Читать книгу An Ethics Beyond - Kevin Richard Kaiser - Страница 12

Chapter 2

Beyond Humanism:

Trends in Posthumanist Ethics

“A Potential in Our Culture": The Emergence of Posthumanism

As early as 1976, literary theorist and writer Ihab Hassan speculated in a keynote address delivered at the University of Wisconsin that “the human form—including human desire and all its external representations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned” (1977, 843). He adds that we must “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” (Hassan 843). If humanism has not completely come to an end, what we indeed “helplessly” call posthumanism is on the verge of eclipsing it. Certainly, we are amidst a condition we might call posthuman in which the wide-ranging implications present in Hassan’s prediction are too multiple for any one theorist or field to address fully. Published the following year as “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?”, this address, which reads more like Greek drama, marked the first appearance of the term “posthumanism” in print. Since then, the term has been used extensively in a variety of contexts. Hassan claims that although “posthumanism may appear as a dubious neologism, the latest slogan, or simply another image of man’s recurrent self-hate,” it “may also hint at a potential in our culture, hint at a tendency struggling to become more than a trend,” leading him to pose the crucial question: “How, then, shall we understand posthumanism? (843). The question is still open to debate.

Posthumanism and its closest kindred terms (posthuman, posthumanist) along with related terms (transhumanism, antihumanism) have remained, across the past four decades, woolly enough that what is meant by them generally depends on the utterer. Furthermore, posthumanism as a term is not without its problems, especially because it remains leashed to what it proposes to deconstruct. Regardless of my qualms with the term, I bear it in this study as I join the posthumanist discourse begun by critics of posthumanism. More than four decades have passed, but Hassan’s question stands. This chapter will offer an overview and criticism of posthumanism as it is understood by various critics and how it relates to nonhuman animals, beginning with a survey of some of the main definitions of posthumanism as a philosophical and critical movement before addressing how deconstruction, especially that found in Derrida’s later essays, relates to posthumanism and what are called “the discourse of species” and “the animal question,” before finally addressing how this pertains to notions of posthumanist ethics, including those suggested by difference theorists, like Derrida, and indistinction theorists. Although this chapter focuses primarily on posthumanist theory, I will provide intermittent acknowledgments as to how it applies to Saunders’s fiction.

One of the critics who has described the differences in terminology with which posthumanism is associated or alternated is Francesca Ferrando. In her incisive comparative essay, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations,” she notes that the term “posthuman” has now

become a key term to cope with an urgency for the integral redefinition of the notion of the human, following the onto-epistemological as well as scientific and bio-technological developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The philosophical landscape [...] includes several movements and schools of thought. The label “posthuman” is often evoked in a generic and all-inclusive way, to indicate any of these perspectives, creating methodological and theoretical confusion between experts and non-experts alike. (2013, 26)

The term, in fact, need not be so ambiguous. Ferrando describes it as an “umbrella term” under which are included various offshoots of posthumanism and transhumanism (as well as new materialisms, antihumanism, posthumanities, and metahumanities) (26). What often appears under the guise of posthumanism is more properly labeled transhumanism, which, as its name suggests, is concerned with transcending the human rather than deconstructing humanism.

Ferrando takes care to identify the key differences between posthumanism, in its more proper senses, and transhumanism. She contends that by taking for granted Enlightenment humanist formulations of those qualities considered the privileged domain of the human, transhumanism “runs the risk of techno-reductionism: technology becomes a hierarchical project, based on rational thought, driven towards progression” (Ferrando 28). Transhumanism, to put it telegraphically, intensifies humanism, whereas posthumanism, in re-evaluating the human subject and de-emphasizing its centrality, de-anthropocentrizes those fields associated with humanism, thus opening and freeing humanism from its own constraints. To call the transhuman and posthuman interchangeable denies the de-anthropocentrism at work in posthumanism.

While both projects do preserve an interest in technology, “posthumanism, in its radical onto-existential re-signification of the notion of the human, may offer a more comprehensive approach” than transhumanism, which Ferrando characterizes as “ultra-humanism” (27). In other words, because posthumanism is post-anthropocentric, it may serve as a better measure of understanding the posthuman condition than transhumanism, whether technological or otherwise. Posthumanism understands the role of technology as interdependence between the human and technological worlds, not solely as anthropological and paleontological issues but as an ontological matter, leading Ferrando to emphasize Michel Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self, which “dismantle the separation self/others through a relational ontology, playing a substantial role in the process of existential revealing, and opening the debate to posthuman ethics and applied philosophy. Posthumanism is a praxis” (29). The human is no longer the sole subject; the Other must also be considered as subject, thereby challenging us to conceive of an ethics that does not start and end with any conception of the human.

Such a challenge is both destabilizing and, according to Stefan Herbrechter, “rapturous.” In Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (2013), he provides a preliminary definition of the term. For him, posthumanism is “the cultural malaise or euphoria that is caused by the feeling once you start taking the idea of ‘postanthropocentrism’ seriously” (Herbrechter 3). By this definition, posthumanism entails a condition, a cultural feeling of profound discomfort and uneasiness or rapture. More precisely, posthumanism is both. Thinking beyond anthropocentrism, when it has existed both implicitly and explicitly as the de facto way of thinking in many fields of study, is culturally and philosophically unsettling. As we no longer accept the human as the core of our studies, we face, and are faced by, a host of subjects. The euphoria is perhaps one with this unheimlich facing, in this being faced, by another subject, the Other. We have never quite been able to define what is, precisely, “the human” through the formulations of humanism, neither by addressing “what is the human” nor by addressing, in a more rigorous Heideggerian vein, “how is the human,” in the sense (of the possibility) of its being, which seem the wrong questions to be asking.

We may now ask how beings are interdependent and what this means, but perhaps the most obvious query concerns how to develop posthuman theory without returning to humanism. Even more importantly, we must inquire how posthuman theory can be not only radicalized but actualized. What Herbrechter and his peers are asking is how posthumanism can avoid regressing into an alternative iteration of humanism and whether it can become an active, evolving praxis. Subjectivity is an important matter in this context. Equally important is how these questions, if indeed they are the questions to ask, are formulated. The risk resides in presupposing that what is paramount in posthumanism is, for example, how to restore a Western humanist notion of universalism in terms of subjectivity or how to extend rights to nonhumans based on qualities akin to those found in humans (as opposed to considering how humans are alike or different from nonhuman or human others). This is not to say the human is not important or that every humanist idea must be rejected; the point is that if the human is important to us, what we call the Other should be equally important. How we ask questions is as important as what we ask if we are to evade human exceptionalism.

Like Herbrechter, the cultural critic Rosi Braidotti also underscores the potential ambivalence of the posthuman condition in her monograph, The Posthuman (2013). Braidotti cites sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who concedes that the posthuman condition “provokes elation but also anxiety” (2). She also understands the “posthuman” as that which describes our current condition, that is, one which launches “a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet” (Braidotti 2). In other words, the posthuman condition has required the qualities of our thoughts (or feelings) to change (or be recognized), which has resulted in a shift in the humanist schemas and attitudes that historically have privileged and prioritized the human.

As Braidotti understands it, capital “h” “Humanism” is a “mutation of the Humanistic ideal into a hegemonic cultural model” that by post-World War II was countered by a wave of anti-humanism (13-14). Posthumanism, while not inevitable, was presaged. The challenges to humanism only recently have led us to realize that “Man” is “in fact a historical construct and as such contingent as to values and locations” (Braidotti 24). The posthuman condition means accepting that what we once took as the cultural model, the humanistic ideal, is misplaced on many accounts. This condition interrogates “the very structures of contemporary science, politics and international relations. Discourses and representations of the non-human, the inhuman, the anti-human, the inhumane and the posthuman profligate and overlap in our globalized, technologically mediated societies” (Braidotti 2). These discourses and representations take on different forms for different theorists, but the intention of taking seriously nonhuman beings and not accepting a priori conceptions of the human remains the same.

Before continuing with an assessment of posthumanism, it is worth considering how the posthuman condition plays into Saunders’s fiction. Although Saunders does not consciously set out to write posthumanist fiction, his stories do relate to posthumanist concerns, presenting them as part of our everyday affairs. In his early stories, the protagonist is usually an “average Joe,” while in his later stories he employs different techniques to present the thoughts and actions of multiple characters coexisting. Frequently, the protagonists are forced to navigate the kinds of globalized societies, mediated by technology, that Braidotti mentions.¹⁴ Although they do not recognize the posthuman qualities of a world whose members, especially those in power, continue to enforce humanist ideologies, they are nevertheless left destabilized by their encounters, which are sometimes posthuman in nature. Unlike some fictional characters, those in Saunders’s fiction generally do not undergo epiphanies but do experience acceptance and/or regret. Likewise, ambiguity is not uncommon. Such ambiguity also works in a posthumanist way to allow the ethical register of the stories to remain open. As we shall learn, an actively open ethics—that is, one that does not point toward a specific moral or set of morals—is required by posthumanist ethics and is necessary to navigate a world in which our condition is posthuman and in which we count as our companions nonhuman animals, as well as, in the case of Saunders’s fiction, ghosts, mutants, and television characters.¹⁵

The points made by Ferrando, Herbrechter, and Braidotti that I have outlined so far, when taken into consideration with the fiction of Saunders, present a conception of posthumanism shared by several cultural critics, especially those whose primary focus is on nonhuman animals. We can count alongside the aforementioned theorists Matthew Calarco, Donna Haraway, Kelly Oliver, Cynthia Willett, Cary Wolfe, Jason Wyckoff, and further posthumanist theorists, whether they call themselves such or not, all of whom demonstrate how posthumanist postulations are key to understanding our current condition and necessary to remedy the errors and omissions of humanism. I also add to this list Jacques Derrida, as many of the theorists frequently cite his writings and draw from his ideas. However, since posthumanism is a relatively recent field and, by its very nature, requires freedom and flexibility, many of these theorists use their own terminologies. Just how their concepts relate, then, may not be obvious, but by sampling a variety of approaches, we can gain a better understanding of each theorist’s formulations.

To start with, Braidotti postulates that “the common denominator for the posthuman condition is an assumption about the vital, self-organizing and yet non-naturalistic structure of living matter itself. This nature-culture continuum” stands as the shared starting gate of posthumanism (3). As we shall discover, what for Braidotti is a continuum is posited variously depending on the critic. For Haraway, who has famously written manifestos on cyborgs and companion species,¹⁶ living with, or “becoming with” promises a more equitable and peaceful autre-mondialisation, or other-globalization (WSM 3). For Oliver, an ethics of difference means not beginning with a predetermined set of differences, dualisms, or binaries. For Wolfe, the discourse of species is a discussion that must remain open if we are to work through theory toward an ethical pluralism. For Wyckoff, avoiding a language of dominionism is key. Neither Haraway, Oliver, Wolfe, nor Wyckoff accept humanism’s delimitations any more than they accept or redraft any notion of the human. Like them, Braidotti’s senses of the posthuman and postanthropocentric relate her “rejection of the principle of adequation to the doxa, or commonly received normative image of thought” (2013, 104). That “normative image of thought” is the conception of the human we have received from humanism: the human as central being to that which gives name to humanism (and the Humanities). What the posthuman condition demands is that philosophy and ethics no longer take for granted the human as the prime agent, the principle subject, the paramount being.

For Braidotti, this condition is a “predicament” in both the posthuman and postanthropocentric senses. She emphasizes “the idea that the activity of thinking needs to be experimental and even transgressive in combining critique with creativity” (2013, 104). In short, what Braidotti is proposing is that thinking is action: how we think is as important as what we think about. Thinking in terms of the posthuman means thinking posthumanism in a posthumanist way—critically, emotionally, and viscerally. Thinking must remain an active process—(re)creative, (de)constructive—if we are to avoid delimitations. Unyoking thought from anthropocentricity or any other doxa, in Braidotti’s sense of the term, means that this very thinking cannot arrive at any definitive end.

In the introduction to his influential study, What is Posthumanism? (2009),¹⁷ Cary Wolfe asserts that what is intended by the “post-” of posthumanism requires it to be posthumanist. According to Wolfe, posthumanism is not “posthuman at all—in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself” (xv). This is not meant to imply that our definition of the human is somehow strictly analog to (bodily) transcendence. For Wolfe, it remains undefined, as he insists in his earlier book, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, that “the ‘human,’ we now know, is not now, and never was, itself” (2003, 9). His sense of posthumanism confronts the disembodied, autonomous, rational subject that he, like his fellow posthumanist theorists, cites as the sense of the human we have inherited from Renaissance humanism. For him, posthumanist posthumanism differs from both transhumanism and what he calls humanist posthumanism because it makes no attempt to realize the human according to a binary distinction, especially not a human/animal division, that escapes or represses “not just its animal origins in nature, both biological and evolutionary, but more generally by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether” (WP xv). Nor does his articulation of posthumanism resort to coercing and constraining humanist ideology into posthumanist terminology. In other words, the human of posthumanism, as animal, is biologically and evolutionarily continuous with the physical world from which it evolves and to which it remains contiguous.

Both ontically and ontologically, Western humanism has determined the human by setting it over and against an “Other.” The contemporary conception of the human is a product of a tradition that has sought to hypostatize the human by discriminating “Man” from the Other. We define the (upper-class or bourgeois white male) human¹⁸ in terms of what it is not. For Wolfe, posthumanism’s concern focuses on what “comes both before and after humanism: before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being” in both its biological world and its technological world and “after in the sense that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks” can no longer be ignored (WP xv). In other words, posthumanism takes seriously the deanthropocentrizing of humanism.

As Wolfe remarks, a deanthropocentrizing move is not a posthumanist means by which to reject humanism entirely but the application to humanism of “the philosophical and theoretical frameworks used by humanism” so as to radicalize and follow through with humanism’s commitments (WP xvii). His belief is that posthumanism must continue to work through theory rather than abandon theory. The problem, Wolfe claims, is that “Enlightenment rationality is not […] rational enough” in that it “stops short of applying its own protocols and commitments to itself” (WP xx). To put this another way, the procedures and obligations of humanism are not sufficiently utilized—or ever utilized—to address the very system from which they emerge. Humanism, it seems, does not take its own demands for rationality seriously. Wolfe contends that what posthumanism does is apply the protocols and commitments it has inherited from humanism to humanism. What we discover in the process is that whatever it is we call “the human” is not something apart from the other-than-human.

While I agree that humanism has not examined itself according to its own framework, I am not certain that the insinuation that posthumanism should be more rational is how we should think about this predicament. The question is not whether applying the frameworks of humanism to humanism can ever be rational enough—it is about whether it can be radical enough. I do not intend to single out Wolfe here, as I believe his insistence on working through theory as a solution to our posthuman predicament is almost comparable, for example, to Braidotti’s insistence on criticism and creativity in active thinking. However, I do think his insistence on rationality and logic can serve as an example of the problems that can be encountered in articulating posthumanist theory. For this reason, Wolfe’s insistence on rationality and logic—on what can read, out of context, as a decisively humanist approach to posthumanism—should be addressed, accompanied by an understanding of the body’s role in posthumanist theory.

Gender theorists and postcolonial theorists recognize both the importance of what is communicated and how it is communicated. Moreover, they hold accountable a body’s communication—or what Judith Butler and others call “performance”—for both its intended and unintended effects. It is worth explaining then that when Wolfe insists, concerning the institution of speciesism, that “posthumanist theory of the subject has nothing to do with whether you like animals,” his intention is not to slight, for instance, ecofeminist theory in general (AR 7, italics original).¹⁹ His point is that posthumanist theory is not contingent upon whether we like an animal or not, and, therefore, that ethical pluralism cannot be contingent upon species preference, or speciesism. Regardless of the intention, an emphasis on rationality—that Enlightenment rationality is not sufficiently rational—does appear to privilege mind over body, logic as separate from a more bodily responsivity, reinforcing the traditional mind/body binary that gender theorists or ecofeminists might want to undo.

Similarly to posthumanist theory, ecofeminism, according to Mary Phillips, aims to reveal that the cultural hegemony’s ideal of masculinity is fostered “through a set of interrelated dualisms, such as mind/body, reason/nature, reason/emotion, masculine/feminine or human/nature” (2016, 59). The danger here is that in calling for an increase in rationality, the traditional cultural associations are carried along with it. As Phillips notes, “[n]on-conformance with the categories determined by the dominant group, including mind over body, reason over emotion, activity over passivity, is therefore to be considered either an inferior copy of the human, or non-human” (60). Emphasizing rationality can, intentionally or unintentionally, reify the same humanist notion of the human—and the compulsion to transcend body—it rejects.

This is not to suggest that rationality or logic—or theory, for that matter—should be rejected. Rationality and emotion should maintain a balance. In this way, we can stay consistent with new (scientific) approaches to understanding mind and body, rationality and emotion. Furthermore, the decentering of the human cannot mean privileging or rejecting mind or body any more than it can mean continuing to conceive them as distinctly separate attributes in opposition. Thus, although Wolfe works beyond dualisms, the unintended potence of his logic, and that of any posthumanist, must be checked by thinking “outside” the system or field of specialization. Thus, how thinking confronts the topics of posthumanism and how that thinking must evolve is essential. Like Braidotti, Wolfe calls for a posthumanist process of thinking. If posthumanism is concerned with “a thematics of the decentering of the human in relation to other evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates,” it is equally concerned with “how thinking confronts that thematics” and what it must become (WP xvi). Wolfe argues that

posthumanism can be defined quite specifically as the necessity for any discourse or critical procedure to take account of the constitutive (and constitutively paradoxical) nature of its own distinctions, forms, and procedures—and take account of them in ways that may be distinguished from the reflection and introspection associated with the critical subject of humanism. The “post” of posthumanism thus marks the space in which the one using those distinctions and forms is not the one who can reflect on their latencies and blind spots while at the same time deploying them. That can only be done […] by another observer, using a different set of distinctions—and that observer […] need not be human (indeed, […] never was “human”). (WP 122)

If Wolfe’s supposition of the role of the “post” in posthumanism, as applied here to humanism, is necessary in order to reflect on “latencies” and “blind sports” then this approach also applies, similarly, to posthumanism itself.

In their essay, “What’s Wrong with Posthumanism?” (2003), Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus call for a critical posthumanism. The concern is “that posthumanism is in the process not so much of being appraised by theory as going along with it. Theory’s strength has always been its claims on the radical, on ‘thinking otherwise,’ on problematizing that which appears commonsensical” (Herbrechter and Callus n.p,). In other words, discourses on posthumanism should be read critically. Theory should “contrive a ‘metaposthumanism,’ with the meta-understood not in the sense of any of the totalizing impulses theory critiques elsewhere […] but according to a signaling of theory’s disposition to step back” and “to cast a sober, evaluative eye over posthumanist orthodoxy” (Herbrechter and Callus n.p.). If posthumanism is to be truly posthumanist, in the senses suggested by Braidotti, Wolfe, Herbrechter, and Callus, posthumanism can never be orthodox. Thinking must remain active.

It is no accident that the phrase “how we think” recurs throughout Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism?.²⁰ If thinking is to remain active—if it is to avoid becoming orthodoxy, if it is to eschew doxa—then theory and philosophy cannot be harnessed and hidebound; however, this is easier claimed than done. Even the emphasis on thinking, which I have asserted thus far in this text, is worrisome. Although thinking need not be associated with the (humanist) mind, I prefer the terms sensing and feeling, which I feel are less troublesome by dint of their indistinctiveness. We feel and sense in multiple ways, and while we can reconceive our conceptions of what is or is not thinking, the term does carry the burden of its association with mind rather than body. Furthermore, while we may deploy the distinctions, forms, and procedures of the so-called discourse of species—or any other discourse, for that matter—we cannot reflect fully upon them from within the same system that produces them. Briefly, no matter how obvious this statement may seem, we cannot know what is concealed from us nor what we do not understand.

Posthumanism exists precisely because the faults in humanism’s procedures cannot be observed by humanism. If humanism were capable of this, it would no longer be humanism. For that, an “outside” observer is necessary. Wolfe’s suggestions that the observer need not be human is indeed the case with the little female cat in Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (2013).²¹ It is also the reason why Wolfe calls on second-order systems theory as a complement to Derridean philosophy. For my purposes, I will adopt a specific field, literary fiction, to which posthumanist theory can be applied so as to make apparent imagined scenarios of what we might call ethical situations and how a posthumanist ethics might appear or occur—indeed, might confront us—in a text. In other words, rather than simply using theory to understand literature, literature can equally reveal to us more readily what remains dormant in conceptions of posthumanist ethics.

Placing valuable emphasis on literature, Pramod K. Nayar’s Posthumanism, describes critical posthumanism as “the radical decentring of the human sovereign, coherent and autonomous human in order to demonstrate how the human is always already evolving with, constituted by and constitutive of multiple life forms and machines” (2013, 2, italics original). In Nayar’s text, posthumanism again centers on deanthropocentrism, which leads us to postanthropocentrism. However, his focus is on the role that literature plays in shaping ideas of the human. Since at least the Renaissance, certain literature has mandated and reinforced particular human behaviors, actions, reactions, and interactions. Nayar believes that literature is the field of humanism in which human “nature” might best be revealed and “in which the human is defined, described and debated,” while also serving as “the site where we can witness the Other and the different” (32). Literature is an immersive engagement. The very act of reading, Nayar contends, allows for engagement with the Other while questioning both “the nature and the limits of the Self” (32). It also cannot be construed strictly as mental exercise; it is a bodily experience that demands response.

By referring to the exercise as both mental and bodily, I do not intend a separation of the terms nor a union that implies a previous separation. Even the compound “mindbody” is not sufficient as a term. Language retains and reinforces conceptions of “mind” and “body” as inherited from a humanist knowledge system that has grounded them as opposites, with the former being privileged, so that it is indicated above and beyond the latter, which is denied a place in discourse other than to occupy a negative space. The import here is that mind and body are not, either of them, as such; they are monist. This is important in regards to thinking as well as reading.

Nayar asserts that reading engages us “in the immersive environment of a text with all its affective and sensuous constituents” (32). Reading is not just intellectual activity in the received sense of the mind as the site of knowing; reading is also visceral, a bodily knowing. In reading of and about the Other, we are also aware of a reading “self” (which is why writing about the Other is so dangerous in terms of how we perceive the Other). Through reading the Other in literature, we can engage with the Other. Nayar suspects, like other posthumanists, that whatever the human is, it is so only because of the Other. Better than continuing to label “the Other” by such a term, at this point it may be more helpful to sense others not as such but as constituents. By this I mean that “others” are participatory members in a community of beings that comprise a whole. For example, humans are comprised of various microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses, archaea, protists, and fungi. The human is given by and gives of (other) beings, whether they are, according to Nayar, living organisms or technology.

Before moving on, I think it is important to qualify the above claims, especially to clarify why I prefer “constituents” to the continued use of “the Other.” The path to this conclusion is nonlinear but is not a digression. The literary texts that demonstrate to us what the human is have traditionally revealed privileged, white male, human rationalist—or, to borrow Derrida’s neologism, phallogocentric—constructions of the human. Derrida goes one step further, of course, acknowledging the culturally accepted norm of flesh-eating as an integral feature of how the human has been though. Because of this, he understands the dominant subject as carnophallogocentric. According to Derrida, who intriguingly includes vegetarians—and assumedly vegans—in the prefix, human “culture rests on a structure of sacrifice. We are all mixed up in an eating of flesh—real or symbolic” (LD n.p.).²² For Derrida, the assimilation of a text is carnivorous in a symbolic sense, such that a deconstructionist reading of a text calls for “respect for that which cannot be eaten—respect for that in a text which cannot be assimilated” (LD n.p.). Derrida exhibits a clear theoretical standpoint, declaring that his “thoughts on the limits of eating follow in their entirety” the very schema as his “theories on the indeterminate or untranslatable in a text. There is always a remainder that cannot be read, that must remain alien. This residue can never be interrogated as the same, but must be constantly sought out anew, and must continue to be written” (LD n.p.). The carnophallogocentric subject dominant to Western culture has not respected the limits of eating, in this sense. It digests, or attempts to digest, all, including the alien, the Other.

Like Derrida, feminist, postcolonialist, and posthumanist philosophers have challenged the carnophallogocentric subject and its conception of the Other, which are conceived in dualistic terms: man/woman, colonizer/subaltern native, human/animal. In philosophy and psychology, the Other has been determined as a counterpart to the Self although the Other does not necessarily require another being. However, while I knowingly am generalizing and oversimplifying, both Other and Self often have been restricted to the human. This is problematic if the human has predominantly been assumed to be the subject, especially so if the subject is what Derrida calls carnophallogocentric. Therefore, to avoid unnecessary associations, I will refrain from utilizing “the Other” or even “the other,” except in instances in which I am examining how it has been used historically, in favor of the term “constituents,” which I find more favorable since it does not carry connotations of dualism and grants a sense of agency to those involved, which is as important for nonhuman beings as it is for human beings.

To summarize the human as topic more simply, what passes for discourse on the human has been almost invariably discourse on a type of human, not about the human, whatever it may be. I will return momentarily to using the standard terminology: literature of and about the Other, if allowing us to engage with the Other, has generally not been written by the Other—or, if it has been written, has not been read, whether it has been available to read or no. Here, I am not referring to a strict definition of what we typically mean by “read” and “write.” I mean them in a more Derridean sense. The text of a nonhuman animal, for example, may appear to us “unreadable.” As previously mentioned, this is why writing about consituents is so dangerous: we continually risk a misrepresentation. Furthermore, we lack terms by which to more properly communicate in an unbiased manner.

Because we infect language with biases, some posthumanists insist that neologisms and radicalized language are necessary. Constituents may be an awkward term, but I believe it more accurately describes what we mean by encounters between the subject and the Other. While use of “the Other” calls attention to alterity, I believe that it still perpetuates the conception of a thing that the Human is above and against if taken out of context. Furthermore, posthumanism, even in its efforts to address the issues neglected by humanism, risks glossing over such matters precisely because conceptions of the human are carnophallogocentrically-b(i)ased—as is the language we have inherited. Again, I am generalizing and oversimplifying; however, the forefathers who have developed so many of our theories and praxis for centuries leave us with the difficult task of unharnessing these theories and praxis from mores. As Donna Haraway remarks,

I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist. For one thing, urgent work still remains 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. (WSM 17)

Because of the aforementioned dangers, it is important for posthumanism not to remain occluded in isolation. Posthumanism is interdisciplinary, and if it is to remain actively open, it needs “outside” fields—that is, integral fields—and radical sensing by which to check this openness.²³

One more claim that needs attention—and that follows my above remarks concerning openness—is Nayar’s emphasis on living organisms and technology as separate categories. Again, this is why I prefer not to think through the Other but to sense through constituents. I argue that we can and should think of beings in a broader sense and in more equivalent terms. We must accept and appreciate all entities as having life and death; that is, they are all subject to flux. While posthumanist theory focuses on interbeing identity especially in terms of nonhuman animals, as will primarily be the case here, I find it more promising for posthumanist theory if we do not delimit our notion of beings. In the interview “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject” (1988),²⁴ philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy asks Derrida why he limits himself to the animal. Derrida counters: “Nothing should be excluded. I said ‘animal’ for the sake of convenience and to use a reference that is as classical as it is dogmatic. The difference between ‘animal’ and ‘vegetal’ also remains problematic” (EW 269). Some theorists might consider this reaching too far, yet if we are to claim that posthumanism must remain open, why imply limits beforehand?

What is called species identity at least applies to plants, but many native cultures, being less impoverished in imagination than several of our philosophers, would even include minerals as living entities. We would be better prepared to understand interbeing identity as not being bound strictly to relationships between sets of principal taxonomic units, even if that determining factor is what we consider life. If subjectivity applies to beings we do not generally classify as subjects, it does not follow that we must accept any formulation of the human. However, if we are questioning subjectivity, why would we only extend subjectivity to a predetermined group? Why preclude any subject at all? We should not be content to eschew the dog-eared, moth-eaten man/animal binary that somehow sets the human apart from all other species. We should also not accept a realigned dualism, such as an organism/object binary, which, I argue, is untrue both in its ontic and ontological senses. It is not my intention to formulate a metaphysics; metaphysics should remain, quite simply, meta, in many senses. My aim here is to insist on radical openness, in the monistic sense. What I call thinking or sensing occurs “both” bodily and mentally. This is not to deny an apparent difference but to assert that body is indeed as much a performer in the active play of thinking as has been historically granted the role of the mind.

Because “Western” language—if I may generalize—lacks appropriate theories regarding this topic, I borrow from Buddhism to argue that mind and body are interdependent due to their dependent origination, which appears by conditioned, plural causality. Neither can exist alone. The same is true of our relationships with those constituents that seem to appear as separate objects. For Nayar, critical posthumanism rejects exclusionary formulations in favor of critico-theoretical conceptions that offer “a sense of the human as an instantiation of a network of connections, exchanges, linkages and crossings” with all entities (5). Briefly, interbeing identity is relational and dependent. In this respect, terms like “interspecies” and “relationship,” or Haraway’s “becoming with,” take on a more resilient import when not pre-delimited. Likewise, Nayar insists that “[i]n lieu of traditional humanism’s species-identity, treated as self-contained and unique, critical posthumanism focuses on interspecies identity” (3, italics original). Although not the thrust of my work here, it is worth emphasizing that the human itself is a superorganism—that is, ninety percent of what each of us considers a self is bacteria and fungi. Our identity truly is interbeing and a welcome reason why we should think in terms of constituents.

Critical posthumanism’s focus on interbeing identity rather than humanism’s autonomous, nonpareil formulation of the human does not mean that traditional posthumanism and its concerns are somehow cut off from humanism. Recalling Herbrechter, we find an insistence on the need for a posthumanism that is both open “to the radical nature of technocultural change” and “emphasizes a certain continuity with traditions of thought [that] have critically engaged with humanism, and which, in part, have evolved out of the humanist tradition itself” (3). Critical posthumanism is both radical and evolutionary because it calls on us to think in new ways while simultaneously drawing on humanism’s contributions, taking them to their more proper conclusions. Rather than discard humanism altogether—if that is even an option—we should remain open to the possibility of applying certain humanist practices to humanism itself and uncover the potentialities that have not been felt through, opening a path to new modes of experience and expression that are not humanist.

My claims concerning humanism may seem contrary to what I have argued thus far. However, while we do not need to accept humanism’s formulations, we can accept certain ideas that may be adopted and reformulated to address their shortcomings in their inaugural forms. Furthermore, Herbrechter recognizes the venture of critical posthumanism as the need “to re-evaluate established forms of antihumanist critique, to adapt them to the current, changed conditions, and, where possible, to radicalize them” (3). I understand this as different, at least potentially, from developing posthuman theories that collapse into humanism. As I have suggested, as Wolfe has emphasized, and as Herbrechter reminds us here, critical posthumanism must not lapse into issuing humanist frameworks under the guise of posthumanism—that is, humanist posthumanism—but develop approaches that are posthumanist—and not, for example, transhumanist.

Like Wolfe, Andy Miah proposes a definition of posthumanism that calls attention to the prefix. Miah claims that posthumanism’s vital assertion is its criticism of human preeminence. For him, “the ‘post’ of posthumanism need not imply the absence of humanity or moving beyond it,” neither biologically nor evolutionarily; rather, he understands the “post” as our point of inception as we endeavor “to understand what has been omitted from an anthropocentric worldview” (2008, 72). A liberal humanist anthropocentric worldview—and those that purport to be deanthropocentric while elevating, in some sense, the human—is a worldview poor in world.

Recalling the difference between posthumanism and transhumanism, posthumanist theory is not about what comes after the human but what comes “after” acknowledging what anthropocentricity in humanism has veiled from us, indeed what is “omitted” when we accept a philosophy that places not only the human at the center of its studies but a historically carnophallogocentric human. What is omitted is plurality: the plurality of beings as well as of cultures, genders, sexes, and so forth. Posthumanist theory, if we can call it such, is an active openness—not a passive openness that simply accepts openness in its own right but an openness that continuously (re)opens. For this reason, posthumanism understands the role of the human, if there is one, as not one of strictly becoming, as such, in the sense that we become exclusive of others, but as one, to use Haraway’s phrase once more, of becoming with, or what she has described as “companion species living in naturecultures” (CSM 65), what Kelly Oliver has emphasized as “response-ability” (2009), and what I am identifying as constituents.

In becoming with, we have, many would argue, an ethical obligation to fellow beings. To have an ethical obligation to these beings is not a strictly posthumanist formulation. What posthumanist theory would insist upon demonstrating is that if there is an ethical obligation, it is not because the human claims ethics or has the power to dictate ethics. In other words, posthuman theory, in terms of ethics, is not about extending rights to nonhuman beings; it is not a utilitarian approach to ethics. The attraction of a truly posthumanist posthumanism lies in how it serves as a radical reconceptualization—or deconceptualization, or sensing—of thinking contemporary ethics in terms of constituents, not in terms for them. Furthermore, posthumanist posthumanism raises questions concerning sociocultural issues. While contemporary conceptions of ethics will be explored more fully later, it is important to note that across what Miah demonstrates as a myriad of posthumanisms, from technological to cultural to philosophical, the emphasis remains upon “the preoccupation with Otherness that appears characteristic of posthumanism’s history” as the foremost concern “of all leading posthumanist scholars” (81), which has led to a variety of discourses, especially the so-called discourse of species. Whether ethical, political, social, cultural or otherwise, posthumanist concern is spurred by that which—or those who—have been tethered “outside” a closed conception of the human.

“We are Animals”: The Discourse of Species

In Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (2003), which I briefly cited earlier, Cary Wolfe analyzes the assumptions of cultural studies and explains how we are to understand the “discourse” of the title. As he elaborates, the discourse of species is “theoretically and methodologically, at the intersection of ‘figure’ and ‘institution,’ the former oriented more toward relatively mobile and ductile systems of language and signification, the latter toward highly specific modes and practices of materialization in the social sphere” (AR 6). The provocative premise of the book calls us to rethink subjectivity, language, and humanism through a range of schemata found throughout cultural studies and its kin. Because “cultural studies situates itself squarely, if only implicitly, on […] a fundamental repression that underlies most ethical and political discourse, taking it for granted that the subject is always already human” (AR 1), it is worth exploring the discourse of species and especially its link with the institution of speciesism.