Abstract
It is difficult to escape the feeling that we dwell in a new world. Though changes have long been afoot, the recent COVID-19 pandemic now marks more intense experiences of our biophysical and ecological vulnerabilities, heightened awareness of shifting political and cultural solidarities and schisms, and the reminder that, even if some of us once thought that we were done with history, that history is hardly done with us. Some of the intellectual questions at the center of these shifts have to do with the “we” and the “us.” What now does it mean to be “human,” and is that “human” up to the challenges that this world presents to us?
The Posthuman Studies Reader: Core Readings on Transhumanism, Posthumanism and Metahumanism, edited by Evi D. Sampanikou and Jan Stasieńko, intervenes through an overview of intellectual approaches that will help readers grapple with these questions. The second book in a series on Posthuman Studies edited by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, it joins a literature that offers frameworks for rethinking the “human,” which will be more useful for academics interested in familiarizing themselves quickly with a broader range of scholarly literature on the “more-than-human.” Sampanikou and Stasieńko, scholars of art history and media respectively, introduce key thinkers concerned with the question of what the human is and is becoming. In this respect, it is comparable to (and partially overlaps in terms of contributors) with Humanity±: Transhumanism and Its Critics (2011) and The Transhumanist Reader (More and Vita-More 2013) and covers similar ground to parts of Tamar Sharon’s Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology (2014). However, Sampanikou and Stasieńko’s introductory chapters, as well as helpful commentaries and author biographies preceding each body chapter, will be useful for those trying to get a sense of the intellectual context of the authors.
Any collection of this sort must navigate the tension between depth and coverage, while also providing threads connecting works and authors for readers to follow. Following an introduction, which briefly sets out this Reader’s goal and context (and a trippy “Anti-Prologue” by Australian performance artist Stelarc), Sampanikou and Stasieńko provide an essay that shows how they deal with the tension. Their chapter gives an intellectual history that begins with pre-Socratic philosophers, jumps to Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari, and then weaves back and forth in time through Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other hallmarks of western philosophy, while also attending to contributions from Buddhist philosophy, Russian Cosmism, and twenty-first-century figures including Francisco Varela and Ray Kurzweil.
The essay frames its selection of scholars as providing the foundations for the texts that follow, and some omissions are unavoidable in any such collection. However, the virtual absence of information theory and cybernetics is significant, especially because of the importance of the “cyborg” (“cybernetic organism”) in much posthumanist writing (see, for example, Chude-Sokei 2015; Geoghgan 2011; Liu 2010). (A similar criticism can be made about the volume’s geographic and cultural coverage: the volume is skewed toward contributors from North America and Western Europe and avoids issues of race and colonialism. For instance, the included excerpts of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” avoid her discussions of Afrofuturism.)
The trade-off is that the volume gains a clearer way to frame the ideas and thinkers that are included. Following the editors’ overview appear body chapters separated into three sections: “Transhumanism,”“Posthumanism,” and “Metahumanism.” Each section is made up of chapters containing excerpts of writing from key intellectuals, accompanied by commentaries and biographical notes about the authors. The excerpts in each section are ordered roughly chronologically. The oldest in the first section is from 1951, by Julian Huxley, one of the originators of the term “transhumanism,” while the newest is 2020 writing from Nick Bostrom, one of the most visible public intellectuals associated with transhumanism. Most of this section covers the height of the Transhumanist movement in the early 2000s, and it includes associated figures like Natasha Vita-More, Max More, and James Hughes. This section articulates the main philosophical positions for and against the radical technological enhancement of humanity of the kinds that are also addressed in Humanity±, mentioned above.
The second section, on “Posthumanism,” will be more familiar to academics in the humanities and social sciences, as it includes the work of many authors crucial for conceptualizing human/nonhuman relations in a range of fields. Parts of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” appear here, as well as works from Rosi Braidotti, Katherine Hayles, and other essential authors. At about 140 pages, the section provides rapid exposure to foundational scholarship, but it comes at the cost of depth—for example, only 2.5 pages of Hayles’s important 1999 book How We Became Posthuman are included.
The third section is the most unique. Focusing on the less well known “metahumanism,” the section is made of excerpts from four works by Jaime del Val and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. As del Val writes in one excerpt, the metahuman, foreshadowed in performance artist Stelarc’s “Anti-Prologue,”“transcends both the idealism of transhumanism and the materialism of a posthumanist critique” (p. 293) to emphasize radical ontological relationality and openness, and creative bodily experimentation. While not as well known as the other approaches discussed in the volume, metahumanism does diagnose a set of problems related to rethinking the human in terms of affect and relations that is of broader interest in posthuman studies, but the basic idea will be familiar to those acquainted with affect theory. Others will see similarities with ideas put forward by authors included in the “critical posthumanism” section.
The book’s chronological progression and its thesis-antithesis-synthesis structuring have the benefit of clarity, and the brevity of the excerpts permits the inclusion of a greater range of viewpoints than might otherwise be possible. But as a result, the volume as a whole ends up telling a quite linear story about a diverse field. Consequently, and contradictorily for a field that, at least in its “critical posthumanist” regions, valorizes the multiplicity of human potentials and the critical analysis of teleological narratives of human evolution, the volume as a whole gives the impression of a field growing in coherence and in the midst of forward progress. Thus, potential readers should approach this collection mindful that it asks “what’s next?” for the human, when perhaps it would be more productive to ask “what else?”
The value of this book then lies primarily in its coverage of key ideas and the intellectual context it provides, as well as its discussion of metahumanism. Those seeking more depth can locate original sources for the excerpts, or draw on the extensive bibliography, though the book’s utility is reduced by the curious lack of an index. Despite its quirks, the Posthuman Studies Reader will be useful for those seeking an accessible introduction to an important slice of posthumanist scholarship.