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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PTLC - Polity Themes in 20th and 21st Century Literature
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
This timely book examines the rise of Posthumanism as both a material condition and a developing philosophical-ethical project in the age of cloning, gene engineering, organ transplants and implants. Nayar first maps the political and philosophical critiques of traditional humanism, revealing its exclusionary and 'speciesist' politics that position the human as a distinctive and dominant life form. He then contextualizes the posthumanist vision which, drawing upon biomedical, engineering and techno-scientific studies, concludes that human consciousness is shaped by its co-evolution with other life forms, and our human form inescapably influenced by tools and technology. Finally the book explores Posthumanism's roots in disability studies, animal studies and bioethics to underscore the constructed nature of 'normalcy' in bodies, and the singularity of species and life itself. As this book powerfully demonstrates, Posthumanism marks a radical reassessment of the human as constituted by symbiosis, assimilation, difference and dependence upon and with other species. Mapping the terrain of these far-reaching debates, Posthumanism will be an invaluable companion to students of cultural studies and modern and contemporary literature.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
1: Revisiting the Human: Critical Humanisms
Terms and Definitions
Critical Humanism and the Origins of Posthumanism
2: Consciousness, Biology and the Necessity of Alterity
Cognition, Consciousness and Autopoiesis
Biology, Systems and Systems Biology
Dealing with/in Alterity
3: The Body, Reformatted
Biomedia, the Body Mathematized and Postvital Life
Other/ing Bodies
The Body as Congeries, Assemblage and Interface
4: Absolute Monstrosities: The ‘Question of the Animal’
Monster Theory: Cultures of Otherness
Animal Nature, Human Nature
The Humanimal
Speciesism
5: Life Itself: The View from Disability Studies and Bioethics
Disability Studies and the Norms of the ‘Human’
Bioethics and Personhood
6: Posthuman Visions: Toward Companion Species
Posthuman Biology
Posthumanist Biology
Companion Species
Conclusion: Posthumanism as Species Cosmopolitanism
Bibliography
Index
This book is part of the series Themes in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture:
Copyright © Pramod K. Nayar 2014
The right of Pramod K. Nayar 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 2014 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6240-4
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7685-2(epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6590-0(mobi)
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Acknowledgements
This book owes numerous debts to institutions and individuals, and select individuals within institutions.
At the University of Hyderabad (UoH), Saradindu Bhattacharya unearthed essays and materials with scrupulous speed and method. Neeraja Sundaram added her bit when called upon to do so. Also, at UoH, Anna Kurian's now-legendary reading of early drafts, conversations and productive disagreements (mostly over the human nature of posthumanism) have with affection and attention shaped this book in ways too many to number.
V. Premlata of Dayalbagh Institute of Education, Agra, invited me to speak on posthumanism at a seminar on interdisciplinarity, following this up with the generous sharing of her collection of books and materials on consciousness studies.
The Indian Council of Cultural Relations gave me a travel grant that helped me take up the Visiting Scholar position for a short but productive period at the University of Dayton, OH, USA in October 2012. Much gratitude goes to the indefatigable Harish Trivedi of the India Foundation, Dayton, OH, for setting the wheels in motion and extending, along with Sharon Trivedi, his superb hospitality. Without him and the India Foundation the trip would not have happened at all. Amy Anderson of the Center for International Programs, University of Dayton (CIP-UD), with customary warmth and quiet efficiency, ensured a perfect stay – her friendship, and Bill's, has been singular. Thanks also are due to Tina Manco Newton and Charlotte Hansen at CIP-UD for all the efforts directed at my comfortable stay. Faculty in the English Department of UD, notably Sheila Hughes and Andy Slade, made sure that my lectures and student consultations would not interrupt my (manic) work schedules. Also at Dayton, thanks go to Alpana Sharma and the English Department of Wright State University, and Susana Peña, Dan Shoemaker, Kristen Rudisill, Jeremy Wallach, Esther Clinton, Marilyn Motz, Khani Begum and Matt Donahue at Bowling Green State University for their hospitality and enthusiastic interaction during the stay there in October 2012.
It is a pleasure to sound a special note of gratitude for Ibrahim, the continuingly loyal friend of my school days, for his warm hospitality during the Ohio stint, an effort in which he was aided admirably by his mother, and of course the team of Sadiya, Adil, Aamer and Salman.
Parts of the book appeared in incipient form in various places. Shalmalee Palekar invited me to contribute an essay on William Gibson to Westerly (56.2, 2011: 48–61, now incorporated into chapter 3) and R. Radhakrishnan invited me to work on biological citizenship for the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies (58.4, 2012: 796–817, now manifest in fuller form in chapter 6). An essay on posthumans and vampires that I first published in response to Nandana Dutta's invitation in Margins (1.1, 2011: 65–84) is grafted into chapter 6 as well. Posthumanism and species cosmopolitanism was the subject of a plenary talk delivered, thanks to Himanshu Mohapatra's generous invitation, at the Utkal University's Department of English seminar on ‘Topographies of Mind, Society, Culture: Identities and Crossovers’ in November 2012.
The section on biometrics in chapter 3 began life as an essay in Economic and Political Weekly (96.32, 2012: 17–22). The analysis of Lessing's The Fifth Child will appear in Samyukta. My argument about the deracination and domestication of vampires using Stephenie Meyer's trilogy as a case study appeared first in Nebula (37.3, 2010: 60–76), and in the case of Octavia Butler's Fledgling, in Notes on Contemporary Literature (41.2, 2011: 6–10). Notes on Contemporary Literature will also publish my reading of posthumanism in Never Let Me Go in a 2013 issue. The arguments on Frantz Fanon find their origins in my FrantzFanon (Routledge, 2013). Much gratitude to Nandana, Shalmalee and Radhakrishnan for inviting me to contribute and the journals’ referees for incisive comments on early drafts of the essays.
I am grateful to Andrea Drugan, Lauren Mulholland (then at Polity) and Jonathan Skerrett, my cooperative and encouraging editors at Polity. And to Leigh Mueller's careful copy-editing, I owe many thanks.
To Nandini, Pranav, parents and parents-in-law, for their unstinting support and uncountable prayers, my gratitude, as always.
1
Revisiting the Human: Critical Humanisms
Shori, the genetically modified vampire, is able to tolerate sunlight and cohabit easily with humans in Octavia Butler's Fledgling (2005). Shori represents a hybrid race, neither human nor vampire, both human and vampire. It is a postgender world in Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and one can choose to be man or woman when coming into heat. Le Guin complicates the supposed distinguishing feature of the ‘normal’ human race, where each body is of a single biological sex, and speculates about genders being interchangeable. In Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), ‘troublesome’ inmates of the mental hospital are implanted with neurotransmitters – a theme Piercy borrows from a real-life incident in which, in the 1960s, the staff at Atascadero and Vacaville (California), prisons for the criminally insane, used the drug succinylcholine to modify their patients’ behaviour – that would enable the doctors and nurses to control patient behaviour, mainly by rendering them passive, inert. The inmates remain arguably human but minus the several cognitive, intellectual and emotive abilities we have associated with the ‘normal’ human. Vampires turn vegetarian and stop feeding off humans in Stephenie Meyer's now-cult Twilight series (2005–8), and even begin considering a life where they merge into the human race through procreation. In Anne Rice's vampire fiction, vampires live in covens and replicate the family structures of humans. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the alien cyborg, develops, inexplicably, emotional capacities and affiliations in the later Terminator films (1984–2009). In Gattaca (1997), an individual's fates are almost entirely determined by her/his genetic codes. Those whose DNA is acceptable become the upper classes (‘valids’) and those who fail the genetic tests become, naturally, the ‘in-valids’. Cloned individuals constitute a segment of the future society in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go (2005). The cloned ‘individuals’ are essentially designed to be organ donors to the humans who need certain organs in order to live on. So-called ‘normal’, self-contained and sovereign humans are ‘converted’ into life forms living on through their incorporation of, and blurring corporeal borders with, other bodies and organs. Animals in fables around the world exhibit anthropomorphic tendencies, while humans routinely turn into werewolves in horror cinema and fiction. Individuals with special powers – mutants – have to battle for rights and dignity against humans in the X-Men (2000–9, with more sequels and prequels in the offing). Yrr, a sentient life form – essentially single-celled organisms that have developed hive intelligence – empower various underwater life forms to attack human civilization in Frank Schwatzing's TheSwarm (2006) for having destroyed the marine habitat of millions of species. Michael Chorost in his autobiography, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (2005), states unequivocally that his cochlear implant – essentially a computer chip in his head that helps him hear – makes him a cyborg, a Homofaber, but it also makes him more human. Mutant babies blur the sex-difference as well as animal–human differences in Katherine Dunn's controversial novel, GeekLove (1989). Dunn makes a political critique of the very idea of the ‘person’ in a world where individuality and ‘personhood’ are perceived, in the case of impaired individuals, only in terms of their ‘disability’ or difference from the ‘normal’ human anatomy or physiology. In Wendy Mass’ novel A Mango-shaped Space (2003), the synesthetic protagonist is addressed as ‘freak’, because she is able to see music and numbers in terms of colours. From a different field, the Tissue Culture and Art project makes sculptures out of lab-manufactured organic materials, where life and its matter are transformed into a work of art in order to show how the vitality of life runs across humans, animals and things.1
These texts focus on the construction of the ‘normal’ human with specific biological features and abilities, sex, form and functions. A particular physiology, anatomy, intellectual ability and consciousness, they implicitly propose, gets defined as the marker of normalcy. The compulsory humanity of the human, as defined by and essentialized in these features, is interrogated by drawing attention to the constructed nature of the human ‘person’. More significantly, these texts emphasize the blurring of bodily borders, identities (gender, species, race) and even consciousness, in which isolating the ‘human’ from a human–machine assemblage, cadavers or another form of life is impossible. Critical posthumanism, as we shall come to call this philosophical and political theme in literature, popular culture and theory, is the radical decentring of the traditional sovereign, coherent and autonomous human in order to demonstrate how the human is always already evolving with, constituted by and constitutive of multiple forms of life and machines. Literary texts that have since the Renaissance always shown us how humans behave, react and interact – indeed it has been said that literature ‘invented’ the human – have now begun to show that the human is what it is because it includes the non-human.
Outside and yet within these literary and popular representations of corporeal–physiological fluidity, ontological liminality and identity-morphing that have firmly placed the man–machine linkage, trans-species bodies and organic-inorganic hybrids within the cultural imaginary, are the rapid advances in technology.
Technologies of cloning, stem-cell engineering, cryogenics, Artificial Intelligence and xenotransplantation blur borders of animal, human and machines in what might be thought of as a new organicism (or even ‘organism’?). Human Rights activists worry that prisoners, comatose patients and asylum inmates, along with ethnic/linguistic/religious minorities, differently abled and developmentally challenged people are treated as less than human, long after slavery has ostensibly been abolished. Cognitive ethologists and biologists have demonstrated that those features we take to be uniquely human – altruism, consciousness, language – are also properties exhibited by animals. Human consciousness itself, they have demonstrated, is an epiphenomenon.
As even this very short and selective inventory demonstrates, previously taken-for-granted categories of the human/non-human are now subject to sustained, controversial examination since the late twentieth century. Philosophers, literary and cultural studies scholars, scientists across various disciplines have fought, often acrimoniously, over what it means to be human in an age like this. Ethicists, animal rights activists, medical experts quarrel with theologians, lawyers and governments in order to establish the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of new forms of hybrid life forms, mostly synthesized and curated in the vat, the operating theatre, the hard drive or the petri-dish.
Even when fiction does not explicitly detail contemporary science, it does explore the nature of the human in the age of advanced biotechnology, genetic engineering and computers. From much of the sci-fi, the dystopian novels and other popular expressions, we understand that a new cultural history of the human needs to deal with the question: what forms of the human are now extant and existent? Sci-fi also calls upon us to speculate on the future course of human evolution: what will the human be like tomorrow? What comes after (post-) the human? Posthumanism is, at first glance, a temporal marker indicative of this later, perhaps more advanced, human.
Two important frames for the term need to be explicated right away.
‘Posthumanism’ on the one hand merely refers to an ontologicalcondition in which many humans now, and increasingly will, live with chemically, surgically, technologically modified bodies and/or in close conjunction (networked) with machines and other organic forms (such as body parts from other life forms through xenotransplantation).
‘Posthumanism’, on the other hand, and especially in its critical avatar, is also a new conceptualization of the human. Posthumanism studies cultural representations, power relations and discourses that have historically situated the human above other life forms, and in control of them. As a philosophical, political and cultural approach it addresses the question of the human in the age of technological modification, hybridized life forms, new discoveries of the sociality (and ‘humanity’) of animals and a new understanding of ‘life’ itself. In a radical reworking of humanism, critical posthumanism seeks to move beyond the traditional humanist ways of thinking about the autonomous, self-willed individual agent in order to treat the human itself as an assemblage, co-evolving with other forms of life, enmeshed with the environment and technology. It rejects the view of the human as exceptional, separate from other life forms and usually dominant/dominating over these other forms. Critical posthumanism begins with the assumption that the human incorporates difference in the form of other DNA, species and forms of life, so that its uniqueness is a myth.
Critical posthumanism rejects the ‘ableism’ of traditional humanism to include variant bodies – such as the differently abled – as well as the animal. By focusing less on ability and agency and emphasizing shared vulnerability, posthumanism calls for a radical rethink of species uniqueness and boundedness of the human. In each of the literary and popular texts cited in the opening paragraph, for instance, the author is interested in looking at the normative human before demonstrating how the non-human or someone who does not fit the taxon of the ‘normal’ human is constituted.
Critical posthumanism seeks a more inclusive definition of the human and life, and, for its theoretical-philosophical methodology, draws upon all those discourses, representations, theories and critiques of traditional humanism in which the marginalization of ‘other’ bodies as infrahuman or non-human has been deconstructed. Disability studies, animal studies, monster studies, cybernetics and consciousness studies all contribute to posthumanism because these redefine the boundaries of the human, and call into question the hierarchies of human/non-human, human/machine and human/inhuman. When humans are speciesist and treat non-human life forms as expendable, then some species of humans are also – as history shows in the form of genocides, racism and slavery – excluded from the category of the human to be then expendable. Cary Wolfe makes the comparison of forms of speciesism that is so central to critical posthumanism's multispecies citizenship:
As long as this humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization remains intact, and as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of whatever species – or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference. (2003: 8)
This perception of the intrinsic link between a speciesist humanism and discriminatory practices such as racism or sexism is at the heart of the new humanism that critical posthumanism seeks.
Thus posthumanism is not simply about a human with prosthetic implants/additions that enhance human qualities and abilities (this is the popular sense of posthumanism, and is more in line with the ontological basis of the term, as opposed to what I have been calling critical posthumanism). Rather, critical posthumanism sees the uniquely human abilities, qualities, consciousness and features as evolving in conjunction with other life forms, technology and ecosystems. This means critical posthumanism does not see the human as the centre of all things: it sees the human as an instantiation of a network of connections, exchanges, linkages and crossings with all forms of life. Its roots lie in disciplines and philosophies in which modes of describing/ascribing difference and categorizations (human/non-human, human/machine and human/inhuman) historically – whether in philosophy or political science – that create The Human as a category have been revealed to be exclusionary. To phrase it differently, critical posthumanism finds its roots in those critico-theoretical projects in which the constructed and exclusionary nature of the systems of segregation, difference, purity, coherence and separation – of bodies, subjectivities, identities – in biology, literature, philosophy or politics is rejected in favour of mixing, assemblages, assimilation, contamination, feedback loops, information-exchange and mergers. In lieu of traditional humanism's species-identity, treated as self-contained and unique, critical posthumanism focuses on interspecies identity; instead of the former's focus on the human, critical posthumanism sees the humanimal. All evolution and human development is less about Being than a ‘becoming-with’, in Donna Haraway's memorable phrasing in When Species Meet (2008).
In this chapter I first examine the many definitions of the terms ‘humanism’, ‘transhumanism’ and ‘posthumanism’. I then survey, briefly and mainly by way of a scene-setting exercise, three major critiques of humanism: Foucauldian poststructuralism, feminism and technoscience.
Terms and Definitions
Humanism
Before we define ‘humanism’, we need to understand what we mean by the term ‘human’. The human is traditionally taken to be a subject (one who is conscious of his/her self ) marked by rational thinking/intelligence, who is able to plot his/her own course of action depending on his/her needs, desires and wishes, and, as a result of his/her actions, produces history. The human has traditionally been treated as male and universal. It is always treated in the singular (the human) and as a set of features or conditions: rationality, authority, autonomy and agency.
Humanism is the study of this individual subject and the composite features we now recognize as the human. It treats the human subject as the centre of the world, which is influenced by the human's thoughts and actions. The freedom of the individual to pursue his choice is treated as central to the human subject. The human's awareness of his self – to recognize himself for what he is – or self-consciousness is also treated as a sign of being human.
More importantly, concepts of human dignity, Human Rights and debates over the human ‘condition’ are premised upon this idea of the universal human. It treats the common human condition. Morality, ethics, responsibility in the modern era (roughly post-1600) all emerge from this view of the autonomous, self-conscious, coherent and self-determining human. The essence of the human lies in the rational mind, or soul – which is entirely distinct from the body. Change and improvement therefore are deemed to be possible through this power of the rational mind. Rationality is also this ‘essence’ of the human – his ability to think about himself, be sure of himself – that distinguishes him (supposedly) from all other forms of life, and aliens.
Transhumanism
Posthumanism – I use the term to signify not only the ontological condition but also a vision of the human – has two visible strands, stemming from very different views of the human, today. The first strand is the pop posthumanism of cinema and pop culture (Terminator, TheMatrix, cyberpunk fiction). This strand, more a hagiography of techno-modifications of the human, argues that technological and biological modifications will improve the ‘human’. This implies that there is a distinctive entity identifiable as the ‘human’, a human ‘self’ or ‘person’ which can do with some improvement. This strand of posthumanism refuses to see the human as a construct enmeshed with other forms of life and treats technology as a means of ‘adding’ to already existing human qualities and of filling the lack in the human. This version of posthumanism is usually referred to as ‘transhumanism’.
Transhumanism is accurately defined by Cary Wolfe as ‘an intensification of humanism’ (2010: xv). Transhumanists believe in the perfectibility of the human, seeing the limitations of the human body (biology) as something that might be transcended through technology so that faster, more intelligent, less disease-prone, long-living human bodies might one day exist on Earth. Nick Bostrom, a leading philosopher of the transhumanist condition, defines it thus: ‘It [transhumanism] holds that current human nature is improvable through the use of applied science and other rational methods, which may make it possible to increase human health-span, extend our intellectual and physical capacities, and give us increased control over our own mental states and moods’ (2005: 202–3).
Transhumanists see existing forms of the human as an intermediate stage before the arrival of the advanced human form in which bodies and their intelligence might be enhanced for greater utility and purpose. (‘Enhancement’ has been most recently defined as ‘an intervention designed to modify a person's traits, adding qualities or capabilities that would not otherwise have been expected to characterize that person’: Bess 2010: 643.) Transhumanism relies on human rationality as a key marker of ‘personhood’ and individual identity, and sees the body as limiting the scope of the mind. While early transhumanists rarely addressed the moral issue, more recent transhumanist philosophers like Ingmar Persson and Julian Savalescu (2010), James Hughes (2010) and others deliberate the issue of a morally advanced human with greater abilities of empathy, selflessness and ethical responsibility, for whom the enhancement of abilities without a moral enhancement (as Persson and Savalescu see it) would mean that a cognitively enhanced but morally backward minority could inflict greater harm. The debate whether modifications enhance or diminish humanness continues unabated (Wilson and Haslam 2009, Harris 2007 and 2011, Koch 2010), even as bioethicists disagree over the treatment-enhancement approach (where certain medical interventions are to be considered treatment for impairments or illness and therefore necessary, as opposed to other interventions that ‘simply’ enhance existing qualities and abilities: see Sabin and Daniels 1994, Bostrom and Roache 2007, O’Mathúna 2009, Buchanan 2011).
Transhumanism continues to believe in the Enlightenment ideals of the human/animal divide. It treats humanity as a species separate and self-contained. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben summarizes it best when he notes how the human has been defined by the expelling of the animal, whereby ‘something like an animal life has been separated’ from the human and a hierarchy created between vegetal, animal and human life (2004: 15–16).
In transhumanism, and especially in its popular manifestation in sci-fi, there is an overarching emphasis on the machination of humans and the humanization of machines. The near-obsessive exploration of superintelligent computers that threaten to overwhelm the humans and the robotic implants that rearrange and derange the human in popular culture treats the posthuman as an advanced human, a congeries of human and machine. A paradigmatic definition of the posthuman as this human–machine interface is Katherine Hayles’: ‘[The posthuman] implies not only a coupling with intelligent machines but a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed’ (1999: 35).
W. J. Mitchell, another hagiographer of this form of posthumanism that believes in advanced humanity, characterizes the posthuman as ‘Me++’, where humans ‘routinely exist in the condition … [of] “man–computer symbiosis” ’, and where they ‘now interact with sensate, intelligent, interconnected devices scattered throughout [the] environment’ (2003: 7).
This version of posthumanism is techno-deterministic, and techno-utopian, in its faith in technology's ability to ensure a certain kind of future. To cite Bostrom once more: ‘the wisest approach to such prospects [indefinite health-spans, greater intellectual abilities] is to embrace technological progress’ (203). Transhumanism also sees a telos for humanity's future that is achieved almost exclusively through technology. This view of the future of mankind in transhumanism draws, not unjustifiably, the criticism that it is another ‘white mythology’ because it retrieves the myth of the white man's technological superiority and progress (see Dinerstein 2006, for example).
Popular posthumanism does not see the human as just another construct. It retains the key attributes of the human – sensation, emotion and rationality – but believes that these characteristics might be enhanced through technological intervention. This implies traditional views of the human persist in popular posthumanism: it only seeks an enhancement of the human. It is this belief in the innate, essential qualities of the human that critical posthumanism disputes by demonstrating how the human is a congeries, and human qualities or characteristics have co-evolved with other life forms.
Critical Posthumanism
The second strand of posthumanism might be termed ‘critical posthumanism’. As an immediate two-part definition of this strand of posthumanist thought, one can say with Maureen McNeil (2010) that it rejects both human exceptionalism (the idea that humans are unique creatures) and human instrumentalism (that humans have a right to control the natural world). This strand is far more critical of the traditional humanism, and treats
Critical posthumanism calls attention to the ways in which the machine and the organic body and the human and other life forms are now more or less seamlessly articulated, mutually dependent and co-evolving. It critiques the humanist and transhumanist centrality of reason and rationality (with its fantasies, sustainedly articulated in cyberpunk fiction and cinema, of disembodiment), and offers a more inclusive and therefore ethical understanding of life. In the place of the sovereign subject, critical posthumanism posits the non-unitary subject (the non-unitary subject has been theorized extensively by feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray as we shall see, and in the case of posthumanism by Haraway 2008 and Braidotti 2013).
Posthumanism as a philosophical approach involves a rethinking of the very idea of subjectivity because it sees human subjectivity as an assemblage, co-evolving with machines and animals. It also calls for a more inclusive definition of life, and a greater moral–ethical response, and responsibility, to non-human life forms in the age of species blurring and species mixing. Posthumanism therefore has a definite politics in that it interrogates the hierarchic ordering – and subsequently exploitation and even eradication – of life forms. Normative subjectivity, which defined and categorized life forms into ‘animal’, ‘plant’ and ‘human’, is now under scrutiny for its exclusivism, and it is this that more than anything else marks critical posthumanism. Critical posthumanism draws the connections between traditional humanism's exclusionary strategy and women, races or ethnic groups, but also animals, being kept out as slaves, monsters or mere providers of meat, entertainment or labour. It is in the exclusionary definition of the human that we can find the origins of sexism, racism and other exclusionary practices.
Unlike the transhumanists who wish to overcome the human form, critical posthumanism does not seek to do away with embodiment. Critical posthumanism sees embodiment as essential to the construction of the environment (the world is what we perceive it through our senses) in which any organic system (the human body is such a system) exists. But this embodiment is embedded embodiment, in which the human body is located in an environment that consists of plants, animals and machines. Critical posthumanism, adapting work from cognitive sciences, biology and philosophy, sees the complexity of the human system, with its ‘unique’ consciousness or cognitive/perceptual processes, as emerging from this embeddedness, where human complexity, with all its internal organization and operations, is a consequence of its openness to the environment (we shall look at this crucial line of thought in cognitive sciences and systems biology in chapter 2). Systems, including human ones, are in a state of emergence rather than in a state of being when the system is constantly traversed by information flows from the environment. When biological sciences tell us that bacteria sustain what we consider to be the self-contained human body, or that many of the evolutionary characteristics of the human were responses to other organic forms on Earth, then critical posthumanism recontextualizes the human system as having ‘become-with’ other life forms.
Critical posthumanism sees the human as a congeries, whose origins are multispecies and whose very survival is founded on symbiotic relations with numerous forms of life on earth.2 Critical posthumanism thus favours co-evolution, symbiosis, feedback and responses as determining conditions rather than autonomy, competition and self-contained isolation of the human. It sees human experience, modes of perception and even affective states as essentially derived from, influenced by and formed by the sensoria of numerous other living beings first, and then becoming autopoietic later. Human biological processes are, as the work of Lynn Margulis has shown, enabled through the absorption into the human body from the environment, of bacteria and organelles, over centuries of evolution. What we understand as uniquely human, therefore, is the consequence of hybridization and exchange of material and immaterial – data, such as in the genetic code – across species, skin and function of animals, plants and humans. The human in this critical posthumanist outlook is a ‘dynamic hybrid’ of ‘ontologically different elements’ (Jöns 2006: 572).
The human as a dynamic hybrid in critical posthumanist thought focuses not on borders but on conduits and pathways, not on containment but on leakages, not on stasis but on movements of bodies, information and particles all located within a larger system. Under the influence of second-order cybernetic theory (or neocybernetics), critical posthumanism is less interested in the great human subject than in the human as (i) a system situated in an environment, and (ii) an instantiation of networks of information (say DNA, but also memories) and material (say bacteria or viral forms) exchanges between systems and environments. Human perception that creates the world – the hallmark of the humanist subject – is made possible through this exchange.3 Finally, critical posthumanism sees the autonomy of the human as the system's self-regulation in response to the environment. As we shall see in the section on neocybernetics in chapter 2, this simply means the internal complexity of the human is not a marker of self-contained autonomy but rather an attempt on the part of the system to regulate itself, close itself and its operations off from the environment in which it is embedded. This means the human is always already engaged with the environment. The human, in the words of one commentator, is ‘fuzzy edged’, ‘profoundly dependent into its surroundings’ (Pepperell 2003). It sees the human's subjectivity as in-formed by lived (biological, embodied) experiences in an environment and the lived experiences as shaped by the subjectivity in a reciprocal relationship. Both biological living and subjectivity are ‘emergent’ conditions, the result of dynamical interactions. What is ‘natural’ to the human is, therefore, the product of natureculture in which materials (bodies, both human and non-human), immaterials (information, data, memories) and the hybrid dynamics – flows, processes – linking these constitute the human even as the human is an instantiation of this hybridization.
If humanism posited a self-contained, exclusive and bounded human, critical posthumanism recontextualizes the human into its setting (both organic and inorganic), and locates the human's structure, functions and form as the result of a co-evolution with other life forms.
Hence critical posthumanism poses the ethical question:
Since our origins, histories and evolutionary trajectories are all merged, and when we share mortality and vulnerability with animals, how do we live with other life forms?
This book focuses on the critical posthumanist strand.
Critical posthumanism shifts away from the moral transhumanist position in one very significant way. Moral transhumanism believes we can accentuate and enhance specific human qualities (such as compassion) for the greater good of life on earth – but with this it retains a very clear idea of the desirable qualities of the human. The human is still the centre of all things desirable, necessary and aspirational. In the case of critical posthumanism, it treats the ‘essential’ attributes of the human as always already imbricated with other life forms, where the supposedly ‘core’ human features, whether physiology, anatomy or consciousness, have co-evolved with other life forms. Where moral transhumanism seeks enhancement of supposedly innate human features and qualities, critical posthumanism rejects the very idea of anything innate to the human, arguing instead for a messy congeries of qualities developed over centuries through the human's interactions with the environment (which includes non-organic tools and organic life).
Critical Humanism and the Origins of Posthumanism
Twentieth-century philosophy, critical theory and biology have radically undermined the very idea of the human and Enlightenment humanist ideals. In this section I shall survey, briefly, some of the major moves in the decentring – where the human is no longer the centre of life on Earth – of the human.
Critical humanism has questioned:
the myth of the human as the centre of the universe;the so-called ‘autonomous rationality’ of the human mind;the agency of the individual in effecting changes in his life, and influencing history;the belief in the transparency of language as a medium of expression of individuality and experience;the exclusion of certain groups and races – Jews, blacks, women, slaves, untouchable castes – from the very category of the human.Critical humanism proposes that the very idea of the universal human (or Human) is constructed through a process of exclusion whereby some of these ethnic and religious groups or races are categorized as less-than-human. In addition, the very idea of the ‘person’ as a self-conscious subject ranks the human above the animal because it is assumed that the animal is not aware of being an animal, whereas the human is aware of her/his ‘humanness’. Thus the universal category of the ‘human’ is not really universal at all because several forms of life have been throughout history subordinated to the human as sub-human, non-human and inhuman in the system of classification. Human history, for the critical humanists, has consistently referred to homosexuals, madmen, slaves, Jews, women as being outside the category of the human, just as it has treated animal life as less important than that of the human. Humanism was always linked to Europe's ‘imperial destinies’ of exclusion, exploitation and conquest (Davies 1997: 23).4 Humanism, when it appeared in Renaissance Europe, was, paradoxically, very attentive to biological mutants and medical anomalies – deemed to be ‘monsters’, about which more in a later chapter – because these seemed to not fit into the category ‘human’: they were formed differently, they behaved differently. ‘Universal’ humanism was ironically, therefore, a system of differentiation in which some forms of the body were treated as ‘human’ and others as ‘not-human’. When, for instance, Arty, the limbless child who becomes the patriarch of the family in Dunn's novel GeekLove, persuades ‘norms’ to amputate their limbs so that they can become ‘special’, like him, he deliberately blurs the normal/deviant binary of the human species. The in-human, or questionable ‘person’, of GeekLove is the product of the differentiation process that has strict norms about what constitutes the ‘normal’.
Humanism centres the white male as the universal human, and all other genders, differently formed bodies and ethnic types are treated as variants of this ‘standard’ model, and also forms/models that lack something. Critical humanism treats humanism as a politically significant philosophy because it enabled Europeans, upper classes, professionals (like medical doctors or psychiatrists) to categorize some individuals as inhuman or sub-human and confine them or deny them rights. Animals and some ethnic groups have been the victims of this form of classificatory paradigm in which the universal Man was defined.
The deconstruction of humanism in the twentieth century has come from multiple sources. Of the major critiques of humanism examined here – poststructuralism, feminism and queer theory, technoscience studies and critical race studies – most focused on the following domains within humanism: subject/subjectivity, the body, the idea of the rational human. We might, at the risk of simplification, summarize the deconstruction of humanism as a two-step argument:
there are no essential features of the human subject because ‘human nature’ is socially constructed and enmeshed in the very systems of observation that characterize it as ‘human’;knowledge cannot be grounded in the human subject and its cognitive processes because knowledge, like human nature, is socially constructed.Poststructuralist Anti-humanism
Michel Foucault traces the emergence of the human, as we know it now, to the set of ideas and concepts that evolved during the European Enlightenment. Toward the end of The Order of Things, Foucault would famously write: ‘man is an invention of recent date’ (1973: 387). What Foucault is referring to here is a way of perceiving the human cognitive processes, human behaviour and actions. The human was ‘invented’ when these ways of perceiving and talking about these processes, behaviour and actions became codified in the ‘human sciences’.
The human was investigated, studied, written about and pronounced upon. Foucault focuses on man in three domains: life (therefore as a biological category, as an animal), labour (as a productive creature in economics) and language (in culture).
The human's cognitive processes and their characteristics which constitute its subjectivity are treated as the foundation of all knowledge within humanism. Foucault argues that the foundation of humanism is its belief that these processes and characteristics can be analysed. It is this belief that leads to the creation of the ‘human sciences’, according to Foucault. Foucault's own project – genealogy – involved an investigation of the histories of disciplines in the social sciences in which the human subject was formed. Thus the very idea of a ‘human nature’, for Foucault, is open to doubt. It is not what human nature is, might be or ought to be: for Foucault, it is about how the very category, the concept of ‘human nature’ works in specific cultures and contexts.
The human subject as the origin of knowledge is demolished by Foucault when he proposes, in a famous conversation with Noam Chomsky:
I have … given very little room to … their [individuals’] attitude for inventing by themselves, for originating concepts, theories, or scientific truths by themselves … And what if the understanding of the relation of the subject to truth were just an effect of knowledge? What if understanding were a complex, multiple, non-individual formation … ? One should … analyse the productive capacity of knowledge as a collective practice. (cited in Barker 2003: 73–4)
Foucault here is situating the so-called ‘sovereign’, autonomous, free-willed human subject within a network of social forces and power relations. All knowledge that the human subject possibly possesses proceeds from the social forces. Hence, where humanism believes that the human subject, the agent of historical consciousness, will generate meaning, Foucault proposes that we need to look at the institutional structures that allow any subject to see something as true or false. That is, ‘truth’, as Foucault put it, is ‘the ensemble of rules by which the true and the false are separated’ (1972: 132). Every society, writes Foucault, has its ‘regime of truth’ (131).
When Foucault demolishes the human subject as the origin of and authority over meaning, he also calls into question the foundational assumption of humanism: of the overriding significance of rationality. Foucault demonstrates how the very idea of rationality or Reason hinges upon the categorization of ‘unreason’ and madness. Thus, what we take to be the ‘natural’ rationality of the human emerged from a set of historical social processes through which specific criteria of the ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ evolved. Scientific rationality, a key cog in this process of defining Reason, ensured that the human could be defined in biology and medicine. This scientific rationality was accompanied by new ‘regimes’ whereby segments of population would be defined and described as ‘deviant’ – criminal, insane, homosexual – and could be, and were, placed under surveillance by the Church, psychiatric hospitals, medical doctors and the police. Economics and sociology examined the human for her/his utility, participation in social activities, and categorized them. What Foucault is suggesting here is that the very idea of the human was bound up with an investigative modality whereby knowledge about the human was generated through particular scientific, social and philosophical apparatuses. Health, the mind, religious beliefs, habits and hobbies, abilities and needs were all studied by individuals and ‘experts’ tasked with identifying criteria of ‘good’ health, acceptable beliefs and needs. Thus the human subject became a subject to these regimes.
With this Foucault has rejected the centrality of human cognitive processes in the production of knowledge. What he is calling attention to is the institutional processes, the rules and regimes, the discursive structures within which the human subject develops meaning. There is no single rational route the human subject takes. No human subject can realize an ‘essential’ or ‘true’ (human) nature free from the constraints and restrictions of power (embodied in the institutions mentioned in the paragraph above).5 This means that self-identity is constituted within power, and so one cannot ever know one's true humanity, one's true identity, independent of power's distorting effects (Ingram 1994: 221). The subject does not pre-exist the discourses: it can exist only within the modalities established by the discourses. And discourse is always about power. Any kind of subject – a listening subject, a thinking subject, a suffering subject, a loving subject, a questioning subject – is formed only within these discourses.
Having established that the subject is formed within (and subjected to) the orders of discourses in the human sciences, Foucault proposes that we treat humanism as a set of techniques or processes. Humanism functioned to ‘differentiate’ between individuals and ethnic groups. Thus Foucault sees humanist philosophy as a device through which powerful groups and institutions were able to control other individuals and groups. Humanism, in this view, was inextricably linked to practices of treatment, administration, surveillance and regulation of individual and collective bodies.
Governments, having acquired knowledge about the individual or group, could, Foucault writes, ‘expose, mark, wound, amputate, make a scar, stamp a sign on the face … in short, seize hold of the body and inscribe upon it the marks of power’ (1997: 24). Subjectivity was thus subject to technologies of power acting upon the body (say, in medical science or the prison) or the mind (say, in psychiatry).
But power was also asserted on the body through what Foucault termed ‘technologies of the self’. He meant that an ethics of living was being put into place, whereby the self becomes a project, to be constantly modified, transformed and upgraded. Thus the humanist notion of the self as sovereign and unitary and therefore in control of its action and its future resulted in multiple practices of the self that the human inherited from traditions. The human, in other words, accepts and assimilates these technologies of the self because s/he comes to believe that the care of the self indicates a sovereign self. In fact, as Foucault argues, these styles, rules and practices of the care of the self are practices of subjection that generate the illusion of freedom.
When Foucault presents the individual as the effect of discourses rather than as a sovereign, self-regulating, self-willed subject, he erases the foundations of humanism itself. There is no more a sovereign subject.
Feminist Critiques
Says a character in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time:
‘Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal.
And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding. ([1976] 1983: 97)
The biological ‘enchainment’ of Piercy is motherhood, which traps the woman in a particular role, and casts her biology in a particular role as well. Considerable feminist thought, in both ‘western’ and postcolonial theory, focuses on this biological determinism that traps women.
In a magisterial study of norms of femininity and eating practices, Susan Bordo (Unbearable Weight, 1993) builds on Foucauldian ideas of the subject. Bordo demonstrates how eating disorders in women are cultural practices that stem from normative ideals of ‘the feminine’. Bordo, like Foucault, treats the body, especially the female body (it must be noted that Foucault had little to say on the gendered body), as a site where multiple discourses intersect. Power relations between the genders are maintained through particular models of femininity. Dieting, cosmetic surgery and fitness regimes are technologies of the self that constitute the female subject, under the guise of a normative standard of the healthy, fit and beautiful female form. Bordo's work foregrounds both the question of subjectivity and the body, locating both within cultural practices and discourses.
Other feminist critics have adopted Foucault differently. Nancy Hartsock objects to Foucault's rejection of the very idea of the subject. Hartsock argues that when marginalized groups such as women, or people of colour, seek justice and identities as themselves, Foucault denies them the chance of subjectivity by treating them as instances of discourses over which they have no control. Hartsock instead proposes that ‘we need to engage in the historical, political and theoretical process of constituting ourselves as subjects as well as objects of history’. She also proposes that women need to develop ‘standpoint epistemologies’, in which their ‘practical daily activity contains an understanding of the world’ (1990: 171–2). Hartsock's emphasis on the performance of subjectivity to generate standpoint epistemologies takes on a slightly different colour in the work of poststructuralist feminist adaptations of Foucault – as in the case of Judith Butler.
Judith Butler, like Foucault, rejects the idea of a founding, or foundational, subject that is female. Such a foundational subject, she writes, ‘presumes, fixes and constrains’ (1990: 148). Butler argues that feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of an internalization of assimilation of loss. This loss and prohibited desire – and here we recall Foucault's emphasis on the social construction of deviance, normalcy, etc. – is inscribed (Butler's term is ‘incorporated’) on the body, which results in the efforts to be ultra-masculine or feminine. The prohibition continues in cultural and legal taboos against homosexuality. One goes through life enacting this loss, and striving to stay heterosexual: ‘Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory framework that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (33).
In Butler's now well-known formulation: ‘to understand identity as … a signifying practice, is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse’ (145). Gender as ontology, for Butler, operates within ‘political contexts’, contexts that determine ‘what qualifies as intelligible sex’ (147). Butler calls for ‘practices of repetitive signifying’ to ensure the subversion of gender (145). ‘Masculine man’ and ‘feminine woman’ are signifiers and acts that, in the very act of naming, construct these identities. The act of naming identifies some body as a masculine one. In other words, there is no gender identity that precedes language. Like Foucault, Butler is anti-foundationalist in her rejection of a pre-discursive ‘I’ that can be the ground of all feminist politics. Such a notion of a pre-discursive ‘I’, for Butler, as for Foucault, returns us to the foundationalism of humanism.
When we view a body, we view it as male or female because we are seeing it from within a set of discourses that have determined a set of features to be male or female. This situatedness of our position when we view the human is what Le Guin seeks to avoid in her androgynous tale, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). We do not know if Ai, the narrator, is a man or woman, although, as critics note (Pennington 2000), the clues indicate Ai is a man. Ai admits that he is unable to escape his own contexts when viewing the gender-shifting people of Gethen: ‘I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own’ (12). What Ai is stating here is that he can only see Estraven and the Gethenians through the gender categories he is used to, from his own culture, even if these categories are ‘irrelevant’ to Gethen.
If Butler follows Foucault and rejects the foundational grounds of identity formation, other feminists reject the humanist universalization of subjectivity. The ‘universal’ human, the French feminist philosophers complain, is invariably coded as male. This means the woman's subjectivity is always seen as a derivative, secondary and incidental to any discussions of the human subject: the feminine is marginalized as the Other of masculinity. Encapsulating the feminist critique of humanism is Lila Abu-Lughod:
There are certainly good reasons to be wary of [a] philosophy that has masked the persistence of systematic social differences by appealing to an allegedly universal individual as hero and autonomous subject; that has allowed us to assume that the domination and exploitation of nature by man was justified by his place at the centre of the universe; that has failed to see that its ‘essential humanism’ has culturally and socially specific characteristics and in fact excludes most humans; and that refuses to understand how we as subjects are constructed in discourses attached to power. (1993: 28)
Or, in Catherine Belsey's words, humanism assumes that ‘ “man” … [is] … the origin and source of meaning, of action, and of history’ (1980: 7).
