Posthumanism and the Posthuman: Towards a Definition
Keywords:
ethics, posthumanism, transhumanism, the cyborg, hybridity, interdiscursivity, hypertext, technologyAbstract
We bear witness to an ever-increasing saturation of the everyday human experience with advanced technology and a gradual virtualization of the real, which, in a complex collaboration with various other factors, intensifies the post-Enlightenment crisis of Western humanism and anthropocentrism. A number of discourses in socio-symbolic circulation co-create, narrate, imagine, endow with meaning, and question the ethos of contemporary humanity, from cultural studies, philosophy, and critical theory to literature. This article identifies the possible common points of inception, interminglings, and discrepancies between the most prominent (and often quite heterogeneous) notions of the posthuman and posthumanism, and delineates them from the related concepts of the transhuman and transhumanism. Due to spatial constraints, this is done fragmentarily and with considerable abstraction. Whereas the posthuman is perceived as a thematic figuration born out of the cybernetic paradigm and subsumed under the more general concept of the transhuman, which is made available for appropriation or transformation to various -isms (such as posthumanism and transhumanism), posthumanism and transhumanism are of a different ilk. They are precisely the ideologically or philosophically defined movements that may interpret the posthuman each in their own way. Whereas transhumanism (or popular posthumanism) aims towards a techno-transcendence that should be achieved through the use of machines and mind-uploading, reduces embodiment to patterns of information, and further reinforces the liberal humanist subject who instrumentalizes all in the name of the phallogocentric “ratio”, critical posthumanism refuses to yield to such abstraction and aims to work through Western liberal humanism, stressing the importance of embodiment, finding inspiration in the philosophy of poststructuralism and deconstruction, and seeking a new posthuman ethos together with a social shift of paradigm.References
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