2. Posthumanism
• Posthumanism began to emerge in the last decades of the
twentieth century.
• It investigates and puts into question the nature of humanity and of
being human.
• The prefix “post-” has multiple connotations,
• it signals an epoch in which humanity undergoes a fundamental change in
being;
• It poses an immanent critique of humanity, humanism, the human being;
• It represents a rediscovery of the non-human.
• Posthumanism undermines the myth of a stable, inviolate, and
autonomous “human nature.”
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
3. Traditional Humanism Vs. Posthumanism
• Traditional Humanism:
• It emphasizes the power of individual human mind.
• It privileges “rational” thought over embodied emotion.
• It values individual autonomy / agency.
• It highlights binaries between humans/technologies and humans/animals.
• It positions white male as the archetypal human.
• Posthumanism:
• It emphasizes the power of the technological prosthesis (Artificial body) –
(we are always already machines)
• It sees that rationality is not necessary for intelligent action / thought.
• It challenges the notion of individual autonomy/ agency through automation
and internetworking.
• It blurs the boundaries between humans/non-humans through hybridity.
• It positions the cyborg or robots as posthuman subjects.
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
4. Posthumanism
• Posthumanism breaks with foundational assumptions of modern
Western culture.
• It is a new way of understanding the human subject in relationship
to the natural world in general.
• It claims to offer a new epistemology that is not anthropocentric.
• It is not centred in dualism and binary oppositions.
• It seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the
human, the animal, and the technological.
• The term “posthuman” is coined by Ihab Hassan in an article
entitled "Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist
Culture?" (1977).
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
5. Posthumanism
• Posthumanism is associated with other related terms including the
transhuman and the antihuman.
• A defining characteristic of posthumanism is its rejection of
traditional humanism.
• Humanism was by definition anthropocentric;
• It places man (rather than God) at the centre of its literary and philosophical
project.
• Modern science depends on human powers of observation and reason to
uncover universal laws and to understand the natural world.
• It views man as an autonomous agent, separate from though still engaged
with nature.
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
6. Posthumanism
• Posthumanists regard Darwin, Marx, and Freud as preliminary
precursors of the breakup of man as a unified Enlightened subject.
• Like postmodernism, posthumanism seeks to subvert claims of
unity, simplicity, or universality related to humanism.
• This can be seen as in:
• What Hassan (1977) labelled as posthuman culture.
• The work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which has profoundly
influenced posthumanist theory.
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
7. The Cyborg as Posthuman Subject
• Donna Haraway (1991) has been a key figure in posthumanism.
• She subverts the boundaries on the continuum machine–human–
animal.
• She offered the cyborg as a contemporary cultural metaphor.
• The cyborg captures the ambivalent condition of the contemporary
human beings
• It is based on the idea that human bodies are open to forms of
technological modification and intervention.
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
8. The Cyborg as Posthuman Subject
• The “Cyborg” metaphor indicates the fantasies of science fiction:
– Prostheses or drugs not only correct characters’ deficiencies, but may
also render them stronger, faster, smarter, and in general other than
conventional human.
– Science fiction is often the realm of the transhuman, which refers to a
condition that is arguably an extension and intensification of
traditional humanism rather than its rejection.
– The “six million dollar man” is still a man in the traditional cultural
sense.
– Haraway’s cyborg is not merely transhuman, but posthuman, as a
rejection and a reconfiguration of the values of the traditional
humanist subject.
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
9. Posthumanism: Blurring the Boundaries
• Posthumanists are concerned with blurring the boundaries
between human and nonhuman animals.
– From their perspective, a central feature of humanism is its insistence
on an unbridgeable gap between the human and the animal.
– This dualism insisted that the essence of the human was cognition and
that animals were merely highly intricate machines.
• Posthumanists have challenged this dualism:
– Positivist science emphasizes continuity rather than separateness in the
biological world.
– Advances in genetics and techniques of genetic manipulation provide
tangible evidence of the possibility of blurring the boundaries between
species. (cloning: Dolly the sheep, born in 1996)
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
10. Posthumanism: Blurring the Boundaries
• Bruno Latour In We Have Never Been Modern (1993),
argued for the breakdown of dichotomies between society and
nature and between the human and nonhuman.
• For Latour, the interplay of human and nonhuman actors
constitutes a rejection of the boundaries that seemed secure in
traditional humanism.
• Posthumanism frequently posits “zones of indistinction” as
the space of confrontation between the human and the non-
human.
• Thus, posthumanism subverts and dismantles the distinction
between humans/non-humans (animals/ machines)
• This creates a sense of hybridity.
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
11. Posthumanism: Blurring the Boundaries
• In How We Became Posthuman (1999), Katherine Hayles
examined the history and impact of cybernetics.
• Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in
machines and animals.
• Hayles’ work on “virtual bodies” are both attempts to expand
the very body as well as the definition of the human.
• Hayles is interested in deconstructing essentialist claims that
human beings and nature are distinct categories.
• For Hayles, the posthuman is essentially a hybrid formation.
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
12. Feminism and Posthumanism
• Feminism as a theoretical position could contribute to
posthumanism:
– Feminism rejects traditional humanist assumption of man as the
standard and norm of the human.
– Feminists displace man from his central position in the definition of
the human and challenge gender as a category.
– In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler argued that gender and
identity are performative—a position radically at odds with
traditional humanism.
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Lecture Six: Posthumanist literary theory
