Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Mark Poster on Posthumanism

I came upon an interview with one of my diss committee members, Mark Poster, in the latest issue of qui parle, a literary journal published here at Berkeley, and, anyway, among the many interesting things he has to say in it he makes a few comments on "posthumanism" that seemed to me especially intriguing. Here are some excerpts:

"Culturally-mandated subject positions have become more and more tenuous. I grew up in the '50s, and... I think that a lot of the solidity of the culture of the 1950s [he means for white Americans who imagined themselves to inhabit the mainstream] has disintegrated and fragmented in various ways. Groups have emerged into the public -- the new social movements -- insisting on their right to be citizens in their own terms.

"The types of practices that involve self-construction -- of lives and of positions and so forth -- have increased, and part of this has to do with the Internet, even if just a small part... [T]he multiplicity of cultures in the new media is increasing in the sense that, for example, you're urged in online chat rooms to define for yourself who you are or who you want to present yourself as being. Here it is understood that such self-presentation and self-constitution is not simply an affirmation of who you are already, but that you're going to discover who you are in the process of defining who you are and through interacting with people on that basis. So I think that Foucault's late ethics, a kind of Nietzschean aesthetics of ethics is, prophetically, increasingly built into the life circumstances and communication practices of people, and it's going to become more and more typical of how they behave.

"This is where I think we find the 'posthuman,' because such a diversification of cultures of the self is not going to be closed off from animals and machines. The issue of where to draw the line[s] between animals, machines, and humans is going to become increasingly important as part of the emerging posthuman culure[.]

"It's somewhat ironic that the stability of humanism was based on rather fixed identities that you didn't have any control over: you were a free agent and you couldn't change that, you were, to remember Rousseau, forced to be free...

"Maybe [posthumanism i]s Hegel's absolute spirit coming to know itself and be itself and realize itself, but without the teleology of the philosopher, without knowing that this is the end or that it's even going to work[.]"

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