The Posthuman Pandemic

Saul Newman, Tihomir Topuzovski

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350239081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

With the COVID-19 crisis forcing us to reflect in a dramatic way on the limits of the human and the implications of the Anthropocene Age, this timely volume addresses these concerns through an exploration of post-humanism as represented in philosophy, politics and aesthetics. Global pandemics bring into sharp focus the bankruptcy of the neoliberal economic paradigm, the future of the arts sector in society, and our dependence upon political forces outside our control. In response to the recent state of emergency, The Posthuman Pandemic highlights the urgent need to rethink our anthropocentrism and develop new political models, aesthetic practices and ways of living. Central to these discussions is the idea of post-humanism, a philosophy that can help us grapple with the crisis, as it takes seriously the unstable ecosystems on which we depend and the precarious nature of our long-cherished notions of agency and sovereignty. Bringing together international philosophers, political theorists and media and art theorists, all of whom engage with the posthuman, this volume explores a range of vital subjects, from the inequality revealed by COVID-19 survival rates to museums' role in spreading human-centric understandings of a world struck by human fragility. Facing up to the realities that the coronavirus outbreak has uncovered, The Posthuman Pandemic combines both breadth and depth of analysis to take on the posthuman challenges confronting us today.

Part I

Philosophy

1

The (post)human and the (post)pandemic

Rediscovering our selves

Christine Daigle

The Covid-19 pandemic is being experienced individually and collectively as a crisis. Referred to as the ‘disease of stoppage’¹ that brings about a ‘rupture’ of the ‘everyday’² and heightened defamiliarization;³ the pandemic is causing massive social and economic disruption, physical and mental suffering and deaths. And yet, it also has the potential of being generative: the first evidence of a potential silver lining to it being the radical diminution of pollution caused by significantly reduced human traffic leading non-human animals to thrive and venture into urban settings. Images and reports of wild goats and boars roaming urban settings and dolphins enjoying the Bosphorus and getting closer than ever to the city of Istanbul have elicited smiles and wonder at the power of nature to reclaim the world once humans cease to be so active, giving us glimpses of what would follow our species’ extinction. However, for the humans relegated to their private spaces and forced into different variations of quarantine and lockdowns, the pandemic has reduced, rather than expanded, horizons. Examining the meaning of ‘crisis’, ‘emergency’ and ‘catastrophe’ in the context of the pandemic, Rebecca Solnit argues that the pandemic is an instance of sudden large-scale disruption, a point after which we need to reorient ourselves. Solnit explains that disasters teach humans lessons, the first of which being ‘that everything is connected . . . [Disasters are] crash courses in those connections’. She further argues that ‘Our sense of self generally comes from the world around us, and right now, we are finding another version of who we are’.⁴ I contend that the being we are discovering – this other ‘version of who we are’ – is actually the being we have always been but forgotten we were: a radically materially entangled being. The pandemic is allowing us to grasp ourselves as the posthumans we always were, namely the materially entangled beings that we are rediscovering.

In this chapter, I explore the disruptive and generative potentials of the pandemic as experienced by a being that has lived under the humanist delusion of existing as an autonomous exceptional subject: the human being. This is a delusion we have lived under until Covid-19 hit us with its powerful agentic capacity. The biothreat we face, hidden yet deadly – the ‘invisible enemy’ as it has been called by some – has confronted us with the fissure at the heart of the concept ‘human’: we were never human and always were posthuman. I examine how the sudden and fearful confrontation generated by the pandemic with our own bodily entanglements is potentially a generative moment. However, this moment in which we recognize that our embodied and subjective existence is deeply entangled with that of all human and non-human others is first lived in anxiety as we discover our ontological vulnerability. Our relations with others have deeply shifted in the crisis: we fear the Other as invisible – the virus – or the once familiar and non-threatening Other – the potential carrier we cross paths with while out – or even our own body either as healthy but asymptomatic, therefore still a carrier and a threat to others, or as disrupted and incapacitated by a potentially deadly host – our body as sick patient. Yet, as much as we fear the Other, we still long for that Other as our quarantined selves are forced into physical distancing. I argue that the pandemic experience, which is rewriting our imaginations⁵ and bringing us back to the body,⁶ is an opportunity to be seized: it has the generative power to allow us, rather than ‘returning to normal’, to reinvent ‘normal’ as we embrace our vulnerability and become the posthumans we always were, existing as such in a post-pandemic world.

My view of the posthuman is formed along the lines of posthumanist material feminist theory, which explores the manifold entanglements that compose us and that we participate in. I propose that we are transjective beings, namely beings that are concomitantly transsubjective and transobjective. We exist and unfold through a web of material and subjective relations that both shape us and undo us. We are dynamic assemblages of unfolding relations, experiences, beings and agentic capacities. This assemblage, which materializes as an embodied being, is itself a porous and permeable being, constantly changing materially and subjectively. I use the term ‘transjective’, which blends the material (objective) and the subjective, as I do not see those as separate. We refer to them as if they were of a different nature but, in fact, the material inflects the subjective just as much as the subjective inflects the material. It is impossible to disentangle those relations and webs of affect. Nor is it possible to conceive of beings as autarkic. This is true of all beings, and not merely the human.⁷ All beings, humans included, are porous and permeable beings. As Samantha Frost puts it, if there is no traffic of molecules through our various membranes, there is no life.⁸ This is also true of the traffic of ideas, affects, images, etc. While porosity sustains life, it also renders it vulnerable. This is the double-sided coin of porosity: the condition for a being’s thriving is its vulnerability. The very openness of beings, which is at the foundation of their thriving, also renders them vulnerable and thereby potentially toxic – as discussed by Stacy Alaimo in the context of environmental exposure to pesticides and pollutants – and potentially infected when encountering a virus such as SARS-CoV-2, whether one develops symptoms and perhaps dies from it or not. One is toxic in two ways: as having various toxins in their assemblage but also toxic to others, in the case of the pandemic, as a carrier of the virus.

It is important to emphasize that our entanglements are manifold. Rosi Braidotti recently captured this by suggesting we are zoe/geo/techno framed subjects.⁹ Material feminists have offered various terms to capture the entangled and dynamic being of both the human and non-human such as ‘mangle’, ‘transcorporeal being’, ‘biocultural creature’, ‘cyborg’ and, most recently, the ‘zoe/geo/techno framed subject’ discussed by Braidotti.¹⁰ I add to this list the transjective. Importantly, each view not only rejects the humanist notion of subject but, with it, the notion of autonomous agency. Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and Samantha Frost are important resources in reconceptualizing the notion of agency as distributive agency or agentic capacity.¹¹ Barad explains that agency is ‘not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world’.¹² These unfold through intra-active relations in which the human is entangled. One cannot single out human agency. Likewise, Bennett argues for what she coins ‘distributive agency’. Grounding her proposals in Spinoza’s views on affect and bodies and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage, Bennett claims that agency is distributed in a continuum: the assemblage has agency just as its different members each have agency. The result is an ‘effervescence of agency’¹³ and ‘a swarm of the vitalities at play’.¹⁴ Human intention is one among many forces with which it always congregates, which is why she also speaks of ‘congregational assemblages’.¹⁵ In addition to this, I find it useful to consider Frost’s distinction between intentionality, as may be found within human agency/consciousness, and the intentless direction she identifies in relation to the biochemical processes that constantly unfold within bodies and necessarily also inflect agency. Thus, we are always dealing with assemblages of agency and intentless direction, and using the phrase ‘agentic capacity’ allows us to capture either form of impetus that drives dynamic unfolding.

Deflating the notion of human agency and emphasizing that of agentic capacity is key to the posthumanist material feminist enterprise, and is helpful in understanding the disruptions brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and the agentic capacity of the virus. Living through this as individual humans, we are suddenly faced with the power of the agentic capacity of a tiny being, the virus. We are also faced with the power of the agentic capacity of its cumulated effect via its myriad entanglements. The repeated admission, on the part of multiple scientists trying to understand the mechanics of the virus and its spread, that we do not understand exactly how transmission occurs or what kind of havoc the virus can cause in a human body has caused major anxiety and forced us to adopt the humility not characteristic of the subject of humanism. We must be humble about our capacity to understand a novel virus that does not behave like the ones we know. We must be humble about the power of our human agency to defeat the virus.¹⁶ We must be humble about the power of our own human agency in the face of the fantastic power this tiny being’s agentic capacity holds. Humility is the name of the game when one realizes fully how deeply entangled one’s being is and thereby how vulnerable one is.

There is something reassuring in clinging to a humanist notion of self. The autonomous rational subject that can orient its action through a simple operation of its will and sometimes in utter disregard of one’s body, circumstances, others and world is one that we can either trust or not. Moral education trains that autonomous humanist subject to make the right decisions, among which not harming others is primary. The notion of the posthuman as radically entangled does not do away with moral responsibility entirely. But this notion makes room for the agentic capacity of a myriad of beings and factors that make the posthumanist subject through its multiple entanglements, porosity and seepage. Political theorists have provided various origin stories for human societies. Social contract theories often rest on pessimistic views of human nature whereby a contract needs to be put in place to control natural human violence or the propensity of humans to do wrongful things. I do not want to debate whether these views are right or wrong. The fact of the matter is, however, that the socialized humans we now are operate on trust. When I board a bus, I trust the driver will not drive us off a cliff. When I use my new appliance, I trust the installer did their job right. When I consult a health-care professional, I trust they take my well-being seriousl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The posthuman pandemic
• Part I Philosophy
• Part II Politics
• Part III Art
• Index
• Copyright