Posthumanist Discourse Research Articles

Introduction: Race, Politics, and the Humanities in an Age of “Posts”—Rethinking the Human/Race

This Special Issue of Humanities comes at a time when the viability of the humanities are challenged on numerous fronts. [...]

Art therapy Places, flows, forces, matter and becoming

This paper explores perspectives on the setting or room where art therapy takes place as an intense sensory, affective and meaning-filled site or placeworld wherein social, material, discursive, and psychological forces mingle. Using Dovey’s (2010 appropriation of the assemblage of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the art therapy room is conceptualised as a dynamic ‘state of affairs’, wherein multiple forces including the political, ephemeral, discursive, material, interpersonal or psychodynamic are at play. Here, matter has agency with which we negotiate, collude and engage, albeit often semi- consciously and tacitly. Located initially in a phenomenological reading of the lived experience of the setting of art therapy for both art therapists and their clients, this proposition of the agential dimension of matter evolves and develops ideas from eco-psychology, new materialism and post-human discourses. Keyword: art room, studio, material conditions, place, client experience, therapist experience

Woman, body, and posthumanism: Lee Bul’s cyborgs and monsters

ABSTRACTLee Bul is a female Korean artist, whose works such as ‘monsters’ and ‘female cyborgs’ take unique forms unprecedented in Korean art history that cannot be explained by feminism alone nor defined as subjects of established humanism. Her monsters resemble the female subjects who were undervalued as “Others” in western history, and are also the ‘abject’ as illustrated by Kristeva. They are in other words ‘beings-in-between’ that cannot be named or formed or explained. And her ‘disabled-female cyborgs’ imply the politics of cyborg-representation that reveal women’s ambiguous identity within technology. Lee Bul’s monsters and cyborgs represent all types of hybrids and “Others” that were alienated by humanism and anthropocentrism. They can open up the possibility of gender transcendence that ultimately denies otherness as well. They are on the boundary, thereby allowing reconsideration of human subjects within the posthuman discourse. These provide the theoretical and discourse evidence to call such ideas as posthuman-feminism.

Metalepsis and the Author Figure in Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction

This paper traces instances of metalepsis in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, Karin Fossum’s Broken, and J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man. In its collapsing of narrative levels, that stylistic device is commonly seen as dramatizing a uniquely postmodern relationship between the author and his or her characters. Such a newly envisioned dynamic has been understood as fiction’s response to the theoretical debate about the so-called death of the author and, more broadly, to the posthumanist discourse on the dissolution of the liberal-humanist subject. In contrast, I argue that, seen as definitive of postmodern poetics, metalepsis stages a peculiarly modernist gesture. Its transgression of diegetic levels ultimately reinforces (rather than undermines) the author figure and thus is incommensurate with the postmodern negotiation of a subjectivity beyond authorial omnipotence. It is only through its gradual extinction that metalepsis serves the postmodern attempt to rethink the author and chart anew its peculiar subject position. In place of the clearly signposted ontological hierarchy on which the device depends, the postmodern promotes a single undifferentiated narrative plane where the author figure is recreated as a fictional character in the process of becoming. The disappearance of the first allows for the resurrection of the latter.

Vulnerable Life: Zombies, Global Biopolitics, and the Reproduction of Structural Violence

This essay offers an intervention in biopolitical theory—using the term “vulnerable life” to recalibrate discussions of how life is valued and violence is justified in the contemporary bioinsecurity regime. It reads the discursive structures that dehumanize and pathologize figures in U.S. zombie narratives against the discursive structures present in contemporary legal narratives and media reports on the killing of black Americans. Through this unsettling paralleling of structures, the essay suggests how the current ubiquity of zombies and the profusion of racial tension in the U.S. are related. In the process, the essay emphasizes the highly racialized nature of the zombie itself—which has never been the empty signifier it is often read as—and drives home just how dangerous the proliferation of postracial and posthuman discourses can be if they serve to elide historical limitations about the highly political determinations of just who is quite human.

The Posthuman that Could Have Been: Mary Shelley’s Creature

At the very core of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Creature meets his maker, acquaints him – and, consequently, the reader – with the narrative of his miserable life, and entreats him to make a female companion with whom he can share his life. Although Victor admits to having been moved by the Creature’s eloquence and fine sensations, he reluctantly succumbs to his plea only to destroy the female before completing her, afraid that this new species might pose a threat to the survival of his own. In the encounter of these two species, however, only one seems to have truly “met” the other: the Creature has indeed become with his maker in a way that Victor fails. Given that the dominant narrative point of view up until that moment had been Victor’s, readers of the novel have the opportunity of having their ignorance enriched regarding the Creature straight from the Other’s mouth, this multiple narrative thus enabling them to take Victor’s creation as far more than the monster he sees. Indeed, I would argue that readers do “meet” the Creature while his creator cannot. Taking this central part of the novel as a starting point, this essay will explore the coexistence of transhuman and posthuman discourses in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, working mainly with the 1818 text. In expressing his desire to create an improved species, rendering “man invulnerable to any but a violent death”, Victor echoes the transhuman discourses of improvement of the human race, while remaining of this transitory stage, unable to make the transition to the posthuman phase which would grant humanness to his Creature, irrespective of his appearance. In failing to do so, I will explore whether he is also preventing the Creature to become truly posthuman.

The Human Figure and Urban Ground: Cyborgs and the City

Recent years have seen developments in cyborgian movements in which people play and experiment with the boundaries of human flesh and aesthetic realities. Some individuals develop novel intimate relationships with devices that, each in their own way, interfere with human subjectivity. Public dissemination of these movements often proposes notions of transcendence, therapy, post-humanism and trans-humanism, but often fails to outline the lived-experience of those who explore cyborgian identity as an alternative mode of being in the world. This paper briefly follows self-described cyborgs who delimit the body through sensory ‘enhancement’ in an effort to disrupt common relationships between the human figure and the urban ground. Borrowing from Lewis Mumford's concepts of biotechnics, I propose cyborgian engagement as a type of psychodynamic living. Rather than focus on post-human discourses, these cyborgs turn to the natural world for inspiration in shaping the terms of engagement between their bodies and the city.

Życie jako kicz. Uwagi o sztuce biologicznej

Bio art is a specific trend of contemporary art practice, where artists adapt solutions offered by biosciences in order to create living works of art. Their actions are a subject to a discussion with dominant voices concerning the significance of such experiments for the fundamental ascertainments concerning what life is, but also for understanding the status of these constructed entities, which thus fur have not existed in nature. Posthumanist discourses such as aesthetics of care, non-anthropocentric aesthetics and zoe-aesthetics are a few examples of this type of reflection. However, is it possible that works, which could be described in terms of kitsch, constitute a solid ground for discussion of this kind? Clement Greenberg has written of kitsch that it is ʻmechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times . If kitsch represents everything that is spurious and non-authentic in our life, can we use it in order to make general statements concerning the basis of life? Can we make statements concerning the fundamental problem of life on the basis of projects, which confront us with glow-in-the-dark rabbits or paintings created with genetically modified colorful bacteria? In my paper I would like to refer to these questions on the basis of an artwork that can be classified in terms of kitsch.

Cripping Communication: Speech, Disability, and Exclusion in Liberal Humanist and Posthumanist Discourse

In this article, I bring communication and disability studies into dialogue, arguing that speech communication has long been a dilemma within liberal humanism and posthumanism. While humanism venerates speech as the most privileged manifestation of rational human identity, it defers the immanent tension in speech between universal and particular by excluding nonnormative voices from the realm of rational discourse. The reconfiguration of the humanist subject into the posthuman privileges informationally flexible and malleable bodies. The disabled speaker provides an important critique of the ableism and exclusion latent within communication theory and offers new modes of thinking about posthuman communication as an embodied and impure activity based on noise, relationality, and reciprocity.

Human Remains

Human Remains Nathan Snaza (bio) and Mina Karavanta (bio) At a recent conference on the role of the humanities, the human, and posthumanism, a professor of literary theory shared her exasperation at yet another “post” announced that promises a premature shift in the problematic field of the human.1 Are we done talking about the human so we can now move onto the next chapter, in the hope that the new vistas it promises will deliver us from the unresolvable debates about “history, the human and the world between” (Radhakrishnan 2008)? Or is it possible, we ask with this issue, that the post in posthumanism is not another fad or a gesture skirting difficult questions about humans and their histories but rather a rupture within their field of representations? Does posthumanism as a wide range of interdisciplinary critical discourses signify a future anterior that enables the rise of new frames of representation of the human and humanity, perceiving the uneven temporalities of different humans, their interspecies collectivities, and complex sets of relations and materialities rather than a humanity at large? Without pretending to have overcome the tensions between humanism and anti-humanism, posthumanisms are informed by an event that indeed is, in Derrida’s language, l’avenir (yet-to-come). This future anterior enables a continuous flow of new narratives about humans and their collectivities as they survive and develop through disasters threatening them with extinction; as new ontological and political ways of being human beyond the humanist representation of Man that restrained and contorted the Enlightenment promise2 are engendered by anticolonial and transmodern thinkers such as Enrique Dussel, Leela Gandhi and Walter Mignolo;3 as new intersectional and interdisciplinary narratives take shape around figures like the animal or the cyborg, requiring an account of being outside the realm of thought that draws on a certain idea of the human in a certain environment; and as critical [End Page 9] analyses of the transnational formations of biopolitics regulating contemporary forms of economic and political dispossession. As William V. Spanos underscores in The End of Education (1993) and further develops in his contribution to this issue, the “post” is not an attempt to forget the human but rather a “gesture of repetition” that attends to what remains as constitutive of the problematic wherein the human lies. The essays collected here attend to the figure of the human as remaining, persevering, always already in excess of its fictions, always already in temporality, relationality and complexity. The “post” in the posthumanist discourses signifies ambivalence and doubt about the certainty of an idea of the human and humanity as generic concepts irreducible to locality, temporality and relationality. Instead this “post” gestures to the indissoluble relation between the human and her temporality as the time of the now (Benjamin’s Jetzzeit), the time that remains to speak the human from below and within rather than above temporality. This time gestures “post” the idea of Man as the central being, and Man as the origin of being, and post the exceptionalist discourses that have founded a sovereign self against her/his other seen as the rogue, the beast and the non-self. In this light, posthumanisms attend to the knowledge that arises from the bios politikos of lives that are seen as bare, subaltern, illegal in order to engage re-presentations of the “experience of the other” often understood “through a ‘negative interpretation’” (Mbembe 2001, 1) as affirmative forms of livity. What posthumanisms promise, in other words, is the discovery of new frames of re-presentation in which the qualities of identity and difference, belonging and dispossession, individual and collective struggle and resistance will be reconceptualized in contexts and localities that are determined by concurrent, oppositional systems of sociogenic codes, and are not limited to a set of universals that speak only to certain humans and their collectivities. Posthumanisms recognize that humanity develops not at large and not evenly but from within the crevices of being that overlap with the interstices of the history of disaster and survival of different collectivities of being and intersect with various and delinked languages and discourses arising from discrepant social and cultural materialities (which are nevertheless always linked). While...

Writing the Anthropocene

This introduction to the focus section on “Writing the Anthropocene” examines the challenges that the entry of our species into a new geological epoch poses for the humanities in general and for literary and media theory in particular. It proposes the hypothesis that the Anthropocene can best be understood as a form of writing, a process by which humankind inscribes permanent messages into the geological, climatological, and biochemical records of our planet and is forced, in turn, to study those records for messages pertaining to its future. It discusses the relationship of the Anthropocene to the wider discourse of posthumanism and also touches upon the importance of speculative realism as well as genres like the science-fiction novel to help us conceptualize our new condition. A brief summary of each of the ten essays in the focus section follows.

Posthuman Affect

This article has a double aim: it contributes to a new theorisation of posthumanism and it revisits standard accounts of the relations between posthumanism and deconstruction. Departing from the observation that the distinction between (semantic, subjective) emotions and (asignifying, nonsubjective) affects is critical for posthumanism, the article shows how posthumanism can be described as a minimal emotive scenario. In this scenario, the cancellation of humanism and its strictly codified emotions generates intractable and nonsubjective second-order affects. Both pleasurable and terrifying, these ‘posthuman affects’ resemble traditional notions of the sublime, without the latter’s recuperative and reterritorialising connotations. The article mobilises this broad emotive understanding of posthumanism to question the traditional account of the rise of posthumanism as a reaction to the excessively textualist and literary interests of deconstruction. Focusing on Paul de Man’s readings of Kant, Schiller and Hegel, it shows how de Man’s use of the notion of ‘materiality’ – another key term in the discourse of posthumanism – is already part of an emotive scenario that, like later posthumanist practices, revises the traditional structure of the sublime in order to map a shift from human emotion to posthuman affect.

Meaning Without Subject

This essay argues that Gertrude Stein’s novella ‘Melanctha’ (1909) inscribed within the canon of Anglo-American modernism the conceptual coordinates for the emergence of a posthumanist aesthetics. It also argues that the potential of such a radical event can be more fully appreciated by considering Stein’s pioneering treatment of meaning in the novella alongside Niklas Luhmann’s account of meaning in his theory of social systems. The essay emphasises the details of Stein’s crucial contribution to the articulation of a discourse of posthumanism and relates this occurrence to the emergence of a mass-media system at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In Search of a Lost Future: The Posthuman Child

A considerable amount of recent English prose fiction includes child figures that can be interpreted as posthuman in that they embody contemporary society’s fears and anxieties about the future. In a reading of John Banville’s The Infinities, Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz and Emma Donoghue’s Room, the essay claims that child characters in each of the narratives place our visions of the future in a distorted perspective. For all of the differences between these children and the cyborgs, beasts and ghostly figures that the technological branch of posthumanist discourse focuses on, they nonetheless function in similar ways: children and other posthumanist figures serve as powerful signs of global, and specifically European, anxieties. The future projected through these children – or the ‘dark continent of childhood’, to use the words of Jean Baudrillard – is not a postapocalyptic one. Rather, this future is fraught with fear and burdened with responsibility and guilt, embodying the worries that the ageing ‘mother of continents’ experiences when it sees its increasingly ‘alien’ children drifting towards an uncertain future.

Don't Fear the Cyborg: Toward Embracing Posthuman and Feminist Cyborg Discourses in Teacher Education and Educational Technology Research

AbstractI argue that larger cultural concerns about human–technology interactions are seldom addressed in teacher education. This article seeks to trace cultural anxieties about technology by addressing the long-standing trope of human versus machine; examine how these concerns are manifested and addressed (or not) in popular culture, educational technology research, and teacher education; and propose how, in a counterintuitive turn, we might begin to use what has been called cyborg anthropology, feminist cyborg discourse, and feminist posthuman discourse to address those fears in a world where human–technology relationships are increasingly symbiotic.

Posthuman Ethics with Cary Wolfe and Karen Barad: Animal Compassion as Trans-Species Entanglement

Although critiques of humanism are not new, the currency of posthumanist discourse on the nonhuman – the animal, the environment, or the object – suggests rising concerns about humanity’s place in the ecological order. This article interrogates Cary Wolfe's posthumanist framework as he approaches the questions of activism and agency in the context of animal ethics and disability politics. By drawing attention to the contradictions in his own commitments to rethinking human exceptionalism, I examine how Wolfe's appeal for a more compassionate account of ethics vis-à-vis the notion of ‘trans-species empathy’ can be more gainfully addressed through the work of feminist and quantum physicist Karen Barad. This essay contends that by preserving the difference between the human and the nonhuman (or animal) as something that is given rather than interrogated, the assumption of ‘the human’ as a self-contained identity is left unchanged and unchallenged.

‘What is man but a mass of thawing clay?’: Thoreau, Embodiment, and the Nineteenth-Century Posthuman

This paper argues for a new understanding of Thoreau’s appraisal of the relationship between humans and the natural world by locating him in current posthuman discourse. Examining the developing nineteenth-century inclination to emphasize basic hybridities between humans and nature reveals how Thoreau’s later work pointed toward an ecological yet non-reductive materialism, neither reducing nature to mere matter nor elevating it to ineffa¬ble spirit. As Thoreau erased distinctions between natural and supernatural realms, an interplay between religion and science in his writing unfolded with respect to competing views of natural history in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. In this reading, Thoreau destabilized traditional interpretations of the af?liation between humans and nature and, in their place, offered a model with interpenetrating identities between matter and spirit. This paper therefore situates Thoreau as a transitional ?gure occupying an intermediate space between liberal humanism and posthumanism. In the end, Thoreau’s struggle—namely, to resolve his wavering between identi?cation with and alienation from the material world—produced new and radical answers to the questions: What is humanity, what is nature, and what is the true relation between the two? In this way he was a forerunner of the posthuman, a radical rethinking or rewriting of what it means to be human.

Networked Bodies in Cyberspace: Orchestrating the Trans-Subjective in the Video Artworks of Natalie Bookchin

For decades, discussions of the impacts of technology on the material body have featured prominently in post-humanist discourse. From Donna Haraway's oft-cited “Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) to Katherine Hayles's How We Become Post-Human (1999) to Franco Berardi's The Soul at Work (2009), an uneasy relationship exists between the networked, electrified, mechanical functionality of computational systems and the material or “meat” bodies of human users of those systems. Whether embracing the potentials or decrying the alienation of “humanity” brought about by the affective gap between the sensual body and the networks it engages by the tap-tap-tapping of fingers on keyboards, anxiety continues to surface relative to how we perceive ourselves as corporeal beings in a largely flattened, detached, and fragmented cybernetic world.

The Rhetoric of Enhancing the Human:

ABSTRACT The task of this article is to explore the current state of bioethical debates over enhancement technologies as articulated through its two dichotomous ideological camps. It aims to explain why the conservative and posthumanist movements have reached a point where they fail to engage with each other and how we can reconceptualize the bioethical endeavor in a way that does not force the public to adhere to a framing of enhancement technologies as either universally desirable or abhorrent. In order to do so, I turn to the work of Lacan and Deleuze to explain why attempts to define what is essentially human always enter what I call “tropological regress,” or the endless procession of linguistic tropes that are artificially linked to transcendental conceptions of “the good.” I aim to diagnose why conservative and posthumanist discourses on enhancement technologies find themselves irreconcilably opposed.

Exposing Humanism: Prudence, Ingenium, and the Politics of the Posthuman

AbstractThis article examines posthumanism and its relationship to humanism. First, it is argued that the term “posthumanism” relies upon an incomplete conception of humanism, and in a way that forecloses the possibility of looking to the humanist tradition for support. Addressing Foucault's often quoted comments about the recent invention and imminent demise of man, it is argued that Foucault is not anti‐humanist, but is rather critical of the use of humanism as an axis of reflection. Second, the posthumanist perspective is summarized as attending to a set of interrelated ethical and epistemological concerns. Calling into question the boundary between human and nonhuman animals, posthumanism also challenges the primacy of empirico‐deductive reasoning and advocates a re‐legitimization of rhetoric as a mode of thought. Lastly, using Ernesto Grassi's interpretation of the early Italian humanists, this article demonstrates not only the compatibility of Renaissance humanism with posthumanist concerns, but also the fruitfulness of this tradition as a conceptual resource. Although the Renaissance notion of ingenium, the ability to adapt and make concrete situations meaningful without also affirming strong ontological commitments, is absent from posthumanist discourse, it is a concept that has the power to enrich the posthumanist project. Consequently, posthumanism is not actually at odds with the humanist tradition in general, but rather only with a very limited and relatively recent conception.