Much of modern political theory deals with those ‘humanist’ questions that concern humanity and the value of human agency. From early modernity to the present day, political questions that place ‘humanity’ at the centre of consideration have constituted much of the bread and butter of theoretical contemplation. Take the seventeenth century questions about order, liberty, the social contract, and the ‘person’ of the state, for example. Here, introspective political discourse was folded back into the nature of humanity and humans as agents living amongst one another.[1] Equally, if we fast forward to the present world, the humanist discourse remains extant when we speak of ‘ethical humanitarian intervention’, ‘global health crises’, or even ‘UNESCO’, placing humanity and human agency at the centre of our political reflections.
It is
because of its longevity as a conceptual and paradigmatic influence on
philosophical, theological and political discourse that it would be nothing but
a misunderstanding to assume that humanism holds a coherency of doctrine across
time, space and language. This would be to commit what the noted political
theorist and historian of ideas Quentin Skinner once labelled as a ‘Mythology
of Doctrine’. Skinner contended that engaging with such a ‘mythology’ occurs
when an interpreter converts some scattered or incidental remarks by a theorist
or theorists into a unified doctrine of any single theme, committing the
‘historical absurdity’ of synopsis upon either one thinker or a parade of
thinkers in order to focus attention on the progression of any given ‘idea’,
and thereby forging the appearance of a smooth development.[2] Such an interpretive
blunder would be like finding a thousand different shards of pottery, all
varying in shape, colour and size, gluing them together to create a vase outline,
and finally claiming the vase to have been made by pieces that slipped together
perfectly like a puzzle, as if they were made for this moment. Such an attitude
feeds only further misunderstanding. The concept of humanism is no different.
Humanism has a long and complicated history that evolves with incoherencies and
fractures like all historical ideas, and therefore cannot be pinned down to a
single definition; indeed, it is rarely so simple.[3] Therefore, in order to
avoid any key interpretive blunders, ‘humanism’ will be associated with the
description above, in connection to the centrality of the human and human
agency in contemplating matters, be they political or otherwise.
If humanism can be
broadly located in the centrality of humanity and human agency, the manner in
which our lives are constellated in relation to technology engages with
‘post-humanism’. As part of her outstanding work, in ‘The Politics of The Human’ Anne Phillips pins down a distinctive
manner in which ‘posthumanism’ can be grasped, referencing not any single definition,
but rather characterising the concept discursively by the commonality of
critical thematic between contemporary ‘posthuman’ works. Here, she states:
“There are three key ways in which
posthumanism has come to figure in recent literature: as a continuing critique
of humanism that drops the starker anti-humanist overtones; as an anticipation
of a future populated by enhanced or hybrid humans; and as an unsettling of the
boundaries between human, animal and machine”[4].
Phillips’
conceptualisation is insightful for its twofold function. Firstly, it mirrors
the conceptual discursive breadth taken into account when grasping ‘humanism’,
avoiding any ‘mythology of doctrine’, whilst attempting to provide as inclusive
a conceptualisation as possible. And, secondly, this is insightful because the
last of Phillips’ thematic characterisations of the posthumanist discourse
directly concerns technological leaps we experience today, namely, the
‘unsettling of the boundaries between human, animal and machine’[5].
Indeed, there has been
a posthuman turn in political theory, challenging the anthropocentric assumptions
that
individuated human agency is the exclusive plain of political action,
subjectivity, and community.[6] Our
era is characterised, for example, by technological leaps which have led to a
new epoch of what Michel Foucault referred to as dispositifs of biopower
and the biopolitical, wherein sovereignty has begun to crystallise its overt character
as an apparatus for rule over biological life to decide how life is to be
lived, or even which life is to be left to die, unworthy of a valued life
(necropolitics).[7] In our world of bionics,
genetic modification and nanotechnology, ‘the subject’ has fallen once again
into question, merging, as Phillips contends, with technology in order to fully
interpret itself as human. Or is this claim too early to stipulate?
Nonetheless, have we already seen this in the sphere of formal politics, where
some argue that even access to electricity should be folded into the discourse
of potential human rights, along with other political and social posits ‘we’
consider to be essential to human life.[8]
The question
in this ‘Black Mirror world’ of technological posthumanism is not whether or
not a certain sense of humanity will be undermined through its ‘singularisation’
with technology, but, as Slavoj Zizek reminds us:
“With the digitization of our lives and the prospect of a direct
link between our brain and digital machinery, we are entering a new posthuman
era in which our basic self-understanding as free and responsible agents will
be affected. In this way, posthumanism is no longer an eccentric theoretical
proposal but a manner concerning our daily lives”.[9]
In this world, would we
be even able to understand ourselves as independent to our technological
achievements ontologically? Would we even be able to see when and if our
technological advances are fundamentally adapting the ‘humanist subject’ to a
post-human one where the organic creativity of non-technological, or at least
non-digital, life is incomprehensible? Perhaps this is what a posthuman
politics should make its concern - the manner in which we are to now navigate a
world in which our creations, norms and epistemological spheres do not
undermine how we interpret ourselves, i.e., how not to lose what makes us human
without jettisoning the benefits of our hyper-technological condition.
[1] For an excellent historical
discussion of humanism in the early modern era, see: Quentin Skinner (2018) From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric
and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Quentin Skinner (1969) ‘Meaning
and Understanding in The History of Ideas’, History
and Theory, 8 (1), pp. 3-53, p. 7.
[3] Tony Davies (1997) Humanism, London: Routledge.
[4] Anne Phillips (2015) The Politics of The Human, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, p. 111.
[5] If one desires a further
exploration in breaking down the conceptual umberella of ‘posthumanism’ into
diverging and constituent categories, e.g., transhumanism, metahumanism and so
on, see: Francesca Ferrando (2013) ‘Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism,
Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations’, Existenz, 8(2), pp. 26-32. Although this
is good for a phenomenological grasp of posthumanism, as far as this piece is
concerned, Phillips’ reduction clarifies what unifies the horizon of the
posthuman discourse, as opposed to its obfuscation by taxonomical
categorisation.
[6] Magdalena Zolkos (2017) ‘Life as a
Political Problem: The Post-Human Turn in Political Theory’, Political
Studies Review, 16(3), pp. 192-204.
[7] Michel Foucault (1980) Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, New York: Pantheon
Books, p. 194; (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at The Collège de
France, 1978-1979, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; Roberto Esposito (2008)
Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, MN: The University of
Minnesota Press; Achille Mbembe (2019) Necropolitics, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
[8] Tanja Winther (2008) The Impact of Electricity: Development, Desires
and Dilemmas, New York: Berghan
Books.
[9] Slavoj Zizek (2018) Like a
Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Humanity, London: Allen
Lane, p.46.