The posthuman: the end and the beginning of the human

Abstract

Posthumanism is used as a collective term to understand ''any discursive or bodily configuration that displaces the human, humanism, and the humanities'' (Halberstam and Livingston 1995:vii, emphasis added). There are compelling reasons for introducing posthumanism to consumer research. Consumer research often theorises technology as an externalised instrument that the human creates, uses, and controls. In the 21 st century we are beginning to realise that, far from being a mere tool, technology is the centre of critical thought about culture and about nature. It has recently been suggested that marketing and consumer research now need to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, and the ways in which it can radically change humanness and human-centred approaches to researching the world. Posthumanism is fundamental to theorising humanness in an era that is witnessing the complexification of new technologies. To follow a posthuman mode of thinking will lead to important ethical and metaphysical insights.

‘If it makes you feel good it must be right’: Embodiment strategies for healthy eating and risk management

“…Technologies of self, even when they are most embodied, are never personal (cf. also Cambell et al ., ).…”

Rethinking Human Enhancement

“…Our identities are shaped, sustained and reinforced by our relationship with technology, a relationship that is far from being neutral and uncomplicated, being mostly rather paradoxical, ideological, fantastical and multidimensional (Campbell, O'Driscoll, & Saren, 2010). This relationship gets even more complicated as the times we live in are times in which the boundaries between the human and the technological are blurred and seen as coextensive, mutually defining and co-dependent (Bukatman, 1993).…”

Beyond the Human: Transhumanist Negotiations and Posthuman Instantiations in Aldoux Huxley’s Brave New World and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

“…18 Most telling for the post/transhuman negotiation is the fifth part of the sextet which envisions transhuman subjects inhabiting a derelict world alongside cloned posthuman subjects devolved to a secondary, subservient position. Inspired by the "cognitive novum" 19 of science fiction, the novel goes beyond the requirements of the genre to describe a present grounded in history, already belonging to a distant past, and instead chooses to accommodate technological innovations within a realm of future which "has, however incompletely, arrived at or sedimented in a present that therefore can no longer develop any clear vision of a future different from itself," 20 with the visions of posthuman assimilated as an immediate reality which concerns all subjects, participants in the ontological creation of now as already lived, its immediacy and sense of urgency foretelling the dreaded encounter with the absolute other.…”

“…32 As Halberstam and Livingston state, humanity in its evolution has widely engaged with policies of domestication and hierarchization of difference within the human, according to different variables of race, class and gender so, when confronted with the possibility of emerging posthumanity, their response might be a continued attempt to "absolutize difference between the human and the nonhuman." 33 Distilled from the fear of simulacra, constructed at "the very edge of semantic availability," 34 the posthuman comes to be regarded as spectral humanity, a degraded version that escapes our control only to savagely ruin the foundation of our prideful celestial conquests. To control it is to control fear, to exercise divine authority over a being able to conquer its creator, Prometheus unbound feared by the gods who are willing to keep it regulated and dumbfounded, a silent consciousness as proof of the wobbly grounds of humanity's reign.…”