Theorizing Posthuman

Neil Badmington’s Views

 Doesn’t accept the view- “Posthumanism has finally arrived, and theory, like “Man”
“himself,” no longer has a place.”
 Posthumanism needs theory, needs theorizing, needs above all to reconsider the
untimely celebration of the absolute end of “Man” in resonance with what Jacques
Derrida calls the “apocalyptic tone” should be toned down a little.
 Apocalyptic accounts of the end of “Man” ignore humanism’s capacity for
regeneration and, quite literally, recapitulation. He gives the example of Lernaean
hydra to explain this.
 Also he doesn’t believe in preserving humanism as such but in negotiation.
 Stresses the use of poststructuralist theory in understanding the posthuman turn.
 Hayles’s project is to imagine a posthumanism that does not fall into the kind of trap
that ensnares Moravec, his approach is slightly different (though not unrelated),
involving instead an attention to what of humanism itself persists, insists, and
ultimately desists.
 If technology has truly sped “us” outside and beyond the space of humanism, why is
“Man” still at “our” side? If “Man” is present at “his” own funeral, how can “he”
possibly be dead? What looks on lives on! The end of “Man” was suddenly in doubt. I
had come up against the problem of what to do with human remains.
 He says Derrida’s reluctance to be seduced by the “apocalyptic tone” bears repeating
today, as posthumanism begins to find its feet within the academy. It seems that many
are a little too quick to affirm an absolute break with humanism, and a little too
reluctant to attend to what remains of humanism in the posthumanist landscape.

Jacques Derrida
 Derrida took a somewhat different approach, arguing that, simply because thought
always takes place within a certain tradition, thought itself is bound to bear some trace
of that tradition suggesting posthumanism is not the end of humanism. It is in fact in
the tradition of humanism that posthumanism exists.
 He rejected the questioning of humanism and an absolute break from the
anthropocentric thought by his contemporaries.
 Derrida points out that the “force and the efficiency” of tradition effect a stricter and
more naive reinstatement of “the new terrain (Posthumanism) on the oldest
(humanism) ground”. The outside (posthumanism) carries the inside (humanism)
beyond the apparent apocalypse. The new now secretes the old then. Humanism
remains.
 He also doesn’t advocate a simple return or surrender to the humanism.
 Derrida goes on to suggest that there is no “simple and unique” choice to be made
between the two methods of challenging humanism. A “new writing,” he concludes,
“must weave and interlace the two motifs” and the apocalyptic desire to leap wholly
beyond needs to be married to the recognition that “[t]he outside bears with the
inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority.”
  The familiar, easy announcements of a complete change of terrain, a pure outside,
need to be complemented by work that speaks to humanism’s ghost, to the
reappearance of the inside within the outside. Both halves of the signifier in question
demand attention: posthumanism, as I have argued elsewhere, is as much
posthumanist as it is posthumanist.
 Derrida’s call for critics to repeat “what is implicit in the founding concepts and the
original problematic” is by no means a demand for a simple, straightforward repetition
of those concepts. Deconstruction, rather, as he has insisted on various occasions,
consists in repeating things “in a certain way,” in order to expose the overwhelming
uncertainty of even the most apparently certain discourses.
 Badmington’s take from Derrida: The version of posthumanism that I am trying to
develop here repeats humanism, it does so in a certain way and with a view to the
deconstruction of anthropocentric thought and to expose how humanism is forever
rewriting itself as posthumanism.

Descartes
 Writes about what it means to be human.
 In his Discourse on the Method reason is held aloft as “the only thing that makes us men and
distinguishes us from the beasts”.
 This essential “power of judging well and distinguishing the true from the false” is what
convinces Descartes of his human being: “I think, therefore I am”
 The truth of the human, of what it means to be human, lies, that is to say, in the rational mind,
or soul, which is entirely distinct from the body
 Descartes is famous for his descriptions of the human, he also told fascinating stories about
the inhuman. There is, in fact, a passage in the Discourse on the Method that reads like
seventeenth century science fiction.
 Argument: If there were a machine that looked like a monkey, it would not be possible to
distinguish between a real monkey and the fake—at the level of essence—because the fact
that neither the animal nor the machine could ever exercise rational thought means that there
would be no essential difference. Both figures are, in Descartes’s eyes, ultimately inhuman. If,
however, machines were to attempt to simulate humans, “we” would, for two simple reasons,
always be able to tell the difference between the true and the false:
o The first of these is that they could never use words or other signs, composing them
as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive of
a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters some regarding the
bodily actions that cause certain changes in its organs, for instance if you touch it in
one spot it asks what you want to say to it; if in another, it cries out that you are
hurting it, and so on; but not that it arranges them [the words] diversely to respond
to the meaning of everything said in its presence, as even the most stupid of men are
capable of doing.
o Secondly, even though they might do some things as well as or even better than we
do them, they would inevitably fail in others, through which we would discover that
they were acting not through understanding [connaissance] but only from the
disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument which can be
of use in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular disposition for each
particular action; hence it is impossible to conceive that there would be enough of
 them in a machine to make it act in all the occurrences of life in the way in which
our reason makes us act.
 Descartes asserts his anthropocentrism on the grounds that it would be impossible for a
machine to possess enough different organs to enable it to respond to the infinite
unpredictability of everyday life.
 Badmington’s take from Descartes: There is, however, something of a blind spot, an aporia,
in Descartes’s account, for if a machine—in keeping with the spirit of his fantastic scenario—
were constructed in such a way that it had what might be called “an organ for every occasion,”
it would, according to the letter of Descartes’s own argument, no longer be possible to
maintain a clear distinction between the human and the inhuman. Given enough organs, a
machine would be capable of responding in a manner utterly indistinguishable from that of a
human being. Reason, no longer capable of “distinguish[ing] us from the beasts,” would meet
its match, its fatal and flawless double.
 On closer inspection it can be concluded that there lies within Descartes’s ontological hygiene
a real sense in which, living and non-living things are exchanging properties. Between the lines
of the text, the lines of humanism cross themselves (out), and the moment at which humanism
insists becomes the moment at which it nonetheless desists. Quite against his will, quite
against all odds, Descartes has failed to police the boundary between the real and the fake
which indicates that humanism has slipped into posthumanism.

Lyotard
 Urged his readers to resist easy, complacent understandings of the postmodern.
 The postmodern should not be seen as a historical period, rather it simply indicates a mood,
or better, a state of mind”
 Postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by
modernity, and first of all modernity’s claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of
liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology. But as I have said, that
rewriting has been at work, for a long time now, in modernity itself.
 Modernity and postmodernity, that is to say, should not be thought of as entirely distinct
entities: postmodernity is the rewriting of modernity, which is itself “constitutionally and
ceaselessly pregnant with its postmodernity.”
 Lyotard’s postmodern, on the contrary, attends to the modern in the name of questioning.
The “re-” of the rewriting, as he puts it, “in no way signifies a return to the beginning but
rather what Freud called a ‘working through’”
 Freud says that the traumatic event cannot be remembered as such, cannot be simply and
surely re-presented to consciousness. But neither can it be forgotten, for if the patient could
turn his or her back on the past, he or she would not require the help of the analyst. This
strange condition, this twilight zone, is the predicament of anamnesis.
 Lyotard is quick to heed Freud’s warning. Cultural analysis, he proposes, can learn from
psychoanalysis. Modernity, that monstrous “Thing” with which postmodernity is trying to
come to terms, must be worked through and patiently rewritten: “Rewriting, as I mean it here,
obviously concerns the anamnesis of the Thing. Not only that Thing that starts off a supposedly
‘individual’ singularity, but of the Thing that haunts the ‘language,’ the tradition and the
material with, against and in which one writes.”
 Badmington’s take from Lyotard: The “post-” of posthumanism does not (and, moreover,
cannot) mark or make an absolute break from the legacy of humanism. “Post-”s speak (to)
ghosts, and cultural criticism must not forget that it cannot simply forget the past. The writing
of the posthumanist condition should not seek to fashion “scriptural tombs” for humanism,
but must, rather, take the form of a critical practice that occurs inside humanism, insisting not
of the wake but the working-through of humanist discourse. Humanism has happened and
continues to happen to “us” (it is the very “Thing” that makes “us” “us,” in fact), and the
experience—however traumatic, however unpleasant—cannot be erased without trace in an
instant.