Or, the Disruption of Disruption [in progress]
Collected Essays on Critical Posthumanism III
Like all social discourses, posthumanism is the sum of its own power struggles, including the subject positions it affords and the identities it promotes. In that sense, it encourages its addressees to engage with the (usually future) scenarios and choices it establishes. Posthumanist discourse is specific in that it mainly circulates contemporary technocultural aspects, even though it also connects back to preceding discourses (especially humanism) and interacts with other co-existing discourses (like feminism, environmentalism, capitalism…). And as for all discourses, there is no agreement on what its at once constitutive but ultimately indeterminable (or “transcendental”) signifier, the “posthuman”, actually means. Just like the discourse of humanism would never (be able to clearly) define what the human actually is or was – because it was basically in its interest to preserve its essential “openness” or “open-endedness” and its underdetermined “nature” – posthumanism sees its transcendental signifier and contested master trope, the posthuman, as either the best or the worst thing that could happen to the human, to humanity and the humanist tradition. There is therefore no consensus as to whether posthumanism is either “inevitable”, whether it is already a “reality”, or merely a phantasy of some technology nerds who have read too much science fiction; there is no agreement as to whether it is politically, culturally, socially “progressive” or, on the contrary, whether it actually represents a “regressive” step underpinned by technological determinism; or, in other words, whether it is the bearer of fundamental technological change or merely an ideology that is motivated by technocapitalist neoliberal interests (or, indeed, a combination of all of these).
Planned contents:
1. Preface: Critical Posthumanism, Now
2. Introduction: Wat is CPH against? – Disruption and Askesis
3. Against Disruption: The Future of Democracy, Populism, Transhumanism and Post-Truth
4. Against Speculation: Science Faction, or, Posthumanism After Science Fiction
5. Against Technogenesis and Originary Technicity: Animality – Humanity – Technology
6. Against Somatophobia: Transhumanism, Embodiment and Disability
7. Against Technofetishism and Posthuman Desire
8. Against Futurecide, or, (De)Constructions of the Future
9. Against AI: Creativity, the Posthuman Economy and the End of Work
10. Against Violence: Posthumanist War the Future of Violence
11. Against Geoconstructivism, Geopolitics, the Anthropocene and the Technosphere
12. Afterword: Against Ghosting the Human and the End of the World
Critical Posthumanism and Politics
Critical posthumanism has established itself as an academic discourse and “school of thought” that focuses on the ways humans are handling the process of what one might call “posthumanisation” – humans somehow becoming something “other” than they (thought they) were. This involves at once a critical reading of the humanist tradition from its very beginnings to philosophical anthropology and the antihumanism of the 20th century, as well as a critical commentary of the radical technological, ecological and social changes that constitute “our” time, from the late 20th century to the present. It is looking for connection points both through genealogical and speculative work, reaching back and projecting forward by using humanities, social sciences as well as science knowledge bases and methodologies to ask what it meant, means and will mean to be human. In doing so it challenges notions of anthropocentrism past, present and future, questions “our” relationship to nonhuman animals, the environment, the planet, and reposes the question of technology and its role in human and nonhuman development. It explores all the “cracks” that open up once the humanist notion of a universal human “nature” or “essence” and the idea of human “exceptionalism” are disintegrating. Needless to say that it has been very efficient at (further) decentering the human. Its focus and motivation has been predominantly “ethical”, however, what it hasn’t really produced is a “politics” in a more concrete and “livable” sense. One cannot deny that there is a certain level of (ideological) disingenuousness of the “human” arguing itself out of the picture today, for example, when everything seems to be turning against “us” and new forms and levels of solidarity would be needed to face the global crises (“man-made” or not). Without risking a humanist “renewal”, for obvious reasons, how can critical posthumanism reengage with the “everyday world” of social exploitation, or uncertainty due to technological change, the violence of an inhuman economic system, the return of old spectres (never really successfully repressed) like nationalism, patriarchy and autocracy. Basically, the political question critical posthumanism needs ask (itself): which way lies liberation these days, or, in other words, what kind of freedom do “we” (to be defined) want or need? And is this still a question that actually makes sense under “posthuman” conditions? Or does posthuman(ist) politics function entirely differently?
