On Posthuman Folklore by Tok Thompson

Abstract

On Posthuman Folklore by Tok Thompson Travis Brisini (bio) Posthuman Folklore, by Tok Thompson. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. ISBN: 9781496825087. Hardcover, paperback, and ebook. If I might be so bold, I’d like to begin this review with a generalization: for the sake of an easy shorthand, there are effectively two types of books about posthumanism. The first is the highly technical philosophical text, aimed at the massive pillars of tradition and topicality that have propped up academia since at least the Enlightenment. While these interventions share the unifying characteristic of skepticism about the privileged and unique ontological status of “The Human,” there is significant diversity in topical focus and scope. Michael Serres—whose oeuvre tells the story of humanity, technology, and nature as an ongoing, contiguous milieu—provides a historical account, while Donna Haraway’s recent work proposes relationships of care and mutual obligation as fundamental to our Earthly life with nonhuman Others. Rosi Braidotti provides a complex philosophical genealogy for the posthumanist turn, while Alaimo, Neimanis and van der Tuin examine the relationship between New Materialist and feminist ontologies, and the consequences of this pairing for political and social formulations. Broadly speaking, these works offer deep challenges to the very ontology and epistemology of twenty-first-century knowledge. It is a question, [End Page 282] in these works, not only of what counts, but of how to imagine, undertake, and interpret the situated knowledge(s) of the world. The second type of book about the posthumanities is the work of survey and application: a text whose primary goal is to take the insights generated by the first type of work and apply them to a particular context, in the process reevaluating that context in light of these new posthumanist ideas. These texts—while perhaps less rigorously and ardently philosophical—nonetheless serve an important place in the ecosystem of the posthuman turn, as the site of application and integration. They are the books that show us the consequences—in our familiar academic fields—of the broad philosophical shifts that arise from posthumanist perspectives. Posthuman Folklore, by Tok Thompson, is a book squarely located in this second camp. It is the first book-length effort elucidating the consequences of the posthuman turn for the field of folklore, including an interdisciplinary cadre of scholars and artists in the areas of folklore, storytelling, anthropology, cultural studies, and performance studies, to name a few noteworthy examples. The book succeeds in its claim to offer a wide variety of examples of posthumanist thought, altering established concepts and tenets of folklore. Its form does, however, come with a number of limitations. Posthuman Folklore is essentially two books: one on the nonhuman (animal, plant, material) tendency in posthumanist scholarship, and another on the technological (digital/virtual) tendency that is sometimes also called “transhumanism.” Thompson suggests that it is his goal to integrate these two often disparate tendencies around the question of ontology, writing that “both can be used to help inform the other, and the wider question of basic human ontology: what is it to be human, and how do we perform our humanity?” (14). But in practice, the two areas remain distinct. One might argue that the chapters each contribute to an emergent, “holistic” conversation that proposes a distinct posthumanist ontology and position for the human, but that conversation never materializes in an overt way, and readers are left to draw their own connections between the ontological statuses of the human proposed by each chapter. The work is clearly a collection of previously published essays, and as such, while each chapter stands on its own, the collective philosophical thrust of the work seems both bifurcated and weakened. The nonhuman bent clearly offers more opportunities for new inventional, conceptual expansions for folklorists but also contains within it the possibility that a posthumanist turn may end with (or demand) a level of conceptual stretching that undoes folklore as a discrete object of inquiry. [End Page 283] It is unclear how coherent our shared program of research will be without the commonplace of the “human” as an agent/element of folkloric construction or performance, or how or to what degree the demands of ethological inquiry will...