Posthuman

Definition

"Posthuman" names a family of positions holding that the human being is not a fixed, bounded, self-identical thing, and that the conception of the human inherited from Enlightenment humanism has ceased to describe — or never accurately described — what people are.

The word covers at least three distinct arguments that are frequently confused, and separating them is most of the work of using it well.

Three Uses

Critical posthumanism. The dominant position in the humanities. Its claim is about the concept of the human, not about biology. The humanist subject — rational, autonomous, bounded, self-transparent, and historically specified as male, European and able-bodied — is argued to have always been a norm masquerading as a description, sustained by excluding animals, machines, women, colonised people and the disabled. Posthumanism in this sense is the project of thinking without that norm. Its central figures are Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti and Cary Wolfe.

Transhumanism. A different proposition entirely, and frequently the one lay readers assume. Transhumanism holds that human biological limits — ageing, cognitive capacity, mortality — can and should be overcome by technology, and that a "posthuman" is a future being enhanced past those limits. Its principal figures include Nick Bostrom, Max More and Ray Kurzweil.

Critical posthumanism is generally hostile to transhumanism, and the reason is precise. Hayles's argument in How We Became Posthuman is that the fantasy of uploading consciousness — leaving the body behind as a mere substrate — is not the abolition of the liberal humanist subject but its perfection: possessive individualism arriving at last at total ownership of a self that has been separated from everything contingent. The transhumanist posthuman is the humanist subject with better hardware.

Posthumanist ontology. The broader philosophical current — new materialism, object-oriented approaches, material semiotics — which decentres the human as the privileged site of agency and treats humans as one kind of participant among many.

Key Claims of the Critical Position

• Embodiment is not incidental. Hayles's central intervention. Information never was bodiless; the idea that it could be was a specific historical achievement with a datable origin in the Macy Conferences.
• The boundary of the human is drawn, not found. It has been drawn differently at different times and always to someone's advantage.
• Distributed cognition. Thinking happens across bodies, instruments and environments. See extended self.
• Nonhuman agency. Animals, machines and systems act; treating agency as an exclusively human property is a choice with consequences.
• A posthuman worth wanting. Hayles's closing formulation: a posthumanism that recognises finitude, embodiment and dependence rather than one that fantasises escape from them.

Criticism

The obvious objection is that a position which dissolves the human subject is poorly placed to ground human rights, and arrives at that dissolution just as groups historically excluded from the category are claiming it. Braidotti and others answer that the target is a particular exclusionary construction rather than the moral standing of persons, but the tension is real and is the field's live problem. A second objection is terminological: a word used for three incompatible arguments has limited value, and much writing trades on the ambiguity.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

This is the theoretical field the cyborg belongs to, and the distinction above is the one this site most needs to keep straight. Cyborg anthropology is critically posthumanist in Hayles's sense — it studies integration, dependency and embodiment as they actually are — and is not transhumanist. Its interest is in what people and machines are doing now, not in what a species might be upgraded into.

Related Reading

• How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
• Cyborg
• Donna Haraway
• Extended Self
• Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age
• Between Nature & Culture Cyborgs, Simians, Dogs, Genes & Us