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This series addresses what is
certainly one of the most complex and pressing questions facing the humanities
at the current moment: “what is posthumanism?”
Part of what makes this series especially urgent is that what is now widely
being called “posthumanism” does not form a
unified field; indeed, the term has not just different but in fact opposed
connotations and implications, depending on who deploys it.
At one end of the spectrum, we find Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future,
which imagines a not-too-distant dystopia where the human is dominated
by genetic technologies currently being unleashed by bioengineering, so
that our fundamental “human dignity” becomes the victim of a Promethean
drive run amok. For Fukuyama—-who opens his book with a nod toward Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World--“posthumanism” names an impending
crisis in which the fundamental “human nature” that grounds our concepts
of justice and morality (and even “constrains the kinds of political regimes”
possible for the human species, as he puts it) is under assault, and can
only be protected by a sovereign power. The genre of At the other end of the spectrum, we find figures such as Donna Haraway, whose “Cyborg Manifesto” has been widely taken to signal the liberating potential of those very “posthumanist” developments lamented by Fukuyama. From Haraway’s point of view, all of the “boundary breakdowns” allegorized in the figure of the cyborg—between nature and culture, organic and inorganic, human and animal, and so on—force upon us the realization that there is no “human” in Fukuyama’s terms, and there never has been. For Haraway, the human is not a given but rather is made in an ongoing process of technological and anthropological evolution (an understanding in which she would joined by continental theorists such as Bernard Stiegler). And if “the human” is made (so the argument goes), then it can be made not just differently but more justly—especially for those who, because of their gender, race, or other characteristics, have historically fallen outside the ruling paradigms of “the human.” As a figure for the posthuman, then, Haraway’s cyborg is both frightening and potentially liberating. As she puts it (in what reads like a response to Fukuyama’s humanism), “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.” Students of contemporary culture might be tempted, at first glance, to gloss the term “posthumanism” by the light of a whole series of other “post-isms” that have made their way (for better or for worse) onto the contemporary intellectual landscape: “post-industrial,” “post-structuralist,” and, most famous (or notorious) of all, “post-modern.” For reasons that this series will attempt to illustrate, however, the question of “posthumanism” is more complicated than any of these, because it references not just a chronological progression (what comes after the industrial, the modern, and so on) but also takes on fundamental ontological and epistemological questions that are not reducible to purely historical explanation (what comes before that historically specific invention of humanism we call “the human”). Indeed, I would hope that one consequence of the series would be renewed attention to the difference between historicity and “historicism” that seems to have been largely elided or avoided in much recent work in the humanities. In this light, it should be stressed that the fundamental orientation of the series is not, of course, a “rejection” or “surpassing” of humanism and many of its animating values, concerns, and commitments. Rather, the point is to reveal, by rigorous theoretical investigation, how those values and concerns—what humanism says it wants (justice, tolerance, equality, and so on)—are undercut or short-circuited by the philosophical and theoretical frameworks from which they have arisen: frameworks that are, of course, historically contingent and quite ideologically specific. An underlying methodological question of the series, then—and it is one that will animate the series’ disciplinary commitment to work that is philosophically and theoretically advanced—is, to borrow Derrida’s formulation of the problem, “can one criticize historicism in the name of something other than truth and science (the value of universality, omnitemporality, the infinity of value, etc.), and what happens to science when the metaphysical value of truth has been put into question. . . .How are the effects of science and of truth to be reinscribed?” (Positions 105 n.32). This disciplinary commitment
to “theory,” as it has come to be called—not “against” history, of course,
but against historicism in its
more unreflective and problematic forms--makes POSTHUMANITIES in some fundamental sense an inheritor of the kind of work published
in the Theory Out of Bounds series, and, beyond that, THL: Theory and History of Literature. (I imagine, however, that the series will be
more coherent and unified than the former because of the thematic focus
and contours I will outline below, and broader than the latter in the
sense that it will be less oriented toward literature and literary theory
per se, and more committed to interdisciplinary thought.) And that commitment
also separates it from what might, at first glance, look like an allied
orientation: “cultural studies” (and I will note in advance that cultural
studies in the U.S. is a quite different formation, of course, from what
one finds in the U.K. or even in Australia). For
while cultural studies is by definition interdisciplinary, it also appears,
to many observers, nondisciplinary
in its lack of rigor and its appropriation of knowledges
drawn from a range of range of disciplines whose forms of knowledge and
types of truth claims are not just different but in fact incompatible—hence
the often bizarre shifting of critical registers one often experiences
in cultural studies from, say, the micro-analysis of a literary text and
its features to, quite abruptly, the most sweeping kinds of ethical and
political claims. In short, contemporary cultural studies often pays insufficient
attention to the fact that the very social constructivist account of knowledge
production that made it possible in the first place—in which the world
of social experience is not given but in some fundamental sense produced
by different interpretive communities operating under differential constraints
(race, gender, and the like)—is also what often threatens to expose cultural
studies as deeply incoherent and even factitious: namely, that the construction
of social knowledges by different interpretive communities means (to
put it in systems theory terms) that
“hetero-reference” is always a product of “self-reference.” And what this
means, in turn, is that interdisciplinarity
is a product of disciplinarity;
it is always and only experienced in and through disciplinarity
itself. As Stanley Fish among others has noted, this fact has important
implications for the kinds of claims—not just intellectual but ethical
and political claims--that may be made on behalf of interdisciplinarity
as a project; and in the absence of rigorous, self-reflexive attention
to that question, contemporary cultural studies often seems to many observers
to avail itself of all of the benefits of interdisciplinarity
while taking upon itself none of the responsibilities. This does not mean,
however (as Fish and his followers such as Walter Benn Michaels think)
that the question of (inter)disciplinarity is
a non- or post-theoretical question. Indeed, I would insist (against both
Fish and contemporary
To return to the question of posthumanism, then, what is needed is to map the terrain of
the topic with more range and more
theoretical rigor than has been attempted thus far. Even on the basis of the two examples of Moreover, these two sets of differences (between positive and negative assessments of posthumanism, and between historical and ontological understandings of the term) partially (but only partially) correspond to what we might call “dry” and “wet” orientations toward the question of posthumanism. The first would be epitomized, perhaps, by the media theory of Friedrich Kittler or the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, which emphasize the historical particularity of the phenomenon of posthumanism (as in Luhmann’s theory of modernity as “functional differentiation”) while focusing on specific technological developments (as in Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, or Luhmann’s investigations of “media of dissemination” in The Reality of the Mass Media). In the second, “wet,” orientation (found in Derrida’s later work, Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto, and in Deleuze and Guattari and their inheritors such as Alphonso Lingis), the emphasis falls instead on how the “human” is enmeshed in the larger problem—at once biological, ecological, and ontological—of what Derrida calls “the living.” Here, we might observe that the blunt theoretical instrument of humanism, which divides the world of the living along the axis of “the human” and everything else, actively prevents our understanding, for instance, that humans and the great apes have far more in common with each other than apes do with most other “animals,” or that a blind person and a guide dog form a third, prosthetic kind of subjectivity whose experience of the world cannot well be explained by reference to the traditional hierarchy of human vs. animal, which belies the complex forms of communication, trust, and mutual dependence entailed in such a hybrid relationship. These last two sets of differences in the discourse of posthumanism—historical/ontological, and “dry”/”wet”—underscore, I think, how my editorship of this series is a logical extension of my previous work. The first orientation is rigorously explored in Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” and in the co-edited collection Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity; and the second is the focus of my two most recent books, Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, and the edited collection Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. And both sets of concerns are the focus of essays of mine that have appeared recently or will be appearing in 2006-7: “Meaning as Event-Machine: Systems Theory and `The Reconstruction of Deconstruction’”; “Lose the Building: Systems Theory, Architecture, and Diller+Scofidio’s Blur”; “Bioethics, Inc., or, How (Not) To Think the Question of `The Living’”: “Thinking Other-Wise: Cognitive Science, Deconstruction, and the (Non)Speaking (Non)Human Subject”; “Learning From Temple Grandin: Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes After the Subject”; and “From Dead Meat to Glow in the Dark Bunnies: Seeing `The Animal Question’ in Contemporary Art.” As the title of this series is meant to suggest, then,
POSTHUMANITIES situates itself at a crossroads:
the intersection of the disciplinary formation we call “the humanities”
in its current configuration, and the challenges posed to it by work (much
of it interdisciplinary) in a range of fields that is associated with
the emergent orientation known as “posthumanism,”
work that in some fundamental sense challenges the humanities as we now
know it to move beyond its current parameters and practices. Against this background, the series will seek
to publish new work by scholars in the humanities that, rather than simply
reproducing established forms and methods of disciplinary knowledge, confront
how changes in society and culture associated with posthumanism
challenge scholars in the humanities to rethink what they do—theoretically,
methodologically, and ethically—in the years to come. In this sense, new
work in the series will, I hope, anticipate what “the humanities” will
look like thirty years from now—that is, when “the humanities” will have
become “the posthumanities.” And it will also work in the reverse direction,
as it were, to excavate the genealogy of what we now call “posthumanism”
by publishing important texts from the past (such as Michel Serres’
The Parasite, or Jakob
von Uexkull’s Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen) that have
been crucial to its emergence over the past four decades. Finally, I would hope to sustain an ongoing
commitment to relevant contemporary work in translation, the better to
illuminate the animating concerns of the series in light of the different
disciplinary and intellectual contexts that obtain in North America, the
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Cary Wolfe © 2006 Allison Hunter |
