Popular and critical posthumanism

Posthumanism as a term suffers from an excess of signification. It can mean many different things in many different contexts. I look forward to dwelling at length on its possible meanings and articulating my own perspective on the concept as I continue to read and write during my doctoral work. However, for now, I think the concept (posthumanism, the posthuman) has at least two primary connotations. Simon Bart distinguishes between "popular posthumanism" and  "critical posthumanism," which I think is a useful way of thinking about the tension between heterogeneous mass cultural representations of techno-human relationships and a heterogeneous academic discourse concerned with questioning the historical liberal humanist subject.

First, I will reflect a bit on popular posthumanism. I find academic discussions of popular posthumanism to be a bit frustrating, because seldom do theorists carefully distinguish between the various threads of popular posthumanist rhetoric, nor do they pay much attention to how "transhumanism," as a cultural and intellectual movement, might qualitatively differ and be distinguished from popular posthumanism. Figures such as Ray Kurzweil and Francis Fukuyama and Hans Moravec are also universally cited as progenitors of popular posthumanism, which isn't in and of itself a problem, but I feel academic critical posthumanism could benefit from trying to show in a more careful way how popular posthumanist ideas manifest themselves in popular culture. I mean, outside of a transhumanist subculture, how seriously do people take the ideas espoused by these thinkers concerning possible posthuman futures? What are the material, political, and economic effects of popular posthumanist ideas? What's at stake in how techno-cultural and techno-human relationships are imagined and represented, and, if academic posthumanists differ from these thinkers, do they offer a coherent alternative to the vision presented by Kurzweil in a work like The Singularity is Near? I don't mean to suggest that it's the responsibility of critical posthumanism to present a unified counter-narrative to that espoused by someone such as Kurzweil. But what I'm trying to understand is where both popular posthumanism and critical posthumanism intersect with mass culture. If we feel that we need to continue to challenge the liberal humanist subject (which is to a large extent preserved within popular posthumanism) with the aim of accomplishing specific political goals, where is this struggle occurring or where should it occur?

One reason why I gravitate so much to Hayles is her emphasis on embodiment and materiality in discussions of the posthuman; there's an almost ecological dimension to her work that I find appealing. She also presents a very concrete counter-narrative to popular posthumanism: organisms are not infinitely malleable beings reducible to patterns of information; they have a material basis that could be impossible to replicate once that form has been destroyed.

I also find Haraway very useful from a more metaphysical standpoint: her critique of the ideology of "organic wholeness," best articulated in the “Manifesto,” is very useful for thinking through virtually any popular representation of the posthuman. I'm not quite sure yet if there's a coherent politics that emerges from Haraway's project, but she's always good at helping me question dualisms, question self-assured ethical positions, recognizing our unavoidable entanglement in networks of nurturing and killing. For me, the cyborg, or the companion species, is a very useful way of thinking about posthuman subjectivity; I am not a whole, integral, autonomous, organic being. I am divided, damaged, artificial, and perhaps only in tenuous communication with all of my parts - but I'm not cynical, either.