[ExI] Posthumanism vs. Transhumanism

[Damien Broderick]

At 08:13 AM 5/6/2007 +0200, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote:

>I always had some doubts on "transhumanism" as a marketing buzzword,
>but I like "posthumanism" even less. The term implies a rejection of
>our humanity and a desire to become something else.

True, but you do realize that the Foucauldian 
buzz word that overwhelmed pomo thinking was not 
just "posthumanist" but "antihumanist"? For all I 
know, it might still be the fashionable thing to be in the academe.

(For anyone not sure what I just said, 
"Foucauldian" is the adjective from the ideas 
advanced by the late Michel Foucault, who 
blighted the minds of a couple of generations of 
very bright people indeed in the humanities, as 
did Louis Althusser, who ended by murdering his 
own wife. A bit more follows below, although, 
again, it's probably now out of touch with fashion.)

Damien Broderick

=========================

Twenty years after refusing on vaguely anarchist 
grounds to take out my Arts degree, I went back 
to university to brush up on whatever absurd 
doctrines had swept to power in the 1970s and 
1980s. What I found in the libraries and 
seminars, as I wrote my doctoral dissertation in 
discourse theory, was a dazzling assemblage of 
brilliant nuance and narrow stupidity. It was 
built from a variety of 
components­deconstruction, new history, 
post-colonial writing, Lacanian psychoanalysis, 
women's studies, multiculturalism, 
antihumanism--but they shared certain core 
strategies. This free-wheeling post-Marxism liked 
to `interrogate' hegemonic beliefs, forgetting 
that interrogation is usually the privilege of 
terrorist regimes. Dubbing itself theory pure and 
simple, posthumanist opinion presented as the 
basis for all rigorous thought and practice. Yet 
its awful language could lead its practitioners 
into absurdity. All too often it was dead on the 
page and in the mind, and one could only wonder 
at the tone-deafness, the lack of rigour, of at least some of its acolytes.
...
           By and large, antihumanist theory 
seeks out `truth effects' produced by `author 
functions'. In lesser hands, theory has 
franchised a machine for processing splendour and misery into doctrine.
           Within this reigning academic 
doctrine, the human person has been unmasked as an ideological imposture.
...

Kate Soper, in a useful and thorough-going 
response to the antihumanist program, makes the same point:

           "[U]nless individuals are to be 
credited with `naturally' possessing the 
capacities enabling them to recognize that which 
will constitute them as `subjects' (a position 
ruled out by Althusser's rejection of a humanist 
epistemology), then the subject is already 
presupposed to its formation, and Althusser's 
argument is circular. Subjects, he says, 
recognize themselves in ideology. But who does 
the recognizing if not the subject as conceived in humanism?"

           It is important, in my view, that we 
retain a clear acknowledgement that beneath all 
the powerful programming and intersocial 
construction of each human subjectivity in every 
culture, there is in some sort a `human nature' 
constrained by our evolutionary history which 
makes that process possible. At no time, even at 
birth, is the human infant correctly described, 
as Althusser does, as `this small animal­which 
only becomes human-sexual by crossing the 
infinite divide that separates life from 
humanity, the biological from the historical, 
"nature" from "culture" ' (Althusser, 1984).
           I am not arguing for a coarse `human 
engineering' postulate, but for a more nuanced 
use of the concept `human nature'. Victor 
Jeleniewski Seidler puts the objection to 
Althusserian global anti-essentialism well:

           "We can recognise the historical 
character of human qualities and needs and so 
recognise the competitive, individualistic, 
ego-centred `natures' that we grow up to accept 
as `normal', without concluding that `human 
nature' is simply a `product' of a particular 
mode of production. This would be to see people 
as passive objects, who are produced within a 
particular mode of production. It would be to 
share a misconception with much social theory 
which tends to deny, in different ways, the 
sources of resistance to the prevailing mode of 
determination and control, by assuming that 
people are `fitted' to a particular mode of 
production. This is to take up a fundamentally 
instrumental attitude towards people...."

           Posthumanist Marxism, as an 
interventionist political position, tends toward 
internal incoherence on this score. Post-Marxism 
tends toward the same failing. Consider 
Macdonell's odd account of the 1968 student/worker rebellion in France:

           "Instead of following the Marxist line 
that the masses make history, the 
[humanist-infiltrated] PCF line in 1968 was that 
the Party in the person of its leaders and 
`experts' makes history. Inflexible, 
underestimating the masses, the PCF acted to 
separate rather than weld together [oppositional] forces."

           Macdonell's account hangs on a simple 
internal contradiction, as follows: the party 
erred because (A) it wrongly supposed `leaders' 
rather than masses are responsible for making 
history, and (not-A) its `leaders' misled the 
masses. This logical inconsistency (it is not a 
`dialectical' insight) is bound to reappear 
within any antihumanist position. Indeed, pushed 
to its conclusion it vitiates the political will 
of both `leaders' and `masses'. Soper observes:

           "The real problem lies not in the 
assertion of the structured nature of experience, 
but in the conceptualisation of individuals as no 
more than social `effects'. For if we play no 
part in the formation of the structures that 
dominate us, what sense is there in trying to 
alter them? If, moreover, the experience of 
individual men and women is viewed as inessential 
to their existence, then the category of the 
`concrete individual' ceases to have any 
reference to human beings; within the confines of 
such a theory, one can no longer speak of 
individuals as `dominated' by social structures 
or in need of `liberation' from them, since they 
are not thought of as beings with `interests' to be affected."

           Oddly, Soper here blunts her own 
thrust. Finding Althusser's case weak on 
rhetorical grounds, she laments that `to convince 
workers of their impotence scarcely seems the 
best way of persuading them to participate in 
collective action'. Yet an obvious objection to 
Althusser is that to make any `appeal to the 
workers' requires one to recognise and depend 
upon their individual openness to persuasion, 
their need to be convinced (perhaps by actions as well as words). [etc]