Cary Wolfe.Com | Posthumanities This series addresses what is certainly one of the most complex and pressing questions facing the humanities at the current moment: “what is posthumanism?” Part of what makes this series especially urgent is that what is now widely being called “posthumanism” does not form a unified field; indeed, the term has not just different but in fact opposed opposed connotations and implications, depending on who deploys it. At one end of the spectrum, we find Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future , which imagines a not-too-distant not -too-distant dystopia where the human is dominated by genetic technologies currently being unleashed by bioengineering, so that our fundamental “human dignity” becomes the victim of a Promethean drive run amok. For Fukuyama —-who opens his book with a nod toward Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World-“posthumanism” names an impending crisis in which the fundamental “human nature” that grounds our concepts of justice and morality (and even “constrains the kinds of political regimes” possible for the human species, as he puts it) is under assault, and can only be protected by a sovereign power. The genre of Fukuyama’s cautionary tale is a familiar one, of course, and it is not very difficult to point with equal alarm toward disturbing historical examples of the use of state or sovereign power to protect a supposed “fundamental human nature” against corruption by alien forces.
At the other end of the spectrum, we find figures such as Donna Haraway, whose “Cyborg Manifesto” has been widely taken to signal the liberating potential of those very “posthumanist” developments lamented by Fukuyama. From Haraway’s point of view, all of the “boundary breakdowns” allegorized in the figure of the cyborg—between nature and culture, organic and inorganic, human and animal, and so on—force upon us the realization that there is no “human” in Fukuyama’s terms, and there never has been. For Haraway, the human is not a given but rather is made in an ongoing process of technological and anthropological evolution (an understanding in which she would joined by continental theorists such as Bernard Bernard Stiegler). And if “the human” is made (so the argument goes), then it can be made not just differently but more justly —especially for those who, because of their gender, race, or other characteristics, have historically fallen outside the ruling paradigms of “the human.” As a figure for the posthuman, then, Haraway’s cyborg is both frightening and potentially liberating. As she puts it (in what reads like a response to Fukuyama’s
humanism), “taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others.”
Students of contemporary culture might be tempted, at first glance, to gloss the term “posthumanism” by the light of a whole series of other “post-isms” that have made their way (for better or for worse) onto the contemporary intellectual landscape: “postindustrial,” “post-structuralist,” and, most famous (or notorious) of all, “postmodern.” For reasons that this series will attempt to illustrate, however, the question of “posthumanism” is more complicated than any of these, because it references not just a chronological progression (what comes after the industrial, the modern, and so on) but also takes on fundamental ontological and epistemological questions that are not reducible to purely historical explanation (what comes before that historically specific invention of humanism we call “the human”). Indeed, I would hope that one consequence of the series would be renewed attention to the difference between historicity and “historicism” that seems to have been largely elided or avoided in much recent work in the humanities. In this light, it should be stressed that the fundamental orientation of the series is not, of course, a “rejection” or “surpassing” of humanism and many of its animating values, concerns, and commitments. Rather, the point is to reveal, by rigorous theoretical investigation, how those values and concerns—what humanism says it wants (justice, tolerance, equality, and so on)—are undercut or short-circuited by the philosophical and theoretical frameworks from which they have arisen: frameworks that are, of course, historically contingent and quite ideologically specific. An underlying methodological question of the series, then—and it is one that will animate the series’ disciplinary commitment to work that is philosophically and theoretically advanced—is, to borrow Derrida’s formulation of the problem, “can one criticize historicism in the name of something other than truth and science (the value of universality, omnitemporality, the infinity of value, etc.), and what happens to science when the metaphysical value of truth has been put into question. . . .How are the effects of science and of truth to be reinscribed?” ( Positions 105 n.32).
This disciplinary commitment to “theory,” as it has come to be called—not “against”
history, of course, but against historicism in its more unreflective and problematic forms--makes POST HUMAN ITIES in some fundamental sense an inheritor of the kind of work published in the Theory Out of Bounds series, and, beyond that, THL: Theory and History of Literature . (I imagine, however, that the series will be more coherent and unified than the former because of the thematic focus and contours I will outline below, and broader than the latter in the sense that it will be less oriented toward literature and literary theory per se, and more committed to interdisciplinary thought.) And that commitment also separates it from what might, at first glance, look like an allied orientation: “cultural studies” (and I will note in advance that cultural studies in the U.S. is a quite different formation, of course, from what one finds in the U.K. or even in Australia). For while cultural studies is by definition interdisciplinary, it also appears, to many observers, non disciplinary in its lack of rigor and its appropriation of knowledges drawn from a range of range of disciplines whose forms of knowledge and types of truth claims are not just different but in fact incompatible—hence the often bizarre shifting of critical registers one often experiences in cultural studies from, say, the micro-analysis of a literary text and its features to, quite abruptly, the most sweeping kinds of ethical and political claims. In short, contemporary cultural studies often pays insufficient attention to the fact that the very social constructivist account of knowledge production that made it possible in the first place—in which the world of social experience is not given but in some fundamental sense produced by different interpretive communities operating under differential constraints (race, gender, and the like)—is also what often threatens to expose cultural studies as deeply incoherent and even factitious: namely, that the construction of social knowledges by different interpretive communities means (to put it in systems theory terms) that “heteroreference” is always a product of “self-reference.” And what this means, in turn, is that interdisciplinarity is a product of disciplinarity; it is always and only experienced in and through disciplinarity itself. As Stanley Fish among others has noted, this fact has important implications for the kinds of claims—not just intellectual but ethical and political claims--that may be made on behalf of interdisciplinarity as a project; and in the absence of rigorous, self-reflexive attention to that question, contemporary cultural studies often seems to many observers to avail itself of all of the benefits of interdisciplinarity while taking upon itself none of the responsibilities. This does not mean, however (as Fish and his followers such as Walter Benn Michaels think) that the question of (inter)disciplinarity is a non- or post-theoretical question. Indeed, I would insist (against both Fish and contemporary U.S. cultural studies) that it is inescapably theoretical—hence the disciplinary (and, if one likes, disciplining ) focus of this series
not just on the humanities, but on theory as well.
To return to the question of posthumanism, then, what is needed is to map the terrain of the topic with more range and more theoretical rigor than has been attempted thus far. Even on the basis of the two examples of Fukuyama and Haraway cited schematically above, certain coordinates of such a mapping come into view. We might begin, for example, by observing that accounts of posthumanism tend to gravitate toward one of two poles, even as they often combine elements of both: a positive (or in extreme form, utopian) assessment, or, as in Fukuyama, a negative (or even dystopian) one. This difference is further complicated by a second polarization already touched on: between a historical understanding of posthumanism (of the sort found in Fukuyama, or in Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman) that identifies the term with specific historical and technological developments, and a philosophical one (of the type found in the work of Jacques Derrida or Judith Butler, for example) which would insist that the “post-“ of “posthumanism” indicates a particular philosophical orientation toward the question of the human itself, one that would insist (to paraphrase the title of Bruno Latour’s well-known study of modernity), that we have never been only or wholly human, if by “human” we mean that creature familiar to us from the Enlightenment and its legacy (the Cartesian subject of the cogito , the Kantian “community of reasonable beings,” or, in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen, rights-holder, property-owner, and so on).
Moreover, these two sets of differences (between positive and negative assessments of posthumanism, and between historical and ontological understandings of the term) partially (but only partially) correspond to what we might call “dry” and “wet” orientations toward the question of posthumanism. The first would be epitomized, perhaps, by the media theory of Friedrich Kittler or the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, which emphasize the historical particularity of the phenomenon of posthumanism (as in Luhmann’s theory of modernity as “functional differentiation”) while focusing on specific technological developments (as in Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, or Luhmann’s investigations of “media of dissemination” in The Reality of the Mass Media). In the second, “wet,” orientation (found in Derrida’s later work, Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto , and in Deleuze and Guattari and their inheritors such as Alphonso Lingis), the emphasis falls instead on how the “human” is
enmeshed in the larger problem—at once biological, ecological, and ontological—of what Derrida calls “the living.” Here, we might observe that the blunt theoretical instrument of humanism, which divides the world of the living along the axis of “the human” and everything else, actively prevents our understanding, for instance, that humans and the great apes have far more in common with each other than apes do with most other “animals,” or that a blind person and a guide dog form a third, prosthetic kind of subjectivity whose experience of the world cannot well be explained by reference to the traditional hierarchy of human vs. animal, which belies the complex forms of communication, trust, and mutual dependence entailed in such a hybrid relationship.
These last two sets of differences in the discourse of posthumanism— historical/ontological, and “dry”/”wet”—underscore, I think, how my editorship of this series is a logical extension of my previous work. The first orientation is rigorously explored in Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” and in the co-edited collection Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity; and the second is the focus of my two most recent books, Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory , and the edited collection Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal . And both sets of concerns are the focus of essays of mine that have appeared recently or will be appearing in 2006-7: “Meaning as Event-Machine: Systems Theory and `The Reconstruction of Deconstruction’”; “Lose the Building: Systems Theory, Architecture, and Diller+Scofidio’s Blur ”; “Bioethics, Inc., or, How (Not) To Think the Question of `The Living’”: “Thinking Other-Wise: Cognitive Science, Deconstruction, and the (Non)Speaking (Non)Human Subject”; “Learning From Temple Grandin: Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes After the Subject”; and “From Dead Meat to Glow in the Dark Bunnies: Seeing `The Animal Question’ in Contemporary Art.”
As the title of this series is meant to suggest, then, POST HUMAN ITIES situates itself at a crossroads: the intersection of the disciplinary formation we call “the humanities” in its current configuration, and the challenges posed to it by work (much of it interdisciplinary) in a range of fields that is associated with the emergent orientation known as “posthumanism,” work that in some fundamental sense challenges the
humanities as we now know it to move beyond its current parameters and practices. Against this background, the series will seek to publish new work by scholars in the humanities that, rather than simply reproducing established forms and methods of disciplinary knowledge, confront how changes in society and culture associated with posthumanism challenge scholars in the humanities to rethink what they do— theoretically, methodologically, and ethically—in the years to come. In this sense, new work in the series will, I hope, anticipate what “the humanities” will look like thirty years from now—that is, when “the humanities” will have become “the posthumanities.” And it will also work in the reverse direction, as it were, to excavate the genealogy of what we now call “posthumanism” by publishing important texts from the past (such as Michel Serres’ The Parasite, or Jakob von Uexkull’s Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen) that have been crucial to its emergence over the past four decades. Finally, I would hope to sustain an ongoing commitment to relevant contemporary work in translation, the better to illuminate the animating concerns of the series in light of the different disciplinary and intellectual contexts that obtain in North America, the U.K., and beyond top
