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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The question of what defines the human, and of what is human about the humanities, have been shaken up by the radical critiques of humanism and the displacement of anthropomorphism that have gained currency in recent years, propelled in part by rapid advances in our knowledge of living systems and of their genetic and algorithmic codes coupled with the global expansion of a knowledge-intensive capitalism. In Posthuman Knowledge, Rosi Braidotti takes a closer look at the impact of these developments on three major areas: the constitution of our subjectivity, the general production of knowledge and the practice of the academic humanities. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial and anti-racist theory, she argues that the human was never a neutral category but one always linked to power and privilege. Hence we must move beyond the old dualities in which Man defined himself, beyond the sexualized and racialized others that were excluded from humanity. Posthuman knowledge, as Braidotti understands it, is not so much an alternative form of knowledge as a critical call: a call to build a multi-layered and multi-directional project that displaces anthropocentrism while pursuing the analysis of the discriminatory and violent aspects of human activity and interaction wherever they occur. Situated between the exhilaration of scientific and technological advances on the one hand and the threat of climate change devastation on the other, the posthuman convergence encourages us to think hard and creatively about what we are in the process of becoming.
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Posthuman, All-Too-Human
Notes
1 The Posthuman Condition
A Convergence
On the Importance of Being Exhausted
Theory Fatigue
Post-Work Fatigue
Democracy Fatigue
Notes
2 Posthuman Subjects
Multi-Scalar Relationality
Immanence and Differential Materialism
‘We-Are-(All)-In-This-Together-But-We-Are-Not-One-And-The-Same’
Posthumanism Is Not Inhumanism
Reaffirming Affirmation
The Force of the Present
Notes
3 Posthuman Knowledge Production
Post-Natural Objects of Enquiry
Epistemic Accelerationism
Cognitive Capitalism and the New Knowledge Economy
Note
4 The Critical PostHumanities
Transdisciplinary Exuberance
A Genealogy of the Critical PostHumanities
First-Generation Studies
Second-Generation Studies
From Critical Studies to the PostHumanities
A Theoretical Framework for the Critical PostHumanities
Defining Features
Institutional Answers
Notes
5 How To Do Posthuman Thinking
Major Science and Minor Science
Posthuman Legal Practice
Desire for Adequate Understanding
Artistic Practice
A Different Empiricism
Posthuman Disability Studies
Defamiliarization
Posthuman Pedagogy
Notes Towards a Posthuman University
Notes
6 On Affirmative Ethics
Are ‘We’ in this Together?
The Planetary Differential Humanities
Zoe
-Driven Ethics of Affirmation
Affirmation and Vulnerability
Notes
7 The Inexhaustible
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 The Posthuman Condition
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Posthuman Knowledge
Rosi Braidotti
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Rosi Braidotti 2019
The right of Rosi Braidotti to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3525-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3526-2 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Braidotti, Rosi, author.
Title: Posthuman knowledge / Rosi Braidotti.
Description: Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018059982 (print) | LCCN 2019014453 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509535279 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509535255 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509535262 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Humanism.
Classification: LCC B821 (ebook) | LCC B821 .B628 2019 (print) | DDC 144--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059982
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Acknowledgements
During the research phase of this book I benefited greatly from the stimulating intellectual environment at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London that Tamar Garb and her team set up and where I was Distinguished Visiting Professor in 2017. I am also grateful to Henrietta Moore, Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London, who invited me as an active Honorary Visiting Professor as of 2017.
I spent two very productive months as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM), at the Bauhaus University Weimar in Germany. I am grateful to Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert for their research leadership, and to my research assistant Eduard Kolosoff for his devoted support.
Part of this material was first presented in my Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Yale University in 2017. I want to thank the Tanner Foundation in Utah and the Tanner Lectures Committee at Yale University for their invitation, and especially Yale University President Peter Salovey for his warm and witty welcome. Sincere thanks to Professor Gary Tomlinson and his colleagues and staff at the Whitney Centre for the Humanities for their splendid hospitality. I am grateful to my respondents Joanna Radin and Rüdiger Campe for their insightful contributions during the open discussion, and to many colleagues and students for their formal and informal comments during the sessions. I am also grateful to my friend Moira Fradinger for her moving public introduction.
My sincere thanks to Genevieve Lloyd for her wise and enlightening guidance throughout the drafting process of this book. Thanks also to Matthew Fuller and Keith Ansell-Pearson for their generous insights, theoretical advice and bibliographical details. I am much indebted to Marlise Mensink for her warm friendship. I also wish to thank my personal research assistants Gry Ulstein, Evelien Geerts and Lauren Hoogen Stoevenbeld for their unfailing logistical and organizational assistance. I am indebted to Linda Dement for introducing me to Jessie Boylan’s photograph of the 2015 ‘Ngurini’, an immersive installation by the Nuclear Futures Arts Program with the Yalata Aboriginal Community.
Sections of this book were published in my chapter in the volume Conflicting Humanities, which I co-edited with Paul Gilroy in 2016, and in the Introduction to The Posthuman Glossary, which I co-edited with Maria Hlavajova in 2018. I acknowledge them both warmly here. An earlier draft of the theoretical framework for the PostHumanities was published in Theory, Culture & Society in May 2018.
This book would not have been possible without the loyal support of my publisher John Thompson; I truly thank him for his enduring commitment to my posthuman project.
Finally, my eternal gratitude to my life partner Anneke Smelik for her intellectual, emotional and moral support, and because living together is so much fun.
Acknowledgement of the Cover Image
Ngurini, immersive installation by the Nuclear Futures Arts Program with the Yalata Aboriginal Community, 2015. Photo by Jessie Boylan.
Introduction: Posthuman, All-Too-Human
It is not at all uncommon for users of any kind of websites or digital services to be requested to prove their humanity on a daily basis. The prompt usually reads something like: ‘Before We Subscribe You, We Need To Confirm You Are A Human’. And it looks like this:
Having to demonstrate one’s humanity assumes as the central point of reference the algorithmic culture of computational networks – not the human. This mundane example demonstrates that in contemporary society the human has become a question mark. Who or what counts as human today?
This is not a simple question and it is best answered in the context of our posthuman times. What or who is the human today can only be understood by incorporating the post-human and non-human dimensions. By posthuman I mean both a historical marker of our condition and a theoretical figuration. The posthuman is not so much a dystopian vision of the future, but a defining trait of our historical context. I have defined the posthuman condition as the convergence of posthumanism on the one hand and post-anthropocentrism on the other, within an economy of advanced capitalism (Braidotti 2013, 2017). The former focuses on the critique of the Humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the allegedly universal measure of all things, while the latter criticizes species hierarchy and anthropocentric exceptionalism. Although they overlap and tend to be used interchangeably in general debates, they are rather discrete and separate events, both in the intellectual genealogies and in their social manifestations.
As a theoretical figuration, the posthuman is a navigational tool that enables us to survey the material and the discursive manifestations of the mutations that are engendered by advanced technological developments (am I a robot?), climate change (will I survive?), and capitalism (can I afford this?). The posthuman is a work in progress. It is a working hypothesis about the kind of subjects we are becoming. Who that ‘we’ is, and how to keep that collectivity open, multiple and non-hierarchical, will be constant concerns in this book.
Though I can barely conceal my fascination for the posthuman, I do inhabit it with critical distance. The posthuman condition implies that ‘we’ – the human and non-human inhabitants of this particular planet – are currently positioned between the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction. Yes, we are in this together: between the algorithmic devil and the acidified deep blue sea. The Fourth Industrial Revolution involves the convergence of advanced technologies, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology and the Internet of Things. This means that digital, physical and biological boundaries get blurred (Schwab 2015). The Sixth Extinction refers to the dying out of species during the present geological era as the result of human activity (Kolbert 2014). More specifically, this conjuncture positions us between two parallel and to a certain extent specular forms of acceleration: the systemic accelerations of advanced capitalism and the great acceleration of climate change. Striking a balance between these conflicting forces, so as to keep the broader picture in mind, is the current posthuman challenge.
At the core of our predicament – but not its sole cause – is the unprecedented degree of technological intervention we have reached, and the intimacy we have developed with technological devices. And yet, the posthuman condition cannot be reduced simply to an acute case of technological mediation. This convergence, with its distinctive combination of speedy transformations and persistent inequalities, is planetary and multi-scalar (Banerji and Paranjape 2016). It affects social and environmental ecologies as well as individual psychic and shared emotional landscapes. It is not a linear event.
My argument is that we need to learn to address these contradictions not only intellectually, but also affectively and to do so in an affirmative manner. This conviction rests on the following ethical rule: it is important to be worthy of our times, the better to act upon them, in both a critical and a creative manner. It follows that we should approach our historical contradictions not as some bothersome burden, but rather as the building blocks of a sustainable present and an affirmative and hopeful future, even if this approach requires some drastic changes to our familiar mind-sets and established values.
To describe the posthuman location as a convergence of several contradictory speeds of transformation does not even begin to approximate the tensions and paradoxes it generates, nor the pain and anxiety it evokes. In such a context, neither universalistic notions of ‘Man’ nor exceptional claims for ‘Anthropos’, are sufficient to explain how we are supposed to cope with this challenge. Such outdated positions do not help us understand how knowledge is being produced and distributed in the era of high technological mediation and ecological disaster, also known as the Anthropocene.1 Humanistic hubris aside, unless one is at ease with multi-dimensional complexity, one cannot feel at home in the twenty-first century.
The posthuman condition may strike the reader as catastrophe-prone at first sight, but in this book, I hope to balance this negative assessment with a more complex and insightful account of the situation. The book highlights the positive potential of the posthuman convergence and offers tools for coping with it affirmatively. Despair is not a project; affirmation is. This book is about the forms of self-understanding and new ways of knowing that are emerging from the convergence of posthumanist and post-anthropocentric approaches. While maintaining the analytical and genealogical distinction between these two components, I argue that their convergence is currently producing a qualitative leap in new directions: posthuman knowledge production. This is not a single development, but a zigzagging set of pathways, which includes a range of posthumanist positions and also a revision of a variety of neo-humanist2 claims. A full overview of contemporary enquiries about what constitutes the basic unit of reference for the human exceeds the scope of this study; I have explored it elsewhere (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018).
In this book I want to focus on a double target: first to outline the features of emergent posthuman subjects and second to explore the new scholarship they are producing within and across the fields of the (Post) Humanities. I will present cartographies that detect a number of operative principles and discursive meta-patterns and will attempt to provide a critical framework for analysing and assessing them. The underlying conviction of this book is that the posthuman convergence, far from being a crisis – let alone an indicator of extinction – marks a rich and complex historical transition. Full of risks, it also affords huge opportunities for both humans and non-human agents, as well as for the Humanities, to reinvent themselves. Like all transitions, however, it requires some vision and experimental energy as well as considerable doses of endurance.
The aims of this book are the following: to ground the posthuman in real-life conditions; to detect alternative formations of posthuman subjects; to assess the fast-growing volume of posthuman knowledge production; and to inscribe posthuman thinking subjects and their knowledge within an affirmative ethics.
In chapter 1, I will outline the extent of the posthuman convergence in both theoretical and affective terms. Chapter 2 addresses the question of what counts as a posthuman subject and traces emerging patterns of posthuman subjectivity. Chapter 3 assesses the advantages of posthumanist knowledge production. Chapter 4 looks at the rise of the Critical PostHumanities and situates them in the fast-moving landscapes of cognitive capitalism. Chapter 5 analyses established patterns of posthuman thought and discusses concrete practices to evaluate them. Chapter 6 delves deeper into affirmative ethics and what changes of temporal and spatial scale it requires. In a shorter final chapter, I return to the affective mood of the posthuman convergence. The book finishes with the endless potentialities of posthuman resistance and the inexhaustible quality of life itself.
Perhaps here, at the end of the Introduction, I should answer the question whether I’m a robot. No, I’m not, but some of my best friends are! I am posthuman – all-too-human. This means that I am materially embodied and embedded, with the power to affect and be affected, living in fast-changing posthuman times. What all of that entails will be explained in the pages that follow.
Notes
1
The term ‘Anthropocene’, coined in 2002 by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, describes the current geological era as dominated by measurable negative human impact on the Earth, through technological interventions and consumerism (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). It was discussed at the International Geological Congress in August 2016, but was rejected in July 2018 by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, in favour of the ‘Meghalayan’ era.
2
These range from the classical humanism of Martha Nussbaum (1999) to post-colonial (Gilroy 2016); queer (Butler 2004) and critical humanism (Critchley 2014), to name just a few.
Chapter 1The Posthuman Condition
A Convergence
Discussions about the human, more specifically about what constitutes the basic unit of reference to define what counts as human, are by now part of daily conversations, public discussions and academic debates. Historically, however, questions such as ‘what do you mean by human?’, ‘are we human enough?’, or ‘what is human about the Humanities?’ are not what anybody – let alone we, Humanities scholars, were accustomed to asking. The force of habit led us to talk about Man, Mankind, or civilization (always assumed to be Western) as a matter of fact. We were encouraged to teach Western civilizational values and to endorse human rights, delegating to anthropologists and biologists the far more irksome task of debating what the ‘human’ may actually mean.
Even philosophy, which is accustomed to question everything, dealt with the question of the human by casting it within the protocols and methods of disciplinary thinking. There it conventionally fell into a discursive pattern of dualistic oppositions that defined the human mostly by what it is not. Thus, with Descartes: not an animal, not extended and inert matter, not a pre-programmed machine. These binary oppositions provided definitions by negation, structured within a humanistic vision of Man as the thinking being par excellence. Whereas the oppositional logic is a constant, the actual content of these binary oppositions is historically variable. Thus, as John Mullarkey (2013) wittily observed, the animal provides an index of death for Derrida (2008), an index of life for Deleuze (2003) and an index of de-humanization for Agamben (1998). But the effect of these variations is to reassert the central theme, namely the pivotal function of the human/non-human distinction within European philosophy.
It is important to keep in mind from the start, however, that the binary distinction human/non-human has been foundational for European thought since the Enlightenment and that many cultures on earth do not adopt such a partition (Descola 2009, 2013). This is the strength of the insights and understandings that can be learned from indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies. As Viveiros de Castro eloquently put it, this theoretical operation implements the Great Divide: ‘the same gesture of exclusion that made the human species the biological analogue of the anthropological West, confusing all the other species and peoples in a common, privative alterity. Indeed asking what distinguishes us from the others – and it makes little difference who “they” are, since what really matters in that case is only “us” – is already a response’ (Viveiros de Castro 2009: 44). He argues that indigenous perspectivism posits a ‘multinatural’ continuum across all species, all of which partake of a distributed idea of humanity. This means they are considered as being endowed with a soul. This situates the divide human/non-human not between species and organisms, but as a difference operating within each of them (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2009). This conceptual operation assumes a commonly shared human nature that includes the non-humans. To call this approach ‘animism’ is to miss the point, because Amerindian perspectivism teaches us that ‘each kind of being appears to other beings as it appears to itself – as human – even as it already acts by manifesting its distinct and definitive animal, plant, or spirit nature’ (Viveiros de Castro 2009: 68). In other words, each entity is differential and relational. Which, incidentally, is also the source of Viveiros de Castro’s explicit – albeit critical – alliance with Deleuze. I shall return to this in the next chapter.
For now, the point is that the posthuman condition encourages us to move beyond the Eurocentric humanistic representational habits and the philosophical anthropocentrism they entail. Nowadays we can no longer start uncritically from the centrality of the human – as Man and as Anthropos – to uphold the old dualities. This acknowledgement does not necessarily throw us into the chaos of non-differentiation, nor the spectre of extinction. It rather points in a different direction, towards some other middle ground, another milieu, which I will explore in this book.
Theoretical and philosophical critiques of Humanism have been carried out in an outspoken and explicit manner in modern Continental philosophy ever since Nietzsche. More recently critiques of Humanism have been advanced by movements of thought such as post-structuralism (Foucault 1970); vital materialism (Deleuze 1983; Deleuze and Guattari 1987), critical neo-materialism (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012), feminist materialism (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Coole and Frost 2010), and anti-racist and post-colonial movements (Said 2004; Gilroy 2000).
The posthuman, however, is not just a critique of Humanism. It also takes on the even more complex challenge of anthropocentrism. The convergence of these two lines of critique, in what I call the posthuman predicament, is producing a chain of theoretical, social and political effects that is more than the sum of its parts. It makes for a qualitative leap in new conceptual directions: posthuman subjects producing posthuman scholarship. The point about the convergence of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism needs to be stressed, because in current debates the two are often either hastily assimilated in a sweeping deconstructive merger, or violently re-segregated and pitched against each other. While insisting that the posthuman convergence is decidedly not a statement of inhumane indifference, it is important to emphasize the mutually enriching effect of the intersection between these two lines of enquiry. At the same time, it is crucial to resist all tendencies to reduce posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism to a relation of equivalence, and to stress instead both their singularity and the transformative effects of their convergence. Unless a critique of Humanism is brought to bear on the displacement of anthropocentrism and vice-versa, we run the risk of setting up new hierarchies and new exclusions.
Stressing the convergence factor helps avoid another risk, namely that of pre-empting the effects of the current juncture, by pre-selecting a single direction for the developments of new knowledge and ethical values. What the posthuman convergence points to instead is a multi-directional opening that allows for multiple possibilities and calls for experimental forms of mobilization, discussion and at times even resistance. The keyword of posthuman scholarship is multiplicity. The range of posthuman options is wide and growing, as the chapters in this book will track and trace. Posthuman knowledge will also provide some guidelines for assessing these developments.
Instead of proposing a single counter-paradigm, the point of the posthuman convergence is to issue a critical call: we need to build on the generative potential of already existing critiques of both Humanism and anthropocentrism, in order to deal with the complexity of the present situation. In this book I stress the heterogeneous structure of the posthuman convergence in order to reflect the multi-layered and multi-directional structure of a situation that combines the displacement of anthropocentrism – in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene – with the analysis of the discriminatory aspects of European Humanism. Considering the perpetuation of violent human activity and interaction, I keep the emphasis on justice as social, trans-species and transnational. In earlier work I have called that zoe-centred justice (Braidotti 2006). A zoe-centred justice has to be backed by relational ethics. These are key elements of the posthuman agenda, because let us not forget that ‘we are in this together’.
Critiques of European Humanism pertain to the very tradition of European Humanism, or, as Edward Said (1994) shrewdly pointed out, you can critique Humanism in the name of Humanism. These critiques are as essential to the Western project of modernity as to the modernist project of emancipation. They have historically been voiced by the anthropomorphic others of ‘Man’ – the sexualized and racialized others claiming social justice and rejecting exclusion, marginalization and symbolic disqualification.
Relinquishing anthropocentrism, however, triggers a different set of actors and a more complex affective reaction. Displacing the centrality of Anthropos within the European world view exposes and explodes a number of boundaries between ‘Man’ and the environmental or naturalized ‘others’: animals, insects, plants and the environment. In fact, the planet and the cosmos as a whole become objects of critical enquiry and this change of scale, even just in terms of a nature–culture continuum, may feel unfamiliar and slightly counter-intuitive.
The critique of anthropocentrism that is entailed in posthuman knowledge is highly demanding for scholars in the Humanities because it enacts a double shift. Firstly, it requires an understanding of ourselves as members of a species, and not just of a culture or polity. Secondly, it demands accountability for the disastrous planetary consequences of our species’ supremacy and the violent rule of sovereign Anthropos. Most people with an education in the Humanities and the Social Sciences are neither accustomed nor trained to think in terms of species.
In this regard, Freud’s insight about evolutionary theory remains sharply relevant. Freud warned us that Darwin inflicted such a deep narcissistic wound upon the Western subject, that it resulted in negative responses to evolutionary theory, such as disavowal. Thus, scholars in the Humanities uphold as a matter of fact, that is to say as a commonsensical given, the classical distinction between bios – human – and zoe – non-human. Bios refers to the life of humans organized in society, while zoe refers to life of all living beings. Bios is regulated by sovereign powers and rules, whereas zoe is unprotected and vulnerable. However, in the context of the posthuman convergence, I maintain that this opposition is too rigid and no longer tenable. In this book I explore the generative potential of zoe as a notion that can engender resistance to the violent aspects of the posthuman convergence.
Although one of the undeniable strengths of Humanism is the multiple forms of criticism that it has historically given rise to, even radical critics of Humanism, with their emphasis on diversity and inclusion, do not necessarily or automatically tackle the deeply engrained habits of anthropocentric thinking. Yet, in order to denaturalize economic inequalities and social discrimination, critical cultural and social theory is also called to task as long as it rests methodologically on a social constructivist paradigm that upholds the binary nature–culture distinction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a post-anthropocentric sensibility has made only a relatively recent appearance in scholarship in the Humanities (Peterson 2013).
In this book I develop a framework for posthuman knowledge by creating a balancing act between post-humanism and post-anthropocentrism. I do so by building on, but also leaving behind, the established controversy between Humanism and anti-Humanism. This controversy preoccupied Continental philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, in what became known as the postmodern moment, with consequences that were far-reaching, notably for ethical and political thought and practice. We cannot possibly ignore or dismiss this controversy, some aspects of which are returning to haunt the posthuman convergence. Nonetheless, we could gain by moving beyond the polemic – which is what I try to do in this book. The central challenge that the posthuman convergence throws open is how to reposition the human after Humanism and anthropocentrism. No, I’m not a robot, but that begs the question what kind of human I am, or we are becoming, in this posthuman predicament. The primary task of posthuman critical thought is to track and analyse the shifting grounds on which new, diverse and even contradictory understandings of the human are currently being generated, from a variety of sources, cultures and traditions. Addressing this task raises a number of challenges that defy any simplistic or self-evident appeal to a generic and undifferentiated figure of the human, let alone to traditional, Eurocentric humanist values.
To start accounting for the human in posthuman times, I suggest to carefully ground the statement ‘we humans’. For ‘we’ are not one and the same. In my view, the human needs to be assessed as materially embedded and embodied, differential, affective and relational. Let me unpack that sentence. For the subject to be materially embedded means to take distance from abstract universalism. To be embodied and embrained entails decentring transcendental consciousness. To view the subject as differential implies to extract difference from the oppositional or binary logic that reduces difference to being different from, as in being worth less than. Difference is an imminent, positive and dynamic category. The emphasis on affectivity and relationality is an alternative to individualist autonomy.
Rejecting the mental habit of universalism is a way of acknowledging the partial nature of visions of the human that were produced by European culture in its hegemonic, imperial and Enlightenment-driven mode. Suspending belief in a unitary and self-evident category of ‘we humans’, however, is by no means the premise to relativism. On the contrary, it means adopting an internally differentiated and grounded notion of being human. Recognizing the embodied and embedded, relational and affective positions of humans is a form of situated knowledge that enhances the singular and collective capacity for both ethical accountability and alternative ways of producing knowledge (Braidotti 2018). The posthuman predicament, with its upheavals and challenges, gives the opportunity to activate these alternative views of the subject against the dominant vision. This is what is at stake in the posthuman convergence.
The posthuman doubles up as both an empirical and a figurative dimension. The posthuman is empirically grounded, because it is embedded and embodied, but it is also a figuration (Braidotti 1991), or what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call a ‘conceptual persona’. As such, it is a theoretically-powered cartographic tool that aims at achieving adequate understanding of on-going processes of dealing with the human in our fast-changing times. In this regard, the posthuman enables us to track, across a number of interdisciplinary fields, the emergence of discourses about the posthuman which are generated by the intersecting critiques of Humanism and of anthropocentrism.
The itinerary is as straightforward as it is breath-taking: the notion of human nature is replaced by a ‘naturecultures’ continuum (Haraway 1997, 2003). The idea of naturecultures brings to an end the categorical distinction between life as bios, the prerogative of humans, as distinct from zoe, which refers to the life of animals and non-humans, as well as to de-humanized humans (Braidotti 2006, 2018). What comes to the fore instead is new fractures within the human, new human–non-human linkages, new ‘zoontologies’ (de Fontenay 1998; Gray 2002; Wolfe 2003), as well as complex media-technological interfaces (Bono, Dean and Ziarek 2008). The posthuman predicament is, moreover, framed by the opportunistic commodification of all that lives, which, as I argue below, is the political economy of advanced capitalism.
On the Importance of Being Exhausted
I fully concede at the outset of my book that the posthuman convergence makes for swinging moods, which alternate between excitement and anxiety. Moments or periods of euphoria at the astonishing technological advances that ‘we’ have accomplished, alternate with moments or periods of anxiety in view of the exceedingly high prize that we – both humans and non-humans – are paying for these transformations. We are caught in contradictory pulls and spins that call for constant negotiations in terms of time, boundaries and degrees of involvement with, and disengagements from, the same technological apparatus that frames our social relations.
Obviously, none of this is happening in a vacuum. If the public debates at the end of the Cold War in the 1990s were dominated by the dubious – and ideologically loaded – claim to the ‘end of history’, by the 2020s we seem to be heading for a massive outburst of over-fatigue with just about everything else. We may feel exhausted about a range of issues, from democracy to liberal politics, everyday politics, classical emancipation, the knowledge of experts, the nation state, the EU, academic education – and so on. Critical theory reflects this negative trend by indulging in its own kind of self-pitying lament. What happened to push us towards such millenarian feelings of doom? What is this tiredness all about?
The mutations induced by the posthuman convergence are unsettling and often startling. To come back to the example at the beginning of the introduction, it is daily practice for the slightly exhausted citizen-users of the new technologies to be requested to prove their humanity in order to gain access to specialized websites and other digital services. After you have seen the prompt ‘we need to confirm you are a human’ and you have clicked the ‘I’m not a robot’ box, you will probably encounter sentences like ‘How would you like to pay? By mobile phone transfer? Paypal? Bitcoin? We don’t take cash …’. As Matthew Fuller pointed out, the box ticking on the reCAPTCHA form is only a pretext.1 What the software is actually looking for are certain characteristic response times and movements of the mouse, track pad or touchscreen that show the action is not being carried out by another piece of software but a human. It is not unlikely, however, that a physical robot may mimic such actions or a piece of code replicate their effect.
In any case, having to demonstrate one’s humanity in order to access goods and services seems to be the imperative of a ‘new’ economy, centred on the algorithmic culture of computational networks, not good old Man/Homo/Anthropos – the human. In our information age the boundaries between anthropomorphic humans and quasi-human technological substitutes have been radically displaced. Just consider the extent to which medicine and health care is now performed by highly sophisticated human–robotics interaction, centralized data banks and Internet-backed self-medication.
The prospect is as exciting as it is depressing. The feeling of dispossession is acute, with so much information, knowledge and thinking power now being produced and situated outside the traditional container – which used to be the human mind, embodied in an anthropomorphic frame. What happens when thinking, reasoning, assessing risks and opportunities are executed by algorithmically-driven computational networks instead? And when so much of life, living processes of cell formation and splitting, is operated synthetically via stem-cell research? Test-tube babies? Artificial meat? As the AI and robotics industry are cloning the neural and sensorial system of other species – dogs for scent, dolphins for sonar, bats for radar, etc. – the human body strikes us as a rather old-fashioned anthropomorphic engine, not quite suited to contain the fast-moving intelligence of our technologies. This is not a ‘new’ problem in itself, but it is gathering momentum and speed.
Obviously, the image of the neural human container is inadequate and needs to be updated and replaced by flows and distributed processes instead. But a switch to fluid process ontologies alone is not enough, as the postmodern era clearly demonstrated. The posthuman conceals deeper conceptual challenges in terms of bridging the mind–body and nature–culture divides. Thus, neither the holistic organicism of early twentieth-century philosophies of Life, often contaminated by European fascism, nor the dismissal of subjectivity altogether, in favour of protocols of in-human reason, is equal to the challenge. What I propose is a shift towards posthuman subject positions so as to be able to affect these transformations and shape them in the direction of ethically affirmative and politically sustainable alternatives.
Indeed, ‘we’, the human heirs of Western post-modernity, are increasingly burnt out and fatigued, while ‘they’ – the technological artefacts we have brought into being – are smarter and more alive than ever (Haraway 1985, 1990). Questions about life, live, liveliness, smartness, of being and remaining alive – and possibly growing even smarter – are circulating widely. They constitute the inevitable and painful knots of contradictions, in the multi-layered ecologies that structure the posthuman convergence. Being a posthumanist is a non-nostalgic way of acknowledging the pain of this transition, of extracting knowledge from it, and reworking it affirmatively.
The constant stress generated by this see-saw of expectation and dejection, euphoria and anguish, boom and gloom, however, leaves us, quite simply, exhausted. On a daily, sociological level, this state of exhaustion has been documented through alarming statistics concerning burn-out, depression and anxiety disorders. The figures are especially high among the youth, with suicide rates also rising at a disturbing pace. Feeling emotionally and physically drained, over-worked and unable to cope, are all-too-familiar conditions in our fast-moving, cynically competitive world.
This system is exhausting in that it pursues an internally contradictory aim: on the one hand, it runs on the ‘timeless time’ (Castells 2010) of a technologically interconnected society where the economy functions 24/7 and capital never stands still. On the other hand, it functions through a public discourse of health, fitness and care of the self and thus requires a conscious and self-regulating, healthy reserve of labour. Not getting enough sleep forms the nucleus of an unresolved tension: to avoid the state of tiredness resulting from the endless pursuit of production, consumption and constant digital connectivity. The negative fall-out of such a state is the emergence of a dysfunctional, under-performing population, untouched by the healing power of restorative sleep – too tired to even sleep properly.
It is no wonder then, as several social commentators have noted (Fuller 2018), that sleep has emerged as a crucial topic in public policy, management and the popular media. On the corporate side, media mogul Arianna Huffington, after selling her majority shares of the world’s largest blog, The Huffington Post, is devoting her latest venture to the pursuit of wellness, sleep and mindfulness, as keys to enhanced professional performance. The alternative to such an approach is the widespread consumption of prescription drugs to deal both with insomnia and anxiety.
According to recent reports, the sale of anti-anxiety medication is expected to generate revenue of $3.7 billion by 2010 in the US alone, while the UK is at present the second largest market of illegal online sales of the anti-anxiety medication Xanax (Mahdawi 2018). The World Health Organization estimated in 2016 that, without more treatment, 12 billion working days will be lost because of anxiety every year. For De Sutter (2018), the psycho-pharmaceutical sub-plot of capitalism is central to its success: mood enhancement and chemical control are so manifest as to warrant the quip that capitalism and cocaine work in tandem. The state of exhaustion is real, but it is not a single or linear phenomenon.
Complexity is at work here, too. Provocatively perhaps, I would like to pick out some components of the exhausted condition, which transcend the negative and are capable of producing generative states. These aspects have less to do with what the professionals call ‘reduced performance’ than with a sense of evacuation of selfhood, a low-energy opening out beyond the frame of ego-indexed identity. Such an opening can be quite liberating and afford the possibility of actualizing yet unrealized potentials.
Approaching the state of exhaustion affirmatively, offers some unexpected options. Exhaustion thus defined is not a psychological mood, but rather an intransitive state that is not linked to a specific object, let alone a mental disposition. As such, it is capable of pervading the full spectrum of our social existence. ‘We are tired of something’, writes Deleuze in his commentary on Beckett, ‘but exhausted by nothing’ (1995b: 4). Let me dare to suggest that there is a creative potential here, which means that exhaustion is not a pathological state that needs to be cured, as an actual disorder, but a threshold of transformation of forces, that is to say a virtual state of creative becoming. Of course, I do not mean to disregard the pain, but rather encourage us to see the intensity of the discomfort as a motor of change, expressing also the capacity to open up to non/in-human and other-than-human forces. This ability to sense, grasp and work with the virtual is one of the distinct qualities that makes us human in the first place. Which is not to say that we have always been posthuman, but rather that the specific contemporary manifestation of this particular contradiction need not inevitably breed negative reactions. If the human is a vector of transversal becoming, i.e. reaching across categories, then the posthuman convergence can multiply the possibilities and unfold in a number of different directions, depending on our own degree of action and involvement (Braidotti 1991, 2011a). Differential, grounded perspectives are the motor for differential patterns of becoming.
Let me emphasize that the grounded, perspectivist and accountable approach I am developing in this book in response to the negative aspects of the posthuman convergence neither ignores nor disavows the pain and difficulties involved in our current predicament. It offers a different way of processing this profound discomfort: my vital materialist account of posthuman affirmation provides a remedy to the political fractures and the ethical challenges of posthuman times, while avoiding a return to falsely universalist notions of the ‘human’. The posthuman convergence is an analytic tool for understanding the grounded, perspectival and accountable nature of the affective, social and epistemic processes we are currently involved in, and the role of non-human agents in co-producing them. It should not be misunderstood as ‘inhuman(e)’, or unconcerned with the well-being of all. On the contrary, the posthuman is a workable framework to assist in the elaboration of alternative forces and values that can be generated from the burnt-out core of the old schemes and mind-sets.
What has been exhausted in our world is a set of familiar formulae, a compilation of motifs and mental habits ‘we’ had embroidered around the notion of the human as a concept and a repertoire of representations. Not unlike the characters in a Beckett text, ‘we’, the posthumans, have run out of possible combinations by which we can pull out our old tricks, one last time. Confronted with a blank existential space, like the silent passages in a radio play, we may remember, but not necessarily miss, the great clamour of Being, the boisterous self-confidence with which the spokesmen of Logos used to bash our ears with grand proclamations and master theories. How all that has changed!
Not only is theory out of fashion (see the next section), but we are not even capable of sharing the same social space anymore, let alone an acoustic one. Nowadays everyone walks around wrapped inside its own acoustic bubble, supported by personalized earphones and Spotified lists. Segregated but conjoined within the same white noise, we have become quantified selves, that is to say both individualized and divided (‘dividuals’, as Deleuze would say, or ‘fitbits’, as others would call it). Caught somewhere between stasis and expectation, we could surrender to despair, or take our chances and re-invent ourselves. Exhaustion can become affirmative, if the conditions for regeneration are shared by a sufficient amount of people, of both the human and the non-human kind, who embrace it as an opening out towards new virtual possibilities and not as a fall into the void. In that case we do need a people, a community, and an assemblage: ‘we’ – this complex multiplicity – cannot survive or act alone.
In this book I propose a creative posthuman approach and explore the case of posthuman knowledge production and the rising field of the PostHumanities to document it. I will argue that the state of exhaustion has already been activated into the generative pre-condition to learn to think differently about ourselves. Such knowledge can help us build a transversal assemblage of human, non-human and inhuman components. Posthuman knowledge is fuelled by transversality and heterogeneity: multiplicity and complexity shall be our guiding principles and sustainability our goal.
The way to get started is by composing a ‘we’ that is grounded, accountable and active. This is the collective praxis of affirmative politics, which can help us out of the alternation of euphoria and despair, giddying elation and toxic negativity. In these posthuman times, amidst technologically mediated social relations, the negative effects of economic globalization and a fast-decaying environment, in response to the paranoid and racist rhetoric of our ‘post-truth’ political leaders, how can we labour together to construct affirmative ethical and political practices? How can we work towards socially sustainable horizons of hope, through creative resistance? How are scholars in the Humanities currently reconfiguring their fields of knowledge, in response to the posthuman challenges? What tools can we use to resist nihilism, escape consumerist individualism and get immunized against xenophobia? The answer is in the doing, in the praxis of composing ‘we, a people’, through alliances, transversal connections and in engaging in difficult conversations on what troubles us. In this respect, our posthuman times, with their large inhuman component, are all too human.
Theory Fatigue
Let me expand on one of the features of contemporary exhaustion that lies close to my experience, namely the manifest fatigue with theory and theorists. Although the definition of theory is never clear or consistent in the polemical debates that surround it, it tends to be linked to critical discourses produced by the Humanities and Social Sciences, especially if left-leaning and prone to use polysyllabic words. The ‘post-theoretical malaise’ (Cohen, Colebrook and Miller 2012) translates easily into anti-intellectualism in society at large and sets a rather sedate mood that is directly linked to our current socio-political context.
