Posthumanism
Ramón del Buey Cañas
The genealogy of posthumanism can be traced back to the Macy Conferences on cybernetics held between 1946 and 1953, with the emergence of a new theoretical model to account for biological, mechanical and communicative processes. This model removed the human from any privileged position in relation to questions of meaning, information and cognition, and integrated it into the systems ecology of the biosphere. This nature–culture continuum is, therefore, the theoretical starting point of posthumanism. However, posthumanism did not fully emerge until well into the second half of the twentieth century: first in its cultural aspect within the field of literary criticism, with the appearance of the term in Ihab Habib Hassan’s essay “Prometheus as a Performer. Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” (1977), and later with the publication of Nancy Katherine Hayles’ seminal work “How We Became Posthuman” (1999).
Posthumanism emerged from within and following on from postmodernism, arising from a radical deconstruction of the idea of the human that began as a critical project in the late 1960s and became established from the 1990s onwards. The notion of the human that posthumanism set out to deconstruct has its roots in a culture—that of Modernity— built on supremacist foundations, establishing rigid hierarchies between humans and other species on the planet (both animals and plants). This ‘speciesism’, as Peter Singer has termed it (see Animal Agency and Animal Ethics), is in turn underpinned by a strongly anthropocentric mindset, which lies at the root of the contemporary eco-social crisis. Furthermore, both the speciesist notion of the human and anthropocentric humanism have been sustained by repetitive formulations of symbolic ‘others’, which have served as markers of the shifting boundaries of who and what would be considered part of ‘us’: non-Europeans, non-whites, women, queers, monsters, animals and automata, amongst others, have been represented by such terms of opposition.
The posthuman, by contrast, is posited on the recognition of the differences that are constitutive of what it means to be human and which have historically been erased by the self-proclaimed objectivity of hegemonic narratives (see Graeber & Wengrow, 2021). In this sense, posthumanism does not seek to mark the end of humanity, but rather the end of a certain conception of the human—a conception that may, at best, have applied to that fraction of humanity which possessed the wealth, power and leisure to conceptualise itself as a collection of independent and autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice (see Interdependence).
This questioning of the concept of ‘human nature’ runs parallel to a crisis of its singularity, brought about by technological development, most strikingly exemplified by the manipulation of the genetic code. However, a more satisfactory way of framing the posthumanist turn might be to present it as a philosophical project aimed at blurring boundaries, at dissolving the ‘ontological hygiene’ through which, over the last three hundred years, Western culture has drawn the dividing and hierarchical lines that separate human beings from nature and from machines. The non-hierarchical perspective of the posthuman, by contrast, grants no primacy to the human and articulates the conditions for an expanded conception of cognition, characterised as a process in which information is interpreted within contexts that connect it to meaning, and in which the non-human and the non-conscious play a fundamental role (Hayles, 2017).
This holistic approach to the posthuman is based on the recognition that difference is already constitutive of the human species, with all its gender, ethnic, social and individual variations. In other words, the posthuman recognition of non-human otherness begins with the recognition of human othernesses. It is for this reason that posthumanism can be regarded as a second generation of postmodernism, the distinctive feature of which lies in taking the deconstruction of the human to its ultimate conclusion by theoretically scrutinising speciesism – that is, the privileging of some species over others. Thus, posthumanism aligns with ecocentrism, and the decentring of the human that it entails runs parallel to the recognition of the rights of nature and the onto-epistemological pluralisation of legal persons (Berros and Carman, 2022).
However, the label ‘posthuman’ is often used in a generic, all-encompassing manner to refer to almost any contemporary reformulation of the human, creating methodological and theoretical confusion. Specifically, ‘posthuman’ has become an umbrella term encompassing posthumanism (critical, cultural and philosophical); transhumanism (in its variants of extropianism, liberal transhumanism and democratic transhumanism, amongst others); the new materialisms (a specific feminist development within the posthumanist framework); the heterogeneous landscape of anti-humanism; the field of object-oriented ontology; and the post-humanities and meta-humanities (Ferrando, 2013).
Posthumanism and transhumanism came to the fore in the 1990s, focusing on similar themes, but they share neither the same roots nor the same perspectives. Whilst posthumanism originated in postmodernism, transhumanism draws on certain assumptions of the Enlightenment and, as such, does not seek to supplant humanism. The main difference between the two concerns what is perhaps the fundamental anthropological dogma associated with humanism: namely, that ‘the human’ is attained by escaping or repressing not only one’s animal origins in nature, the biological and the evolutionary, but, more generally, by completely transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment. In this sense, posthumanism is the opposite of transhumanism and, from this perspective, transhumanism must be regarded as an intensification of humanism. To grasp this distinction in a more nuanced way, it is worth characterising posthumanism in its critical, cultural and philosophical dimensions.
In the critical and cultural sphere, Hassan’s work examines the evolution of human consciousness and proposes a concept of humanity that is historically and socially conditioned and therefore in need of revision. He also emphasises the performative nature of posthuman culture and highlights its ‘cosmic’ dimension. Furthermore, as indicated by the aforementioned title of his essay, Prometheus becomes the first emblematic figure of posthumanism, before the cyborg or the monster take centre stage. Hassan attributes to this posthuman Prometheus the potential to connect worlds and treats him as an ideal to aspire to.
In this sense, posthumanism is conceived as a praxis, a process of mediation, sharing certain approaches with the ecological humanities: a critique of modern mechanicism and Cartesianism, seeking to move beyond ontologies that divide reality into two opposing realms (nature/culture) in order to recognise the complexity of both poles as part of a continuum; the end of human exceptionalism, that is, the tendency to conceive of social issues as if they could exist apart from what has traditionally been termed ‘nature’; a break with anthropocentrism, seeking to broaden the community of alliances and shared interests with other species; and an emphasis on the ideas of interdependence and eco-dependence as constitutive elements of the web of life.
From this mediation-based perspective, we can interpret posthumanism as a reflection on what has been omitted from the notion of the human, but also as speculation on the possible developments of the human species. The two approaches are connected: the speculative aspect is based on a critical understanding of what the notion of the human entails. Furthermore, this conception of posthumanism is analogous to Jean-François Lyotard’s paradoxical interpretation of the postmodern: it is situated both before and after humanism. ‘Before’, in the sense that it refers to the embodiment and rootedness of human beings not only in their biological world, but also in the technological one; the prosthetic co-evolution of the human animal with the technical nature of tools and external archival mechanisms (such as language and culture), all of which precedes that historically specific phenomenon known as ‘the human’. But it also comes afterwards, in the sense that posthumanism denotes a historical moment in which the human is decentered and its interweaving within various networks and systems is recognised, urgently pointing to the need for new theoretical paradigms in view of the significance of the human factor in the eco-social crisis.
Philosophical posthumanism is an onto-epistemological, and ethical approach that manifests as a philosophy of mediation, rejecting confrontational dualism and hierarchical legacies; it can therefore be understood as a form of post-anthropocentrism and post-dualism. Historically, it can be regarded as a philosophical approach attuned to the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Whilst philosophical posthumanism proposes removing human beings from the centre of discourse, the geological epoch of the Anthropocene, with its variations and nuances (Hallé & Millon, 2020), highlights the scale of the impact of human activities on a planetary level and thus underscores the urgency for human beings to become aware that they are part of an ecosystem which, when damaged, adversely affects the human condition. In this regard, Rosi Braidotti has noted that post-human becoming is a process of redefining the sense of connection to the shared world and the environment, whether urban, social, psychological, ecological or planetary. This connection can be articulated through multiple ecologies of belonging and can bring about a transformation of sensory and perceptual coordinates, with the aim of recognising the collective nature and the place within ecosystems of what we still call the subject. This subject is conceived as a mobile assemblage integrated into a shared living space which it neither controls nor possesses, but inhabits and traverses, always in community, in a group, within a network (see Ecological Agency).
For posthuman theory, indeed, the subject is a transversal entity, immanent to and fully immersed in a network of non-human relations (animals, plants, viruses, etc.). In this regard, the notion of performativity is crucial, as Karen Barad has pointed out, since posthumanism calls into question the supposedly given nature of the differential categories of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, examining the practices through which these boundaries are stabilised and destabilised. According to Barad, there is an important sense in which practices of knowledge cannot be fully regarded as human practices, not only because we utilise non-human elements in them, but because knowledge consists in one part of the world becoming intelligible to another part. Thus, practices of knowledge and of being cannot be isolated from one another, but are mutually implicated. We do not acquire knowledge by positioning ourselves at the margins of the world; rather, we know because ‘we’ are part of the world. Consequently, the separation of epistemology and ontology echoes a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between the human and the non-human, the subject and the object, the mind and the body, matter and discourse. Dualisms are therefore out of place in posthumanism, and onto-epistemology—the study of practices of knowing within being—presents itself instead as a more suitable framework, linking posthuman philosophy with the ecological humanities.
Posthumanism thus appears to constitute a fruitful philosophical foundation for developing ecocentric frameworks of thought and, consequently, ones better suited to addressing the eco-social crisis. However, it must be acknowledged that posthumanism has been criticised by ecological humanists, who are sometimes concerned about the techno-optimistic aura surrounding certain voices within the posthumanist cacophony (see Technique and Technology), and at other times about of the controversy surrounding certain animist, vitalist or panpsychist proposals from which some attempts to address the aporias and hierarchies of metaphysical dualism derive (see Animism). These concerns are in line with contemporary materialist critiques such as that of Ray Brassier, who has pointed out that ‘[T]he logic of liberalism culminates with the ontological ratification of capitalism’s personification of things and reification of people in the formal equivalence of human and non-human. Its ideological corollary is an ‘ethics of affirmation’ that not only masks but consolidates capital’s sub-division of class into the ramifying fractures of race, gender, ethnicity, culture, etc.’ Nonetheless, all these claims are compatible with posthumanism, which can also converge with the ecological humanities by understanding ‘the human’ as a complex adaptive system, as a holobiont within a symbiotic planet (Riechmann, 2022; Haraway, 2016), and even as an organism within the Gaia superorganism.
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