Posthumanism

Abstract

Posthumanism is a philosophical perspective of how change is enacted in the world. As a conceptualization and historicization of both agency and the “human,” it is different from those conceived through humanism. Whereas a humanist perspective frequently assumes the human is autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional in acts of change, a posthumanist perspective assumes agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human participates but does not completely intend or control. Posthumanist philosophy constitutes the human as: (a) physically, chemically, and biologically enmeshed and dependent on the environment; (b) moved to action through interactions that generate affects, habits, and reason; and (c) possessing no attribute that is uniquely human but is instead made up of a larger evolving ecosystem. There is little consensus in posthumanist scholarship about the degree to which a conscious human subject can actively create change, but the human does participate in change. As distinguished from posthumanism, humanism is credited with attributing the conscious and intentional human subject as the dominant source of agency most worthy of scholarly attention. Since its inception during the Renaissance, humanism has been constituted in various ways throughout history, but as a collective body of literature, the human is typically constituted through humanism as: (a) autonomous from nature given the intellectual faculties of the mind that controls the body, (b) uniquely capable of and motivated by speech and reason, and (c) an exceptional animal that is superior to other creatures. Humanist assumptions concerning the human are infused throughout Western philosophy and reinforce a nature/culture dualism where human culture is distinct from nature. In contrast, a posthumanist scholar rejects this dichotomy through understanding the human as entangled with its environment. A posthumanist scholar of communication typically integrates scholarship from a variety of other disciplines including, but not limited to: art, architecture, cybernetics, ecology, ethology, geology, music, psychoanalysis, and quantum physics.

Beyond Entanglement: (Socio-) Materiality and Organization Studies

“…Several key authors can be associated with this movement (Barad, 2003(Barad, , 2007Deleuze & Guattari, 1980Foucault, 1977a;Haraway, 1987Haraway, , 1991Latour, 2005Latour, , 2013Law, 2009;Massumi, 2002), which has sometimes been affiliated with posthumanism (Barad, 2003). While posthumanist perspectives have often been caricatured and denounced as a form of anti-humanism (Fukuyama, 2002), Keeling and Lehman (2018) remind us that, despite their diversity and heterogeneity, they should first be understood as attempts to resituate human beings in their environment and conceptualize agency as distributed. This does not mean that humans are suddenly devoid of their autonomy, consciousness, intentionality, or specificity.…”

9. Symbiosis and Interdependency

“…Posthumanist philosophy conceptualises the human as: (a) moved to action through a variety of environmental interactions, affects, habits and sometimes reasons; (b) physically, chemically, and biologically formed by and dependent on their environment; and (c) possessing no attribute that is uniquely human, but is instead made up of a larger evolving ecosystem. (Keeling and Lehman, 2018) I believe a posthumanist conception of human nature fits well with system biology approaches. Such approaches also fit in with dynamic and normative biological concepts of pathology, which consider disease as lesions, infections or genetic mutations and entangled with the milieu in which an organism lives.…”

Interplay of coherent and dissipative dynamics in condensates of light

“…At this point we note that the previous first-order term was omitted by Kirton and Keeling [38,39], based on the implicit assumption that it is irrelevant due to the rapid collisional dephasing [69]. As we will demonstrate below, its influence deep in the photon BEC regime turns out to be negligible, so this regime can be described satisfactorily even if it is not taken into account.…”