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.

The Dixie Flatline

Philosopher of mind John Searle begins his book The Mystery of Consciousness with the following reflection:

The enormous variety of stimuli that affect us – for example, when we taste wine, look at the sky, smell a rose, listen to a concert – trigger sequences of neurobiological processes that eventually cause unified, well-ordered, coherent, inner, subjective states of awareness or sentience. Now what exactly happens between the assault of stimuli on our receptors and the experience of consciousness, and how exactly do the intermediate processes cause the conscious states? (3)

Without resorting to dualism between body and mind, and without eliminating human subjectivity in favor of reductive materialism, Searle attempts not to explain consciousness, but to move us toward exploring consciousness as an emergent property of a physical, embodied system: “The liquidity of water is a good example: the behavior of the H₂0 molecules explains liquidity, but the individual molecules are not liquid” (16). According to Searle, consciousness does indeed emerge from the material operations of the brain. However, he maintains, “Consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be reduced to anything that has third-person or objective ontology” (212). He argues that our dualist/materialist vocabulary of mind stymies our ability to formulate a coherent response to the hard problem of consciousness.

I am interested in how we might understand the differences between human consciousness and machine “consciousness.” I believe a character in William Gibson’s Neuromancer offers a literary example of these concepts. The Dixie Flatline, who exits only as a “ROM personality construct” utilizes language, responds to verbal commands, carries out autonomous tasks, and analyzes vast amounts of data. “Dix” would certainly pass the Turing test as developed in Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” a simple game in which a human player attempts to distinguish between a computer and another human player through text based queries. If the investigator incorrectly declares the computer a human, according to Turing, we might then think of the computer as an “intelligent” machine. If our criteria for determining machine intelligence is merely its ability to process and manipulate a wide array of linguistic information, the Flatline would indeed possess the capacity for thought as defined in the Turing test. However, it is precisely this narrow definition of conscious thought that Gibson’s character poignantly undermines. First, the Dixie Flatline forces us to confront the gulf between syntax and semantics. Searle explains:

Computation, so defined, is purely a syntactical set of operations, in the sense that the only features of the symbols that matter for the implementation of the program are the formal or syntactical features. But we know from our own experience that the mind has something more going on it than the manipulation of formal symbols; minds have contents. For example, when we are thinking in English, the English words going through our minds are not just uninterpreted formal symbols; rather, we know what they mean. For us the words have a meaning, or semantics. The mind could not be just a computer program, because the formal symbols of the computer program by themselves are not sufficient to guarantee the presence of the semantic content that occurs in actual minds. (10)

The reverse holds true as well, a computer program cannot be a mind if it merely manipulates symbols without possessing semantic content. Searle’s famous rebuttal to Turing’s account of machinic thinking, “The Chinese Room Argument – as it has come to be called – has a simple three-step structure: 1. Programs are entirely syntactical. 2. Minds have a semantics. 3. Syntax is not the same as, nor by itself sufficient for, semantics. Therefore programs are not minds. Q.E.D” (11-12). Like the occupant of the Chinese room who successfully manipulates symbols without understanding their semantic content, the Dixie Flatline appears to be conscious, but does not possess a self, a locus of subjective experience in which words come to “mean” something. Circuits and silicon cannot recreate the experience of embodied consciousness or the feeling of qualia. For Dix, the biological character of the human sensorium has been completely liquidated, and with it human feeling and the meaning sedimented in the formal symbols of our language.

In short, I am interested in exploring the question of whether there exists some kind of “ontological” distinction between human consciousness and machinic intelligence.

"H+/-: Transhumanism and its Critics"

"Transhumanism" is seldom mentioned in discussions concerning the posthuman in literary and cultural theory. Katherine Hayles, with her critique of our cultural condition of "virtuality," in which we privilege information over the material locations in which it is instantiated, is perhaps an exception to this observation. Indeed, in her essay, "Wrestling with Transhumanism," she writes, "transhumanism for me is like a relationship with an obsessive and very neurotic lover. Knowing it is deeply flawed, I have tried several times to break off my engagement, but each time, it manages to creep in through the back door of my mind. In How We Became Posthuman, I identified an undergirding assumption that we will soon be able to upload our consciousness into computers and leave our bodies behind. I argued that this scenario depends on a decontextualized and disembodied construction of information" (215).

Hayles goes on to observe that "there are, of course, many versions of transhumanism, and they do not all depend on the assumption I critiqued. But all of them… perform decontextualizing moves that oversimplify the situation and carry into the new millennium some of the most questionable aspects of capitalist ideology" (215).

Whether or not we agree with the latter part of Hayles claim, H±: Transhumanism and its Critics, presents a series of essays by transhumanist and posthumanist thinkers that explores the “many versions” of transhumanism.

How to define "transhumanism"? Oxford professor and transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom offers the following influential definition:

Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rationale means, we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have. (29)

"Transhumans," then, represent an intermediary stage between the human and the posthuman. The transhuman community is involved in envisioning an evolutionary path for the transhuman into its posthuman future, using emerging NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive sciences) developments to better the human, while at the same time avoiding the "existential risks" (to use Bostrom’s phrase) posed by these converging technologies.

The sixteen advocates and critics of transhumanism whose essays are collected in the book seem to agree that transhumanism represents an outgrowth of the Enlightenment project of humanism and secular rationalism characterized as "attempts by science and technology to improve the human condition" (Tirosh-Samuelson 32).  When viewed from its origins in Western secular humanism, "transhumanism is not as novel as it seems, since all of us are already augmented beings if we take into consideration the many technological advancements over the centuries that have transformed who we are. Thus, agriculture, writings, postal services, navigation, calculus, antibiotics, radio, television, photography, and computers are all technological innovations that have shaped who we are, and it is reasonable to assume that we will continue to be augmented by future technologies. So long as transhumanism simply advocates the nineteenth-century commitment to progress and alleviation of human suffering, it is hard to critique it" (32).

The question becomes much more complex when transhumanists start talking about changing human "nature" in radical ways. Among their most sought-after changes are radical life extension, increased intelligence, and the digitization (and thus indefinite preservation) of mind and consciousness. Futurologists such as Ray Kurzweil also imagine that we can use nanotechnology to clean and restore the environment.


I don’t necessarily wish to advance an argument for or against transhumanism here. Rather, I want to comment briefly on how H±: Transhumanism and its Critics, as its title suggests, does a wonderful job of presenting both sides of the issue.  The book is divided into four parts:

I. A critical historical perspective on transhumanism
II. H+ proponents of transhumanism
III. H± point-counterpoint
IV. H- critical perspectives on transhumanism

In Section I, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson presents a thoughtful and thorough overview of the intellectual and scholarly terrain surrounding both "transhumanism" and "posthumanism." Like transhumanism, there is no singular posthumanism, and Tirosh-Samuelson enumerates the differences between transhumanism as a social movement and posthumanism as a postmodern philosophical critique of the human subject.

Section II offers six essays that present the transhumanist project and defend it against detractors. Perhaps the most interesting feature of transhumanism is that, in a certain sense, it operates against the notion of an essential human self. Precisely because there is no natural or innate self, because we cannot derive a human essence from Nature, transhumanists argue that we can and should use science and technology to improve the human condition as well as individual human beings. It’s very difficult to argue against this position without resorting to what Nick Bostrom calls "bioconservatism," or a critique of human modification based on an appeal to a fixed biological nature.

Section III offers three chapters that argue against transhumanism while seeking to avoid essentialist trap. Each chapter is immediately followed by a rebuttal from an advocate of transhumanism. I must admit, the critics of transhumanism are often guilty of creating rhetorical strawmen and mischaracterizing their opponent’s positions, and the transhumanists miss no opportunity to point this out.  One particularly interesting justification for transhumanism comes from Max More, who insists on "morphological freedom," or, the ability of “each of us to alter and improve (by our own standards) the human body” (143). It seems as if at least some transhumanists would then be sympathetic to the varying "permutations of the human" advocated for by Judith Butler. In fact, at least one transhumanist in the volume presents transgender people as pioneering transhumans.

Section IV features critical perspectives on transhumanism, including Katherine Hayles essay, "Wrestling with Transhumanism." The problems with transhumanism discussed are numerous, but in general focus on the neoliberal ideology that underlies the movement and its insistence on individual freedom divorced from social, political, and ecological contexts.

In short, I found the rich and contested definition of "transhumanism" presented by the text incredibly useful in continuing to explore the topographically-varied terrain of the posthumanities.

Two proposals

I thought it would be a good idea to create a blog in order to commit some of my ideas to writing. For my first posting, I'll share two proposals I've recently written for academic projects. The first is for the 33rd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The second is for a book on "learning for sustainability in times of accelerating change." Both proposals originate from my interest in asking critical questions about how we conceive of and represent "Nature," especially in light of emerging sustainability movements and the urgency of developing viable cultural alternatives to globalized consumerism.

"The Eden that Beckons Us" is an examination of Paolo Bacigalupi's "biopunk" novel The Windup Girl (2009). In the proposal below, I try to develop a sympathetic reading of the text, but I'm not sure if it'll hold up after I reread it. In other words, there are a few images in The Windup Girl that might be somewhat difficult to make sense of, especially the character Gibbons, a genetic-engineer who is depicted as a gay, syphilitic pedophile. I'm not sure whether the novel perpetuates or unravels the "queer against Nature" myth...




Paper proposal for The 33rd International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts: “The Monstrous Fantastic”

“The Eden that Beckons Us”: Unraveling Organic Wholeness in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl

The globalized production, distribution, and consumption of food constellate a series of interrelated ethical and political concerns such as cultural autonomy, social and economic justice, animal rights, biodiversity, and ecological integrity. The negative consequences of the current agribusiness food system include the intense confinement and unnecessary suffering of animals, massive expenditure of energy and material resources, exploitation of labor, genetic monoculture, and erosion of community. In response, consumers increasingly demand organic, locally grown, fairly traded, and humanely produced foods.


Like many strands of environmentalism, however, the emerging food counterculture often employs a lapsarian narrative of humanity’s fall from an imagined state of organic wholeness. (Consider for example the simulacral images of pastoral scenes and edenic farmlands that adorn organic products on supermarket shelves.) While a powerful imaginative device, this mode of thought reveals its limitations when confronted with the difficult choices involved in responsibly marshaling technological and scientific resources to feed a burgeoning global population that has already diminished Earth’s life support systems. This dilemma is dramatized in Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl (2009), which depicts a biosphere irrevocably altered by “calorie companies” using genetic engineering to gain a stranglehold on the world’s food markets. The novel’s protagonists inhabit an environment ravaged by bioengineered plagues against which the only defense is to genetically-engineer foodstuffs resistant to mutating diseases – there is no turning back the clock to a prelapsarian food system.


Bacigalupi’s text is at least part cautionary tale against the marriage of corporate agribusiness and genetic engineering, but with its emphasis on human relationships with artificial and engineered life forms, The Windup Girl asks its reader to take up what Donna Haraway calls the “skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life.” The proposed paper will investigate how the novel critiques the current global industrial food system while simultaneously challenging binary categories of thought such as organic/inorganic and natural/artificial. Moving beyond the rhetoric and politics of “Frankenfood,” The Windup Girl presents artificial life forms outside of antagonistic dualisms, and, if “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion,” the novel demands we reconsider our stance toward the artificial in a finite and fragmented world.




Chapter proposal for Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change

"Welcome to the Anthropocene": Ecological Ontology in Times of Accelerating Change

The proliferation of digital media and information technologies, coupled with the expansion of our built physical and virtual environments, creates a crisis for traditional understandings and representations of "Nature," even as nature itself exists in a state of ecological crisis. Humans, especially in the world's most technologically-developed countries, inhabit ambiguously natural and crafted environments in which intact or unappropriated ecosystems are either non-existent or have been pushed far outside the possibilities of immediate lived experience. As Timothy Morton observes, "We're losing the ground under our feet. In philosophical language, we're losing not only 'ontological' levels of meaningfulness. We're losing the 'ontic,' the actual physical level we trusted for so long. Imagine all the air we breathe becoming unbreathable" (31).


I do not contest what Katherine Hayles calls the "fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced" (49), a finite biophysical world within which we and other organisms are enmeshed and upon which we ultimately depend for our flourishing. However, informed by a growing chorus of scholarship that questions the ontological utility of our predominant conception of Nature, I contend that the traditional lapsarian narrative of humanity's fall from an imagined state of organic wholeness, as well as the anti-technological politics associated with this cultural myth, reveals its inadequacy when confronted with the complexity of our current social reality.


The fiction of a return to organic wholeness fails to provide the imaginative and analytical tools to make sense of the ecological crisis, which is ultimately a crisis of failed relationships between humans, between humans and other organisms, and between humans and machines. Our work then is not to restore the Garden, but to understand and care for the asymmetric relationships with near and far-flung people, places, organisms, and things in which we are instantiated. As Morton writes, "Ecology is about relating not to Nature, but to aliens and ghosts."


The proposed chapter will argue that our present moment necessitates new ecological ontologies that "must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness," but about the "power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world" (Haraway 175). The proposed chapter will explore a heterogeneous array of efforts to develop new ecological ontologies appropriate to our current moment of accelerating change, including Deleuze and Guattari's "rhizome," Donna Haraway's "cyborg," Bernard Stiegler's "epiphylogenesis," and Timothy Morton's "dark ecology."

Works Cited

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.


Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1999.


Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009. Print.


Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010. Print.