Posthuman Ethics Research Articles

Toward an Ethics of Affinity: Posthumanism and the Question of the Animal in Two SF Narratives of Catastrophe

ABSTRACT This article reads two narratives of catastrophe, Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” (1983) and Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” (2015), in an attempt to explore how their concern with disaster destabilizes the binary human/nonhuman. Conjuring up visions of transformation and extinction before and after catastrophe, the stories interrogate humanist accounts of subjectivity through their focus on language and consciousness, prompting us to rethink the ontological divide between the human and the animal. This interrogation is carried out not only at the level of thematics, but also at a formal level, through the techniques of defamiliarization and extrapolation as well as through the choice of narrative voice and focalization. Thus, the two stories engage with some of the key issues addressed by the discourses originating from the fields of animal studies and critical posthumanism, which are currently gaining momentum in philosophy and literary criticism in the context of the Posthuman turn. As will be contended, the stories send a powerful message about the boundary between self and other, highlighting the necessity of a shift toward a posthumanist ethics of affinity.

Language and Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s <em>Never Let Me Go</em>

Netty Mattar discusses in her article “Language and Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” the complexities of ethical compassion in this biotechnological age. Mattar highlights how genetic technology creates new forms of life that dissolve the line between ‘human’ and ‘technology.’ In spite of this, contemporary ethical discussions do not take into account changing conceptions of human subjectivity and instead reinstate older assumptions about what ‘human’ is. Mattar argues that speculative fiction (SF), as a self-conscious play on signs and signification, can draw attention to how ethical responses are determined by the language we use. Mattar reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s SF novel Never Let Me Go as a critique of liberal humanist ethical discourse, which eliminates difference as it promises inclusion. She argues that Ishiguro’s uncanny narrative presents a posthuman ethics that forces the reader to confront their own dependence on exclusionary understandings of ‘human’.

Human rights and posthuman poetics in contemporary Irish poetry: technology, media, ecology

ABSTRACT This article examines a series of poems by contemporary Irish authors writing in English, and focuses on the role of media technology in considering post-human ethics and human rights issues in these poems. Human rights discourse has faced the challenge of addressing the broadening of the category of ‘human’ through post-human ethics and aesthetics. What is therefore needed is a consideration of how the sphere or concept of human rights can encompass what Rosi Braidotti describes as ‘post-human subjects of knowledge – embedded, embodied and yet flowing in a web of relations with human and non-human others’. This theoretical framework informs the article's discussion of selected poems, how these poems approach human rights conflicts and violations in a distinctively post-human context, and how different manifestations of media technology shape and reflect such discussions. Poetry, technology, and the post-human subject are understood as equally embedded in the material, cultural, and political assemblages within which human rights and post-human ethics also emerge.

Этика постчеловечества

The content of posthuman ethics is clarified through a comparative analysis of the psychophysical structure of modern man and posthuman, the features of which specifically determine the ethics of different types of society. For this purpose, the content of the concepts mind, consciousness, soul, spirit, human cognition is investigated from the point of view of modern neuroscience, Christian anthropology and Cartesian philosophy. The questions of free will are raised, arguments are given in favor of the concept of compatibilism.

Human Rights, Posthuman Ethics, and the Material Aesthetics of Flight in Contemporary Irish Poetry

This article examines a series of poems by Irish authors, and focuses on their engagement with human rights violations and conflicts through the metaphors and imagery of flight and the aerial view. It argues that these poems address the need for a shift away from the perspective of a defined, distinct human subject, and towards a posthumanist framework which emphasizes relational, situated, and embodied ethics and aesthetics in an interconnected world. Since the introduction of modern aviation, Irish poets have frequently employed the imagery of flying to consider poetry's role in relation to conflict and crisis. Here, the adoption of visual and material metaphors of flight and aerial travel in human rights contexts is discussed, particularly in poems by Seamus Heaney, Peter Sirr and Justin Quinn. Through a reimagined poetics of flight, these poets question established dichotomies between proximity and distance, and material embodiment and disembodied abstraction.

Interrogating the “Animal”: An Investigation into the Ethics of Man-Animal Divide

Humanity defines itself through an animal other, the animal in Jacques Derrida’s definition of “absolute alterity,” cannot return the human gaze. In this paper, I explore the possibilities of accommodation and hospitality which posthuman philosophy provides in conceptualizing the position of alterity of the “animal”. Building on the writing of Jacque Derrida and Giorgio Agamben I will argue how Posthumanism can radicalize the way in which the anthropocentric worldview looks at the animal as other, questioning the positioning and relevance of speciesism and species boundary. Also, the issue of the agency has been interrogated in this research article. I have also argued for a new mode of conceptualizing the “other” / the “animal” which abolishes the hierarchical view of anthropocentric conception of nonhuman but instead views the other from the lens of companionship, borrowing from the ideas of “companionship” and “Chuthulucene” of Donna J. Haraway. The paper is an attempt to expand the humanist exclusionary boundaries and is an exercise in developing a posthuman ethics through which the category of human can be radically questioned and can be made more hospitable.

Exploring posthuman ethics: opening new spaces for postqualitative inquiry within pedagogies of the circular economy

AbstractThis article discusses closed-loop systems, namely Cradle to Cradle and circular economy, in the context of sustainable education. These circular models, at least ideally, promise absolute decoupling of resource consumption from the economy. This article presents student assignments applying these models to Hennes & Mauritz, a clothing retail company, and insect food producer, Protix.While the discussion of circular economy revolves around the economic benefits of closed-loop systems, it rarely addresses posthumanism. Posthumanism is related to postqualitative theory, inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that nature has become intertwined with technology and culture. In the cases discussed, combining both techno- and organic materials produces ‘monstrous hybrids’. It appears that fully circular solutions are rare as absolute decoupling is limited by thermodynamic (im)possibilities. This realization still has to be developed in environmental education. Within this posthumanist inquiry, the larger lesson from the case studies is the necessity of teaching about degrowth in production, consumption and corporate strategy. In pedagogical terms, this article aims to generate a more critical discussion within the environmental education community about how postqualitative inquiry can provide different and distinct perspectives from qualitative inquiry in the context of the circular economy.

Ethics and research with young children‐new perspectivesEdited byChristopher M.Schulte

Ethics and research with young children‐new perspectivesEdited byChristopher M.Schulte

Expanding to bulk: scale and the challenge of posthuman ethics in Moby-Dick

ABSTRACT Posthumanist theory has stressed the fictionality of accounts of human exceptionality and has viewed humans as particular sorts of things in a non-hierarchical relation with the universe of things. This approach has recently been taken up by nineteenth-century American literary scholarship through works by Michael Jonik, Cristin Ellis, Matthew Taylor, and others. However, because posthumanism can emphasise interconnection between human and nonhuman, it can run into difficulty, particularly in accounting for ethical imperatives. Drawing from Mark McGurl’s theorisation of the giant as symbolic of the reality of physical forces, this essay considers how the size of the whale in Moby-Dick is a central descriptive problem of crossing scalar boundaries within a material field. What such a speculative reading offers is an understanding of Moby-Dick’s size as both a challenge and an affordance for the expansion of the human. Through prosthesis, the human may scale up to the whale’s size, but that also entails a change of scalar field that disorients what such scaling procedures are for. Allowing for the difference between scales not only challenges narratives of human dominance in particular ways, but it also reveals, in Moby-Dick, an indication of a route towards a plural and posthuman ethics of discrete scales.

The Debate of Post-human Ethics in the Implementation of Futuristic Automatons: The Case Study of Robotic Dogs in Utopian Western Military juxtaposed against the Real Abuse of Street Dogs in a Dystopian Global South

The Debate of Post-human Ethics in the Implementation of Futuristic Automatons: The Case Study of Robotic Dogs in Utopian Western Military juxtaposed against the Real Abuse of Street Dogs in a Dystopian Global South

Beyond‐human ethics: The animal question in institutional ethical reviews

AbstractIn this paper, I investigate how the development of ethics and methods in beyond human and posthuman research have largely been ignored within institutional ethical frameworks. Specifically, I argue that the ethical review process for research needs critical consideration in light of emerging multispecies methodologies. The inclusion and consideration of animals in geography should go further than “bringing animals in” to the discipline; instead they must seek to rethink geographical theory as with and for non‐humans. The ethics, politics, and practices of animals’ inclusion in research have been differentially attended to across geographical scholarship. To do this, I investigate how institutional ethical review operates as a disciplining and shaping tool in the neoliberal university. In doing so, I contend that ethical review processes shape the narratives and structures of what kinds of research are possible for not only animal geographers, but across the discipline. I then explore how multispecies research specifically is affected by and can affect institutional ethical review, revealing how these processes fall short against the heightened backdrop of species difference. Where posthumanist ethics is in tension with institutional ethical frameworks, I argue that ethical approval does not necessarily indicate that researchers have successfully grappled with complex moral dilemmas. Particularly, the acquiring of ethical approval prioritises outmoded forms of knowledge that prioritise homogenised ethical and methodological practice over ethical innovation and questioning. Finally, I offer three propositions drawing on posthumanist ethics and informed by innovative and exploratory multispecies research: the inclusion of animals as participants in research; the reimagination of multispecies ethical and methodological practice; and the reform of institutional ethical review processes. By exploring how radical ethics might be mobilised in multispecies research, I argue that we can further geographical theory and practice to reconfigure who matters as a geographical and ethical subject.

Reading Posthuman Ethics in Daniel Wilson’s Amped

In 20th century and beyond, humans have witnessed numerous advances in technology which have opened new horizons. Science and technology redesigned human life exponentially and humans always search for a more technological world and hence more comfort and ease. As such, going past human confinement could be accessible through a few changes in human form, but these changes posture a contentious point since people grow into being more reliant on technology in order to execute their desires and needs. What will happen to humanness and humanity? What will happen to their moralities and behaviors? In this manner, technological development could have both promising and discouraging pictures within the human mind. The current study cites Daniel H. Wilson’s Amped (2013) to discuss the clash of views between Transhumanists and Bioconservatives. Transhumanists believe that human improvement advances should be made broadly accessible, where people could adopt these innovations and apply them to themselves to have a better life. In particular, bioconservatives consider human enhancement technologies as ‘dehumanizing’ for these technologies might weaken human dignity and affect something that is profoundly valuable about being human. As such, Posthuman theory is consulted in order to analyze the ethical and moral concerns of human enhancement technology in Wilson’s Amped. The findings are summed in the importance of ethics in any kind of enhancement and conclude that the trustworthy source is a priority to ensure success.

Ulysses-Machine: Posthuman Joyce andthe Ethics of Production

There have been increasing interests in techno-poetics and posthuman aesthetics in recent literary studies. This work harnesses this critical energy and re-reads Ulysses as a work that embodies this posthuman ethos and explores its affiliation with technology and mechanical movements of language. This essay attempts to articulate Ulysses’s machine-like qualities using Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus as a theoretical framework. Just like Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machine, Ulysses is a mechanical body with a peculiar awareness of the possibilities of language in duplicating, reproducing, and even transforming and redistributing the real. Ulysses-machine keeps deferring the moment when one voice, one language, or one perspective becomes a dominant agency. Ulysses-machine also enables new connections between bodies (biological, mechanical, and textual) through its mechanical production and indifferent productions and juxtapositions of multiple perspectives. In so doing, Joyce’s language and characters embody the posthuman ethics of becoming machine-like.

Ball jars, bacteria, and labor: CO-producing nature through cooperative enterprise

The production of nature has been employed to theorize shifts in nature-society relations that have accompanied historical transformations in production and social reproduction. While Marxist scholars have employed this framework to theorize the nature-society relations that accompany capitalist production, they have paid less attention to those that accompany non-capitalist production. In the meantime critical food studies has grown abundant with more-than-human and more-than-capitalist encounters with nature. This paper attempts to bring these two streams of thought together, in order to explore what they reveal about encounters and entanglements with microbes and non-human labor in the non-capitalist production of yogurt. Drawing on ethnographic research with a yogurt making cooperative in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA, I explore the contribution of microbial labor to the co-production of nature and post-human ethics in a cooperative food enterprise.

A humanist university in a posthuman world: relations, responsibilities, and rights

This paper explores the entanglement of humanism and posthumanism within the Western European University, focusing on ethical implications and the role of the university in protecting the marginalised. To illustrate its arguments, it draws on a small study conducted in an ancient Italian university which specialises in Humanities and Social Sciences. The paper focuses on two key knotty issues: relationships between university aspirations to posthumanism and the colonial legacies of humanism, and the implications of holding on to humanism as a guarantor of human rights for marginalised people. It concludes by discussing the limitations of a posthuman ethics of responsibility and proposes instead a posthuman ethics of rights for the university.

Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

LEARNING FROM NONHUMAN ANIMALS: TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF POSTHUMANITIES

Throughout the debated discourse of humanism, humans were considered as the only species endowed with reason and moral values. The result was an andro/anthropocentric humanism that divided everything into hierarchies and confined everything within boundaries. European model of higher education has undoubtedly been an enforcement of humanist ideas and ideologies which established certain humans as exceptional and superior to other ‘non-privileged’ humans and nonhuman animals. In this era of posthumanism all the imposed and imbibed boundaries between the human and nonhuman are being questioned, challenged and eliminated to create an open network of cross-species encounters. In this context this article through the theories of Posthuman philosophy and Critical Animal Studies proposes a shift towards posthuman ethics of inclusion and understanding in the field of classical humanities in India. This can be achieved by employing postontological methods to create and understand nonhuman representations. Theories and studies by posthuman scholars like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, Graham Harman form the basis of this paper. This article is an acknowledgement as well as an advocation of the shift happening across disciplines from humanities to posthumanities, which however is yet to make a movement in education in India.

The Ecological Turn in Design: Adopting a Posthumanist Ethics to Inform Value Sensitive Design

Design for Values (DfV) philosophies are a series of design approaches that aim to incorporate human values into the early phases of technological design to direct innovation into beneficial outcomes. The difficulty and necessity of directing advantageous futures for transformative technologies through the application and adoption of value-based design approaches are apparent. However, questions of whose values to design are of critical importance. DfV philosophies typically aim to enrol the stakeholders who may be affected by the emergence of such a technology. However, regardless of which design approach is adopted, all enrolled stakeholders are human ones who propose human values. Contemporary scholarship on metahumanisms, particularly those on posthumanism, have decentred the human from its traditionally privileged position among other forms of life. Arguments that the humanist position is not (and has never been) tenable are persuasive. As such, scholarship has begun to provide a more encompassing ontology for the investigation of nonhuman values. Given the potentially transformative nature of future technologies as relates to the earth and its many assemblages, it is clear that the value investigations of these design approaches fail to account for all relevant stakeholders (i.e., nonhuman animals). This paper has two primary objectives: (1) to argue for the cogency of a posthuman ethics in the design of technologies; and (2) to describe how existing DfV approaches can begin to envision principled and methodological ways of incorporating non-human values into design. To do this, the paper provides a rudimentary outline of what constitutes DfV approaches. It then takes up a unique design approach called Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as an illustrative example. Out of all the other DfV frameworks, VSD most clearly illustrates a principled approach to the integration of values in design.

How to expand the boundaries: feminist posthumanist elaborations on change in education

Change is a vital matter connecting to key educational concerns of teaching and learning and also involves questions of ethics. By deploying a feminist posthumanist framework, this paper elaborates change together with the notions of boundaries and responsibility. This is done by exploring moments from a collaborative research project conducted in a Swedish upper secondary school concerning a teaching unit focusing on equality and norms. The questions guiding the paper are: How is change enacted within the teaching? And, how to unfold the responsibilities the teaching entails? By working within the interplay of empirical enquiry and theoretical elaboration, the paper addresses how a multitude of encounters become involved in enactments of change. Further, it unfolds how change entails both unpredictability and responsibility for teaching and learning. In the concluding notes the ambiguities of change are stressed addressing the call within posthuman ethics of how to expand the boundaries.

Ethics After Poststructuralism: A Critical Reader ed. by Lee Chancey Olsen, Brendan Johnston, and Ann Keniston (review)

Reviewed by: Ethics After Poststructuralism: A Critical Reader ed. by Lee Chancey Olsen, Brendan Johnston, and Ann Keniston Lucien Darjeun Meadows Lee Chancey Olsen, Brendan Johnston, and Ann Keniston, editors. Ethics After Poststructuralism: A Critical Reader. McFarland & Company, 2020, 283p. How do we—ethically—relate to the Other? Does the category of “the Other” still hold valence in contemporary critical conversations? Who, for that matter, counts as “we”? How can scholars advance an ethics that resists grand narratives, an ethics that offers planet-wide relevance, and an ethics that opens considerations of human, animal, and ecological sentience? In Ethics After Poststructuralism, editors Lee Olsen, Brendan Johnston, and Ann Keniston offer a robust critical reader centered around Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophies as a pathway toward exploring these important questions. These editors balance their text in a complex space. They offer an inclusive anthology of “ethics after poststructuralism” —a wide field, potentially including philosophers across the world from the 1960s onward—yet they use one significant philosopher, Levinas, as the fulcrum, with inclusions serving to interrogate and advance, to “counter and extend” what they term Levinasian ethics (8). The editors admit that “Levinas never aligned himself with the poststructuralist movement as such” (15), and this categorization is due to subsequent scholars (e.g. Jacques Derrida and Simon Critchley). However, their decision to focus on Levinasian ethics opens a dynamic space for applying his ethics, particularly his assertion that the source of all ethical praxis is in one’s relationship with the “vulnerable Other” (3), across a wide range of disciplines and fields, including: relational theory, psychology, politics, postcolonialism, decoloniality, posthumanism, animal studies, ecology, and more. [End Page 128] Ethics After Postcolonialism organizes sixteen chapters into four sections: “Hospitality and Responsibility for the Other,” “States of Exception,” “Decoloniality and Ethics,” and “Posthuman Ethics.” The selection mindfully includes woman-identified philosophers (almost 40% of the total contributors) and philosophers from nations beyond the United States (e.g. Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and Turkey). Scholars and students are likely to recognize several names—Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Derrida, Michel Foucault, Walter D. Mignolo, and, of course, Levinas—but many will welcome the opportunity to engage with lesser known or emerging philosophers, like Mary Bunch and Madina V. Tlostanova. In a growing textbook and research market, instructors and researchers alike will enjoy inclusions largely from 2000 onward, and scholars looking for deeper investigations will appreciate that many are condensed versions that originally appeared as articles or book chapters. “Suggested Further Reading” directs readers to a range of anthologies, books, and themed journal issues. Most are for explicitly Levinasian scholarship, which reaffirms the anthology’s slant, but even so, the editors include Levinasian and broader materials on biopolitics, ethics, politics, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and trauma studies. Witnessing the strong focus on Levinas, this reader was grateful to see how the invited scholars resonate with Levinas and challenge and complicate his ethical philosophy. For these reasons, the chapters in the “Decoloniality and Ethics” section were particularly engaging, since they bring African, Central American, European, and South American perspectives to Levinas’s Eurocentric scholarship. For example, in their collaborative article, Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo push against Levinas’s potentially reductive formulation of Same and Other. They extend this conversation from the colonialist formulations and decolonialist implications of labeling humans as Same or Other, to the ecological implications and ethical questions of seeing the Same as humanitas, or fully-human, and the Other as anthropos, or less-than-human (157). In another chapter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres questions Levinas’s infamous 1961 essay describing, “The yellow peril! […] it is spiritual,” his 1986 statement that “humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks,” and other manifestations of what Maldonado-Torres terms Levinas’s “hegemonic identity politics” (173), interrogating Levinas’s problematic assertions by going beyond [End Page 129] the still-dualistic formations of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek to advance the philosophies of Frantz Fanon and to offer a means toward more sophisticated conceptualizations of alterity and decolonialist humanities. Further, many contributors reference the theories of other contributors to the volume, such as Mari Ruti’s challenge to Judith Butler’s “flight from a priori norms” in her...