A case for posthumanism - Part 2

Remember that if the devil
wants to kick somebody, he won't do it
with his horse's hoof
but with his human foot

From the poem Pig Roast by Tadeusz Róźewicz (tr. from Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)

---

If you missed the introduction to this short series on one of the fundamental animating ideas for this ParaDoxa site, you can find it here.

In this ‘stack-post I want to try to tease apart some of the similarities and differences between the main branches of posthumanism, because it’s a relatively new and fertile field, and is already made up of some strikingly diverse philosophies.

To begin with, clarifying some important terms

Firstly, posthumanism does not refer to the ‘death’ of the human in the way that the word posthumous does, but rather the active de-centring of human identity, voice, presence, and aspirations from our thinking, our work, our research, and our practice.

The fact that we are trying to suppress the anthropocentrism of ‘our’ thinking here assumes that the human will always remain somewhere in the picture. The extent to which humans are displaced, however, has allowed for enormous theoretical and methodological creativity.

Transhumanism vs posthumanism

Memes of transhuman hubris parody some of its core principles

In the crudest sense, transhumanism works in the opposite way to posthumanism.

Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that seeks to enhance, rather than de-centre, human capabilities through the use of technology and science. Its goal is a more perfect human; an ‘ultra-humanism’ (Onishi 2011), through ‘existing, emerging, and speculative technologies (as in the case of regenerative medicine, radical life extension, mind uploading, and cryonics)’ (Ferrando, 2019 p.3).

Its dominant form — Libertarian transhumanism (LT) — draws heavily on Enlightenment ideas of human autonomy and sovereignty, and it aligns politically with free-market thinking and the individual’s freedom to use technology as they see fit.* (See this and this as recent examples).

A second branch of transhumanism is somewhat closer, politically at least, to posthumanism. Democratic transhumanism (DT) is concerned with social justice through the collective distribution of technologies that might bring about a more equitable society. I find it quite hard to distinguish DT from any technological intervention designed to address social inequity though, be it water sanitation in low-income countries or iPads in the classroom. So much depends here on the specific meaning used to designate an intervention as ‘technology’.

DT does share an interest in some of the key questions at the heart of posthumanism, however: questions about the nature of agency, bodies, creativity, identity, and the possibilities for social change. And this overlap has created some understandable confusion, most particularly between DT and critical posthumanism, because both appear to call for a ‘better’ human.

Critical posthumanism and the call for us to do better

Thanks to the work of people like Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Katherine N. Hayles, Luce Irigaray, Pramod Nayar, Margrit Shildrick, and Isabelle Stengers, critical posthumanism (CP) is by far the most advanced and fleshed-out form of posthumanism to date. 

Consider these two quotes which fall squarely within the frame of CP:

‘Posthumanism provides a philosophical foundation from which to shift nursing attention away from its predominant focus on the promotion of ‘human freedom’, human health, human rights and ‘person-centred care’. It helps surface the interrelatedness of humans and the roles of human-centric worldviews in systems of oppression including colonialism, racism, species extinction and climate change (Cohn & Lynch, 2018; Dillard-Wright et al., 2020)’ (Adam et al, 2021)

‘My attention to the operations of difference in posthuman relations aligns with Lucy Suchman’s warning that theories of mutually constituted humans and artefacts must not overlook the persistence of asymmetries in intra-active becoming. As she argues, ‘we need a rearticulation of asymmetry…that somehow retains the recognition of hybrids, cyborgs, and quasi-objects made visible through technoscience studies, while simultaneously recovering certain subject–object positionings – even orderings – among persons and artifacts and their consequences’ (DeFalco 2020)

With their emphasis on the interrelatedness of all things alongside the ‘persistence of asymmetries in [our human] intra-active becoming’ (Adam, et al, above), critical posthumanisms retain the spirit of critical theory while embracing the possibilities for the more-than-human world.

But in attempting to do this, CP exposes a tension at the heart of all of the posthumanisms: the extent to which we should be trying to either mute the human voice or make it sing more in tune.

In CP the goal is the latter, and the language some authors are now using to navigate the subtle complexities of this positioning can range from the elegant and inventive to the complex and obscure:

‘Posthumanism provides a theory of the subject demanding a disruption of the human story as exceptional and considers: what are mediated bodies capable of becoming?’ (Malone & Tran, 2022).

‘A neo-materialist vital position offers a robust rebuttal of the accelerationist and profit-minded knowledge practices of bio-mediated, cognitive capitalism. Taking ‘living matter’ as a zoe-geo-centred process that interacts in complex ways with the techno-social, psychic and natural environments and resists the over-coding by the capitalist profit principle (and the structural inequalities it entails), I end up on an affirmative plane of composition of transversal subjectivities’ (Braidotti, 2019).

There is a subtle shift here from ‘humanistic approaches to practice that focus on humans’ — a ‘relational materialism’, if you will — ‘and their practices and posthumanist approaches that, instead, focus on the very process of connecting, in which all mobilized elements achieve agency through their connections’ (Parolin, 2022). 

This approach ‘suggests the displacement of the human subject as the central seat of agency’ (ibid), without, necessarily, insisting upon it. 

This approach has been an enormous source of methodological innovation in recent years, and journals like Qualitative Inquiry have been enthusiastic advocates for its exploration. 

The case for us to do better

The case for critical posthumanisms are relatively straightforward. Braidotti summarises it this way;

‘[T]he ‘human’ – which so preoccupies legions of thinkers and policy-makers today – never was a universal or a neutral term to begin with. It is rather a normative category that indexes access to privileges and entitlements. Appeals to the ‘human’ are always discriminatory: they create structural distinctions and inequalities among different categories of humans, let alone between humans and non-humans (Braidotti, 2013, 2016)’ {Braidotti, 2019, #134624}.

In plain terms, we could say that for much of human history, perhaps as far back as the pre-Socratic philosophers, humans have seen themselves as superior to all other things in the cosmos, and have increasingly sought to justify this exceptionalism on the basis of human consciousness, reason, and self-awareness. 

This accelerated dramatically after the Enlightenment, whose central purpose was to show that ‘man’ was a sovereign, autonomous being with a distinct identity.

Figure 1. The pyramid of human exceptionalism

Posthumanism sees two major problems with this pyramid of human exceptionalism. Firstly, it perpetuates the belief that humans have a right to think of the world and all its inhabitants this way. Who said, for instance, that consciousness — however we define it — should be the metric that governs universal dominance in the first place? Why not longevity — in which case mountain ranges would probably be at the top? The ability to decompose lignin, Or some other function?

Of course, we did. Humans did. Because we value those capacities most that allow us to think this way in the first place.

But with that sense of exceptionalism comes hubris. And posthumanists are quick to remind people that our belief that the world can be turned to human flourishing has caused us to drive species to extinction, destroy entire ecosystems, strip mine the land, and pollute the oceans. The climate crisis is the poisoned dividend of our human progress.

The second problem posthumanists point to comes from the fact that human hubris does not only extend to other non-human entities, but lives within humanism itself.

Figure 2. The anthropocentrism that places SOME human above all others

The top portion of the gold-coloured pyramid in Figure 1 is not a uniform grouping. The history of human ‘civilisation’ has always been one of privilege for some, and marginalisation for others. 

‘[T]here exists no portion of the modern human that is not subject to racialization, which determines the hierarchical ordering of the Homo sapiens species into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans’’ (Weheliye 2014, cited in DeFalco, 2014 p.8)

And while that sense of privilege for some has brought phenomenal progress in science and the arts, it has also been the direct cause of the holocaust and repeated acts of genocide, war, torture, human enslavement, patriarchy, child labour, and sex trafficking, it has fed human greed and placed untold wealth in the hands of very few at the expense of most others, and it has come to define our politics, our culture, and our beliefs about how we relate to others — human and more-than-human — in the world.

‘[W]e might be at the top by force’, Lucy Jones reminds us, but we would be wise to remember that when it comes to everything else that exists in the universe, we are decidedly ‘not at the center’ (Jones, 2023).

It’s also worth bearing in mind that posthumanism holds the political ‘left’ to account for this human hubris as much as the ‘right’;

‘The reinvention of a pan-human is explicit in the conservative discourse of the Catholic Church, in corporate pan-humanism, belligerent military interventionism and UN humanitarianism. It is more oblique but equally strong in the progressive Left, where the legacy of socialist humanism provides the tools to re-work anxiety into political rage. In all cases, we see the emergence of a category – the endangered human – both as evanescent and foundational’ (Braidotti, 2019). 

But, we should ask, would things be better if we inverted Fig. 2 and reordered human relations to put majoritarian culture on top, like this?:

Figure 3. An inverted pyramid of human exceptionalism

In one respect, this would be an entirely justifiable project (and one to which many many people are committed — especially in healthcare). 

But this still leaves us with an “us” and “them’ binary which, can only be sustained if one group secures dominance over another. Which always leaves open the possibility for a contest between ‘my’ right/might and your right/might. And ‘freedom for the wolves has often meant death for the sheep’ (Lyons, 2019).

So a third branch of posthumanism focuses on pursuing an even more radical posthumanism; one that deconstructs not only human hubris, but the entire project that makes human hubris possible in the first place; a philosophy based not on the pursuit of a better human being, but one that uses posthuman philosophy to imagine an entirely unremarkable human in a cosmos of wonder.

Radical posthumanism

Just dwelling for a moment on the fact that there are more atoms in a single drop of water than planets in the known universe, should be enough to make us realise that even though the scale of our impact on the planet far outweighs our contribution to its mass, a concern with human exceptionalism is not enough.

We need an approach that can, if only in theory, dissolve away the notion of ‘the human’ as an autonomous, bounded entity altogether.

After all, as I pointed out in the first part of this series on posthumanism, there is a lot less of ‘me’ than humanism would like to acknowledge;

‘not only is the line between human and non-human impossible to definitively draw with regard to the binding together neurophysiology, cognitive states and symbolic behaviours, the line between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘brain’ and ‘mind’, is also impossible to draw definitively. For the ‘human’, what makes us ‘us’ – whether we are talking about cultural and anthropological inheritances, tool use and technologies, archives and prosthetic devices, or semiotic systems of all kinds – is always already on the scene before we arrive, providing the very antecedent conditions of possibility for our becoming ‘human’. In a fundamental sense, then, what makes us ‘us’ is precisely not us; [emphasis original] it is not even ‘human’ (Wolfe, 2018, p. 358)

And if we could truly revolutionise our thinking about the way entities, including ‘us’, form, deform, and die, then everything is on the non-essentialised table.

The pure sciences, of course, have followed this path for centuries, but they suffer from what Graham Harman called a tendency to undermining — meaning a tendency to reduce everything down to its smallest possible active component. (Here, again, we have the inherent transcendentalism of science — the search for the ultimate fundamental ‘particle’ that forms the basis of all matter).

Similarly, the cultural, social, and political sciences cannot account for the sheer teeming abundance of creativity at play in the world because of their tendency for overmining — reducing everything to its largest super-structural unit (economy, race, gender, etc.). 

There has been no shortage of interest in this kind of radical philosophical speculation in recent years, particularly from people like Ian Bogost, Franz Brentano, Levi Bryant, Manuel DeLanda, Tristan Garcia, Graham Harman, Bruno Latour, Quentin Meillassoux, and Tim Morton.** And their work draws on a rich heritage, including various aspects of the philosophies of Nietzsche, Foucault, Husserl, Heidegger, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Whitehead.

But many see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as the crown princes of radical posthumanism, in part because their work displaces all of the parameters of conventional (Western) philosophy and creates a new approach to thinking that, while it still holds relevance for human studies, makes possible an analysis of people as just one entity among billions;

‘At this present moment in intellectual history it is impossible to consider the human without contextualizing it with the nonhuman turn. Furthermore, it is unsurprising that the nonhuman turn has been, in its entirety, an interdisciplinary affair – no discipline has a unique purchase on the nonhuman, and engaging with it demands of us that we exceed the boundaries set before us. As does Deleuze. Indeed, there is no single thinker who occupies the nexus of so many intersecting lines’ (Roffe and Stark, 2015).

Radical posthumanism, of course, has its own problems. Not least being the question of how one practically, methodologically, even theoretically, removes oneself from thinking, researching, and practicing enough to do justice to the idea of a radically de-centred human? Aren’t you always already there?

Is Braidotti right to argue that;

‘One needs at least some subject position: this need not be either unitary or exclusively anthropocentric, but it must be the site for political and ethical accountability, for collective imaginaries and shared aspirations’ (Braidotti, 2013 p.102)?

And even if it were possible to become that minoritarian, is there not the sense that doing this work is not enough in the face of structural racism, patriarchy, social injustice, rampant capitalism, and an impending climate catastrophe?

In the next post I’ll try to tackle some of these questions and give some thought to the core principles of posthumanism, before moving on to some ways we might think about this in healthcare.

As always, I truly value your thoughts and comments on any of this. 

This is a work of discovery for me and I’m using this writing very much as a way to work through how I can used these ideas in the future.

So, if you have anything you’d like to add to this melange, it would be lovely to hear from you.

References

Adam, S., Juergensen, L., & Mallette, C. (2021). Harnessing the power to bridge different worlds: An introduction to posthumanism as a philosophical perspective for the discipline. Nursing Philosophy, 22(3). Link

Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. John Wiley & Sons. Link

Braidotti, R. (2019). A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(6), 31-61. Link

Braidotti, R. (2020). “We” Are In This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same. J Bioeth Inq, 17(4), 465-469. Link

DeFalco, A. (2020). Towards a Theory of Posthuman Care: Real Humans and Caring Robots. Body & Society, 1357034X2091745. Link

Ferrando, F. (2019). Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury Publishing. Link

Foucault, M. (1977). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (S. Sherry & D. F. Bouchard, Trans.). In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Cornell University Press. Link

Fox, N. J. (2022). The critical (micro)political economy of health: A more-than-human approach. Health (London), 13634593221113212. Link

Jones, L. (2023). Creatures that don’t conform. Link

Malone, K., & Tran, C. (2022). Diffracting child-virus multispecies bodies: A rethinking of sustainability education with east–west philosophies. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1-15. Link

Onishi, B. B. (2011). Information, Bodies, and Heidegger: Tracing Visions of the Posthuman. Sophia, 50(1), 101-112. Link

Parolin, L. L. (2022). A posthumanist approach to practice and knowledge: Capitalist unrealism: Countering the crisis of critique and imagination. Ephemera, 22. Link

Roffe, J., & Stark, H. (2015). Introduction: Deleuze and the Non/Human. In Deleuze and the Non/Human (pp. 1-16). Palgrave Macmillan UK. Link

Warbrick, I., Heke, D., & Breed, M. (2023). Indigenous Knowledge and the Microbiome-Bridging the Disconnect between Colonized Places, Peoples, and the Unseen Influences That Shape Our Health and Well-Being. mSystems, e0087522. Link

Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press Books. Link

Wolfe, C. (2018). Posthumanism. In R. Braidotti, & M. Hlavajova (Eds.), Posthuman glossary (pp. 356–359). Bloomsbury Academic. Link

Footnotes

* Examples of LT can be found in the work of people like Max More, Nick Bostrom, Aubrey de Grey, Natasha Vita-More, and Anders Sandberg.

** If I were a poststructural feminist, I might be tempted to point out that the vast majority of critical posthumanists are women, whereas those in a radical ‘anti-humanism’ are almost exclusively men. Equally;

’The ‘newness’ of new materialism is relative only to Western/Eurocentric ontology: its recognition of continuities between natural and social worlds recapitulates aspects of indigenous and First Nation ontologies (Rosiek et al., 2020; Sundberg, 2014). Braidotti (2022: 108) suggests ‘renewed materialism’ as a more apt nomenclature terminology). For critical assessments of the new materialisms, see Lettow (2017) and Rekret (2018)’ (Fox, 2022. See also Warbrick et al, 2023).

Or, to quote Rosi Braidotti, ‘when it comes to human/non-human relations, it is time to start learning from the South’ (Braidotti, 2020 p.467).

Perhaps the salient point here is that these arguments sit firmly within a critical posthuman frame. You are unlikely to see a radical posthumanist making this argument, because they would reject the notion of any essentialised human that critical posthumanism bases its posthumanism upon. To quote Foucault;

‘nothing in man — not even his body — is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men’ (Foucault 1977).

All images my own.