Posthumanities

Rise of the ‘Posthumanities’ Exit, the Human…Pursued by a Cyborg Pramod K. Nayar* The Humanities in the 21st century has to contend with both critique and context. It has to account as an anthropocentric, imperial discipline that not only privileged the human over other forms of life, but also some kinds of humanity. It also has to negotiate with a context where accepted notions of the human have eroded through the technological ‘interfacing’ of humans with machines and animals. The Humanities must, therefore, reinvent itself if it has to stay relevant for the present contexts and politics, since the object of its study has been reinvented. The essay is in two parts. First, the author maps the structuresof the new form of the human that have emerged in the age of biotech and computers, the posthuman, and then proceeds to argue a case for a Posthumanities. *Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India, Email: [email protected] Everything that concerns the question and the history of truth, in its relation to the question of man, of what is proper to man, of human rights, of crimes against humanity, and so forth, all of this must in principle find its space of unconditional discussion, and without presupposition, its legitimate space of research and reelaboration, in the university and, within the university, above all in the Humanities. - Jacques Derrida, ‘The University Without Condition’ (2002a: 203, emphasis in original) ‘Humanities’ has traditionally investigated the subject of the ‘human’. Premised on the cluster of ideas of equality, tolerance, justice, the sovereign body of the individual and individual agency – commonly grouped under term ‘humanism’ – that emerged with the Enlightenment project in Europe, the Humanities is a ‘discipline’ that takes all aspects of human life as its domain. Here is a pithy project-definition of Humanist studies from the Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Geoffrey Galt Harpham: scholarship in the humanities is defined by its concern with the subject of humanity. Humanists operate on a human scale; they treat their subjects not as organisms, cells, or atoms, nor as specks of animate matter in the vast universe – nor, for that matter, as clients, patients, customers, or cases – but as self-aware individuals conscious of their existence. (2005: 27) The term ‘humanism’ derives from the Latin humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘ground’, and humanus, meaning ‘earthy human’. The important “human” was contrasted with other life forms on earth such as plants and animals. Scholasticism made a division between the study of divinitas (knowledge derived from and about the scripture) and humanitas (those dealing with the practical and secular life). ‘Humanitas’ that focused on literature and the arts became the ‘Humanities’. Two major developments in the late 20th century have produced what many see as a ‘crisis’ in the Humanities – one a critique of the very ideational basis of humanism and the other a context of high-tech cultures. For commentaries on this “crisis”, see Perloff 2000, Harpham 2005, Culler 2005. Contemporary theory’s critique has shown how the very figure of the human in humanism is marked in particular ways: as male, white, heterosexual, for example. This means, humanism excludes and has always excluded the blacks, women, the queer and the differently-abled as ab-human, sub-human or even non-human. As Tony Davies puts it: All humanisms, until now, have been imperial. They speak of the human in accents and the interests of a class, a sex, a race. Their embrace suffocates those whom it does not ignore. (131) Theoretical critiques after poststructuralism and feminism have interrogated humanism’s universalist assumptions, revealing them to be, in fact, exclusionary. Two, we live in a context when transgenic and bio-technologies call into question the very basis for the Humanities itself: the human. How does one define the human – and therefore the Humanities – in the age of genetic engineering, cloning, wired bodies and Artificial Intelligence? The “human” as defined through the ages cannot be studied as independent of other life species any more. The feminist critic of technoscience, Donna Haraway, points out that the biological term “species” is also related etymologically to respecere, to look with respect, to behold, to notice, to pay attention to: “polite greeting, to constituting the polis, where and when species meet”, 2006: 102), and thus showing the mutuality of species. The Humanities in the 21st century has to contend with both critique and context. It has to account for Humanities as an anthropocentric, imperial discipline that not only privileged the human over other forms of life, but also some kinds of humanity. It also has to negotiate with a context where accepted notions of the human have eroded through the technological ‘interfacing’ of humans with machines and animals. The Humanities must therefore reinvent itself if it has to stay relevant for the present contexts and politics, since the object of its study has been reinvented. The essay has two parts. I first map the structures of the new form of the human that have emerged in the age of biotech and computers: the posthuman. Having argued for a posthuman, I proceed to argue a case for a Posthumanities. From Human to Posthuman The posthuman is a congeries of software, hardware and wetware. Flesh and machine, mind and computers, self and the world, human and animal are merged in a seamless articulation. The posthuman can be schematically sketched in terms of body and mind, while keeping alive, as a point of departure or reference, the traditional human as one endowed with autonomy, sovereignty and agency. Bodies The idea of the self-enclosed biological organism that is the human is eroded in biotechnology and computerisation. The networked human whose subjectivity, Katherine Hayles (1999) argues, is distributed throughout the electronic circuit, is one whose self extends beyond the immediate body, whose identity is linked to others. This posthuman is a hybrid. Genetic engineering and stem cell research seek genes and DNA from ‘companion species’. Transgenic life forms – animal, vegetable, human gene modification and therapy – means that we share genes with other species. If the body is the condition of having a self at all, then contemporary technologies demand a posthumanism where the body cannot be the substratum of a self. The sociologist of the body, Margrit Shildrick, calling attention to the constructed and technology-dependent nature of the self, writes: “where once the material body could be taken as relatively stable and predictable … the technological possibilities of a postmodern age – and this is especially clear in the area of reproduction and genetics – continually disrupt humanist certainties (2005: 10). Mind and Consciousness European modernity, the Enlightenment and its Humanities created the human as we know it today: the autonomous individual with agency. The primacy of the mind in this view of the human is one of the first “humanistic” feature that has been demolished with current research in the cognitive sciences. Francesco Varela et al in their The Embodied Mind (1991) demonstrate how the mind is not a homogenous unity but a “disunified, heterogeneous, collection of processes” (106-07). More importantly, “what counts as an agency … a collection of agents, could, if we change our focus, be considered as merely one agent in a larger agency” (107). The cognitive abilities of the “human” – and therefore the human’s agency and sense of self – emerge as a result of a series of processes within and enmeshed with the context. Mark Hansen (2006) has persuasively argued that in postmodernity we increasingly occupy a “mixed reality” condition where our cognitive abilities and perception of the world are mediated through technology. Katherine Hayles has argued, following the work of Humberto Maturana, Francesco Varela and Artificial Intelligence scientists that the human seems intimately linked to the contexts, that consciousness is an “epiphenomenon”, appearing rather late. The posthuman, as Katherine Hayles summarises it (1999: 288, 290), is emergent (rather than teleology), with a distributed cognition (rather than autonomous will), and as a system (rather than self). The human emerges as a result of interaction with the environment. In other words, the human is a set of processes that works in a field of possibilities, a field that includes machines and animals. The idea of the bounded self is no more valid within the posthuman. Posthuman thinking believes that the human “is no longer part of the “family of man” but a zoo of posthumanities” (Halberstam and Livingstone 1995: 3). This connected, genetically hybridized, modified (surgically/chemically/electronically) human with a distributed consciousness and mediated perception is the posthuman: the new “subject” of the Humanities. This is the subject that will have to be studied within the modified, connected, hybridized discipline of the Posthumanities. The Posthumanities: A Draft Agenda Jacques Derrida (2002a) has argued that the first task of the “new Humanities” would “treat the history of man, the idea, the figure, and the notion of ‘what is proper to man’”. This will be done on the basis of a “nonfinite series of oppositions by which man is determined, in particular the traditional opposition of the life form called human and of the life form called animal” (231, emphasis in original). Derrida elaborates: the new Humanities would problematize the conditions that shaped the modern history of this humanity of man … the juridical performatives … [of] the Declarations of the Rights of Man – and of the woman … the concept of the “crime against humanity” … the performative productions of law or right (rights of man, human rights, the concept of crime against humanity) (231, emphasis in the original). Derrida is outlining here a grand new project for the Humanities that deconstructs the conditions in which the definitions of the human have emerged, the consequences of these definitions and finally, the exclusions within these definitions. In the remainder of this essay I wish to build on this outlined programme and propose new tasks for the Humanities in the age of biotech, animal rights, genetic engineering and human rights violations. I begin with two examples of this new disciplinary formation. Symptomatic of the Posthumanities is the work of BABEL. BABEL is a working group that links medieval literary and historical studies with social sciences and the “hard” sciences (http://ww2.coastal.edu/babel/Babel-Home.htm). In the words of Eileen Joy and Christine Neufeld, BABEL represents an attempt to “formulate new paradigms for humanistic study at the university level” (2007: 169). Joy and Neufeld summarize the concerns of the new humanism of BABEL thus: (i) exploring the significance of individual freedom, expression and affectivity, (ii) the impact of technology and the new sciences on what it means to be an individual or self, (iii) the importance of art and literature in defining and enacting the human, (iv) the importance of history in defining the human, (v) the transformational possibilities inherent in the human, (vi) the question of what might be called a human collectivity: what is the value or danger in “being human” or “being inhuman” together? (174-5). Minnesota University Press in 2007 has launched a new series, Posthumanities. The first titles are indicative of its aims: Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, Roberto Esposito’s, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, Michel Serres’ The Parasite (reprint); Judith Roof’s The Poetics of DNA and David Wills’ Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics. The write-up on the series is illuminating and captures much of what the discipline is likely to become: Posthumanities investigates the many ways that the human has been entangled in complex relations with animals, the environment, and technology for which the theoretical and ethical understandings of humanism are no longer adequate. (http://www.upress.umn.edu/byseries/Posthumanities.html) Cary Wolfe, series editor, Posthumanities, writes: the point is to reveal, by rigorous theoretical investigation, how those values and concerns – what humanism says it wants (justice, tolerance, equality, and so on) – are undercut or short-circuited by the philosophical and theoretical frameworks from which they have arisen. Wolfe goes on: [The series is situated at the] intersection of the disciplinary formation we call “the humanities” in its current configuration, and the challenges posed to it by work (much of it interdisciplinary) in a range of fields that is associated with the emergent orientation known as “posthumanism”. (http://www.carywolfe.com/post_about.html) Wolfe points to a ‘wet’ version of posthumanism in which the “human is enmeshed in the larger problem – at once biological, ecological, and ontological – of what Derrida calls ‘the living’ ”. Clearly Wolfe’s statements (and the titles in the series) indicate the breadth of the series – from philosophy to technology studies, all of which revolve around the question of life (and the human). The Posthumanities, as I see it, is an interrogation of the very idea of life in a new age. Building on these two schematics of the ‘new humanism’, I develop a programme for the Posthumanities. The Posthumanities, as I see it, will be a theoretico-political examination of the human in the age of technology; the rights of posthumans; the arts, literature and poetics of posthuman thought; the history of notions of life in its various inclusions, exclusions and hybridizations that distinguish between “bare life” and political life, or human and animal; and the question of species and species-borders. While an entire programme or project for the new discipline is beyond the scope of this essay, I shall sketch – the operative word being ‘sketch!’ – what I believe are central to the Posthumanities. Art and Literature in the Posthumanities Marjorie Perloff (2000) rightly argues that Humanities students must be trained to “read” works of art. I argue that since the Humanities has traditionally been concerned with rhetoric and the languages of representation, we must retain this element. The task, I suggest, is to unravel discourses and representational strategies through which the human has been defined. Posthumanities must address contemporary forms of art (especially genomic arts, techno-art, cyberpunk) that codify, contest and conflict with techno-cultures of the posthuman condition. Since arts and literature have traditionally helped define the human, we need to study the emergent cultures of the posthuman in order to see how this new category is being defined. Films and work with monstrous posthumans – cyborgs, modified people, hybrid species, cloned life – would be broadly the representational or poetics issue in Posthumanities. The work of Eduardo Kac, Orlan, the PigWings Project, Stelarc, cyborg/SF films (Terminator; I, Robot; Hancock, etc) and cyberpunk fiction (William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Marge Piercy, Bruce Sterling) foreground, I propose, a “new monstrous” – an argument I have made elsewhere about posthuman arts (Nayar 2006). My argument here, in the case of the arts in the age of cybercultures and biotech, is that the now omniscient cyborg helps us rethink monstrosity. Reading the figure of the monster in the works of Jacques Derrida, Colin Milburn argues that the monster “embodies a means of thinking otherwise”, it indicates “the nascent germ of a species about-to-become” (2003: 603-4). I believe Milburn is actually sketching out a program in poetics for the Posthumanities. Can we regard the monstrous hybrids of Stelarc, Kac, Kevin Warwick and others as indicative of an emerging species? Does “monster theory” with its emphasis on the constructedness of monsters (as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen terms it, 1996) help us? Doryjane Birrer answers in the affirmative, arguing that the monstrous can be productively read (for humanism) “not only as a function of difference but as arising from hybridity” (2007: 240). Transgenic art – the work of Eduardo Kac, in particular – offers new forms of life that help us understand the interrelatedness of technology, information, life and species. Eduardo Kac writes: There is no transgenic art without a firm commitment to and responsibility for the new life form thus created. Ethical commitments are paramount in any artwork, and they become more crucial than ever in the context of bio art. (2005: 237) I have proposed (2006) that the monstrous is always future-directed, it gestures at the shape of things to come. This future arrivant – the transgenic – must be prepared for and worked at welcoming. And this work is a question of responsibility, a task which the arts and literature in the traditional Humanities had admirably (if selectively) carried out: preparing the grounds for justice, equality, emancipation for the others. Posthumanities art and literature will work at welcoming the cyborg, the monstrous and the modified. It prepares for the cyborg by rethinking: the question of what is human and/or animal and of what constitutes humanity through a poetics of the monstrous and the posthuman, a species-understanding and new notions of life. Posthuman Freedom and Affect If reason, autonomy and agency have been the characteristics of the human in traditional humanist thought, then popular posthumanism also seeks to inscribe the posthuman within this same ideology of affect. Myra Seaman notes that in monster tales (werewolf stories, for instance) the human nature of the individual is still exhibited “amidst or over the hybridity, expressed through the person’s affect and reason rather than through his physical form” (2007: 252). Affect and reason, therefore, are seen as distinguishing features of the humans. Seaman suggests that popular posthumanism marks its distance from theoretical posthumanism by emphasizing the role of affect, even as it fears the reduction of the hybrid to “all mind” (258-9). An example would be the posthuman figures of “Terminator” or “Robocop” – cyborg creatures that seem to possess an intractably human feature: affect. The question of agency is related to the idea of the free human. Does a human have the freedom to choose a change in the course of her/his life? Does the choice of modification for enhanced abilities lie with the individual? And does such a choice imply a loss of what has been seen as a solely human prerogative: affect? Would one, in other words, sacrifice the mark of the human (the emotional self) for a superior intellect and physique? The Posthumanities would have to study the history of the idea of affect as embodying the ‘human’. Are emotional states like shame, desire, love, sorrow ‘human’? And human alone? With contemporary animal rights discourses, the question of affect as the prerogative of humans has been undermined. For a representative volume see Susan Armstrong and Richard Boltzer (eds) The Animal Ethics Reader (2003). Biologists working within animal rights (such as Barbara Smuts) and moral philosophers (like Peter Singer) have pointed to the humanized notion of affect itself. Others have noted the gendered construction of (Mills 2003). The Posthumanities will therefore unpack the processes through which an emotional identity and history of the human has been constructed. It examines the discourse of affect and its politics, including the cases of beyond-language affects in genocide, trauma and the excluded life. Bíos, Zōē and the History of the ‘Human’ When Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib scarred our screens in 2004 it revealed to the world a category of humans that we last encountered in the pages of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel: the abhuman, a figure that is invested with all the dangerous and endangering consequence of biopolitics. It reveals to us, yet again, the Other history of the human, or a history of the Other non-human. ‘Biopolitics’ gestures at both: technologies such as biotech but also at the institutions that work on populations, individuals, the self and the community. Posthumanities asks: what is human in the age of biotech, the connected/hybrid organism, the distributed self, but also in the age of genocide and human rights violations? Derrida points out that concepts of human rights and “crime against humanity” constitute a “mondialisation or worldwide-ization”, but one that “wishes to be a humanization” (2002a: 203). Derrida, I believe, is calling for a universalization of the very idea of humanity – a task that defines the role of the Humanities itself. The task of the new Humanities is to explore the exclusions from the history of the concept of the human: those reduced by war, politics or disease to a condition that Giorgio Agamben (1998) terms “bare life” or zōē. The traditional Humanities has not always categorized or counted people with similar biology as “human”: women, ethnically different people, working-class bodies were always less than human. The Posthumanities is a chance for the Humanities to study these expulsions-exclusions of the human especially in an age where (i) particular bodies continue to be consigned to the “outside” (immigrants, queers, women, minorities) and (ii) bodies are “monstrous” in their hybridized cyborg natures. More and more people, I argue, remain on, or are consigned to, the outside of the category of human to bare life rather than bios (the political life). The Posthumanities must first generate an analytics of institutions and structures – “history”, as Cary Wolfe would term it – where life is redefined so as to exclude the monstrous, the different and the Other (it is no surprise that Roberto Esposito working on biopolitics begins his study with a reading of the technics of the Third Reich, an institutionalized structure of and for exclusion). The Posthumanities would study genocides, traumas, tortures that have instituted norms that create homo sacers, Agamben’s term for those who are so outside the pale of the human that to kill them would not amount to murder. The turn to human rights – that deal with political life and those denied it – would be appropriate in this context. I suggest that the Posthumanities would examine the narrative traditions of human rights. If human rights discourses demand and necessitate a narrative [Ignatieff 2001, Smith and Schaffer 2004; Langlois 2005; Slaughter 2006], then I see as central to the Posthumanities a study of all those narratives excluded from the narrative tradition of human rights. The Posthumanities would examine the history of the division between bíos and zōē in an age when more people have been reduced to zōē than ever before (the Holocaust’s “Mussulman” as discussed in Agamben and Primo Levi; Rwanda, Stalin’s gulags, apartheid, Bosnia, Vietnam, Abu Ghraib, Gujarat …). For me the task of the Posthumanities is to see how the figure of the human and the idea of human rights must be renegotiated. I had argued (2007), well before encountering the work of Roberto Esposito, that the war on terror and the Abu Ghraib-Guantanamo Bay “events” were the making of homo sacers – people who exist as bare life beyond the border. After Esposito, I believe that this process of exclusion of people as bare life (zōē ) as opposed to political life (bíos) is the immunity paradigm. What are the constatives and peformatives that have instituted the human and therefore, human rights? Feminist critiques of human rights have opened up the discourse to show how women’s rights (including juridico-political and biological issues such as reproductive rights) must be renegotiated within human rights. Third Sex and transgender rights, queer rights and the rights of the differently-abled must be studied for their historical exclusions from the field of human rights. In other words, the Posthumanities is a critique of humanism, and the Humanities. It is in its search for a more inclusive definition of what it means to be “vital” or alive that posthumanism echoes the ancient goals of liberal humanist. I therefore agree with Neil Badmington’s assertion that posthumanism is not a break with humanism: in fact we need to “attend to what remains of humanism in the posthumanist landscape” (2003: 15). The Individual and the Collective The Humanities has traditionally been concerned with the rights of the individual within a group. In the 20th century, biopolitics works at the level of entire populations (witness the Human Genome Project and Human Genome Diversity Project For a critique of the “enactment” of diversity in the laboratory in the Project, see Amade M’charek (2005). M’charek contends that “genetic diversity cannot simply be the end-product of knowledge applied to populations or their DNA” (14-15). The point is persuasive because M’charek shows how diversity is constructed through laboratries and scientific practices where the “objects of genetics are enabled by technologies” (167). Since diversity is a feature of humanist studies, such projects invariably and inevitably, I argue, call for a Posthumanities. ). This means, the Posthumanities must necessarily locate the ‘new’ human within a new biopolitics of the collective. Posthumanities begins by meshing the human-individual with the non-human-collective. Towards the end of their book on the “embodied mind” Francesco Varela et al write: If planetary thinking requires that we embody the realization of groundlessness in a scientific culture, planetary building requires the embodiment of concern for the other with whom we enact a world (247) The Posthumanities is interested not only in hybrid forms of the human (cyborgs) but in companion species and in the collective. If the human is constituted through a dynamic interaction with the Other (or context) then it follows that I need to be concerned about this Other if I or my self has to survive. This means Posthumanities will have to analyse the linkage between species, and between individual and collective. Doryjane Birrer has argued that the “postmodernist-humanist ‘we’, [is] made up as it is of self-reflexive ‘I’s aware of their personal responsibility for their roles in shaping their own and others’ futures” (2007: 234, emphasis added). I propose that this argument could be extended to the posthumanist vision: of a self-reflexive humanism that can identify with, empathise with the radically different Other in the age of biotech and the screen. Genetic engineering and biotech represent, as Teresa Heffernan (2003) correctly argues, an extension of the Enlightenment humanist project. Only this time the new human will emerge not through education and socializing processes (which was the ‘traditional’ humanist project) but through the wonders of genetic engineering that will seek to create better, ageless, more productive humans. This brings the question of the new human into the field of bioethics. Roberto Esposito’s work (2008) is a useful entry point into the bioethics of/in the posthuman age. Esposito suggests that immunisation renders the individual unaccountable to the community – it frees him from the obligations to the community. The question of increasing individuation is actually, for Esposito, a withdrawal from the community through a process of immunisation. He proposes, in the place of immunization-individual, a bíos. This bíos is not the neutralization of the individual but rather is the condition in which individuation can occur. Bíos is the condition where the individual is not definable outside the political relationship with those that share the condition of life. With this move, Esposito presents bíos as the living common to all beings and invests the process of individuation with something more. Esposito argues that the individual will be (must be) seen as the site or space in which individuation takes place thanks to other living forms. The human body is to be seen in a series of relations with the bodies of others. There is difference but not Otherness. Bioethics, Species and Posthuman Rights The Posthumanities will foreground questions in bioethics. By ‘bioethics’. I do not only mean debates about cloning or stem cell research, or even about humans alone. Bioethics in the Posthumanities might be primarily cathected into global projects of what Eugene Thacker has termed ‘biocolonialism’ (2005): genome projects, gene patenting, GM foods and genomic medicine that involve entire populations. But bioethics will also be about posthuman modified bodies and all “companion species”. In the age of big pharma, genomic projects and wars, the task of the Posthumanities shifts from a study of the human’s many dimensions into the political thinking through of technology, from the human at the centre of the discipline to the disciplined study of companion species and the meeting of species, from the norms of life to the borders of the body. I strongly believe, with Cary Wolfe, that the Humanities cannot afford to ignore technology any longer. If it has to continue to be interested in the human then it will have to undertake an examination of the social policy, the state sponsorship, the corporatisation of the technologies that construct the humans. This is not to say that all Humanities scholars will now shift to Social Studies of Technology, but rather that for Humanities to have any relevance it needs to deal with the new realities emerging in the age of high-tech. The Posthumanities would be the appropriate response to what John Brockman has pronounced as the “irrelevance” of the traditional Humanities. In his 2003 book, The New Humanists: Scientists at the Edge (www.edge.org), Brockman argued that traditional Humanities scholars have shied away from addressing the major philosophical questions about the body, consciousness and identity in the age of new technology. There is an urgent need to address the nature of the self, the mind and the body in the age of biotech. The posthuman is about new forms of embodiment, and embodiment remains the cornerstone of social and political debates. Posthumanities would have to examine the philosophical and theoretical basis for new forms of the human emerging with the new technology. This will require a thorough examination of the norms that define and decide on what constitutes life, and the forms excluded from this norm. We turn once again to Esposito: “only a life that is already ‘decided’ according to a determinate juridical order can constitute the natural criteria in the application of the law” (184). Studies of the new human in the age of biotech would lead, in the Posthumanities, to the rights of posthumans. Cary Wolfe suggests that “a blind person and a guide dog form a third, prosthetic kind whose experience of the world cannot be well explained by reference to the traditional human vs animal” (http://www.carywolfe.com/post_about.html). Wolfe’s point is a crucial one, for it refers to the abilities and rights of different life forms. I have elsewhere argued that there exists a narrative tradition of posthuman rights (2008). Jerold Abrams (2004) has argued, like Chris Hables Gray (2001), that posthuman citizenships are imminent since there are more cyborg bodies than ever before. In a world where, arguably, more wired, modified, humans exist than ever before, what rights do such posthumans possess? Is a human-machine or human-animal hybrid likely to experience the world the same way as a “normal” human and therefore wouldn’t they require different rights? If human rights is based on an idea of what is human, and on the notion of a sovereign, cogent, self-bounded organism, then what about animal-human-machine hybrids whose bodies, consciousness and agency are determined by different cognitive abilities, bodies and genetic structures? Posthumanities would explore these questions. The Posthumanities would explore the theme of posthuman rights as a series of juridical, social, technological negotiations of the very definition of “normalcy” and “humanity”. Hybrid forms such as the ones listed above would need to be brought into the fold. Their narratives – and narratives are about cognition of the world – are central to the ways in which we would redefine the human. The debates about posthuman rights would invariably revolve around definitions about the human and the distinctions between humans and animals and inanimate objects. The problem in the posthuman age is simply that, with genetic engineering, xenotransplantation and transgenic creatures, formerly distinct divisions between humans and animals have blurred. Animal Rights movements place increasing pressure to redefine their status vis á vis humans. Derrida writes: “I have never believed in some homogeneous continuity between what calls itself man, and what he calls the animal” (2002b: 45-6, emphasis in original). Novelist JM Coetzee speaks of the “sympathetic imagination” (1999: 35) in the case of the human perceptions of animal suffering. Donna Haraway’s posthumanist vision therefore includes what she calls “companion species” (2006). She defines “companion species” in terms of two main poles: response and respect. Haraway’s new manifesto is worth citing at some length because I believe she inaugurates here – along with Derrida (2002b) whom she critiques – a new ethical Posthumanities: To knot companion [companion derives from cum panis, to share bread] and species together in encounter, in regard and respect, is to enter the world of becoming with, where, who, and what are, are precisely what are at stake … Species interdependence is the name of the worlding game on Earth, and that game must be one of response and respect … Not much is excluded in the needed play – not technologies, commerce, organisms, landscapes, peoples, practices. I am not a posthumanist, I am who I become with companion species. (2006: 102) The agenda for a Posthumanities is written in this “companion species manifesto”: the search for bioethics, for appropriate response and respect to/for “companion species”. As a consequence, it sets the agenda for the radical redefinition of the “human” when at least part of the human is linked to animals and machines. Rather than the autonomous, free-willed, affective and rational subject of the liberal Humanities, we now find emerging – Posthumanities is still nascent – a different Humanities of the companion species. However, Katherine Hayles detects a current of liberal humanism in the autopoesis theories of cognition in the works of Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela (Hayles 1999: 142). The Posthumanities: a new cultural literacy of mechanisms, institutions and structures that define the human, and asks that we define it in terms of all that it has historically excluded. It is, as Cary Wolfe argues, a rigorously theoretical procedure, a new “poetics” (which Marjorie Perloff uses as a shorthand for the literacies and skills developed within what is known as the “Humanities”). I see the Posthumanities as a reading practice that revives the theme of “technics” – skill, craft, theory, poetics. The technics in/of Posthumanities is an informed cultural literacy about the nature of the human in the age of the posthuman, the nature of life itself and the rights to life. The Posthumanities does not locate the human alone at the centre: it locates companion species, monsters, transgenics, cyborgs. The Posthumanities: with its mix of poetics, technics, historicity, bioethics and posthumanisms of the companion species, and involved with questions of rights, the “human” (and therefore the animal), sovereignty (of bodies, being, nations) and borders, is the “Humanities to come”. Mark Zuss (2000) points out that the “genomic technic participates in an ironic inversion of the grounding premises of the autonomous and monadic subject” (269). The sovereignty drawn from his idea of the subject implicitly defined the extension of the dominion of the human over animals and plants – a condition increasingly difficult to sustain. The Posthumanities, like Derrida’s “new Humanities” will “not let itself be contained within the traditional limits of the departments that today belong, by their very status, to the Humanities” (Derrida 2002a: 230). Derrida expects that “departments of genetics, natural science, medicine, and even mathematics” will also be interested in the questions raised by the Humanities (230). The task of the Humanities is, and has always been, to think through the procedures of thought itself, and the Posthumanities is within this “tradition” when it unravels the thinking of the human itself. The transdisciplinary and theoretical Posthumanities meets, I believe, the unconditional condition Derrida (to invoke him for the very last time) envisages for the Humanities: One thinks in the Humanities that one cannot and must not be enclosed within the inside of the Humanities. But for this thinking to be strong and consistent requires the Humanities (2002: 236). References Abrams, Jerold J. “Pragmatism, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman Bioethics: Shusterman, Rorty, Foucault”, Human Studies 27 (2004): 21-258. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Armstrong, Susan J. and Richard G. Boltzer (eds) The Animal Ethics Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Badmington, Neil. “Theorizing Posthumanism”, Cultural Critique 53 (2003): 10-27. 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Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT, 2005. Varela, Francesco J, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT, 2000 (1991). Zuss, Mark. “Genomics: Technics and Writing the “Posthuman”“, Dialectical Anthropology 25 (2000): 255-279. PAGE 1 eSS Essay/ Posthumanities/Nayar March 2009