Chapter Title: (Post)Humanism

Book Title: Avatar Bodies

Book Subtitle: A Tantra for Posthumanism
Book Author(s): Ann Weinstone
Published by: University of Minnesota Press

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 Ψ (Post)Humanism Ψ

In , the same year that Of Grammatology appeared in English for the
first time, critic and cultural theorist Ihab Hassan delivered the keynote
address at the International Symposium on Postmodern Performance
organized by the Center for Twentieth-Century Studies at the University
of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Hassan opened by announcing the eclipse
of the postmodern by the posthuman. Despite the greater intellectual
reach and impact of Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” it
is likely Hassan who first explicitly identified the cyborg with the post-
human (). He described the posthuman as a creative, Promethean
trickster split by language, in intimate, shaping contact with technology,
obeying only the law of change, and charged with the Nietzschean task of
evolving humankind beyond humanism’s dangerously oppressive “Man.”
We need first to understand that the human form—including human desire
and all its external representations—may be changing radically, and thus
must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of
humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into
something that we must helplessly call posthumanism ().
In The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, William Spanos posi-
tions posthumanism as an outflux of the social protest movements that
led up to and shaped the Vietnam War era: the Black Power movement,
feminism, and movements of other ethnic minorities (xiii). He employs
posthumanism as an umbrella term that subsumes both Continental
philosophy and postmodernism (xiv). His purpose is to draw from
these domains related projects that he supports even as he argues that

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 (Post)Humanism 9

they have been incompletely realized by posthumanist thinkers and ac-

tivists thus far. These projects are the decentering of the human or the
anthropologos, the articulation of difference and otherness, and the
project of rendering porous disciplines of knowledge and therefore,
academic disciplines (–). While Spanos places posthumanism exclu-
sively within the purview of U.S. social movements and the Continental
European philosophical response to liberal humanism and Western
metaphysics, N. Katherine Hayles has focused her extensive writings on
the reconfiguration and decentering of concepts of the human and the
person emerging from post–World War II sciences and social sciences
such as cybernetics, systems theory, and artificial intelligence. In How
We Became Posthuman, Hayles argues that the posthuman appears when
computation rather than possessive individualism is taken as the ground of
being (). Hayles aptly coins the computational subject to denote a view
of the person that privileges informational pattern over material instan-
tiation . . . considers consciousness . . . as an epiphenomenon . . . thinks of
the body as the original prosthesis . . . and configures human being so that
it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines (, ). The
inaugural moment of this posthuman might be  when cyberneticist
Norbert Wiener opined that he saw no reason why a human being might
not be sent through a telegraph wire (, –).
Both Spanos and Hayles use the term “posthumanism” to denote crit-
ical orientations toward Western humanisms as advanced by philoso-
phers, scientists, critics, and activists whether or not the term “post-
humanism” is explicitly employed. I take a somewhat different approach.
I use “posthumanism” to denote those who specifically invoke the term
in their work. The addition of “progressive” distinguishes the commit-
ments of my interlocutors from those of technophiles who long for digi-
tal, disembodied immortality: a variety of posthuman that is not at
issue here. I also include those who engage with the figure of the cyborg,
as this figure has been central to posthumanist thinking generally. By
doing so, I hope to give you a sense of the range of concerns of those
working under the rubric of posthumanism. I also hope to avoid pin-
ning the term on those I believe would actively reject it, those Spanos
groups, somewhat injudiciously I think, under the banner of “post-
structuralism.” Here I am thinking most vigorously of Derrida, who has
generally declined to endorse the ruptures and surpassings indicated by
the prefix “post.” Distinguished from those who explicitly use the term

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 10 (Post)Humanism

posthumanism are the major philosophical and technoscientific sources

for progressive posthumanism. These include Michel Foucault, Deleuze
and Guattari, cognitive scientist Francisco Varela, and social systems
theorist Niklas Luhmann.
While posthumanism responds to the legacies of humanism by break-
ing up, fracturing, distributing, and decentralizing the self-willing per-
son, questioning its subjectival unity and epistemological conceits, like
its humanist, Enlightenment, and Romantic progenitors, posthumanism
is passionately concerned with creativity and freedom. Posthumanist
figurations of freedom range from the beatitude of autonomous self-
creation found in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari to states of lib-
ertarian noninterference inspired by the systems theory of sociologist
Niklas Luhmann. Despite posthumanism’s interest in undermining the
humanist subject, Hassan’s invocation of a singular, salvific, and rene-
gade figure, that of Prometheus, still serves as an index of contempo-
rary posthumanism’s reliance on solo figures of creative and often heroic
autonomy. These figures—a poet, a trickster, a cyborg, a scientist, an engi-
neer of self—are triply charged with maintaining an ethical stance with
respect to others, with preserving a zone of human freedom without
which respect for difference would not matter, and with carrying for-
ward what is explicitly, or simply by virtue of a kind of posthumanist
rhetorical zeal, the project of posthuman creative differentiation. Keith
Ansell Pearson makes this point with respect to the machinic assemblages
of Deleuze and Guattari, and I think it applies to much of posthuman-
ist theorizing. In many of the examples given of ethological assemblages
that involve supposedly nonhuman becomings of the human the crucial
component in the assemblage is more often than not the human one. It is,
in fact, the technicized human that provides the unifying and privileged
point of consistency in such an assemblage (–). The focus on the
human individual “part” derives, I believe, from posthumanism’s con-
cern with freedom—freedom from oppression, freedom for self-creation.
Posthumanist iterations of the person often assume that control of cre-
ative transformative capacity is the engine of freedom. Despite other dis-
locations and attenuations, the human part effects this control, and this
control is, as we shall see, guaranteed by the closure of the individual,
by maintaining a legible gap, a legible difference between one and another.
Posthumanism emerges, then, from a tension between the urge to dis-
perse the subject into decentralized agents or more autonomous, anony-

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 (Post)Humanism 11

mous forces and the urge to find a locus for the pursuit of freedom
founded on practices of creative self-constitution.
In light of the above, posthumanism retains the logic of humanism
in several ways. First, posthumanist inquiries are still addressed to closed
entities or individuals, even when closure is narrowly delimited. Post-
human theorists write about the posthuman as an entity in contact with
many other entities and substances, yet the difference must be told. In the
final analysis, each “part” must do its work of maintaining clearly legible
instances of difference, the sine qua non of postwar ethics. While Cary
Wolfe writes of “boundary breakdowns” between the human and the
animal or the technological, the boundaries may never be truly violated
or difference would be put at an untenable risk. Second, while the indi-
vidual is often simply a posthuman, he or she is just as often a heroic,
special individual, such as a poet or an “engineer of self,” charged with
carrying out the creative self-constituting work on which freedom is
predicated. Posthumanism remains firmly within the purview of human-
ism insofar as it tends to retain at the center of its narratives the one who
becomes and the one who owns those becomings. Third, posthumanism
asks a great many questions in which the Other or alter or alien or ani-
mal or nonhuman or technological feature as active terms. Relationships
between these entities and a “human” individual are the relationships
that appear most frequently in posthumanist texts. Yet in general, the
urge of these questions is to formulate something about a “human”
individual, however human is figured. Finally, posthumanism places great
faith in the idea that a reformulation of the concept of an individual
will produce better politics or ethics: the courtier and l’uomo universale
of humanism are supplanted by the exemplary, differentiating posthuman.

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