The Posthuman

Abstract

‘Posthuman’ is a multivalent and multidisciplinary term that references a complex, sometimes conflicted reconceptualization of the body and subjectivity resulting from developments in biology, technology and ecology, which highlight human animals as fundamentally relational and mutable. Biotechnology, genomic and transplantation sciences, microbiome research, climate science, cybernetics, and a host of other research areas have effectively cast doubt on the integrity and unity of ‘the human’ as a discrete material and conceptual entity. The posthuman and its attendant philosophies emerge out of this reconceptualization of the human as a malleable material entity interconnected and inter-related with a whole host of ‘others’, human, animal, environmental and technological. In cultural texts, posthuman bodies are frequently represented as those that have been enhanced and augmented, both functionally and aesthetically, by prostheses, implants or other assistive technologies. Posthuman bodies abound in contemporary literature and film, where the posthuman imaginary of the cyborg figure -- ‘a hybrid of machine and organism’, to use Haraway’s formulation1 -- enact two visions of posthuman discourse. First, a transgressive and liberatory vision, via thinkers such as Haraway, where entanglements with ‘others’ -- machines, animals, technologies etc. -- overthrow limiting categories of humanism and a ‘way out of the maze of dualisms’ that categorise Western thought’. And second, a transhuman vision, where entanglements with others -- primarily enhancement technologies -- produce post-human beings who have overcome the limiting realities of flesh-and-blood human bodies.