On the Posthuman

Few can have failed to notice that, historically speaking, the so-called universal accomplishments celebrated under the banner of humanism from the Renaissance to the present day have rarely been enjoyed by more than a privileged group of men, and occasionally a few women, within strictly limited socioeconomic positions.

And even at its most capacious and inclusive, it is hard to shake the worry that any purely humanist and hence anthropocentric and hence human-racist grounding of ethics will likely stand perplexed in the face of the demand of Great Apes, dolphins, and other nonhuman animals (let alone trees, or for that matter biospheres) for some measure standing and respect.

Honestly, the celebrated category of "humanity" seems rarely to have provided much protective cover for even fully sane, mature, "exemplary" human beings caught up in the sometimes genocidal technoscientific dislocations of the modern era.

A number of "post-humanist" discourses have emerged to register these dissatisfactions with the limitations of the traditional humanist project.

It is important to recognize that the "post-human" does not have to conjure up the frightening or tragic spectacle of a posthumous humanity, an end to the best aspirations of human civilization, or even a repudiation of humanism itself, so much as a new effort emerging out of humanism, a moving on from humanism as a point of departure, a demanding of something new from humanism, perhaps a demand that humanism actually live up to its ethical and democratizing self-image for once.

To be sure, the “post-human” is not one kind of imaginary or idealized prostheticized person of the future, soliciting our identification in the present and facilitating our dis-identification with our peers. Nor is “post-humanism” a singular response to a particular current of prostheticized personhood -- whether involving digital network immersion, peer-to-peer Netroots democracy, post-Pill feminism, transsexual queerness, non-normalized post-"disabled" prosthetic different-enablements, open source biopunks and copyfighters, or what have you -- nor certainly is it a matter properly of the more fantastic identifications with robots, or eugenicized superhumans, or artificial intelligences, or aliens that seem to come up so often when “post-humanism” is discussed as a topic in hyperbolic popular futurism or sub(cult)ural technophilic discourses.

"Post-humanism," properly so-called, names the ethical encounters of humanism with itself, the confrontations of a universalism with its historical and practical limits and contradictions. And the ethical visions that emerge either out of ("post" in the sense of "after") or in resistance to ("post" in the sense of "over") that confrontation are themselves ethical terms.

This post was adapted from material excerpted from two longer pieces, one of them my Technoprogressivisms essay, the other Posthuman Terrains, in answer to a request from Vladimir de Thezier for a brief statement on Posthumanism as a keyword in contemporary critical theory.