Loss, Lack
When Ihab Hassan introduced the term âposthumanism â in 1977, it marked a state of powerlessness and disorientation in face of rapidly changing humanities. 1 âWe need first to understand that the human form âincluding human desire and all its external representationsâmay be changing radically, and thus must be re-visionedâ, he urged. âWe need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism â. 2 Characterized as the crisis of humanismâs vocabulary forty years ago by Hassan, posthumanism presaged both the fear and anticipation of a shift in some of humanismâs more dubious dichotomies, or even its practice of binarizing conceptual terrain itself. Nature/culture, subject/object , human/machine , human/animal/animal: all seemed to be the products of a humanist tendency to reduce and simplify on behalf of a conception of world order that made the position of human as arbiter clearly apparent.
Even if pushing past humanist assumptions ultimately resulted in the loss of a worldview in which the human was both central arbiter and beneficiary, it is only through loss , as psychoanalysis understands the term, that we experience lack . Lack , or a manque-Ă -ĂȘtre, not only generates desire , but also reflects the (pre) ontological status of being itself as constituted by âthe gap of the unconscious â. 3 The loss of human centrality represented by the shift away from humanist ideals, thus, repeats a more profound, traumatic lack . Conjuring a philosophical system in which humans imagine themselves as subject to rather than authors of a worldview might be a sobering encounter, were it not for the variety of posthumanist efforts to come to terms with, reimagine, resituate, and even recommend the effects of human decentralization in circumstances conceived to arise from a much broader and diverse set of possibilities.
Negativity , Subject
âThe subject is no oneâ; â[i]t is decomposed, in piecesâ, 4 Lacan suggests and he warns us: âWhen one speaks of subjectivity , the problem is not to turn the subject into an entityâ. 5 Conceiving of the human subject as already the effect of multiple processes, fictions, and solutions to the ineffable, psychoanalysis has been perhaps the least comfortable with humanist outlook, especially in so far as the centrality of the human subject in humanist worldviews elaborates a more certain and stable subject than the split and contingent beings of quotidian existence. But psychoanalysis, as many of the essays in this volume demonstrate, has also already offered a way of thinking that can explore the ways cultural textsâfilm, literature, philosophyâhave enjoyed, normalized, and/or foreclosed the dis-ease that derives from humanist suppositions of subjective control and stability. Psychoanalytically speaking, it is not enough to say âwe have never been humanâ. There is always the lurking issue of what being speaks that can make such a declaration.
Although the shadowy presence of the subjectâs illusion is imbedded in culture and society as well as our own sense of individual subjectivity , both humanism and posthumanism devise sites for the persistence of the subject, even in its apparent denial. Despite themselves, centuries of thinkers working within humanist assumptions have encountered the lack at the core of species-beingsâ ex-sistence. Humanism âs response has been to erect an ethical system centering the human as custodial to all beingsâa system that had the effect of orthopedically concealing subjective lack . Acknowledging the human subject as a continuous part of the system instead of as its governing exceptionâan insight of which psychoanalysis was already well awareâposthumanism provides another perspective on what psychoanalysis already knew about humanism âs subjects. Such posthumanist thinkers as N. Katherine Hayles have characterized this insight about the human subject by articulating the affirmative âwe have always been posthumanâ, instead of confronting the sheer negativity of the lack that dwells at the basis of Lacanâs notion of the subject. 6
Temporality, Future
It is evident in contemporary thought that the subjectâs lack -in-being does not reside solely in the past, but also inhabits the future. Time travel has returned as a trending topic in sci-fi and scholarly inquires, 7 as we now ponder the possibilities of a new form of determinism coming from the future. Dispensing with temporal linearity, some thinkers pronounce the future as already stolen or alienated from us, 8 already âwrittenâ at the cost of our well-being or freedom. In Lacanâs work, the determinative sense of futurality is expressed in the cybernetic terms: âthe letter always arrives to its destinationâ, provided that its destination is where it arrives. This makes psychoanalytic thought well equipped to encounter and confront the complexities of the invasive pre-emption and premediation imposed by the current techno-political regimes that have been drawing the attention of scholars in media studies, political-economic studies, and sociology for several decades. When the future emerges in the present, the sense of âleaving behindâ or âovercomingâ or âlosingâ or âtransgressingâ in regard to what may come next suggests that âposthumanism â is a misnomer.
In this volume, essayists trouble posthumanism âs sense of âpostâ. The âpostâ in posthumanism is not the indicator of either the serial displacement of one philosophy by another or some species of intellectual or perceptual progress or even a logical ordering. Although it seems to supply its own self-temporalization, the posthuman, as it always has, undergirds, coexists beside and within, and plies after a humanism that itself persists. The âpostâ in posthuman is as much scalar and perspectival as it is a polysemous temporal configuration. Seeming to occupy a point of view from a grander scale than the humanist so as to correct humanism âs myopic mistakes, the âpostâ of posthumanism imagines a more perceptive locus for the subject it thinks it has left behind (or below or on a different scale) relegated to an egalitarian status with all else. This illusion of an adjusted scalar perception is partly an effect of an increasing ability to discern the operations of larger systems and networks within which the human, among all else , is ensconced as a contributing part. This attention to systemic complexity is less interested in human responsibility and conceptual categories defined in language , but in a host of material relations imagined to be real . Finally, the âpostâ of posthuman is the effect of an imaginative leap made by human subjects to transcend the human subject by observing the humanâs constitutional weakness from a point simultaneously distant and suddenly endowed with the insight of le-sujet-suppose-savoir.
Nonhuman , Imaginary
The posthuman shares its ânonhuman â turn with other non-anthropocentric humanistic approaches. Generated by the rise in technologies (digital computers, biotechnological engineering, nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence) that in their operation seem to decenter the human as the site of apprehension and linguistic reifications, these approaches appear to offer models wherein all (eco-)systems operate like technologies instead of, as perhaps formerly, all complying with humanist perceptions of hierarchically arranged systems. Most of these approachesâthe new materialism , cognitive science approaches to aesthetics, actor-network theory, affect theory, object-oriented ontology , syst...