Some thoughts on posthumanism

Perhaps we might understand posthumanism at least in part as a challenge to the traditional borders, boundaries, and oppositions that have structured how humans understand and relate to the world. Posthumanist theory, or what we might term “posthumanist theory” for the sake of keeping track of scholarly discussions while acknowledging their heterogeneity, asks us to think about what is stake on how we construct and maintain differences between terms such as natural and unnatural, human and animal, mechanical and organic.

The idea of “boundaries,” in particular, plays a central role in Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” The term appears frequently in the essay. Here are a few examples of how she uses the concept:

My cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. (154)

Of course, who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneutics is a major feminist issue. (169)

We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. (180)

There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. (181)

Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, 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, in communication with all of our parts. (181)

To confront a boundary is to confront a limit – a line one must not pass. Boundaries are imaginative. Boundaries, their maintenance, and their dismantling involve confronting relationships of social power. Boundaries may also create the very entities that they purport to separate.  Boundaries are performative.

It seems as if the human, historically, in the West anyway, has certainly been the cultural product of shifting boundaries. We need think only of something as simple as our contemporary preference for the word “human” over “man” to understand this. In the United States Declaration of Independence, the word “men” doesn’t include men of color, nor does it include women. In a historical light, then, we see that the human has been defined, and continues to be defined, in opposition to its racialized and gendered others. Judith Butler, whom we wouldn’t necessarily recognize as a “posthumanist,” makes a rather posthuman theoretical gesture when she writes:

That we cannot predict or control what permutations of the human might arise does not mean that we must value all possible permutations of the human; it does not mean that we cannot struggle for the realization of certain values, democratic and non-violent, international and antiracist.  The point is only that to struggle for those values is precisely to avow that one’s own position is not sufficient to elaborate the spectrum of the human, that one must enter into a collective work in which one’s own status as a subject must, for democratic reasons, become disoriented, exposed to what it does not know.

What I mean to get at with these observations is that “posthumanism” probably doesn’t emerge from a particular techno-cultural moment, although emerging technologies certainly disrupt, and force us to reconsider, traditional human boundaries. Rather, as Butler seems to suggest, posthumanism involves making room for new and unexpected “permutations of the human,” and confronts us with the notion that the historical human subject has always been in a process of permutation.