The Legacy of Humanism in Posthumanism
Continuing the human-posthuman dichotomy, this chapter explores the implications of becoming posthuman1. “Posthuman” literally means that a
hypothetical being becomes something more than s/he currently is by surpassing his or her own limitations, but is still recognizable as a human being. The posthuman is also regarded as a symbiosis of biological human and artificial intelligence, roughly synonymous with the term “cyborg.” Rather than a stable ontology, the posthuman embodies different identities. On the other hand, “posthumanism” illustrates the death of the humanist subject, which depends on a privileged position possessing superior characteristics to all significant others. This death of the humanist subject leads to critical theorists of posthumanist subject position. Posthumanism refers to a critique of humanism, focusing on the exploration of the posthuman realm of possible modes of being. It also emphasizes a changing realization of the self and its relations to the natural world, society and human artifacts. Discourses on becoming posthuman generally fall into two groups: the pessimistic sentiment and the optimistic expectation. On the one hand, while the human form keeps constructing and reconstructing, human age comes to an end as humanism transforms into
posthumanism. “Post” as a prefix for “after” suggests that the definition of the term
“human” may be displaced one day in the near future. The end of the human age echoes the deep fear that our humanity will be altered beyond recognition. This fear comes from the humanist reaction to the possibility of transcending the merely human
1 For definitions of the terms “the posthuman” and “posthumanism,” see Chapter One, page 14-17.
being through the technological achievement. Many SF, like Mary Shelly’s
Frankenstein and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek series,
2 embody this attitude: playing God always ends in disasters. On the other hand, from Rosi Braidotti’s perspective inThe Posthuman
3, the accelerating power of new technologies leads to a morepromising future for humans. For example, virtual reality (VR) opens the possibility of humans escaping their bodies. VR systems reproduce the user’s movements by simulacrum, also known as an avatar, on the computer. When the VR user moves his or her body, the computer display recreates the movement in a corresponding fashion.
With a set of informational process, this virtual simulation of the human form creates the illusion that the user is “inside” the computer screen. In VR, information is
regarded as a separable stuff from the material substrates. Advocates of the posthuman, as a new form of subjectivity, privilege informational pattern over materiality. Virtual technologies thus transform the embodied human subject into a disembodied subject that inhabits a virtual realm.
However, both aspects mentioned above centralize the humanist vision as the measure of values. Humanist thought holds a conception of human nature which conditions our uniqueness as humans. This human nature, either its moral aspects or prudential aspects, distinguishes humans from other creatures. But the standard notion of human faces challenges as anti-humanism emerges to deal with changing
understanding of human subjectivity. For example, Michel Foucault criticizes humanism in The Order of Things (1970) with the “death-announcement of Man.”4
2 One of the examples is “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot episode of the American SF television series Star Trek. This episode asks questions about morals, the ideas of human frailties and the godhood. In the story, the characters explore what it means to be human and what it means to be a god.
3 See more details in Chapter One, page 14-15.
4 Foucault stresses a fundamental tension characterizing the modern construction of “man.” He explains this unsteady subject in reference to three binary oppositions: First of all, an
empirico-transcendental doublet; secondly, the cogito and the unthought; and lastly, the retreat and
As Foucault argues, “Man” as empirico-transcendental doublet is “a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible” (318).
Man is the lawmaker in the order of the world. In fact, all the molds of thought are formed within the relations woven between men. Foucault’s announcement, as Rosi Braidotti notes, targets the humanistic arrogance of placing Man at the center of world history. Foucault formalizes an epistemological and moral crisis that goes beyond binary oppositions and cuts across the different poles of the political spectrum (Braidotti 23). What begins with humanism are our sympathetic understanding and treatment of human nature. By contrast, posthumanism marks the end of the seemingly endless polemic between humanism and anti-humanism. Posthumanism focuses on two things. First of all, posthumanism considers current technological trends to see how future technologies might affect humans. Major theorists, like Francis Fukuyama, believe that humans are about to enter a new stage of history.
Secondly, posthumanism attempts to strike a new position that combines the current and upcoming technologies to bring about beneficial society change of values. The works of N. Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe and Rosi Braidotti, to name but a few, highlight the potential of the posthuman condition as conducive to human
enhancement. The posthumanist perspective assumes the decline of the fundamental premises of humanism and explores alternatives of subjectivity. However, “human” as a first-order observer still unavoidably recognizes every other living creature as political “other” in a hierarchical system. The humanistic arrogance rises over and over again from its ashes, and continues to control the measure of values.
I prefer to take a more macroscopic view to deal with humanist subjectivity, and fundamentally revolutionize what becoming posthuman means with technological
return of the origin.
advancements. Rethinking about the hierarchical relationship between “humans” and
“others” is not to dehumanize ourselves or take the existence of nonhuman as the disciplinary subject. The human of posthumanism is neither an ideal nor an
elimination from the course of evolution. On the contrary, we should reconsider the intersection between humans and nonhumans from human-nonhuman associations and companionships. In this chapter, I address N. Katherine Hayles’s and Cary Wolfe’s discourses regarding the posthuman and discuss how to keep discourses on becoming posthuman from being written once again into the dominant concept of subjectivity.
N. Katherine Hayles’s Posthumanist View
Is it possible that the mind could be separated from the body? If such a separation is possible, can human consciousness be downloaded into a computer?
Hayles argues that human consciousness reveals in ways different from those of the intelligence embodied in cybernetic technologies. According to Hayles, the intelligent machine is constructed with informational pathways connecting the organic body to its prosthetic extensions. That is, “consciousness” of the intelligent machine can flow as a disembodied entity not only within the subject but also between the subject and the environment. However, the human body contributes to a content taking part in the workings of the mind. The body communicates to the mind information about its states with feelings and emotions. Thus, humans may enter into symbiotic relationships with intelligent machines. Humans may be displaced by intelligent machines, such as assembly plants that use robotic arms for labor. But the
distinctively different embodiments limit the possibility for humans to be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines (Hayles, How 284). To figure out the interactions
of technology among human and posthuman constructions, Hayles considers the nineteenth-century U.S. and British anthropologists’ discourses about “man” as a tool-user. The focus shifts from man as a tool-user to man as a tool-maker. The tool is at once “apart from the body” and an “extension of the body.” This construction of the tool as a prosthesis points forward to the posthuman (Hayles, How 33-34). The
posthuman future of humanity implies a connection not only with intelligent machines but also with informational circuits.
Hayles characterizes the posthuman based on the following four assumptions.
First of all, the posthumanist view makes informational pattern seen more important than material instantiation. Hence, embodiment in a biological substrate is not an inevitability of life but an accident of history. “Liberal humanist subject” shares with
“posthumanist subject” a common theme about the erasure of embodiment from subjectivity. The erasing of bodily difference, including sex, race and ethnicity, in the cybernetic construction of the posthuman takes place in ways that has not occurred in other critiques of the liberal humanist subject (Hayles, How 4). The liberal humanist subject has been criticized from the following perspectives: feminist theorists, such as Jean Bethke Elshtain and Angela Davis, point out that the humanist subject has
historically been constructed as a white European male. Therefore, this view presumes a universality suppressing women’s voices; postcolonial theorists, like Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, oppose to not only the universality of the white male liberal subject but also the idea of a unified, consistent identity; postmodern theorists, such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, reject the modernist notion of a rational and unified subject. They argue for the dynamic potential of a decentered subjectivity liberated from the fixed identities. All three perspectives above show some affinities with the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject in cybernetics. However, the
construction of the posthuman considers humans as informational processes. This construction suggests that embodiment is not essential to human being, since the liberal humanist subject is not identified with the body, but the mind.
Secondly, from the posthumanist view, Hayles considers consciousness as an epiphenomenon. Although in the Western tradition, consciousness is viewed as the seat of human identity/subjectivity, the conscious agency is not the essence of human self-identity. Consciousness is not the main show in the evolutionary processes, but merely a minor subsystem running its program of self-construction while ignoring the actual dynamics of complex structures (Hayles, How 286). In the field of artificial intelligence, consciousness can be manufactured inside a machine as an intelligence comparable to that of a human. Conversely, in artificial life, consciousness is viewed as an epiphenomenon of human’s nervous systems for intelligent machines to
understand human beings. Instead of identifying the self with the conscious mind, the posthuman subjects achieve consciousness through recursive feedback loops cycling between multiple coding levels. The association of posthuman subjectivity with different coding levels seems to deconstruct the liberal humanist subject, an emphasis on anthropocentric views. Because “the essential function for both intelligent
machines and humans is processing information” (Hayles, How 239), Hayles recommends different models of signification recognizing the distinctive feature of human language and computer coding structure. When the redrawing of boundaries between the human and the nonhuman shifts the seat of identity from brain to cell, subjectivity radically changes. The fragility of consciousness, including an absorption or hijack of artificial consciousness, implies that human and technics have coevolved together. From the human’s point of view, Hayles rethinks the human “with” the nonhuman others, imagining the next logical development where humans join with
the intelligent machine to create the human-computer equation.
Thirdly, from the posthumanist view, Hayles thinks of the body as the prosthesis we all learn to operate. Accordingly, expanding or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that had begun before we were born (Hayles, How 3). Last but not least, the posthuman view configures the human so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. For the posthuman, bodily existence and computer simulation have no essential differences. Cybernetic
mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals have no absolute distinctions, either (Hayles, How 3). Hayles does not claim to leave the body behind but rather extend embodied awareness in a specific and material way with electronic prosthesis. The third episode of Robotica,5 “The Bionic Man,”6 shows the development of prosthetic: a robotic arm with 26 joints controlled with a person’s mind like a regular arm. With surgery remapping the remaining nerves from missing arms, brain signals can be sent to control the prosthetic. The long-term goal for the prosthetic is to have noninvasive ways, no extra surgeries or extra implants, to control a dexterous robotic device. Researchers envision a kind of device with sensors for amputated or paralyzed people to wear that would feed information about brain activity to the robotic prosthetic. Hayles’s view of the posthuman offers resources for thinking in more sophisticated ways about virtual technologies. As a way to maximize human potential in a virtual realm, the construction of virtuality functions as an expansion of human body. In William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, a direct neural
5 New York Times video series Robotica examine how robots are poised to change the way humans do business and conduct daily lives. In the videos, roboticists and researchers explore innovations at the leading edge of technology. The other two episodes are “Faster, Stronger and Cheaper: Replacing Humans with Robots” and “Building the Autonomous Machine.”
6 See the related news. Emma Cott. “Prosthetic Limbs, Controlled by Thought.” The New York Times.
20 May. 2015.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/technology/a-bionic-approach-to-prosthetics-controlled-by-thou ght.html?_r=0 >
link connects the human brain with the computer through electrodes. This link allows direct neural access to computer memory. Case, the protagonist of Neuromancer, regards his physical body as merely “meat” that exists primarily to preserve his consciousness till the next time he jacks into the global computer network in cyberspace. As long as the cyberspace body endures, one has attained a kind of immortality. The question of how the human became the posthuman seems to present the posthuman as a potent antidote to the survival of humans in a chaotic and
unpredictable future. For Hayles, the posthuman prompts the optimistic prospect of getting rid of old restrictions and giving us new ways of thinking about what being human means.
Through understanding “human” as a set of informational processes, Hayles proposes that humans leave the old cosmos constructed by presence and absence and enter a world computed by the binary of pattern and randomness. As Hayles notes, it is a “pattern” rather than a “presence” which constructs information. If information is a pattern, non-information should be the absence of pattern, or rather, randomness (Hayles, How 25). The development of information theory implies that information could be equated with randomness and with pattern. Hence, pattern and randomness are not so much opposites as supplements to each other. The invention of virtual reality brings pattern and randomness into the foreground and causes presence and absence seem irrelevant. When VR simulations put the user’s sensory system into a direct feedback loop with a computer, a multisensory interaction creates a false impression that the user both is and is not inside the screen. The change from presence/absence to pattern/randomness is encoded into a part of our daily life. For instance, money is stored in online account as informational patterns instead of the presence of cash. Automation of the factories controls the work assignments by
programs and constitute production schedules as flows of information. The transition from presence/absence to pattern/randomness affects humans on two levels: a change in the body and a change in the message. Accompanying these changes is the
emergence of subjectivity constituted by the crossing of the materiality of informatics with the immateriality of information (Hayles, How 193). Dealing with the human being as embodied being, Hayles illuminates the fate of embodiment in an
information age. Hayles divides the history of cybernetic technology7 into three interrelated stories. The first story focuses on how information lost its body. In other words, how do we conceptualize the information as a separable entity from the embedded material forms? The second elaborates how the cyborg was created as a technological artifact and cultural icon in the years after World War II. The third one concerns how a historically specific construction called “the human” is giving way to a different cultural and technological construction called “the posthuman.” These three stories presume a conception of information as a disembodied entity flowing between the organic body and its prosthetic extensions. According to Hayles,
information, like humanity, cannot exist with the exception of the embodiment which brings it into being as a material entity in the world (Hayles, How 49). That is,
human’s interactions with digital technologies are not only cognitive but also have bodily effects on the physical level. For humans, embodiment takes the form of extended cognition that exists throughout the body and even extends beyond the body’s boundaries.
In “Mutation, History, and Fantasy in the Posthuman,” R. L. Rutsky argues that
7 Hayles makes reference in relation to the history of cybernetics: the three main movements or
“waves” of cybernetics are homeostasis (1945-1960), reflexivity (1960-1985) and virtuality (1985 to the present). Hayles not only provides a historical examination of the history of cybernetics but also explores the complex interrelationship between embodied forms of subjectivity and arguments for disembodiment throughout the cybernetic tradition.
the posthuman has nothing to do with a physical, genetic or biotechnological changes in the human body or mind. With regard to Hayles’s posthumanist view, “the
construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg”
(Hayles, How 4), Rutsky claims that changes of technological enhancement continue to reinforce “the human” as an autonomous subject, defined by its mastery over the object world (Rutsky 105). The relationship between humans and posthumans is cast in reference to human mastery or its loss. That is, the posthuman does not make an absolute break from the legacy of humanism for we remain within the realm of the human. Becoming posthuman means to be more than merely an extension of the human, and to look for “processes which can never be entirely reduced to patterns of standards, codes or information (Rutsky 111).
Hayles understands the human and the posthuman as historically specific
constructions emerging from different configurations of embodiment, technology and culture. She defines contemporary posthuman bodies as follow:
But the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human […]. What is lethal is not the posthuman as such but the grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self […] Located within the dialectic of
pattern/randomness and grounded in embodied actuality rather than
disembodied information, the posthuman offers resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines. (Hayles How 286-87) Hayles holds a conception of human nature conditioning our uniqueness as human in our capacity for rationality. The posthuman continues the liberal tradition by
constructing embodiment as the instantiation of thought/information. As Braidotti points out in The Posthuman, Hayles opposes the notion of subjectivity coinciding
with conscious agency, “notably the liberal vision of an autonomous subject whose manifest destiny is to dominate and control nature” (Braidotti 101). To avoid the risks of recreating a hard core, Braidotti proposes to remold posthuman bodies into radical relationality. She argues that bodies are reduced to their informational substrate in terms of materiality and vital capacity (Braidotti 97). That is, the markers for the distribution of sexualized, racialized and naturalized differences shift from being categorical boundaries under humanism to alternative modes of transversal subjectivity.
In short, Hayles presents the posthuman as a transformation of the human being.
In short, Hayles presents the posthuman as a transformation of the human being.