Posthuman Knowledge

Abstract

Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman Knowledge opens with a vignette that has by now become a recurring experience for users of digital services: a “reCAPTCHA” window requests that users confirm their humanity by checking the box “I’m not a robot.” That nowadays individuals have to constantly assert their humanness reflects the ontobiological permeability and vulnerability of the notion of the human. For Braidotti, the definitional challenge of “what or who counts as human today” must be understood “in the context of our posthuman times” (1). A Deleuzian feminist by training, Braidotti has spent the past two decades developing an embodied and ethical language to examine the diverse subjectivities that emerge at the intersection of continental philosophy, cultural and political theory, and gender and postcolonial studies. Her work, ranging from Nomadic Subjects (1994, reedited in 2011) and Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006), where she most clearly articulates a diverse and nonunitary conception of the feminist nomadic subject, to The Posthuman (2013) and Posthuman Ecologies (2018), has considered the ways in which the imbrication of liberal humanism, technocapitalism, and ecology has shaped how we think about the human, and articulated the need to break with traditional, segregative notions of subjectivity through the image of the posthuman.In this new publication, Braidotti takes an ethical and practical approach to posthumanism, considering the geopolitical, sociocultural, and philosophical factors that make the present moment a “posthuman convergence” and reflecting on how the emerging field of the critical posthumanities may help us tackle the rise of fascistic regimes across the Western political landscape and, more broadly, the persistence of inequality on a planetary and cross-species scale. Through a series of epithets and adjectives that reveal the concept’s metamorphous and fluid nature, Braidotti argues that the “posthuman condition” (or convergence) is a “historical marker” of contemporary society, serving to critique liberal humanism’s alignment of the human with the white, Western, male, abled subject, a totalizing definition that excludes any and all distinctions of race, gender, class, and embodiment from the realm of the human. Most importantly, the posthuman is “a work in progress . . . a working hypothesis about the kind of subjects we are becoming” (2). The image of a subject that is continuously becoming through a relational and affirmative praxis is one that Braidotti returns to continuously and is aptly encapsulated in the book’s thesis—“we are all in this together but we are not one and the same” (52). What does such a positive difference look like inside and outside of our academic walls? And how may we, as posthuman/ist scholars, harness this diverse togetherness into our own work? Contending with the institutional, sociopolitical, and ecological tensions that characterize our time, Braidotti suggests that we do so through an affective, affirmative ethics founded on difference and relational engagements within and across disciplines.Posthuman Knowledge is an optimistic critique of contemporary institutional and political power structures, continuing the project initiated in The Posthuman. A key contribution to the field of posthuman studies, Braidotti’s 2013 publication began to sketch out a definition of the posthuman and its convergence, tracing the emergence of posthumanist scholarship from the French poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial work of the 1970s and 1980s. Aware of the increasing blurring of boundaries between human and nonhuman, Braidotti outlined the tenets of posthumanist thinking, namely the rejection of human exceptionalism and the acknowledgment that subject and environment are inextricably enmeshed both biologically and affectively; she also identified difference, relationality, and interdisciplinarity as the main tools of posthumanism. Now Braidotti calls for, and models, a shift from theoretical engagement with the posthuman to investigation, practical and ethical, of the production and circulation of posthuman knowledge(s) across disciplinary, geographical, and affective borders. The culmination of Braidotti’s efforts to develop a mode of posthuman inquiry, the critical posthumanities emerge as a deeply affective project, resting on an “affirmative ethics” that thinks through the posthuman within the complex ideological, environmental, and technological conjuncture of our “posthuman convergence.” Braidotti’s affirmative ethics emerges in response to and as a critique of the pessimistic, bordering on fatalistic, tendencies of contemporary scholarship, constituting a fundamental tool in achieving a “sustainable present . . . and hopeful future” (3).Chapters 1 and 2 outline such a pessimistic condition. Deeply cognizant of the rise of fascistic governments in the West, Braidotti traces the trend to a particular affective state: that of exhaustion. The product of the neoliberal gig economy, globalized markets, and a toxic rhetoric of self-care that continuously seeks to regulate bodily dispositions, exhaustion and fatigue emerge as the two key affects in the posthuman convergence. They have penetrated individuals, whose value and self-worth is determined by their ability to successfully balance the “expectation and dejection, euphoria and anguish, boom and gloom” of our culture of automation and competition (15). And they have infiltrated institutions, where the combination of “post-theoretical malaise” and “democracy fatigue” has resulted in anti-intellectual approaches toward neoconservative white supremacism à la Jordan Peterson.Conversely, Braidotti urges scholars to conceive of exhaustion not as a source of negativity and passivity, but rather as a generative position, a “threshold of transformation” (17) or “opening act” (18). To do so, scholars must reach beyond theoretical figurations toward a praxis that is embodied, embedded, and transversal. In other words, we must devise a practice that welcomes embodied difference, that is politically embedded, and that brings together a wide range of disciplines and discourses. To achieve this praxis, Braidotti calls for epistemological and ethical accountability “capable of increasing our relational capacity (potentia), as distinct from the protocols of institutional control (potestas)” (50). The distinction between potentia and potestas is fundamental to her project, and she articulates it deftly: while the two are inextricably linked, Braidotti sees in potentia’s relationality the potential to reconcile critique and creativity, as exemplified in feminist and Indigenous works, to achieve what she calls a “material immanence” grounded in intersectional modes of becoming and belonging. This is perhaps the most abstract section of Braidotti’s otherwise quite clear argument; however, she successfully walks her readers through the intersections of Spinoza and Deleuze that culminate in her own materialist reading. Braidotti’s immanent ethics does not claim or aim to eliminate the exhaustion and negativity that permeate current political and philosophical thought but, instead, to activate these affects as tools for knowledge production. The critical posthumanities emerge, then, as an image of collective resistance, ethical accountability, and relational transformation.Chapter 3 engages with posthuman knowledge production concretely, emphasizing experimentation and the possibilities of becoming. Engaging with the posthuman as a “zoe/geo/techno-mediated being, immanently related to and hence inseparable from the material, terrestrial and planetary locations” around it (63), Braidotti asks that knowledge production grapple with the intrinsic tensions between actual and virtual, past and future, that come out of such an entrenchment in the world, through two strategies: first, through the endorsement of interdisciplinary methodologies; second, through a qualitative shift toward affective modes of knowledge-making. The proliferation of neologisms and counterconcepts to the Anthropocene denotes “a touch of white panic . . . mingled with masculinist fear and Christian eschatological visions” (82–83) that seeks to return the human to its universalizing tradition, threatening to erase the diversity and relationality of the posthuman. In the face of this “epistemic accelerationism,” Braidotti asks that scholars shift their focus from a theoretical, purely geological, understanding of the Anthropocene to an examination of the economic and geopolitical power relations that it encodes. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Jennifer Gabrys and Jussi Parikka, Braidotti argues that we must look to the geomaterial frameworks of media culture and their intersection with racialized labor in order to develop an interdisciplinary, postidentitarian mode of knowledge production (79).In Chapter 4, Braidotti outlines the critical posthumanities’ main lines of inquiry. Thematically, the new discipline must engage agencies beyond the human, considering our intricate relationship with the nonhuman world on an animal, technological, and planetary level. Methodologically, the new field must be transdisciplinary, discourse flowing across and between disciplines. Conceptually, it must recognize the interdependence of the social and the environmental in what Donna Haraway calls the “naturecultures” through an affective approach. Finally, the critical posthumanities must engage politically with the neoliberal structures that organize academia today. This constitutes a particularly poignant moment in Braidotti’s argument. Acknowledging the ways in which posthuman discourse is already in some ways complicit with neoliberalism, Braidotti asks that the critical posthumanities develop a concerted conversation about the need for such a bond, while opening pathways for the valorization and growth of the “minor” sciences—the noninstitutionally funded, but also independent, disciplines such as feminist, queer, migrant, diasporic, decolonial, and disability studies, which work to decentralize intellectual practice and challenge fast-paced, heteropatriarchal capitalism. These “minor” sciences, Braidotti argues, operate along nonlinear, qualitative lines of inquiry, “reterritorializ[ing] and recompos[ing] the dominant knowledge production systems . . . through creating multiple missing links, opening generative cracks, and visiting marginal spaces” (127). Through a Deleuzian “becoming-minoritarian,” the critical posthumanities are a transdisciplinary field seeking to resist the scholarship of white anxiety through deceleration and nonnormative affect.“Becoming-minoritarian” critical posthumanities are at once a political and institutional endeavor, and therefore require the development of a “posthuman pedagogy.” It is in the sketching out of such a pedagogy that Braidotti’s argument is most tangible and future-oriented. Grounded in feminist and postcolonial practice, a posthuman pedagogy is nonhierarchical and transversal, employs new materialist and collaborative methods, and seeks to defamiliarize political and institutional praxis from dominant models of subjectivity. Such a collaborative approach perceives teacher and student as equal knowledge producers and “makes room for non-human elements, technological, animal or other, to intervene as heterogeneous forces that connect the educational practice to the wider world” (142). A posthuman pedagogy necessitates a posthuman university, which Braidotti delineates throughout Chapter 5. Emphasizing the need to disengage posthumanism from its superficial similarities to postmodernism, Braidotti calls for “mutual adjustments” among scholars: those who claim theory fatigue must “drop the aggression” and embrace theory as a critical cartography toward the production of meaning; “high theory” scholars should, in turn, make their conceptual work more accessible. Another key task of the posthuman university is to assess what elements of the tradition of humanism can and should be salvaged, while seeking to elevate and incorporate the “activist research” of radical epistemologies from feminist and queer studies to ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and disability studies. A posthuman pedagogy must also construct a network of knowledge sharing between the posthumanities, the life sciences, and technology. Here, Braidotti reiterates the need to invest in minor or nomadic sciences as alternative knowledge systems, as well as to foster deceleration and slowness, as ethical strategies to resist neoliberalism’s hold on academia. Finally, we must reassert the role of the university as a civic space engaged in the discussion of what it means to “do democracy” (149) in the face of neoliberalism and fascism.In the last two chapters of Posthuman Knowledge, Braidotti describes her project for a praxis-oriented affirmative ethics. Positioning the posthuman on the margins of normative institutional spaces, the author asks that scholars rearticulate our attachment to the material environment in the form of “becoming-world.” At the risk of sounding repetitive, Braidotti once again emphasizes the value of minoritarian disciplines such as feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, specifically in their aptitude to expose the knowledges and histories previously disregarded by white Western humanism to excavate the discourses of the dispossessed and disempowered. Similarly, we must turn the negative into the positive. This does not mean a denial of negativity and exhaustion, but a reassessment of these feelings as alternative paths for meaning-making.This is the core ethical argument of Posthuman Knowledge: to turn anxiety and pain into action opens up a space for the enactment of the potentia of all bodies, human and nonhuman, microscopic and planetary. Braidotti’s posthuman convergence rests on the vitality and vibrancy of zoe, of life that is material, vulnerable, and never taken for granted. “There is so much to do and it is exhausting just to think of it,” the author tells us, yet we must begin somewhere (181). Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman Knowledge provides such a starting point—through an ethical praxis that does not give in to anxiety, but seeks to construct meaning relationally and collaboratively, recognizing difference and the need to cohere into a “we-who-are-not-one-and-the-same-but-are-in-this-convergence-together.”