Posthumanism
Contextual Quote
"Aligning themselves with information science and Foucault’s proclamation of the death of man, posthumanism, inspired by Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) and Katherine Hayles’s book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), is replacing postmodernism as the defining form of political correctness in the humanities. This provides further justification for the elimination of the humanities, the raison d’etre of which is to cultivate the humanity of people. This is at a time when more humanity is needed than ever before to challenge the power of the global corporatocracy who have massively concentrated wealth and subverted democracy, and to avoid the catastrophe of a war of all against all as global ecological destruction destroys the conditions for civilization. Posthumanism is essentially a philosophical notion, and although the term did not originate in the work of philosophers, a good many philosophers have conformed to what is politically correct and embraced posthumanism."
- Arran Gare [1]
Description
Julia Rijssenbeek en Martine Dirkzwager Wu:
"A frequently voiced answer to 21st-century anthropocentrism is post-humanism. Departing from humanism, post-humanism rejects humans’ exceptional position vis-à-vis other species. Instead of considering humans binarily opposed to non-humans, it invites us to critically rethink the identity we have attributed to humans. Post-humanism highlights the entanglement of humans, animals, plants and other living and non-living beings. By embracing a relational ontology, in which the mutual relations between things constitute the things themselves, beings cannot be conceived of as individuals. Post-humanism thus de-emphasizes the agency of humans and draws attention to the role of non-human agents, placing the same value on all beings. As a result, placing humans at the top of a moral hierarchy stops making sense.
Post-humanists, along with feminists, postcolonial, and queer theorists have decentralized the role of (hu)man and re-integrated humans into an entangled web of lifeforms and technological structures. Post-humanist scholar Rosi Braidotti sums it up in the following way: “The human subject is no longer a singular entity but a more complex ensemble… This implies that thinking and knowing are not exclusively the prerogatives of humans, but take place in the world, which is defined by the co-existence of multiple organic species and technological artifacts alongside each other”.
While post-humanism is currently receiving much attention, post-humanist thinking has long historical roots. In post-humanist fashion, the theories of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud have been called “major blows to man's narcissism”. The Copernican revolution showed us planet Earth was not the center of the universe; the Darwinian revolution taught us that we are part of the animal kingdom and a process of biological evolution; Freud showed us the limits of human rationality, arguing it was hidden thoughts and feelings, not rationality, that influence human behavior."
(https://www.freedomlab.com/posts/will-we-ever-be-post-human)
Discussion
Posthumanism as the successor of deconstructive postmodernism
Arran Gare:
"How should we understand posthumanism in this context? Posthumanism is the successor to deconstructive postmodernism. There are several reasons why postmodernism was superseded. First, it was associated with an extreme scepticism towards science, which, given the technological achievements evident all around us that were made possible by science, seemed absurd. Second, it led to intellectual stagnation. As Paul Mason (p.177) observed, citing the work of the Australian-Italian feminist Rosi Braidotti:
- postmodernist academia had entered a “zombified landscape of repetition without difference and lingering melancholia” which had run out of new ideas. A new theory beginning with “post” was needed to justify the usefulness of humanities departments and pay the rent. Post-humanism was the result. Its central claim was outlined by Katherine Hayles, an American literary critic: the human self is basically information, so whether it resides on a computer or a body doesn’t matter. Consciousness is in any case a “side show,” because the Libet experiment in neuroscience is said to have proved we take most of our decisions unconsciously. As a result, the human being can be “seamlessly articulated with a machine.”
Referring to Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1987), Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), offered a history of information science from its establishment in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics from 1946 to 1953. Cognitive scientists embracing information science believed they had the concepts required to “mechanize the mind,” showing that organisms, including humans, are nothing but complex information processing machines (Dupuy 2009). By adding information to matter and energy, and even privileging information, some participants believed they had the basis for a metaphysical monism, a belief that was embraced by many others, despite the scepticism of major figures at the conferences (acknowledged by Hayles). For these ontological reductionists, the universe’s essential nature is digital, composed of bits of information (Zurek 1990; Floridi 2011: 91). It appears that the technological achievements made possible by information science persuaded Haraway and Hayles to accept the universalizing claims of this science, viewing human individuals as mere information processing nodes in a landscape dominated by information technology. They were left only to consider how we might rescue some remnants of humanity from this claimed revolution in science.
The oddity of this is that both Haraway and Hayles are historians of science, and Haraway had previously written a book on the history of embryology that discussed the work of Waddington and other anti-reductionist biologists. As I have pointed out above, the anti-reductionist philosophers and scientists from Schelling onwards have been struggling to align the sciences and the humanities, not only because they support the value of the humanities, but because the mechanistic conception of life and mind developed by thinkers influenced by Hobbes made science itself unintelligible. In doing so, these anti-reductionists have been enormously successful, as I have also argued above. The proponents of information science have been concerned to update reductionism to make it more plausible, but without success."
Who are the posthumanists
Arran Gare:
"Posthumanism amounts to a total rejection of the revival of humanism by the New Left, which reinterpreted Marx’s work on this basis to oppose the nihilistic, instrumentalist thinking dominating both Soviet Marxism and Western bureaucratic capitalism. The New Left in turn were recovering the heritage of German thought developed in opposition to the atomistic, utilitarian philosophies dominating France and Britain. They were defending a more exalted idea of humans and humanity that acknowledged their capacity for autonomy, and central to this, a more exalted view of reason and imagination, conceived to be creative in a way that empiricists and mechanists had refused to countenance (Engell, 1981). These Germans in turn were reviving and developing the civic humanism that emerged with the defence of democratic republicanism of the Florentine Renaissance, inspired by the Roman republicans and Ancient Athens, and reviving at the same time appreciation of Roman and Greek philosophers.
That all this should be rejected for an updated mechanistic conception of humans, which is now being used by Nick Land and others to argue that as artificial intelligence surpasses the intelligence of the most intelligent humans, humans should reconcile themselves to being displaced as the next stage of evolution, is something that calls for investigation. Can the posthumanists be seen as just Hobbes’s epigones, continuing the work of the reductionist tradition of thought to undermine the values associated with the humanities, perhaps now trying to advance their careers by disguising their alignment with ruling elites hostile to the very idea of democracy? It appears there is more to it than this. Although posthumanists have embraced information science, in characterizing themselves as posthumanists they refer to Michel Foucault’s work heralding the death of man. Like the postmodernists, their reference point is French philosophy, although they have tacitly accepted the social imaginary of the reductionists (to use the language of Cornelius Castoriadis) of gaining total control over the world through techno-science, with the ultimate goal being to overcome mortality. Why should they be subverting the humanities? To comprehend why posthumanism is being promoted and taken to be politically correct a broad historical perspective is required."
The Role of Foucault
Arran Gare:
" Foucault, who was strongly influenced by structuralism while denying that he was a structuralist, played a crucial role in undermining the humanism of the New Left.
The observation from Foucault embraced by the posthumanists comes from the concluding two paragraphs of The Order of Things (1970, p.387; Wolfe, 2020, p.xii) where he wrote:
- As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises — were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."
This claim echoed the conclusion Foucault (2008) had come to in his study of Kant in
his complementary thesis for his Ph.D; and it concluded what overtly was a study of
the human sciences; but there was more than this: it was essentially a rewriting of
history of culture, portrayed as a sequence of epistemes that dominate for a time and
then are replaced, with each episteme being characterized by a particular conception
of order. The result was an account of history that excluded any place for dialectical
struggle between competing research programs or political agendas, or the struggle
between people understood as conscious agents. In giving a place to the Renaissance
episteme, the classical episteme and the modern episteme, renaissance humanists,
scientific materialists and proponents of the radical enlightenment were all accorded
a place, but through a convoluted effort to describe all thinkers within each epoch as
dominated by the same episteme with its assumed conception of order."
Reacting to posthuman philosophy
Mark Stahlman:
"Philosophy has gone “post-human.” Or, as the 2015 The Nonhuman Turn (a conference volume, edited by Richard Grusin, of the Center for 21st Century Studies) puts it, “This book seeks to name, characterize, and therefore to consolidate a wide variety of recent and current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social science. Each of these approaches, and the nonhuman turn more generally, is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies.”'
'Decentering the human. In favor of . . . technologies. How long before the hue-and-cry for “robot rights” becomes front-page news? This is not exactly a fringe movement. A few years back IBM's Watson group (yes, they make robots) sponsored an event featuring post/transhuman proponents including sociologist Steve Fuller, who has published and lectured extensively on these topics. Fuller is noted for his statement that “If you take seriously that evolution has to do with the transition of forms, and that life and death are just natural processes, then one gets to be liberal about abortion and euthanasia. All of these kinds of ideas seem to me follow very naturally from a Darwinian perspective – a deprivileging of human beings, basically.”46 In 2013 a group of Russians took over the Lincoln Center for the “Global Future 2045 International Congress.” The event was dubbed “Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution.” They want to “upload” the psyche into machines.47 In 2018, the 24th “World Congress of Philosophy” convened in Beijing with “Posthumanism” as one of its highlighted through-the-conference tracks, in which leading proponents from around the world participated.
Stanford University is busy with its “Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence,” where the obvious extension of “human rights” to “nonhumans” is being discussed.49 Although most involved are pained to minimize the “negative” consequences, Elon Musk personally wrote a $1M check to finance Max Tegmark's “Future of Life” group at MIT, ostensibly to campaign against weaponized robots.50 Trying to stop the deployment of Robocop. Signatures have been collected and pledges have been made. Few believe that will really work. Roman Yampolskiy, a computer science professor at the University of Lexington (Kentucky) and signatory of the “Asilomar Principles” believes that AIs must be “boxed” to be trusted.51 He just might be right. The alternative to all this “decentering” and “deprivileging” might be to return to the beginning of our effort to understand the human psyche. Aristotle “invented” psychology in the 4th-century BC. His Peri Psyche (De Anima in Latin and On the Soul in English) is little studied today and generally unknown to the typical psychology major.52 Indeed, repeated and detailed discussions of Aristotle appear to be rare nowadays. Thomas Aquinas famously brought Aristotle back in the 13th-century and his Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima (along with many others, including key figures in Islamic philosophy) really has to be featured in that renewed course of study. Today, academic followers of Thomas, particularly among Spanish philosophers, while few-and-far-between, continue to keep these topics alive. Until the “Enlightenment” these were wellworn paths both in Continental and Anglophone circles. The time has come to retrieve this largely forgotten wisdom."
Critical Posthumanism
Arran Gare:
Primod Nayar in Posthumanism (2014, p.22) referring to “Critical Posthumanism,”, wrote:
- 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).
Similarly, Rosi Braidotti wrote in The Posthuman (2013, p.1) that
- the concept of the human has exploded under the double pressure of contemporary scientific advances and global economic concerns. After the postmodern, the postcolonial, the post-industrial, the post-communist and even the much-contested postfeminist conditions, we seem to have entered the post-human predicament.
She then set out to defend a posthuman subject based on the notion of autopoiesis, that is, second order cybernetics.
Embracing Foucault’s proclamation of the “death of man” appears to be central to the thinking of these posthumanists, with the advance of information science providing justification for their allegiance to Foucault and providing direction for their militant attack on humanism. Their world vision is a complete negation not only of the humanism that emerged with the New Left in their reaction to Stalinism and domination of the West by the military-industrial complex, but also to the whole history of humanism with its struggle for autonomy, democracy and social justice from the pre-Socratics and defenders of the Republic in Rome to the Renaissance and then the Radical Enlightenment. As noted, Foucault’s critique of humanism was technical, directed principally against Kant, and his “death of man” proclamation appears as something of a rhetorical flourish. However, humanism had been criticised by a number of philosophers, including Heidegger, who had reacted to Sartre’s affirmation of humanism in his Letter on Humanism, as well as by the structuralists and poststructuralists. The posthumanists have interpreted Foucault as being aligned with a broader tradition of posthumanism. To support this anti-humanism, they have embraced information science and the technologies advanced through it in order to question the boundaries that defined human beings in the past, associated with embodiment, claiming along with the transhumanists that we can extend ourselves beyond embodiment through new technologies. There is now no clear division between what people are and what their technology is, or for that matter, what other forms of life are or what is not alive. We are largely made up of non-human microorganisms moving in and out of what had previously been regarded as the boundaries of the body.
As information processors, what had been taken to be humans are now seen as continuous with the physical processes around them. From this reductionist perspective, there is nothing but energy, information, and matter (Gare, 2020). Since information technology emerged during World War II and has been driven by the drive to augment military and industrial power, posthumanism amounts to accepting our complete absorption into the military-industrial complex.
Posthumanism is claimed to be anti-elitist and aligned with ecological thinking, but offers a debased view of life and provides no place for people taking responsibility for ecological destruction. Those who call for the development of such responsibility are in the long tradition of humanism and therefore politically incorrect. As became clear from New Left thinking, it was the elimination from orthodox Marxism of a conception of humans as subjects whose humanity could be cultivated, but who could also be dehumanized, that paved the way for the brutality of Stalinism. Slavery amounted to a failure to acknowledge the humanity of people and their potential; and depriving people of access to the means of production and treating their creative potential as a commodity, as labour-power, dependent upon others who could destroy their livelihoods, had also been shown by Marx to be a form of slavery. A conception of the world and people as machines, and identifying reason with instrumental rationality, produces a one-dimensional culture that eliminates the basis for even criticising this dehumanization. Orthodox Marxism as developed in the Soviet Union had simply reproduced such thinking in a slightly different form. The development of philosophical anthropology, characterizing humans and their potential, and showing which potentialities should be realized, provided the basis for challenging and overcoming such thinking both theoretically and in practice. This conception of humans, while differentiating humans from other kinds of living beings, was the basis for reconceiving the nature and life. Showing that even plants have Umwelten, surrounding worlds that have meaning for them and that semiosis, the production and interpretation of signs, is central to all life, including ecosystems, has provided the basis for defending the intrinsic significance of all life. To conceive life as nothing but information processing cyborgs is a rejection of this work, without even acknowledging it, and undermines the basis for any appreciation of this intrinsic significance and eliminates completely any possibility of challenging domination by instrumental rationality (Gare, 2020).
Beyond this, it is difficult to gain a clear picture of what the posthumanists stand for. Continuing deconstructive postmodernists scepticism about reason and anti-elitism, they simultaneously uphold being non-judgemental as a virtue while engaging in enforcing political correctness and upholding the new “cancel culture,” defending this on supposedly scientific grounds."
Will we ever be post-human?
Julia Rijssenbeek et al. :
"Beyond our lived experiences, scholars have pointed at significant theoretical shortcomings of post-humanism. Can post-humanism really provide us with a representative and guiding perspective from which to understand humanity in these times? Understanding that human-non-human relations are always and already entangled in a complex ecology is necessary if we are to critique anthropocentric thinking. But post-humanism also has its limits.
By emphasizing the intertwined relations between people, animals, plants, microbes and machines, post-humanism eliminates the ability to speak of “something” or “someone”. In speaking of networks and relations, post-humanism does away with the idea of the self which humans have always counted on to understand their being in the world, acting in the world, and having a sense of responsibility for the world. Yes, Tripaldi is right in saying that “there are minds that function in a non-representative way, without any need to build a reflective image of [them]selves and the world”, but this is not the case for humans. As recognized by Bridle, some anthropomorphism is inevitable, for “We are anthropos, and we have no other means of addressing these worlds than through our own.” Humans can only think and speak from a human point of view.
By the same token, post-humanism’s overemphatic effort to level humans and non-humans on equal footing risks losing much analytic capacity and oversimplifying complex power dynamics and social relations. Power and agency cease to matter or even exist once they have been distributed amongst everyone, equally. Not recognizing power dynamics, post-humanism also undermines moral and political considerations that are key in our Anthropocenic day and age. There has to be some difference among the planet’s actors. For instance, Tripaldi assigns cognition, but not consciousness, to materials. Perhaps because of this (and contrary to animals or other non-human beings), humans have been able to differentiate and disentangle their own biology from material production in order to produce a wide array of different materials.
Lastly, post-humanism might just be the other end of a pendulum swing between human-centrism and the total decentering of humans. It is not necessary for us humans to engage with the more-than-human world in an absolutely symmetrical manner. The point of relating to other species and materials is precisely learning to love and respect their differences, not erase them altogether. Through technologies such as nanotech, which could potentially act on the same level as biological life, we can observe and learn from other species. But we should also not fetishize their differences. We are, as Bridle and Tripaldi argue, urged to remain open to the logic of other ways of being, always humbled by our incapacity of experiencing and acting in the world as something more-than-human. Perhaps the way to start discovering this equilibrium is by expanding a perennial method of building networks of care and compassion which has brought meaning to human life: friendship."
(https://www.freedomlab.com/posts/will-we-ever-be-post-human)
More information
Books:
- James Bridle’s Ways of Being
- Laura Tripaldi’s Parallel Minds