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Posthumanism

From "The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory"


2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Posthumanism considers the possibility that historical phenomena (such as advances in technology or discoveries about animals) are leading to fundamental changes in the human species and its relationship with the world. It thus involves radically rethinking the dominant, familiar humanist account of who we are as human beings. According to the humanist model (a clear and influential example of which can be found in the seventeenth-century writings of Ren Descartes), the figure of the human has a natural and eternal place at the very center of things, where it is clearly distinguished from machines and animals, where it shares with all other human beings a unique and universal essence, where it is the origin of meaning and the sovereign subject of history, and where it acts according to something called human nature. For humanists, Man, to use the problematic gendered term often employed in accounts of the human condition, enjoys a position of automatic and unquestionable hegemony. Man is the measure of all things. Posthumanism, byway of contrast, begins with the recognition that Man is not the privileged and protected center, because humans are no longer - and perhaps never were - utterly distinct from animals and machines, are the products of historical and cultural differences that make any appeal to universal human essence impossible, are constituted as subjects by a linguistic order that pre-exists and transcends them, and are unable to direct the course of world history toward a supreme, uniquely human goal. In short, posthumanism emerges from the theoretical and practical inadequacy- or even impossibility - of humanism. Posthumanist criticism has certain things in common with the antihumanism commonly associated with the work of theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, but it tends to depart from antihumanist discourse when it comes to the matter of approaching the troublesome figure of Man: while antihumanism regularly set out actively to shatter the hegemony of humanism by making a radical, sometimes scientific, break from the legacy of Man, posthumanism often takes as its starting point the inherent instability of humanism. Man does not necessarily need to be toppled or left behind with a giant leap, in other words, because he is already a fallen or falling figure. Many books and essays have explicitly and extensively addressed different aspects of posthumanism in the last couple of decades, and in a wide variety of academic disciplines (literary studies, cultural studies, philosophy, film studies, theology, geography, animal studies, architecture, politics, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, education, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, for example). Recent popular culture, too, has explored the implications of posthumanist existence, often in the realm of science fiction, where cyberpunk novels by writers such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, along with films such as David Cronenberg's eXiztenZ , television series such as Star Trek: The Next Generation , and manga/anime such as Ghost in the Shell, depict humans and machines interfacing with each other in new, complex, and provocative ways. The term posthuman might, then, feel like a fairly recent invention, as if it were perhaps something coined with the rise of online existence or artificial intelligence. But post-Human can actually be found as far back as the 1880s, when it was used in the work of the theosophist H. P. Blavatsky. (In the name of historical accuracy, it should be noted that Oliver Krueger (2005: 78) is completely wrong to claim that the term in question is present even earlier in Thomas Blount's Glossographia dictionary of 1656; Blount refers there

only to posthumian, a now obsolete word which is taken simply to mean following, to come, or that shall be.) Blavatsky did not develop a detailed theory of the posthuman, however, and neither did the handful of writers (Jack Kerouac among them) who used the term in passing at various points in the first half of the twentieth century. It was not until the publication in 1985 of Donna J. Haraway's A manifesto for cyborgs, in fact, that posthumanism began truly to catch on and take shape. Although she did not actually use the terms posthumanism, posthumanist, or posthuman in her manifesto, Haraway proposed that a series of three interrelated boundary breakdowns (68) had transformed the long-established and long-untroubled figure of the human into a shimmering, hybrid cyborg. (Although cyborgs are often associated with the realm of science fiction, the term was actually coined in 1960 by two scientists, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, to describe the technologically enhanced human being that they imagined safely exploring the dangerous depths of outer space. The word cyborg itself is a contraction of cybernetic organism.) Humanism, Haraway noted, had always relied upon clear distinctions between human and animal, organism and machine, and physical and nonphysical, but a host of dramatic modern developments in science, technology, capitalism, race and ethnicity studies, militarism, animal studies, and feminism, for example - as well as the fantastic visions made possible by science fiction - had made such rigid, absolutist thinking unsustainable and politically dubious. By the late twentieth century, she wrote, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics (66). The human had become obsolete; the figure of Man had been replaced by the cyborg. In the wake of Haraway's widely reproduced manifesto, many accounts of posthumanism have examined how modern technoscientific culture has irreparably undermined the hegemony of humanism. In books by N. Katherine Hayles (1999), Chris Hables Gray (2001), Elaine L. Graham (2002), and Thomas Foster (2005), for instance, the posthumanist implications of cybernetics and cyberspace, informatics, artificial intelligence, genetics, and medicine have been examined in detail. When computers can beat humans at chess, when life is understood as a code and when death can be deferred or redefined by medical intervention, when the Genome Project has revealed that humans share 98 percent of their genetic composition with chimpanzees, when artificial limbs outperform and blend seamlessly with their organic counterparts, and when some experts in the field of artificial intelligence believe that it will soon be possible for humans to achieve immortality by transferring themselves into a computer, the old humanist model seems desperately incapable of speaking to the present order of things. Only a radically revised account - a posthumanist account - could make sense of such a scenario. Posthumanism is not purely a question of high technology, however, and not merely because, as Hayles points out in How We Became Posthuman (1999), technological rapture can all too easily preserve some of the most fundamental assumptions of humanist discourse. While it is true that a great deal of criticism and fiction has imagined the posthuman as a technological figure, other strands of scholarship have examined posthumanism in terms of architecture and space, gender, mathematics, geography, education, paleoanthropology, cognition, rights, fetishism, extraterrestrials, botany, postcolonialism, and theology. Meanwhile, Cary Wolfe's Animal Rites (2003) has led the way in arguing for a posthumanism that arises not from technological developments, but from a sustained reconsideration of the speciesist humanist binary opposition between Man and animal. (In a curious oversight, many of the technology-obsessed critics who were quick to embrace Donna Haraway's Manifesto for cyborgs were just as quick to ignore or marginalize the crucial collapse of the traditional human/animal divide mapped by her essay.) Although it claims with some force not to be interested in the terms posthuman, posthumanism, and posthumanist (perhaps because of some of the ways in which A manifesto for cyborgs has been appropriated by simplistic technophiles), Haraway's When Species Meet (2008) covers ground closely related to that examined by Wolfe in Animal Rites. In attending to the phenomenon of companion species, Haraway traces how absolutely ordinary, everyday encounters between humans and animals baffle the assumptions of humanist discourse and dramatically disturb the reign of Man. In the light of the work of Wolfe and Haraway, as well as related scholarship by Julie Ann Smith (2003) on how humans can live experimentally in posthumanist arrangements with animals, it seems most likely that posthumanism - a field so often wrongly associated only with the latest technological development - will continue to address animals and what Wolfe's book calls

the discourse of species as it unfolds toward future configurations. While a great deal of scholarship devoted to posthumanism takes issue with humanism and subsequently celebrates its waning - Haraway famously ends her manifesto by declaring that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess - it would be a mistake to conclude that everyone who writes about the subject is in favor of posthumanist existence. In 2002, for instance, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama published a widely discussed book entitled Our Posthuman Future, in which he proposed that the contemporary drift away from the principles of humanism was a dangerous societal development in need of urgent correction. Contemporary biotechnology, for Fukuyama, is a threat because it will possibly alter human nature and thereby move us into a posthuman stage of history. This is important because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species (7). While writers such as Haraway and Wolfe have stressed the new and exciting possibilities that open up with the shift from humanism to posthumanism, Fukuyama sees only fear and terrible loss in the fading of Man. For him, that is to say, posthumanism is something to be strongly opposed and countered by the trusty principles of humanism. There is, then, no convenient consensus when it comes to questions of posthumanism; different critics have approached the term in very different ways and have drawn very different conclusions. One thing, however, would appear to be certain: posthumanism has become a major point of debate in recent years because humanism is no longer an adequate or convincing account of the way of the world. SEE ALSO: Althusser, Louis; Comics Theory; Cyberspace Studies; Foucault, Michel; Hegemony; Lacan, Jacques; Science Fiction ; Science Studies; Technology and Popular Culture REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Badmington, N. (ed.) (2000). Posthumanism. Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke. Foster, T. (2005). The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis. Fukuyama, F. (2002). Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution . Profile London . Graham, E. L. (2002). Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. Manchester University Press Manchester. Gray, C. H. (2001). Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. Routledge New York. Haraway, D. J. (1985). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, 80, 65-107. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. University of Chicago Press Chicago . Krueger, O. (2005). Gnosis in cyberspace? Body, mind and progress in posthumanism. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 14, (2) 77-89. Smith, J. A. (2003). Beyond dominance and affection: Living with rabbits in post-humanist households. Society & Animals, 11, (2) 181-197. Wolfe, C. (2003). Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. University of Chicago Press Chicago . NEIL BADMINGTON

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Persistent URL to the Entry: http://literati.credoreference.com/content/entry/wileylitcul/posthumanism/0

APA
BADMINGTON, N.(2011). Posthumanism. In The encyclopedia of literary and cultural theory. Retrieved from http://0-literati.credoreference.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu/content/entry/wileylitcul/posthumanism/0

MLA
BADMINGTON, NEIL "Posthumanism." The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Hoboken: Wiley, 2011. Credo Reference. Web. 21 February 2014.

Chicago
BADMINGTON, NEIL "Posthumanism." In The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Hoboken: Wiley, 2011. http://0literati.credoreference.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu/content/entry/wileylitcul/posthumanism/0 (accessed February 21, 2014.)

Harvard
BADMINGTON, N. 2011 'Posthumanism' in The encyclopedia of literary and cultural theory, Wiley, Hoboken, USA. Accessed: 21 February 2014, from Credo Reference

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