Posthumanism

Contextual Quote

"Aligning themselves with information science and Foucault’s proclamation of the death of man, posthumanism, inspired by Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) and Katherine Hayles’s book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), is replacing postmodernism as the defining form of political correctness in the humanities. This provides further justification for the elimination of the humanities, the raison d’etre of which is to cultivate the humanity of people. This is at a time when more humanity is needed than ever before to challenge the power of the global corporatocracy who have massively concentrated wealth and subverted democracy, and to avoid the catastrophe of a war of all against all as global ecological destruction destroys the conditions for civilization. Posthumanism is essentially a philosophical notion, and although the term did not originate in the work of philosophers, a good many philosophers have conformed to what is politically correct and embraced posthumanism."

- Arran Gare [1]

Discussion

Who are the posthumanists

Arran Gare:

"Posthumanism amounts to a total rejection of the revival of humanism by the New Left, which reinterpreted Marx’s work on this basis to oppose the nihilistic, instrumentalist thinking dominating both Soviet Marxism and Western bureaucratic capitalism. The New Left in turn were recovering the heritage of German thought developed in opposition to the atomistic, utilitarian philosophies dominating France and Britain. They were defending a more exalted idea of humans and humanity that acknowledged their capacity for autonomy, and central to this, a more exalted view of reason and imagination, conceived to be creative in a way that empiricists and mechanists had refused to countenance (Engell, 1981). These Germans in turn were reviving and developing the civic humanism that emerged with the defence of democratic republicanism of the Florentine Renaissance, inspired by the Roman republicans and Ancient Athens, and reviving at the same time appreciation of Roman and Greek philosophers.

That all this should be rejected for an updated mechanistic conception of humans, which is now being used by Nick Land and others to argue that as artificial intelligence surpasses the intelligence of the most intelligent humans, humans should reconcile themselves to being displaced as the next stage of evolution, is something that calls for investigation. Can the posthumanists be seen as just Hobbes’s epigones, continuing the work of the reductionist tradition of thought to undermine the values associated with the humanities, perhaps now trying to advance their careers by disguising their alignment with ruling elites hostile to the very idea of democracy? It appears there is more to it than this. Although posthumanists have embraced information science, in characterizing themselves as posthumanists they refer to Michel Foucault’s work heralding the death of man. Like the postmodernists, their reference point is French philosophy, although they have tacitly accepted the social imaginary of the reductionists (to use the language of Cornelius Castoriadis) of gaining total control over the world through techno-science, with the ultimate goal being to overcome mortality. Why should they be subverting the humanities? To comprehend why posthumanism is being promoted and taken to be politically correct a broad historical perspective is required."

(https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp-4-2021-arran-gare-against-posthumanism-posthumanism-as-the-world-vision-of-house-slaves)

The Role of Foucault

Arran Gare:

" Foucault, who was strongly influenced by structuralism while denying that he was a structuralist, played a crucial role in undermining the humanism of the New Left.

The observation from Foucault embraced by the posthumanists comes from the concluding two paragraphs of The Order of Things (1970, p.387; Wolfe, 2020, p.xii) where he wrote:

- As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises — were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."

This claim echoed the conclusion Foucault (2008) had come to in his study of Kant in his complementary thesis for his Ph.D; and it concluded what overtly was a study of the human sciences; but there was more than this: it was essentially a rewriting of history of culture, portrayed as a sequence of epistemes that dominate for a time and then are replaced, with each episteme being characterized by a particular conception of order. The result was an account of history that excluded any place for dialectical struggle between competing research programs or political agendas, or the struggle between people understood as conscious agents. In giving a place to the Renaissance episteme, the classical episteme and the modern episteme, renaissance humanists, scientific materialists and proponents of the radical enlightenment were all accorded a place, but through a convoluted effort to describe all thinkers within each epoch as dominated by the same episteme with its assumed conception of order."

(https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp-4-2021-arran-gare-against-posthumanism-posthumanism-as-the-world-vision-of-house-slaves)

More information

• Humanism