Abstract
What is Posthumanism? The title seems to herald the emergence of a new intellectual movement. Granting, for a moment, that there is indeed such a trend, a range of questions regarding it might be raised: ‘What are the concerns of this movement?’; ‘Whom does it concern?’; ‘How are these concerns to be addressed?’; ‘What is its relation to other modes of thought?’; ‘How and why did it arise?’; and so on. The answers to such questions, if Wolfe is to be believed, render this reader less than optimistic about its future prospects.
As its name suggests, the book deals with the coming-to-pre-eminence of ways of being and becoming that no longer define themselves in relation to a fixed concept of humanity. Wolfe seeks to characterize posthumanism in terms of a set of questions that, broadly, relate to the mechanicity and/or animality of subjectivity. In an increasingly familiar move, the book abandons the modernist project of defining human being, in favour of a questioning of the biological and technical conditions that characterize our current intellectual and spiritual situation.
The first half of the text embarks on this project in relation to the concerns of two totemic 20th-century thinkers: Jacques Derrida and Niklas Luhmann. Over five chapters, we are shown how the conventionally opposed concerns of postmodern literary theory and biologically inspired systems analysis in fact hold a great deal in common. In simple terms, the outcome of this thinking-together is that we must develop a more thorough awareness that the act of making statements about the world cannot be understood as subordinate to our beliefs regarding it. That is, we must abandon all residual notions of definitional authorship, ‘Cartesian’ separations of body and self, that media be considered in terms of the capacity to ‘represent’ an author’s intentions, and so on.
It might be asked how such concerns differ from those already made familiar by postmodern critics. The answer seems to lie not so much in Wolfe’s intellectual positioning (which amounts to little more than an insistence that postmodernist critique is not at odds with bio-philosophy), but in his text’s thematic concern with deconstructing ‘the human’ in relation to a plethora of non-human ‘others’.
This thematic innovation is played out through a series of critiques addressing the construction of human being as something that can be differentiated from the world more generally: of the elevation of suffering as an exclusively ‘human’ experience, of the notion of a foundational set of human or animal rights, and of the convention that human visuality constitutes a pre-eminent medium of intellectual expression.
The second half of the text seeks to apply Wolfe's Derridean and Luhmannian insights to the appreciation of a series of artistic and architectural endeavours. Above all, it insists not so much on the inherent importance of these endeavours, but on the need to re-evaluate their canonical significance in the light of the aforementioned proto-posthuman thinkers. Discussions of works as diverse as Sue Coe’s paintings of animal slaughter, Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark, and an installation by the conceptual architects Ricardo Scofido and Elizabeth Diller, all present opportunities to contest the readings of prior critics with the new-found tools of posthumanism.
The aesthetic conclusions of such eminent critics as Stanley Cavell, W. J. T. Mitchell and Slavoj Žižek are in this way all subjected to Wolfe’s critical gaze. It is not Dancer in the Dark itself that is at issue, but the relative valency of a series of potentially ‘posthuman’ intellectual concepts, evaluated in relation to the insights of Derrida and Luhmann. For example, in his discussion of Dancer in the Dark, Wolfe accepts Žižek’s theorization of the ‘phallus as prosthesis’, but expresses concern when confronted with the same author’s representation of the phallus as a ‘signifier’; the former conception complements Derrida’s conception of prosthesicity, whereas the latter contradicts the same author’s broader deconstructive project (185–202).
None of this is inherently objectionable. Rather, it points to a much broader coming-together of discourses relating to life, mind and technicity that might be said to be participating in the constitution of a posthuman condition.
It is, however, difficult to discern the broader aims of the posthumanist project as articulated in this text. A comparison with postmodernism is instructive here. As Paul Forman has noted, ‘postmodernity’ as an historical phenomenon cannot be said to have been exclusively reliant on its academy-centred, postmodernist aspects. Rather, postmodernism was merely the academic facet of a movement that thrived far beyond universities (Forman, 2010). Similarly, as such well-known authors as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour have shown at length, it is clear that posthumanity as an historical phenomenon thrives in a variety of specific contexts and situations.
This observation raises the question of what relation any self-consciously academic posthumanism might have with its broader material and political context; does Wolfe’s posthumanism introduce itself as a project that might accompany the coming-to-pre-eminence of posthuman subjectivity, or as one that should direct the proper (i.e. posthumanist) conduct of artistic, architectural and intellectual inquiry?
The answer, I believe, is not encouraging. Wolfe’s text seems to forget that the posthuman condition is not the effect of an academy-centred posthumanism. In relying so heavily on Derrida and Luhmann, it implies that it is only through an in-depth engagement with these authors that posthumanity might be apprehended and understood – that an academy-centred posthumanism is the key to apprehending, producing and maintaining posthumanity more generally. Such academic self-referentiality entails an inward-looking stance that seeks to control the dynamism of posthumanity ‘in the wild’ (such as Haraway delineates in relation to the laboratory subjects of the medical industry, for example) by maintaining itself at a safe distance from it.
Where the posthumanist project as proposed by Wolfe becomes problematic, then, is in its implication that the tools with which we are able to apprehend our present condition are already available, and are to be found exclusively within the academy. Such a stance focuses attention on an exegetic project to find ‘correct’ readings of canonical works such as Derrida’s, rather than on the (I believe necessary) articulation and/or construction of new kinds of intellectual equipment.
Wolfe’s rather careless dismissal (xii–xiii and xvii) of the academic author who has engaged perhaps most closely with the place of literature in posthumanity – N. Katherine Hayles – is similarly telling. Where Hayles’s most recent texts concern themselves above all with examining a literary practice that is subject to historical forces beyond the control of theorists – as something that is becoming simultaneously mechanical and fleshy, digital and analogue, academic and lay (Hayles, 2005; Hayles, 2008) – Wolfe insists that it is only with a specific set of already-existent, difficult-to-master intellectual tools that we will be able fully to appreciate our non-humanity. The conditions of posthumanity as described by Hayles often have the effect of opening literary practices up to non-academic participants. Wolfe’s posthumanism excludes those who are not able to master and deploy the rhetoric of deconstruction and systems theory.
It is then the implicit response of What is Posthumanism? to one of the most critical questions that can be asked of any intellectual movement – ‘Who can participate?’ – that discourages this reader from endorsing the text. Concentrating its analysis on a relatively small number of cultural theorists (albeit evaluated in relation to a range of ‘cultural’ artefacts), it points to the academy as the principal arena upon which posthuman concerns will be played out.
If we accept with the likes of Latour, Haraway and Hayles that as an historical force, the posthuman has already begun redefining the conditions of intellectual endeavour (and even relocating the critical sites of such endeavour outside of universities), Wolfe’s text reads like a rearguard action against further erosion of academic privilege. Though it presents itself as heralding the emergence of a new intellectual direction, it actually constitutes an attempt to institutionalize the already-existing phenomenon of posthumanity using established (principally postmodernist) tools. While it might be considered presumptuous to suggest that this is an inherently undesirable prospect, it will surely be agreed that the success or failure of such an endeavour will depend on a set of historical conditions that do not themselves originate in the academy.