REVIEW-ESSAY
Steven Shaviro
Unable to be Born
Sherryl Vint, ed. After the Human: Culture, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century. Cambridge UP, After Series, 2020. 278 pages. $95 hc, $29.99 pbk, $24 ebk.
This collection gives a brisk, state-of-the-art account of where we are today as regards our developing posthuman state of existence. Or better, it gives a series of perspectives on how we are currently registering, and taking account of, the posthuman transformations that have been ongoing for a number of decades. As an older person, now in my late sixties, I think that I can say that these changes have been going on for my entire lifetime. The time when I was born, the early-to-mid 1950s, saw the discovery of the structure of DNA, the widespread adoption of television, the first computers available for sale to businesses and the government, the founding of the research program of artificial intelligence, the first explosion of a hydrogen bomb, the first steps to the establishment of a space program, the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement in the United States and of decolonization across the Global South, the crossover of rock ’n’ roll to a mainstream white audience, the use of standardized shipping containers on a massive scale as the backbone of global commerce, the accelerated construction of highways and suburbs (with catastrophic consequences for the environment), and the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics that helped to establish the intellectual paradigm that has guided our understanding ever since.
The world has changed radically just in the course of my own lifetime. One good way to summarize all these changes is to say that, even as human activity has intensified both in quality and in quantity and altered the Earth to an unprecedented extent, our very notion of the human has been knocked off the pedestal upon which it was placed in the eighteenth century, at the time of the Enlightenment. Ironically, it is the very force unleashed by the Enlightenment—the force of Reason, with its Promethean compulsion to place Nature, the World, and ultimately the entire Universe under the dominion of Man (or more precisely, of affluent, white, straight, male Western Europeans)—that now compels us to give up these dreams of domination and to acknowledge that the time of capital-M Man has passed. This double legacy is reflected in the increasingly accepted designation of our age as the Anthropocene. We are more powerful than ever before, because human activities have reached the point of radically reshaping the biosphere and the geosphere. At the same time, we are forced to recognize our fragility and dependency as never before: not only are we capable of obliterating ourselves but we are also ever more aware of how our sheer existence is intimately linked with that of so many other entities, both living and nonliving.
Of course, it has taken a good while for us to take account of these (still ongoing) changes. It is difficult to be “as radical as reality itself,” as Lenin famously exhorted us to be. Arguably the first academic thinkers to take the full measure of our new, posthuman condition were Donna Haraway, whose “Manifesto for Cyborgs” first appeared in 1985, and N. Katherine Hayles, whose book How We Became Posthuman (seeing this transformation as already a fait accompli) was published in 1999. Today, several decades further on, these epochal changes have been widely recognized, and we have robust conversations going on about the decline of the traditional figure of the Human, and the uncertainties of its replacement. After the Human gives us a state-of-the-art summary of these conversations and the various possibilities, for good or for ill, that they have opened up.
The volume opens with Sherryl Vint’s “Introduction,” which gives a quick overview of the contents. After this, the book is divided into three sections: “After Humanism,” “New Objects of Enquiry,” and “Posthumanities.” The first section is concerned with what has changed, or with the ideas and practices that have been forcibly abandoned or otherwise left behind. Veronica Hollinger’s “Historicizing Posthumanism” considers the various ways that we have come to modify, or abandon, the idea—dating back to ancient times, but seriously taken up in Europe in the Early Modern period, systematized in the Enlightenment, and spread by the projects of capitalism and colonialism—that “Man” is the unique center of all meanings and values. This idea is closely linked to the disciplines of the Humanities in academia and in general culture. The idea of the Human has been shaken by developments in science and technology and at the same time has been increasingly challenged by a range of posthumanist and anti-humanist modes of thought, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, and most recently new materialism. The imperialist and colonialist strands of traditional humanism have also been quite unpleasantly retrofitted with the latest technoscientific upgrades in what has come to be known as transhumanism. Hollinger gives a useful overview of all these tendencies in her chapter.
The rest of Part I considers some of these developments in closer detail. Stefan Herbrechter gives an account of poststructuralist modes of thought and the ways in which they work to break down traditional anthropocentric and voluntaristic assumptions. Jonathan Boulter gives an account of postmodernism, a term that was widely used in the late twentieth century, but that has since fallen out of favor. The postmodern account of the decentering of the human subject and of the ubiquity of fictions was an important step on the road to posthumanism as we understand it now. Michael Richardson gives a lucid account of affect theory, a new mode of cultural criticism (but with roots extending back at least to Spinoza in the seventeenth century). Affect theory addresses embodiment directly, rather than assuming a mind separate from the body; and it examines how bodies and entities affect one another. This perspective is especially valuable in order to comprehend the ways that human subjects are not free and autonomous, but multiply intertwined with other elements and factors, both social and biological. In the last chapter of this section, Marcel O’Gorman gives a more personal account of what it means to transition from the traditional Humanities to what has become known as Digital Humanities, and from a sense of writing and research as direct expression to one that sees these activities as networked and embodied, entangled both with other researchers and with new sorts of technological processes.
Part II starts with Bruce Clarke’s account of “Machines, AIs, Cyborgs, Systems.” This chapter gives an overview of how the technological development of “thinking machines,” and the concomitant theorizations of cybernetics and systems theory, have spurred the existence of a “posthuman imaginary.” Clarke traces the development of this imaginary through cultural fantasies such as transhumanist visions of omnipotence on the one hand, and dystopian horror stories of robot takeovers on the other. This involves both pop-technology treatises such as those of Ray Kurzweil, and the denser and more nuanced reflections of sf creators, such as, most notably, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora (2017). Clarke’s chapter was noteworthy to me for the way it takes science-fictional speculation seriously alongside the more discursive writings of cyberneticists and scientists.
Susan McHugh’s chapter on “Animals” tracks the ways that recent developments in animal studies have worked to question the subordination of other sorts of animals to human beings in Humanist thought. This suggests a link between animal studies and posthuman thought more generally; the fit is imperfect, however. The decentering of the Human in relation to other entities both natural and artificial does not necessarily lead to the scrutiny of power relations implicit in everyday encounters between human beings and other living beings. Animal studies and posthuman studies can both be strengthened, however, on the basis that they both question human centrality, and both emphasize biological vulnerability and the need for more explicit practices of community or of mutual aid and being-with.
Nadine Ehlers’s chapter on “Life ‘Itself’” considers how our understanding of “life” has shifted alongside other posthumanist developments, including changes in disciplinary procedures and political and economic forms of organization, together with the new biotechnologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We now tend to see life in terms of open, dynamic processes rather than fixed states, and as autopoietic or self-generating; we also, however, tend to see life more than ever in terms of the economic values it produces, which can be captured by large corporations and commodified and from which surplus value can be extracted.
Gerda Roelvink questions “The Anthropocene” as a form of intelligibility to explain how human actions are changing the entire planet and risking catastrophic changes and extinctions. She considers the usefulness of the term in comparison to the proposed alternatives of the Capitalocene (Jason Moore) and the Chthulucene (Donna Haraway). All these terms have their advantages and disadvantages in both how they apportion blame and how they envision possible ways of averting ecological disaster. Ultimately, Roelvink goes into the question of alternative economic arrangements beyond our actually existing capitalism.
Magdalena Zolkos’s chapter discusses “The Inorganic.” Even when we have deconstructed the binary between human beings and other sorts of living beings, we are still left with an opposition between organic and inorganic configurations of matter. But the turn away from anthropocentrism can also lead us to question this deeper opposition. Zolkos discusses Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity, and Georges Didi-Huberman’s discussions of physical remnants as sites of retained memories; she reminds us of the contiguities and continuities between living and non-living forms, which must also be taken into account once we reject the naive assignment of activity and centrality to human beings alone.
The third and final section of After the Human begins with Sonja van Wichelen’s discussion of “More-Than-Human Biopolitics.” Michel Foucault developed the notions of biopower and biopolitics, showing the ways that power arrangements in the modern world came increasingly to be focused upon the regulation both of the biological functions of individual human beings and of the general health and reproduction and overall biological status of human populations. The chapter shows how recent research has extended these concerns in order to consider the relationships among biological regulation and the movements of capital, the structures of law, and the understanding of relations between human beings and other biological and non-biological entities in speculative realist, new materialist, and environmental anthropological modes of thought. Biopower can no longer be understood only in terms of human bodies and populations; it must take more account of our entanglements with other life forms and non-organic things.
The following three chapters address particular schools of posthumanist thought. Stacy Alaimo discusses “New Materialisms,” with specific attention to Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, as well as related strains in ecological thought and in the new developmental biology. She also briefly addresses criticisms of these schools that arise from discussions of race, postcolonialism, and Indigenous thought. Such concerns are addressed more fully in Mark Minch-de Leon’s chapter on “Race and the Limitations of the ‘Human.’” This chapter points out that most varieties of non-Western thought never entertained the anthropocentric ideas of modern Europe; these other types of thought already accepted many of the claims now being furthered as “new” by mainstream posthumanists. The structure of the “Human” has long coexisted with denials of the full humanity of all those human beings who are not white heterosexual males. For people who have been long denied full human status, “to be human ... continues to be a desired thing” (209). Black, Indigenous, and other non-white modes of thought therefore stand in a position oblique both to modernist humanism and to contemporary posthumanism.
In between these two chapters, Brian Willems offers a discussion of “Speculative Realism,” a new Euro-American philosophical strain that decisively rejects the anthropocentrism of mainstream Western philosophy since Kant. Willems exemplifies the alternative positions of the various speculative realists though citations of how the nonhuman has been envisioned in recent works of science fiction. In this way, his discussion both links back to Clarke’s chapter and forward to Vint’s chapter on “Speculative Fiction.” All three of these authors, and Vint most extensively, treat science fiction as being in its own right a significant mode of speculation on what comes after modern humanism. Vint discusses transhumanist fantasies of human omnipotence through the very technological means that other thinkers have cited to deprivilege the human, and shows how this has been a central strain throughout the history of science fiction. But she also focuses on alternative visions that imagine “the deconstruction of human exceptionalism,” whether in relation to nonhuman forms of life or in terms of the remediation of ecological destruction and injustice. In the book’s final chapter, “Aesthetic Manipulation of Life,” Ionatt Zurer and Oron Catts discuss biologically based art, created both by themselves and by other practitioners, that questions the limits of contemporary and future-projected biotechnology and that proposes other views on the stubborn particularity of nonhuman forms of life.
All in all, the Introduction plus sixteen chapters of After the Human give us a lucid and reasonably complete picture of where we are right now with regard to posthumanism. We are in a period aptly described by Gramsci’s maxim that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith [Lawrence & Wishart, 1971], 276). We have come to the end of several centuries of Euro-American white peoples’ celebration of themselves, or of the “Human” fashioned in their image, as the crown of creation. But we do not yet see the way forward to another conception of the world; we do not even know if we will survive our own decimation of the world we share with other beings, and upon whose bounty we still necessarily rely. In this interregnum, both science-fiction writers and academic theorists and scholars are striving to imagine a way forward. After the Human collects the heterogeneous pieces of this search; it remains for future thinkers and activists to put them all together.
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