Being Posthuman

Ontologies of the Future

Zahi Zalloua

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350151109
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Filosofía
• Categoria: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Posthumanism is both a descriptive and a prescriptive term. Firstly, it registers a shift beginning in the late 1960s and epitomized by Foucault's "the death of Man". Secondly, it refers to the future and a new relationship with the non-human, along with a different understanding of human exceptionalism. In Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future, Zahi Zalloua interrogates this future and shows that "post-" does not necessarily mean 'after' or that what comes after is more advanced than what has gone before. He pursues this line of inquiry across four distinct, yet interrelated, figures: cyborgs, animals, objects, and racialized and excluded 'others'. These figures disrupt the narrative of the 'human' and its singularity and by reading them together, Zalloua determines that it is only when posthumanist discourse is combined with psychoanalysis that subjectivity can be properly examined.

1

Cyborgs

Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.

Donna Haraway¹

When we hear that modern science and technology pose a threat to our human identity, the first thing we should do is to raise the elementary philosophical question: which notion of “human,” of the specific human dimension, guides us; which notion are we presupposing in advance as an implicit measure of being-human when we formulate such threats?

Slavoj Žižek²

Science has transformed the very notion of perfection, redefining the means by which it can be achieved. In the West today, it is often science—like the spiritual imitation of Christ, or the philosophical imitation of Socrates, which were dominant ideas at other moments in Western history—that promises to perfect humans. Gene therapy, cosmetic surgeries, prosthetic enhancement, and pharmaceutical solutions are all options available to humans in the here and now, who refuse to settle for what is. Science is also catching up with science fiction: artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and the possibility of uploading human memory into computers await us. These technologies have all impacted the way in which characteristics sometimes taken as givens—age, sexuality, sex assignment, health—are redefined as malleable, and thus perfectible.

The partisans of a scientifically mediated posthuman go by the name of transhumanists. They have celebrated the new conceptions of humanity and agency that cyborg technologies have helped open up. Transhumanists see in the “cyborg”—a term that combines cybernetic and organism—the future of humanity itself, a Humanity Plus (captured by the symbol H+).³ Transhumanists view the “posthuman” teleologically: the cyborg is posthuman insofar as it is the human fully realized, the human minus fleshly vulnerability. Unlike traditional humanists, transhumanists conceive of human nature as a process, a work-in-progress, rather than a static or timeless essence. Transhumanist discourse revives the Renaissance ideal of perfectio hominis; we might say that it ushers in the ideal of perfectio hominis 2.0. What comes after the human—what comes with the advances in bioscience and technology—is not less agency but more of it. In his 2005 article, “In Defence of Posthuman Dignity,” Nick Bostrom, a leading figure of the transhumanist movement, writes:

Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades, and can be viewed as an outgrowth of secular humanism and the Enlightenment. It holds that current human nature is improvable through the use of applied science and other rational methods, which may make it possible to increase human health-span, extend our intellectual and physical capacities, and give us increased control over our own mental states and moods. Technologies of concern include not only current ones, like genetic engineering and information technology, but also anticipated future developments such as fully immersive virtual reality, machine-phase nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.⁴

Giving primacy to rationality, transhumanism privileges and elevates the mind while the body is devalued and treated as a limitation, whose vulnerability technological innovation seeks to reduce, if not eliminate.⁵ Transhumanism fully enacts “the scientific-technological realization of the Gnostic dream of the Self getting rid of the decay and inertia of material reality.”⁶

Transhumanists claim the cyborg as an example of posthuman progress, of a futurity beyond humanity: with the advances of biotechnology, the posthuman is stronger, its bodily precariousness minimized (and potentially surmounted altogether in the future). The cyborg, in the eyes of transhumanists, has transcended many of the given limitations surrounding the original mortal body of the human. The human as would-be victim, plagued by his or her mortal body, now gives way to a heroic, masculinist posthuman. Mastery, perseverance, and the promise of technological immortality typify the cyborg of transhumanism.

In contrast to this aggressively utopian and optimist rendering of the cyborg, we might keep in mind Donna Haraway’s seminal account of this locus classicus of the posthuman in her 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In it, Haraway foregrounds the interpenetration of humans and machines, the hybridity and impurity of the human, its coexistence or fusion with the machine in the sci-fi image of the cyborg. This posthuman figure comes to stand for all that disrupts and contaminates binary oppositions (including human and animal, organism and machine, the physical and the nonphysical), embodying her socialist-feminist vision of and for the subject. George Myerson attests to the cyborg’s transformative and inventive presence: “You can tell you are in the presence of a cyborg figure when you feel a new world coming into being around you.”⁷ At the same time, the cyborg illustrates and enacts the hopes, anxieties, and ontological and ethical dilemmas bound up with science and its potential to alter being itself.

Pace the transhumanists, Haraway’s cyborgs do not represent the achievement of a “dematerialization of embodiment”⁸ —that is, a perfect, static ideal of the subject—but rather the entanglement of the human with other forms of life, an entanglement that accentuates, rather than escapes, questions of power, responsibility, and relation. The cyborg, as Haraway deploys it, downgrades the mind, and downgrades man’s privileged status in the humanist order of things, in the hierarchy that places humans at the pinnacle, above animals, plants, and inanimate matter. Moreover, this shift away from the hegemonic model of the undivided, sovereign subject, Haraway insists, has already happened: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics” (7, emphasis added). Whereas ontology is traditionally about the classification and categorization of beings, the cyborg’s ontology—our queer ontology—lies in its impropriety, in its refusal to be put in its natural or proper place. The figure of the cyborg illustrates and enacts Haraway’s ethico-political imperative to queer the “natural”: “Queering what counts as nature is my categorical imperative.”⁹ The cyborg is not only a menace to the humanist order of things (“the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in ‘the West’ since Aristotle” [32]) but being cyborg also perverts “Man” (from the Latin pervertere, meaning to subvert, to turn upside down), taking pleasure in “taboo fusions” (52). Nothing is more foreign to the cyborg than desiring perfection, a permanent state of stasis—for this reason, “the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden” (9), that is, it would not perceive it as something desirable. Indeed, the cyborg jams all fantasies of closure, having “no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness” (8).¹⁰

On Haraway’s model, transhumanists are producing their own fantasy of closure. The transhumanist cyborg dream is a dream of pure transcendence, which is after all nothing but a renewed humanist desire to escape mortality, corporality, and/as animality. Haraway’s own version of the cyborg is decidedly not amenable to such transhumanist co-optation. But is this liminal figure any safer from the more progressive camp of the posthumanists? It obviously depends on the posthumanism that is being proffered. Again, this brings us back to the ontological status and understanding of the human in posthumanism and in relation to the posthuman.

Unlike transhumanism, which embraces the humanist goals of individual perfection and self-determination, posthumanism, as defined by Cary Wolfe, proceeds by radically questioning and redefining what it means to be human in the first place. According to Wolfe, the posthumanist project must genuinely trouble the place of the human: “Posthumanism means not the triumphal surpassing or unmasking of something but an increase in the vigilance, responsibility, and humility that accompany living in a world so newly, and differently, inhabited.”¹¹ It is thus clear that Wolfe’s posthumanism is fundamentally at odds with transhumanism, which is merely “an intensification of humanism” through technological means.¹² And when you combine such advancements with a dominant neoliberal ideology, you get a disastrous sociopolitical outcome; human transformations are treated as commodities to be bought and sold. In this posthuman new normal, the rich purchase their ontological upgrades, becoming more and more posthuman, while the poor are stuck in the ontological equivalent of coach, remaining, as it were, more and more human.

Haraway’s cyborg seems more hospitable to the label of posthumanist identity: an identity that overcomes human(ist) identity. And yet it is this type of interpretive reasoning that compels Haraway, in When Species Meet, to qualify, if not altogether decline, the label of posthumanist:

I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist. For one thing, urgent work still needs to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of woman and human, properly pluralized, reformulated, and brought into constitutive intersection with other asymmetrical differences.¹³

Relationality trumps de-subjectivization. Making kin, becoming-with, is both more rewarding and more urgent than simply critiquing the human subject. Abandoning subjectivity—a sine qua non of posthumanism—is thus not a viable solution. For Haraway, the cyborg was crucial in its challenge to essentialism and Cartesian humanism, but almost two decades after writing her “Cyborg Manifesto,” she finds it urgent to shift attention away from the trope or fantasy of the cyborg—away from questions of social constructionism, spurred by the linguistic turn—and toward ethical considerations of nonhuman otherness, especially “real” dogs, for example. Haraway was, of course, not alone in making this move. Theory more broadly experienced this paradigm shift: whereas the linguistic turn is said to have paid too much attention to mediation and representation, the ethical turn attended to material reality, to our exposure to the other, to the ways the other (human or nonhuman) interpellates us and “calls us to ethical accountability.”¹⁴ It is the flesh of animals, their “vulnerability and pain,”¹⁵ that occupies her thoughts. In this new ethical horizon, the cyborg still has a place but it is one dominated by Haraway’s companion species: “I have come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger queer family of companion species.”¹⁶

In dealing with the question of the animal (to which I will return in Chapter 2), Haraway expresses her suspicion over posthumanism’s exclusive critique of subjectivity, when what is needed is a better appreciation of our relation to animals or companion species, which is itself preconditioned on a kind of epistemic queering of the subject:¹⁷ a defamiliarization of the human, rendering it less comfortable, less familiar, less known to itself. Yet the cyborg, I would add, played and, more importantly, continues to play an invaluable role in this queering of the human, and thus merits continued attention and exploration, not least because of the importance of this figure for transhumanists, posthumanists, and bioconservatives who are invested in preserving human nature against the encroachment of bioscience (such as biogenetic enhancement), but also for the pull or fascination it exercises in popular culture—as in the Netflix series Black Mirror. Black Mirror’s cyborg examples ironically do not conform to the utopian or normative aspirations of either transhumanists (the dream of pure transcendence, living without corporeal entanglement) or posthumanists (the dream of post-subjective existence, dwelling in the plane of immanence), nor do they unproblematically acquiesce to the nostalgic impulse of pre-cyborg reality. Haraway herself ends the cyborg manifesto with its most memorable line: “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (68). It is crucial to insist on the still emancipatory force of this line. Why is it better to be a cyborg than a goddess? What do cyborg and goddess mean in the context of the ontological turn? Or better yet, what kind of beings are they? What are the politics of each figure?

Haraway with Žižek

In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway aligns the figure of the goddess with an idyllic time, a matriarchal past, a utopian feminism untouched by men, grounded in nature, the organic, and all that evokes purity and transcendence. But, as she writes, “it’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’” (30). The cyborg, by contrast, is a thing of this world; its body does not “end at the skin” (61); it is suspicious of “holism,” but hungry or “needy for connection” (9). The cyborg is not innocent; indeed, it is the product of power, “a deeply compromised figure,”¹⁸ a problematic child of “militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” (9). The cyborg, however, doesn’t believe in destiny; it prefers beginnings (which are always historical and multiple) to origins (which are divine and exceptional).¹⁹ The manifesto that gave us the cyborg is not the “ramblings of a blissed-out, technobunny, fembot.”²⁰ Against recuperative readings of the cyborg, Haraway stresses the unruliness of her posthuman progeny, “often exceedingly unfaithful to [its] origins” (10). Haraway’s cyborgs avow their illegitimacy and consider “their fathers . . . inessential” (10). An iconoclast, the cyborg is a deviant, a blasphemous trickster, with a penchant for dissensus and breaching boundaries. Its predilection is for serio ludere, “serious play” (5). Indeed, the cyborg delights in “irony” and “perversity,” and readily avows its partiality, making no pretension to completeness and mastery (9). Its “power to signify” (55) is of a different order.

What is at stake in the paring of cyborg and goddess, however, is not—or does not have to be—simply the choice between culture (the manufactured) over nature (the given). Being for culture in this way would return us to a binary opposition—culture versus nature—that the manifesto sought to undermine.²¹ Drawing on Žižek’s ontologization of Lacan’s formu...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Improper of the Human
• 1 Cyborgs
• 2 Animals
• 3 Object Fever
• 4 Black Being
• Conclusion: Inhuman Posthumanism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright