What is Posthumanism? And how can critical posthumanism develop an ethical approach in the context of technocapitalism and neoliberalism?

Waiting for the Instagram page to load in the multiple tabs that are open in front of me, hoping to view the digital archive of the photographs I’ve taken with ‘my’ mobile phone and partially worried about the materiality of events, objects and people in that virtual world of mobile apps, tech devices, new media art and drone warfare brings me into simultaneous moments of departure and arrival.
Turns out that questions like “Who am I?”, “What is real?”, “What am I doing?”, “What lies in the future?” are not the banal and basic questions that I am asking alone, but are the most relevant questions of the times, when the crisis of being human is getting worse every day. What does it mean to be a human being in this epoch when so many things that we have to deal with are non-human? Is this a question somebody studying humanities should ask or should it be a concern for academics in other fields too?
When more than half the world’s population lives in urban centers, with a developing global consciousness fueled by media, technology and economy, it is interesting to see how the human subject develops. With growing inequality, financial crises, climate change, mass migration, rising individualism, terrorism and violence and looming uncertainty making the larger picture of our zeitgeist, we need a new way of thinking, new way of embracing change and a new way of understanding ourselves.
“This change constitutes a radical transformation within increasingly globalized ‘late capitalism’ from an ‘analog’ (humanist, literate, book or text — based) to a digital (posthumanist, code, data or information based) social and economic system. Techno-scientific cultures, global economic crises, looming environmental disaster, the spread of digitalisation, the rise of biomedia and the erosion of traditional demarcations between human and nonhuman all call for alternative ways of thinking about humanity and its environments.” (Herbechter, 2013)
The corporate colonization of our social relations and basic drives, needs and desires like hunger, sex, shelter, of our identity as humans, and of life itself is an ongoing enterprise which is ‘crisis prone’ as it affects all aspects of our existence and nature on a global scale. It degrades us, turning our most precious human qualities into commodities. Our creativity, our knowledge, our learning thus become not qualities that emancipate but resources for production of false desires of health, love and humanity. Society as a whole thus becomes laboratory of technocapitalism. (Suarez-Villa, 2009)
There’s a shift happening from the ‘humanist’ way of thinking which serves to promote the cohesion of all of humanity with certain universal values that have been criticized by postmodernist and poststructuralist thinkers as it presupposes a capitalist bourgeois subject who is regarded as ‘liberal’. This ideology and politics that promotes ‘tolerance’ in the face of superficial difference (like gender, race, culture, location, history) has been challenged by a form of humanism with a prefix ‘post’ which means to ‘go beyond’ and instead stresses on alternative values like ‘particularity’, ‘difference’, ‘multiplicity’ and ‘plurality’ and emphasizes the radically local and temporal context — specificity. It also criticizes the supposed transparency of mediality (realism in language, painting, media and other image-based technology) and instead emphasizes the fact that any medium has its own dynamic, its own power to construct identities and to position subjects. It points towards changeability and relativity of human nature and individuality as well as the relativity of values but turns against any idealistic form of transcendence, accentuates the inseparability of form and content, the radically determining function of context and an understanding of truth as process and insists on the ‘materiality’ of thinking and importance of ‘embodiment’ in agency. (Herbechter, pg12)
Posthumanism is a paradigm emerging from the challenges to humanism. It responds to anthropocentrism, speciesism and biopolitics, and informs new creative practices like bioart and electronic literature. It is an idea that covers philosophy, history, cultural studies, science and technology, new media and digital culture, environmentalism and earth sciences, bio-genetics, neuroscience and robotics, evolutionary theory, critical legal theory, primatology, animal rights and science fiction.
In the digital age of intelligent machines, rampant mechanisation and automation of all biological phenomena, technology is literally a body invader, penetrating consciousness, reshaping perception, circulating bodies and desire in cybernetic loops of information. Distraction is the norm in a digitally saturated world: information is everywhere, connectivity pervasive, bodies augmented, perception illuminated, truth a purely phantasmagorical effect, perception coded by media feeds, attention fully wired. Cybernetics is precisely how the language of posthuman is delivered to us.
We have become posthuman in the sense that subjectivity is not immanent to the laws of media, that peculiarly technological condition and object of the fully realized digital society. (Kroker, 2014) It potentially breaks the barrier of geographical distance, sexual difference, national difference, crashed boundaries, challenged frames of reference — the porous borders. It blurs the qualitative lines (male/ female, black/white, human/animal, nature/technology, local/global, present/past, dead/alive, central/ margin — in spaces that flow and connect the binaries) and reshapes the identity of humanistic practices, by stressing heteronomy and multi–faceted relationality, instead of autonomy and self–referential disciplinary purity. (Bradotti, 2013) It is a complex assemblage of human and non- human, planetary and cosmic, given and manufactured.
Power then as conceptualized by Foucault can be seen as restrictive (potestas) and affirmative (potentia). Figurations such as the feminist/the queer/the cyborg/ the diasporic/ native, nomadic subjects, as well as oncomouse and Dolly the sheep are no more metaphors, but signposts for specific geo political and historical locations. As such they express complex singularities, not universal claims. (Bradotti, 2013 ) The body, reconfiguring relation and ethical emergences of bodies beyond being received through representation, external and within consciousness negotiating reality through representative perception, is the foundation and the site of the event of the posthuman encounter. To add to this posthuman subject, in the nomadic theory, Braidotti explains how the process of becoming woman is always the precondition and the necessary starting point for the whole nomadic transformation.
With a fragmented identity living both in the virtual and physical world, the subject is a materialist and vitalist, embodied and embedded, firmly located somewhere, according to the feminist politics of location with spatio-temporal ambiguity and different planes of existence. Time itself has become condensed and speed and acceleration are the motions to be confronted with (Virilio, 1986). But what Virilio misses is the emancipatory and democratizing nature of new media and technology which can be good as well as bad depending upon the context. This point is taken up by contemporary feminist theorists under the term ‘cyberfeminism’ who see internet as a means of freedom from social constructs like gender and sex difference and machines as extension of humans. Donna Haraway’s 1985 text –“A Cyborg Manifesto” was an iconic text describing this way of being.
Bradotti’s claim of the posthuman becoming animal — earth — machine is supported by Luciana Parisi (2004) who says that the great advantage of vitalist monism is that it defines nature — culture as a continuum which evolves through ecology of differentiation. Development in research in biology specifically in biotechnology and nanotechnology has led to an extensive study in genomics — complete genetic makeup of the species which according to Dr. Craig Venter is going to shape the future of life on this planet. The human genome project which was started in 1990 is set to take medicine to a next level where diseases can be cured by altering the information in the DNA. The non-semiotic codes (the DNA of all genetic material) intersect with the complex assemblages of affects, embodied practices and other performances that include but are not confined to linguistic realm. Parisi strengthens this case by cross-referring to the new epistemology of Margulis and Sagan (1995), through the concept of endosymbiosis, which, autopoiesis, indicates a creative form of evolution. This means that the genetic material is exposed to processes of becoming freed from ontological foundations for difference but is not confined by social constructivism.
Human subjectivity has become so deeply and inextricably embedded with technology that the posthuman is born at the interstices of data and flesh. Digital devices once thought outside of ourselves, have now broken barriers of skin and mind, shaping from within the deepest recesses of consciousness, desire, perception and imagination. Ray Kurzweil’s debatable theory of singularity and artificial intelligence reaching considerable attention and acknowledgement from futurists is also a sign of technology going beyond its assumed limits.
Time which has always been seen as unidirectional and going forward supported by the idea of development is being thwarted by posthuman time which is a complex and non-linear system, internally fractured and multiplied over several time sequences, where affect and memory become essential elements. Memory is joyfully discontinuous as opposed to being mournfully consistent. (Bradotti, 2013) Technologies that are mobile, interpolated, fast are deeply haunted by the psychic violence against cognition, affect, and perception precipitated by recent developments in neuroscience.
In digital culture, the autonomous liberal humanist subject is a postmodern, multilayered individual and ‘consumer’ of cultural meaning, which in a media consumer society is always necessarily transmitted by the media. In the course of encoding and decoding cultural ‘messages’ the media subject develops specific decoding and encoding skills, which means that this subject is not the purely passive receiver of overwhelming media power, but an active consumer in search of fulfilment of his or her desires. (Herbrechter, Pg 181)
Here, the golden rules of our times can be developed — cartography accuracy — the use of GPS, with the corollary of ethical accountability; trans-disciplinarity; the importance of combining critique with creative figurations; the principle of non-linearity; the powers of memory and imagination and the strategy of de-familiarisation. (Bradotti, 2013)
As said by the visionary Marshall Mcluhan, “All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical”; in digital culture, gravity bound words and capital and power and warfare are literally launched into the weightless space of the regime of computation. Data is the currency which is being traded and codes and algorithms are the underlying mechanism of most urban activity. More data has been collected in the past two years than the entire history of humanity. Big data, distant reading and augmented reality are being used in all forms of media for entertainment, advertising, treatment of diseases and so on.

Dualistic distinction between nature- culture has collapsed and is replaced by complex systems of data — feedback, interaction and communication transfer. Data banks of biogenetic, neural and mediatic information about individuals are the true capital today, as the success of Facebook demonstrates on a more banal level. When everything can be coded in virtual capitalism and in the code of governmentality, datafication is the norm, and notions of time-space are modified, the question that needs to be asked is of work and labour and how that is supposed to change too. Digital labor and creativity are all changing with hypermobility and individuality, freelancing and project based work is more preferred with flexible working hours. Experiencing and embodying this light-time and light-space of digital reality with communication at the speed of light, we’re at the beginning of a new order of communication called ‘Liminal communication’. Social media usage averaging 44.5 hours per week, its skin barrier is being broken down by deep immersion as a circulating node within complex loops of information. When all activities of human life are archived, development of a theory for media archaeology was essential as done by Jussi Parika.
Arthur Kroker (2013) also talks about the new icons of power, sex, consciousness and truth and describes the current conundrum as Accelerate, Drift, Crash.
“Drift culture- This is the essence of the data storm that engulf us — gigantic galaxies of social, political and economic data, broken apart by the technical rewiring of everything to suit the requirements of the logic of code, here invaded by technological devices as they take root in the languages of consciousness, desire, interest, there learning to speak again in the language of social media, to see again with enhanced data perception, — bodies, metals and AI combine into new species — forms . Genetics (code drift), cosmology (history drift), distributive consciousness (archive drift), or remix media (video drift), drift culture is the ontological foundation of the posthuman axiomatic.”
When there’s information overload, it loses its body and consciousness itself is increasingly patterned by the language of codes which itself forms reality.
“Screen drift — is the eye of the future in fast motion accelerating across the deep space of media archive. That we live in a culture of proliferating screens is already a truism. Silent, but very real impact of screen culture on our psycho — geography: the psychological territory of human imagination and perception, identity and truth — saying, indeed truth — seeing. Radically altering the deepest language of human perception, shape shifting the boundaries of the real, speeding up the meaning of time itself, and transforming virtual space into artificial horizon, we are the very first explorers of the culture of screen drift.”
In the age of information culture, the body learns to swim in the data storm for reasons of survival. Scanned by the surveillance cameras, the signature of its iris photographed and data banked by electronic airport security, its movements through the economy electronically tracked by its own credit card history, probed by all the ubiquitous technologies associated with contemporary medicine, entertained by youtube, connected by social networking technologies, seduced by the HD screens of mass media — cinema, TV and blu ray, its ears hardwired to the sounds of ipods and eyes to the screen of Ipads, its every thought patiently recorded by the hovering satellites of the national security system, the body today is punctured, pierced, probed, and pummeled by information from all sides.
What religion could never fully accomplish — the unification of the world in fixed cosmological consciousness — the language of technology has set out to complete by wrapping the skin of the planet in a universal language of connectivity, thereby subordinating the heterogeneity of humanity to the steady signal of networked society. Kroker writes —
“Premonitory signs of the future — the digital dialectics — its virtual organs: the death of the eye associated with the appearance of the software necropolis, its synthetic physiology — Flesh Rezzing; its logic of abjection –full mind scanning; its dominant comportment — the lonely Digital Crowd: and its mythology — the rings of Saturn. Liminality is everywhere, destabilizing boundaries, undermining the logistics of perspective, challenging the binary division of life and death, light and darkness, flesh and data. What is the future of human flesh when bodies are fully wrapped within the skin of their own virtual second lives? What is the fate of privacy in the future of the fully networked ego — something to be jettisoned as extra ballast as the body blasts into the space of global communication of something very different, that is a longing for privacy as the hauntology of the lonely digital crowd?”
Technologies contribute actively to how humans do ethics. Technological tools are agents that can guide human decision making on normative issues. According to Bradotti, what the neoliberal forces are after and what they financially invest in, is the informational power of living matter itself. The capitalization of living matter produces a new political economy, which Melinda cooper (2008) calls ‘life as surplus’. To counter this upheaval of monetization of life, we can see emergence of the earth as a political agent.

To think beyond our species, and respecting existence of all life forms as an ethic is called deep ecology. Gaia hypothesis, a theory put forward by scientist James Lovelock posits that the organic and inorganic components of Earth have evolved together as a single living, self-regulating system. It suggests that this living system has automatically controlled global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean salinity, and other factors, that maintains its own habitability. In a phrase, “life maintains conditions suitable for its own survival.” In this respect, the living system of Earth can be thought of analogous to the workings of any individual organism that regulates body temperature, blood salinity, etc. To preserve this, we need a new form of thinking which is transdisciplinary and gets the best ideas from science, arts, humanities and social sciences to work on a sustainable future.
What then is the place of humanities as a scientific enterprise in this globalized network culture that no longer upholds the unity of space and time as its governing principles? In the era of citizens’ science and citizens’ journalism, what can be the role of academic research institutions? Bonta protevi (2004) talks about Deleuze’s ‘geo philosophy’ which encourages the humanities to engage with contemporary biology and physics.
Posthuman humanities according to Katherine Hayles (1999) can create and evolve a new set of narratives about the planetary dimension of globalized humanity; the evolutionary sources of morality; the future of our and other species; the semiotic systems of technological apparatus; the process of translation underscoring the role of gender and ethnicity as factors that index access to the posthuman predicament and the institutional implications of them all. From Gutenberg to 3D printing, media has come far in shaping human knowledge and it’s for the posthuman to use it for his survival. To conclude I’d like to quote from N Katherine Hayles (1999) —
“My dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.”