Mapping Posthumanism: An Exchange

Abstract

The serried ranks of post-prefixed isms marched their way through human geographyduring the 1990s. To open the door to yet another may seem the habitual act of ahopelessly trendy discipline, one derivatively preoccupied with what’s de rigeur in thesocial sciences and humanities. Yet there might be something both apposite andproductive about staging a confrontation between a subject whose very title announcesits determined commitment to ontological purity and a discourse that questions thiskind of delusive hygiene. In one sense, of course, that confrontation has been ongoingfor several years now. Since the early 1990s many ‘human geographers’ have steadfastlyquestioned the adequacy of the appellation used to describe themselves, theirresearch, and their discipline. Drawing upon the thinking of Deleuze, Guattari, andLatour, among many others, they have revealed what Sarah Whatmore, in hercommentary below, calls ‘‘more than human geographies’’. The gravitational forceof their work has not yet exerted a tidal pull on human geography as a whole. But ithas certainly raised some profound questions about the routinised ontological beliefsthat underpin research in the discipline. The full explanatory and normative con-sequences of this questioning will only become apparent in the years ahead, ashuman geography’s ‘structure of feeling’ altersoor does notoin response to itsinsistent demands.What, then, of the discourse of posthumanism? It is hardly new, nor is it unified(Braun, 2004). Like so many of the intellectual currents that have animated humangeography in recent years, it originated outside the discipline, gathering momentumover the last decade. By the time Katherine Hayles published her well-known bookHow We Became Posthumanin 1999 there was already a sizeable literature explainingwhy ‘the human’ must be compulsively draped in scare-quotes.What’s more, the nownot so new neologism ‘posthumanism’ has been fleshed out in a variety of ways that,while generically resonant, are substantively irreducible. Some of these elucidationsare, inevitably, demotic. Francis Fukuyama’s (2002) Our Posthuman Future is partofapredictable genre ofwriting inwhichthe incipient eclipse of the‘human’is lamentedand the ‘post’ taken, in eschatological mode, as a decisive temporal break. Othertheorisations of the posthuman are, fortunately, more sophisticated and thoughtful.