.
The relationship between the human and the technological other has shifted in the contemporary context, to reach unprecedented degrees of intimacy and intrusion. The posthuman predicament is such as to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation between structural differences, or ontological categories, for instance between the organic and the inorganic, the born and the manufactured, fl esh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems.
The metaphorical or analogue function that machinery fulfilled in modernity, as an anthropocentric device that imitated embodied human capacities, is replaced today by a more complex political economy that connects bodies to machines more intimately, through simulation and mutual modification. The cyborgs are the dominant social and cultural formations that are active throughout the social fabric, with many economic and political implications.
Cyborgs include not only the glamorous bodies of hightech, jet-fighter pilots, athletes or film stars, but also the anonymous masses of the underpaid, digital proletariat who fuel the technology-driven global economy without ever accessing it themselves. What I want to argue next is that technological mediation is central to a new vision of posthuman subjectivity and that it provides the grounding for new ethical claims.
Becoming-machine, a playful and pleasure-prone relationship to technology that is not based on functionalism. It adds a political dimension by setting the framework of recomposition of bodily materiality in directions diametrically opposed to the spurious efficiency and ruthless opportunism of advanced capitalism. Contemporary machines are no metaphors, but they are engines or devices that both capture and process forces and energies, facilitating interrelations, multiple connections and assemblages. They stand for radical relationality and delight as well as productivity.
The elaboration of new normative frameworks for the posthuman subject is the focus of collectively enacted, non-profit-oriented experimentations with intensity, that is to say with what we are actually capable of becoming. We need to become the sorts of subjects who actively desire to reinvent subjectivity as a set of mutant values and to draw our pleasure from that, not from the perpetuation of familiar regimes.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The notion of codependence replaces that of recognition, much as the ethics of sustainability replaces the moral philosophy of rights. This reiterates the importance of grounded, situated and very specific and hence accountable perspectives in a move that I call zoe-centred egalitarianism.
Guattari’s machinic autopoiesis establishes a qualitative link between organic matter and technological or machinic artefacts. This results in a radical redefinition of machines as both intelligent and generative. They have their own temporality and develop through ‘generations’: they contain their own virtuality and futurity. Consequently, they entertain their own forms of alterity not only towards humans, but also among themselves, and aim to create meta-stability, which is the precondition of individuation. Machinic autopoiesis means that the technological is a site of post-anthropocentric becoming, or the threshold to many possible worlds. I also refer to these practices of becoming-machine as ‘radical neo-materialism’ or as ‘matterrealism’.
Capitalism is ‘bio-political’ in that it aims at controlling all that lives. It has already turned into a form of ‘bio-piracy’ because it exploits the generative powers of women, animals, plants, genes and cells. Human and anthropomorphic others are relocated in a continuum with non-anthropomorphic, animal or ‘earth’ others. This anthropocentric process produces a negative category of the human as an endangered species bound by fear of extinction. It also forces a new unity among the human and other species, in the form of compensatory extension of humanist values and rights to the non-human others. The same system perpetuates familiar patterns of exclusion, exploitation and oppression.
Let us trust women, gays, lesbians and other alternative forces, with their historically ‘leaky bodies’ and not fully human rights, to both reassert the powers and enhance the potentiality of the posthuman organism as generative ‘wetware’. The power of contemporary techno-culture to destabilize the categorical axes of difference exacerbates power relations and brings them to new necro-political heights, technological apparatus is no longer sexualized, racialized or naturalized, but rather neutralized as figures of mixity, hybridity and interconnectiveness. If the machine is both self-organizing and transgender, the old organic human body needs to be relocated elsewhere.
It would be misguided to assume that posthuman embodied subjects are beyond sexual or racialized difference. The politics of representation and hence the location of sexualized, racialized and naturalized differences are still strongly in place, though they have shifted significantly. Advanced capitalism is a post-gender system capable of accommodating a high degree of androgyny and a significant blurring of the categorical divide between the sexes. It is also a post-racial system that no longer classifies people and their cultures on grounds of pigmentation (Gilroy, 2000), but remains nonetheless profoundly racist. Gender is just a historically contingent mechanism of capture of the multiple potentialities of the body, including their generative or reproductive capacities. From the perspective of a posthuman monist political economy, power is a not a static given, but a complex strategic flow of effects which call for a pragmatic politics of intervention and the quest for sustainable alternatives We need to experiment with resistance and intensity in order to find out what posthuman bodies can do.
Because the gender system captures the complexity of human sexuality in a binary machine that privileges heterosexual family formations and literally steals all other possible bodies from us, we no longer know what sexed bodies can do. We therefore need to rediscover the notion of the sexual complexity that marks sexuality in its human and posthuman forms. Sexuality is a force, or constitutive element, that is capable of deterritorializing gender identity and institutions. Return to sexuality as a polymorphous and complex, visceral force and to disengage it from both identity issues and all dualistic oppositions. On a world scale, extreme forms of polarized sexual difference are stronger than ever. They get projected onto geo-political relations, creating belligerent gendered visions of a ‘clash of civilizations’ that is allegedly predicated in terms of women’s and GLBT people rights.
This humbling experience of not-Oneness, which is constitutive of the non-unitary subject, anchors the subject in an ethical bond to alterity, to the multiple and external others that are constitutive of that entity which, out of laziness and habit, we call the ‘self’. This is the ‘we’ that is evoked and actualized by the postanthropocentric creation of a new pan-humanity. It expresses the affirmative, ethical dimension of becoming-posthuman as a gesture of collective self-styling. It actualizes a community that is not bound negatively by shared vulnerability, the guilt of ancestral communal violence, or the melancholia of unpayable ontological debts, but rather by the compassionate acknowledgement of their interdependence with multiple others most of which, in the age of anthropocene, are quite simply not anthropomorphic.
The most serious political problems in post-anthropocentric theory arise from the instrumental alliance of bio-genetic capitalism with individualism, as a residual humanist definition of the subject. The new transversal alliance across species and among posthuman subjects opens up unexpected possibilities for the recomposition of communities, for the very idea of humanity and for ethical forms of belonging. We all stand to gain by the acknowledgment of a postanthropocentric, transversal structural link in the position of these embodied non-human subjects that were previously known as the ‘others’ of the anthropocentric and humanistic ‘Man’. Both kinship and ethical accountability need to be redefined in such a way as to rethink links of affectivity and responsibility. Not only for non-anthropomorphic organic others, but also for those technologically mediated, newly patented creatures we are sharing our planet with. It produces a more adequate cartography of our real-life conditions because it focuses with greater accuracy on the complexities of contemporary technologically mediated bodies and on social practices of human embodiment.
The modernist era stressed the power of technology not as an isolated event, but as a crucial element in the assemblage of industrialization, which involved manufactured objects, money, power, social progress, imagination and the construction of subjectivity. Objectification is indeed a humiliating and demeaning experience for humans in that it denies their full humanity and can thus be truly called inhuman at a basic social level. The commodification process itself reduces humans to the status of manufactured and hence profit-driven technologically mediated objects. These new technologies cannot but alter the organic human body through new forms of wanted and unwanted intimacy.
By transposing us beyond the confines of bound identities, art becomes necessarily inhuman in the sense of nonhuman in that it connects to the animal, the vegetable, earthy and planetary forces that surround us. Art is also, moreover, cosmic in its resonance and hence posthuman by structure, as it carries us to the limits of what our embodied selves can do or endure. It reaches the limits of life itself and thus confronts the horizon of death.
Science shares the mixed legacy of this historical period and is central to the project of industrialized modernity. Mechanical ‘others’, from impressive industrial machinery to banal household appliances, are the coveted objects of collectively funded and socially empowered scientific practices. They are yet another expression of that mixture of fear and desire for technology that art and cinema make manifest.
The bodies of the empirical subjects who signify difference (woman/native/earth or natural others) have become the disposable bodies of the global economy. Contemporary capitalism is indeed ‘bio-political’ in that it aims at controlling all that lives. Climate change is an unintended consequence of human actions as a species. Death and destruction are the common denominators for this transversal alliance.
The public discourse about environmental catastrophes or ‘natural’ disasters – the Fukushima nuclear plant and the Japanese tsunami, the Australian bushfires, hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, etc. – accomplishes a significant doublebind: it expresses a new ecological awareness, while re-inserting the distinction between nature and culture. The geo-political forces are simultaneously re-naturalized and subjected to the old hierarchical power relations determined by the dominant politics of the anthropomorphic subject. Public discourse has become simultaneously moralistic about the inhuman forces of the environment and quite hypocritical in perpetuating anthropocentric arrogance. This position results in the denial of the man-made structure of the catastrophes that we continue to attribute to forces beyond our collective control, like the earth, the cosmos or ‘nature’
Our public morality is simply not up to the challenge of the scale and the complexity of damages engendered by our technological advances. How to turn anxiety and the tendency to mourn the loss of the natural order into effective social and political action, how to ground such an action in the responsibility for future generation, in the spirit of social sustainability. Illness is clearly not only a prerogative of organic entities, but includes a widespread practice of mutual contamination between organic matter – anthropomorphic or not – and electronic circuitry.
Digital technology promotes dreams of immortality and control over life and death: complemented by a palpable fear of death and annihilation from uncontrollable and spectacular body-threats: antibiotic-resistant viruses, random contamination, flesh-eating bacteria. As is often the case, advanced capitalism functions by schizoid or internally contradictory moves. Thus, a socially enforced ideology of fitness, health and eternal youth goes hand in hand with increased social disparities in the provision of health care and in mortality rates among infants and youth. Both the quantity and the scale of the changes that have taken place in social and personal practices of dying, in ways of killing and forms of extinction, as well as the creativity of mourning rituals and the necessity of bereavement, are such as to support the expansion of the socio-cultural agenda. The new practices of bio-political management of ‘life’ mobilize also new and subtler degrees of death and extinction.
Bio-ethical citizenship indexes access to and responsibility for the cost of basic social services like health care to an individual’s manifest ability to act responsibly by reducing the risks and exertions linked to the wrong lifestyle. Where once the sole objective was to control the insane, the young, the feminine, the vagrant and the deviant, the objective in recent times has been to arrest the nonhuman, the inorganic, the inert – in short, the so-called “natural worlds. Linking forms of political control with the estimation of risk factors is a technique that Foucault defined as racism, as it configures – it engenders as ‘raced’ – entire populations in a hierarchical scale, this time not determined by pigmentation, but by other genetic characteristics. It permits the healthy life of some populations to necessitate the death of others, marked as nature’s degenerate or unhealthy ones. The question of the governance of life contains that of extinction as well. I find the over-emphasis on death as the basic term of reference inadequate to the vital politics of our era.
Speaking from the position of an embodied and embedded female subject, capable of reproducing the future and the species, I find the metaphysics of finitude to be a myopic way of putting the question of the limits of what we call ‘life’. Re-think death, the ultimate subtraction, as another phase in a generative process. The process of confronting the thinkability of a Life that may not have ‘me’ or any ‘human’ at the centre is actually a sobering and instructive process.
necro-politics, the administration of death: ‘the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and population’. Not only human, I might add, but also planetary. New forms of warfare entail simultaneously the breath-taking efficiency of ‘intelligent’, un-manned, technological weaponry on the one hand, and the rawness of dismembered and humiliated human bodies on the other. It is not up to the rationality of the Law and the universalism of moral values to structure the exercise of power, but rather the unleashing of the unrestricted sovereign right to kill, maim, rape and destroy the life of others. The old-fashioned army has now mutated into ‘urban militias; private armies; armies of regional lords; private security firms and state armies, all claim the right to exercise violence or to kill. The ‘population’ has also become disaggregated into ‘rebels, child soldiers, victims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or massacred on the model of ancient sacrifices, while the “survivors”, after a horrific exodus, are confined to camps and zones of exception.
Many contemporary wars, led by Western coalitions under the cover of ‘humanitarian aid’ are often neo-colonial exercises aimed at protecting mineral extraction and other essential geo-physical resources needed by the global economy.
Chomsky: Armed with the technology of global devastation and the jargon of pulp fiction, tabloid headlines and PlayStation games: ‘the War on terror, the Clash of Civilisations, the Axis of Evil, Operation Shock and Awe’. Those adventures set out to save the civilized world (‘homo humanus’) from its enemies (‘homo barbarus’), under the venerable banners of liberty, decency and democracy.
We have rather entered the era of orchestrated and instrumental massacres. These necro-political modes of governance also circulate as infotainment in global media circuits. It is also striking to note the role played by academic research in leading universities in the development of these killing robots.
Border control of immigration and the smuggling of people are major aspects of the contemporary inhuman condition and central players in the necro-political game. Refugees and asylum seekers become another emblem of the contemporary necro-power, because they are the perfect instantiation of the disposable humanity that Agamben also calls ‘homo sacer’ and thus constitute the ultimate necro-political subject.
The majoritarian masculine legal social contract is built on the desire to survive. This is not a politics of empowerment, but one of entrapment in an imagined natural order that in our system translates into a bio-political regime of discipline and control of bodies. What this means is that we are recognized as full citizens only through the position of victims, loss and injury and the forms of reparation that come with it. Hanafin proposes to take the necro-political dimension seriously by shifting away from thinking of legal subjectivity as death-bound to thinking about singularities without identity who relate intimately to one another and the environment in which they are located. Posthuman critical politics of rights. Think with and not against death.
Affirmative ethics is based on the praxis of constructing positivity, thus propelling new social conditions and relations into being, out of injury and pain. We need to think more rigorously about ways of dying, in the posthuman context of necropolitics on the one hand and the new forensic social sensibility on the other. Death is not a human prerogative, the environmental question is how to prevent species extinction. A bio-political issue: which species are allowed to survive and which to die?
A necro-political approach produces a more accurate cartography of how contemporary embodied subjects are interacting and inter-killing.
In my vitalist materialist view, Life is cosmic energy, simultaneously empty chaos and absolute speed or movement. It can hurt. Zoe is always too much for the specific slab of enfleshed existence that constitutes single subjects. Death is the inhuman conceptual excess: the unrepresentable, the unthinkable, and the unproductive black hole that we all fear. Also a creative synthesis of flows, energies and perpetual becoming. In a posthuman perspective, the emphasis on the impersonality of life is echoed by an analogous reflection on death. It is the event that structures our time-lines and frames our timezones, not as a limit, but as a porous threshold. It has already taken place as a virtual potential that constructs everything we are. Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor.
The ethics of productive affirmation is a different way of handling the issue of how to deal with pain and traumas and to operate in situations which are extreme, while working to bring out the generative force of zoe – life beyond the ego-bound human. Death is the event that has always already taken place at the level of consciousness. As an individual occurrence it will come in the form of the physical extinction of the body, but as event, in the sense of the awareness of finitude, of the interrupted flow of my beingthere, death has already taken place.
To approach death differently, we may want to start by introducing some critical distance from the allegedly self-evident value attributed to ‘Life’ in our culture. I would like to refer to a more lucid tradition of thought that does not start from the assumption of the inherent, self-evident and intrinsic worth of ‘life’ and stresses instead the traumatic elements of this same life in their often unnoticed familiarity. Life is passing and we do not own it; we just inhabit it, it is the inhuman within us, which frees us into life.
If sustained long enough, life becomes a habit. If the habit becomes self-fulfilling, life becomes addictive, which is the opposite of necessary or self-evident. There is nothing natural or automatic about it. One has to ‘jump-start’ into life regularly, by renewing the electro-magnetic charge of desire, though one often ends up going through the day on automatic pilot. Life is at best compelling, but it is not compulsive.
Moving beyond the paralysing effects of suspicion and pain, working across them is the key to ethics. Posthuman vital materialism displaces the boundaries between living and dying. ‘Life’, or zoe, aims essentially at self-perpetuation and then, after it has achieved its aim, at dissolution.
What we humans most deeply aspire to is not so much to disappear, but rather to do so in the space of our own life and in our own way.
Paradox: something in the structure of the human that simply resists belonging to common humanity and stretches beyond. What we do stretch out towards is endless cosmic energy, which is as fierce as it is self-organizing. While at the conscious level all of us struggle for survival, at some deeper level of our unconscious structures all we long for is to lie silently and let time wash over us in the stillness of non-life. The generative capacity of this life–death continuum cannot be bound or confined to the single, human individual. Just as the life in me is not mine or even individual in the narrow, appropriative sense espoused by liberal individualism, so the death in me is not mine, except in a very circumscribed sense of the term. It is neither human nor divine, but relentless material and vowed to multi-directional and cross-species relationality. Life does go on, relentlessly non-human in the vital force that animates it.
Sustainability does assume faith in a future, and also a sense of responsibility for ‘passing on’ to future generations a world that is liveable and worth living in. It is the intelligence of radically immanent flesh that states with every single breath that the life in you is not marked by any master signifier and it most certainly does not bear your name. Death is but an obvious manifestation of principles that are active in every aspect of life, namely the impersonal power of potentia. The posthuman subject rests on the affirmation of this kind of multiplicity and the relational connection with an ‘outside’ that is cosmic and infinite.
Te political and legal subject of this regime of life–death governmentality is a post-anthropocentric eco-sophical entity. Marked by the interdependence with its environment through a structure of mutual flows and data transfer that is best configured as complex and intensive inter-connectedness. This environmentally bound subject is a finite collective entity, moving beyond the parameters of classical Humanism and anthropocentrism. It is useful to defi ne it as a machine, something that is simultaneously more abstract and more materially embedded. An embodied affective and intelligent entity that captures processes and transforms energies and forces. Thus we need to experiment with new practices that allow for a multiplicity of possible instances – actualizations and counteractualizations – of the different lines of becoming. Such a subject of zoe-power raises questions of ethical and political urgency. We need more pragmatic open-endedness and a diversification of possible strategies. The starting point is the relentless generative but also destructive force of zoe and the specific brand of trans-species egalitarianism which they establish as the grounds for posthuman ethics. The specific temporality of the posthuman subject needs to be re-thought beyond the metaphysics of mortality. If the embodied subject of biopower is a complex molecular organism, a bio-chemical factory of steady and jumping genes, an evolutionary entity endowed with its own navigational tools and an in-built temporality, then we need a form of ethical values and political agency that reflects this high degree of temporal complexity. This ethical approach cannot be dissociated from considerations of power. The potency of zoe, in other words, displaces the exploitative and necro-political gravitational pull of advanced capitalism.
Far from being merely a crisis of values, this situation confronts us with a formidable set of new opportunities. A re-composition of our shared understanding of the human as a species. Start from those differences of location and, by accounting for them in terms of power, as both restrictive and productive. To experiment with different modes of posthuman subjectivity. We should consider the posthumanistic brand of post-anthropocentric vitalism. This conviction is supported by my historical and geopolitical location.
Humanities and in particular theory [have been] an exercise of hierarchical exclusion and cultural hegemony. New critical epistemologies have offered alternative definitions of the ‘human’ by inventing interdisciplinary areas which call themselves ‘studies’, like: gender, feminism, ethnicity, cultural studies, post-colonial, media and new media and Human rights studies. It requires methodological innovations, such as a critical genealogical approach that by-passes the mere rhetoric of the crisis.
Technologically mediated post-anthropocentrism can enlist the resources of bio-genetic codes, as well as telecommunication, new media and information technologies, to the task of renewing the Humanities. Things are never clear-cut when it comes to developing a consistent posthuman stance, and linear thinking may not be the best way to go about it. Environmental, evolutionary, cognitive, bio-genetic and digital trans-disciplinary discursive fronts are emerging around the edges of the classical Humanities and across the disciplines. They rest on post-anthropocentric premises and technologically mediated emphasis on Life as a zoe-centred system of species egalitarianism
New multi-disciplinary research areas had to be set up to come to terms with the horrors of our times: from Holocaust studies to research on slavery and colonialism, through to work on the traumatic memories of multiple ideology-driven genocides. I propose to move forward into multiple posthuman futures. To develop an ethical framework worthy of our posthuman times.
Affirmation, not nostalgia Self-transformation through humble experimentation.
Foucault argued back in the 1970s that the Humanities as we have come to know them are structured by an implicit set of humanistic assumptions about ‘Man’, which are historically framed and contextually defined, in spite of their universalistic pretensions. What has emerged as a potentially fatal flaw at the core of the Humanities is their structural anthropomorphism and perennial methodological nationalism. Translates into sustained hostility towards, or genuine incompatibility with, the culture, practice and institutional existence of science and technology.
The university as an institution, and the Humanities especially, are under attack. They are accused of being unproductive, narcissistic and old-fashioned in their approach and also of being out of touch with contemporary science and technology culture. Humanities need to fi nd the inspirational courage to move beyond an exclusive concern for the human, and to embrace more planetary intellectual challenges. Cultural and social studies of science need to address their resistance to theories of the subject, while philosophies of the subject, on the other hand, would be advised to confront their mistrust and mis-cognition of bio-sciences.
Posthuman times call for posthuman Humanities studies. A position between universalistic pretensions of standing outside space and time on the one hand, and narrow empiricism on the other. Specific theory is grounded, accountable but also shareable and hence open to generic applications. This approach offers both epistemic and ethical advantages which can be immediately put to good use.
The ‘matter-realists’ combine the legacy of post-structuralist. Anti-humanism with the rejection of the classical opposition ‘materialism/idealism’ to move towards ‘Life’ as a nonessentialist brand of contemporary vitalism and as a complex system. Karen Barad’s work on ‘agential realism’ is an eminent example of this tendency. By choosing to by-pass the binary between the material and the cultural, agential realism focuses on the process of their interaction. This results in emphasizing an ethics of knowledge that reflects and respects complexity and also renews the practice of critical reflexivity. Luciana Parisi emphasizes that the great advantage of vitalist monism is that it defines nature–culture as a continuum which evolves through ecology of differentiation.
The proper study of the posthuman condition is the posthuman itself. This new knowing subject is a complex assemblage of human and non-human, planetary and cosmic, given and manufactured, which requires major re-adjustments in our ways of thinking. Sustainable Humanities spells the end of the idea of a de-naturalized social order disconnected from its environmental and organic foundations, and calls for more complex schemes of understanding the multilayered form of inter-dependence we all live in. It stresses the specific contribution of the Humanities to the public debate on climate change, through the analysis of the social and cultural factors that underscore the public representation of these issues.
Humanities and more specifically cultural research help us think the unthinkable. 'Deep History’: an interdisciplinary combination of geological and socio-economic history that focuses both on the planetary or earth factors and on the cultural changes that have jointly created humanity over hundreds of thousands of years. Knowledge that grants the earth the same role and agency as the human subjects that inhabit it. One Health seeks to promote, improve, and defend the health and well-being of all species by enhancing cooperation and collaboration between physicians, veterinarians, other scientifi c health and environmental professionals.
Cartography accuracy, with the corollary of ethical accountability; trans-disciplinarity; the importance of combining critique with creative fi gurations; the principle of non-linearity; the powers of memory and the imagination and the strategy of de-familiarization. A cartography is a theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present. Cartographies aim at epistemic and ethical accountability by unveiling the power locations which structure our subject-position. Implies the partial or limited nature of all claims to knowledge. Non-linearity.
The heteroglossia of data we are confronted with demands complex topologies of knowledge for a subject structured by multi-directional relationality. Adopt non-linearity to develop cartographies of power that account for the paradoxes of the posthuman era.
Nomadic theory proposes a critique of the powers that dominant, linear memory-systems exercise over the Humanities and social sciences.
The ‘truth’ of a text requires an altogether different form of accountability and accuracy that resides in the transversal nature of the affects they engender, that is to say the outward-bound interconnections or relations they enable and sustain. The method of ‘faithfulness to the text’ and of citation is more than flat repetition without difference. What comes to the fore instead is the creative capacity that consists in being able to remember and to endure the affective charges of texts as events. A text, theoretical and scientific as well as literary, is a relay point between different moments in space and time, as well as different levels, degrees, forms and configurations of the thinking process. It is a mobile entity, move outwards, out of bounds, in webs of encounters with ideas, others, texts.
Creativity constantly reconnects to the virtual totality of a block of past experiences, memories and affects, which, in a monistic philosophy of becoming, get recomposed as action or praxis in the present. An exercise in synchronization, which sustains activity ‘here and now’ by making concrete or actual the virtual intensity. Freed from chronological linearity and the logo-centric gravitational force, memory in the posthuman nomadic mode is the active reinvention of a self that is joyfully discontinuous, as opposed to being mournfully consistent.
The practice of defamiliarization, the knowing subject disengages itself from the dominant normative vision of the self he or she had become accustomed to, to evolve towards a posthuman frame of reference. Becoming-earth or becomingimperceptible are more radical breaks with established patterns of thought (naturalization) and introduce a radically imminent planetary dimension. It can involve a sense of loss and pain. Involves the loss of cherished habits of thought and representation, a move which can also produce fear, sense of insecurity and nostalgia.
Co-presence, that is to say the simultaneity of being in the world together, defines the ethics of interaction with both human and non-human others. A collectively distributed consciousness emerges from this, a transversal form of nonsynthetic understanding of the relational bond that connects us. This places the relation and the notion of complexity at the centre of both the ethics and the epistemic structures and strategies of the posthuman subject.
The dominant vision of the scientific enterprise is based on the institutional implementation of a number of Laws that discipline the practice of scientific research and police the thematic and methodological borders of what counts as respectable, acceptable, and fundable science. In so doing, the laws of scientific practice regulate what a mind is allowed to do, and thus they control the structures of our thinking.
The important aspect of nomadic vitalism is that it is neither organicist nor essentialist, but pragmatic and immanent. Practices and flows of becoming, complex assemblages and heterogeneous relations. No idealized transcendental, but virtual multiplicity. The monistic ontology that sustains this vision of life as vitalist, self-organizing matter also allows the critical thinker to re-unite the different branches of philosophy, the sciences and the arts in a new alliance. Posthuman critical theory, post-identitarian, non-unitary and transversal subjectivity based on relations with human and non-human others.
The Renaissance model of the Humanist academy defined by the scholar as an artist or artisan handcrafting his or her research patiently and without constraints, over a long period of time, is simply over. It has been replaced by a modern ‘Fordist’ model of the university as a chain-production unit massproducing academic good. The university is a point of capital’s self-knowledge, of capital’s ability not just to manage risk or diversity, but to extract a surplus value from that management. This extraction occurs as a result of speculation on differentials in information. The lack of specific referents means that ‘excellence’ is indexed on money, markets’ demands and consumers’ satisfaction.
On a more positive note, ‘dereferentialization’ opens up the possibility for new spaces ‘which we can think the notions of country and community differently’. Confronting the historicity of our condition means moving the activity of thinking outwards, into the real world, so as to assume accountability for the conditions that define our location.
As the professoriate and students’ representative bodies lost their powers of governance to neoliberal economic logic, the Humanities dispersed their foundational value to become a sort of luxury intellectual consumer good. The new campuses will be virtual and hence global by definition. The university as a hub of both localized knowledge production and global transmission of cognitive data. New forms of re-grounding and of accountability.
The global city space requires and depends upon intelligent spaces of high-technological interactivity and can thus be defined as a ‘smart’ city space with dense technological infrastructure. Ambient technology rests on infrastructural networks which, being non-hierarchical and user-friendly, defeat the traditional organization of both knowledge production and knowledge transfer. In some ways, the technologically smart urban space displaces and replaces the university, by inscribing knowledge and its circulation at the heart of the social order. The academic needs to unfold onto the civic and become embedded in the urban environment in a radical new manner. The city as a whole is the science park of the future.
The key words are: open source, open governance, open data and open science, granting free access by the public to all scientific and administrative data. The cities of tomorrow will be living centres of learning, information brokering and shared cognitive practice, based on intense social networking. More than ever, the university needs to pursue its aim of ensuring independent research, constructive pedagogical practice and critical thinking. The combination of technical skills and civic responsibility, a concern for social and environmental sustainability, and a discerning relationship to consumerism, are the core values of the contemporary multi-versity. An exploded and expanded ‘smart’ city space distributes the knowledge products to students-users who are literate in infrastructural knowledge production.
The distracted, numbers-swamped, audit-crazed, grant-chasing life of most contemporary academics departments is far removed from classical ideals of the contemplative life’. Academics function more like mid-ranking executives in a business organization run by accountants and fi nancial advisors than as independent scholars in a self-organized community. We need a university that looks like the society it both reflects and serves, that is to say a globalized, technologically mediated, ethnically and linguistically diverse society that is still in tune with basic principles of social justice, the respect for diversity, the principles of hospitality and conviviality.
We already live in permanent states of transition, hybridization and nomadic mobility, in emancipated (post-feminist), multi-ethnic societies with high degrees of technological intervention. These are neither simple, nor linear events, but rather multi-layered and internally contradictory phenomena. Nostalgia and hyper-consumerism join hands, under the hold of neo-liberal restoration of possessive individualism. We need to start from non-unitary, relational subject positions so as to learn to think differently about ourselves and our systems of values, starting with adequate cartographies of our embedded and embodied posthuman locations.
Embrace non-profit as a key value in contemporary knowledge production, but this gratuitousness is linked to the construction of social horizons of hope and therefore it is a vote of confidence in the sheer sustainability of the future Inter-generational solidarity, responsibility for posterity, but it is also our shared dream, or a consensual hallucination.13
The posthuman predicament enforces the necessity to think again and to think harder about the status of the human, the importance of recasting subjectivity accordingly, and the need to invent forms of ethical relations, norms and values worthy of the complexity of our times. I have emphasized the importance of critical theory, in the sense of a mix of critique and creativity that makes it imperative for us to come to terms with the present in new, fundamental ways.
We simply do not know what our enfleshed selves, minds and bodies as one, can actually do. Find out by embracing an ethics of experiment with intensities. Ontological relationality. A sustainable ethics for non-unitary subjects rests on an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the nonhuman or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of selfcentred individualism on the one hand and the barriers of negativity on the other.
Combining ethical values with the well-being of an enlarged sense of community, which includes one’s territorial or environmental inter-connections.
Posthuman theory also bases the ethical relation on positive grounds of joint projects and activities, not on the negative or reactive grounds of shared vulnerability. Capable of a universalistic reach, though it rejects moral and cognitive universalism.
Non-profit; emphasis on the collective; acceptance of relationality and of viral contaminations; concerted efforts at experimenting with and actualizing potential or virtual options; and a new link between theory and practice, including a central role for creativity. The yearning for sustainable futures can construct a liveable present. The future is the virtual unfolding of the affirmative aspect of the present, which honours our obligations to the generations to come.
The pursuit of collective projects aimed at the affirmation of hope, rooted in the ordinary micro-practices of everyday life, is a strategy to set up, sustain and map out sustainable transformations. Responsibility and inter-generational accountability. The ethical ideal is to actualize the cognitive, affective and sensorial means to cultivate higher degrees of empowerment and affirmation of one’s interconnections to others in their multiplicity. Regulated by an ethics of joy and affirmation that functions through the transformation of negative into positive passions.
Nomadic posthuman thought yearns for a qualitative leap out of the familiar, trusting the untapped possibilities opened by our historical location in the technologically mediated world of today. It is a way of being worthy of our times, to increase our freedom and understanding of the complexities we inhabit in a world that is neither anthropocentric nor anthropomorphic, but rather geo-political, ecosophical and proudly zoe-centred. My interest in the posthuman is directly proportional to the sense of frustration I feel about the human, all too human, resources and limitations that frame our collective and personal intensity.
I live at the tail end of bio-power, that is to say amidst the relentless necro-political consumption of all that lives. I am committed to starting from this, not from a nostalgic re-invention of an all-inclusive transcendental model, a romanticized margin or some holistic ideal. Also, simultaneously and without contradiction, from the staggering, unexpected and relentlessly generative ways in which life, as bios and as zoe, keeps on fighting back. A joyful member of multiple companion species in practice
The limits and limitations of posthuman bodies must become the object of collective discussions and decisions across the multiple constituencies of our polity and civil society, in a manner that does not assume the centrality, let alone the universality, of humanistic principles and anthropocentric assumptions. We need new frameworks for the identification of common points of reference and values in order to come to terms with the staggering transformations we are witnessing. It is both exciting and unsettling to be reminded, almost on a daily basis, that we are, after all, such stuff as dreams are made of and that the new possibilities are immense.