14
Posthumanism

Abstract

The year’s work in posthumanism includes both surveys of the field and publications that contribute significantly to posthumanist thought by examining processes and practices that call the singularity of the human into question. If we were to think of the principal strands of posthumanist thought that dominated publications in 2023, then human embodiment, environmentalism, and care-beyond-the-human, appearing in multiple collections and essays, would be clear choices. This review is divided into four key sections that consider how such strands play out in a range of disciplinary contexts in work published across 2023: 1. Surveys and Elaborations, which considers comprehensive accounts of the posthumanist school of thought and works that contribute to specific posthumanist themes; 2. Posthumanism in Literature and Culture, which considers the continuing interest in the literary and cultural enunciations of the posthuman, particularly fiction and art; 3. Posthumanism and the Anthropocene, which considers posthumanism’s intersections with environmental thought; and 4. Posthumanism and Care, which examines work on theorizations of care in which non-human and other-than-human care figure prominently.

1. Surveys and Elaborations

2023 saw the publication of several surveys of the field, speaking to the ongoing desire to map the precise borders and limits of the field of posthumanism. There also appeared work that elaborated specific themes and concerns, such as feedback loops or prostheses, that have informed posthumanist thought by blurring the inside/outside borders of the human body.

Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau’s edited collection, Mapping the Posthuman, is organized, in their words, around ‘four […] mythical aspects of the posthuman that continue to shape the idea of the human in our technological modernity’ (p. 9). These are: ELIZA, the software program of the 1960s; Anansi, the African demi-god; R.U.R, the first exhibition of robots; and ‘Anansi Reprised’. In Part I, ‘ELIZA’, N. Katherine Hayles’s contribution argues that non-living forms, including computational media of today, are in an assemblage with the human. For Hayles, the rise of such an assemblage calls for an acknowledgement of the agency of the nonhuman, and a reciprocity of attention towards the nonhuman. Kenny K. N. Chow’s essay focuses on the key phenomenon and process of the feedback loop, arguing that ‘feedback loops between humans and technologies prevail at multiple levels, from the cognitive to the socio-technological’ (p. 63). Later, Chow offers numerous examples of such feedback loops, from games such as Pokémon Go and everyday devices/technologies such as data-visualization systems. Chow’s essay reinforces the arguments of the cybernetic theories of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Autopoiesis and Cognition [1979]) and the early work of Hayles (How We Became Posthuman [1999]), regarding human ontology as enmeshed in a feedback loop with its environment. Part II, ‘Anansi’, consists of essays that are interested in the identity politics involved when humans enmesh with technology. Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal’s essay on the racial aspects of technogenesis argues that the pace of human evolution can be measured by the rate of innovation and technological change rather than through the slow pace of natural selection. Lizzie O’Shea’s essay focuses on workers and workers’ rights in the age of rapid technological developments. Other essays of note in this section include Stephen Oram’s speculation on the ways in which techno-avatars of humans could live on after the death of the human person.

Part III, ‘R.U. Radius’, returns to the body–machine assemblage. Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal look at what they call ‘maternal technologies’ such as artificial wombs and nanny robots. With these technologies, they argue, our intercorporeality is made of other human bodies as well as technologies. In Part IV, ‘Anansi, Reprised’, Carolyn Lau’s contribution examines the future of posthuman storytelling (that involves humans, nonhumans, and machines). In the final section of the volume, Part V, ‘Potnia Theron’, Sherryl Vint considers Adam Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series, while Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska attempt a multispecies ecology of the Baltic Sea, with due attention to the massive environmental pollution and detritus that define the waterscape now. Francesca Ferrando and Debashis Banerji’s essay moves in a new direction: towards posthuman spirituality, which ‘leads to a state of consciousness, which may be approached as the transcendence of the human in toto, which is to say as a condition that exceeds and precedes humanhood’ (p. 256).

Hamilton and Lau’s wide-ranging collection will serve as a useful if advanced introduction to multiple aspects of posthuman thought: spirituality in the age of technology, narrative, multispecies ecologies, ageing, and others. Most of the essays continue to treat the human–machine interface as a foundational aspect of the posthumanization of the human. Hamilton and Lau’s volume is a significant contribution to posthumanist thought because it includes essays that examine how social identities—whether of workers (class), mothers (gender), or racial groups (race)—are complicated by the human–machine assemblage and therefore does not valorize technologization as simple enhancement.

Rosi Braidotti, Emily Jones, and Goda Klumbyte’s More Posthuman Glossary, published at the very end of 2022, is a key survey that expands upon Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova’s 2018  Posthuman Glossary. More Posthuman Glossary adds key concepts and ideas that have grown to occupy considerable space in posthumanist thought, including posthuman care, posthuman data, refugee prison collective, Manus prison theory (built on the experience of Behrouz Boochani at an offshore immigration detention facility in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea), and the ‘meltionary’, an ‘experimental directory that investigates different materials, metaphors and modes of melting’ (p. 80). Several terms and ideas are at the intersection of environmental studies and posthumanism. Take for instance, Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska’s entry on ‘low trophic theory’, which is an attempt to think through low-consumption (hence ‘low trophic’) patterns of specific communities as an alternative model for the rampaging human consumption that has produced the current ecological crisis. The volume’s expansion is welcome because it situates posthumanist thought in conjunction with, and often embedded within, numerous disciplinary formations, contexts, and theories, indicative of the growing influence of posthumanism upon other fields and vice versa.

Francesca Ferrando’s The Art of Being Posthuman: Who Are We in the 21st Century? is an elaboration of particular themes in posthumanist thought. Written in a style we have come to associate with her work—poetic, meditative—the book brings together philosophical and existential issues with art and aesthetics, and developments in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences. It seeks to undo anthropocentrism in favour of a relational model of the human by providing alternative models of consciousness, ontology, biological life, and other aspects of the human in which connections triumph separation, co-becoming is valorized over autonomous ontology, and cooperation precedes competition. Ferrando speaks of ‘biotic co-becoming’, where all life forms are interconnected, whether these are microbes, viruses, or humans. Interweaving this sense of co-becoming with insights into the relational nature of the body, and the anima, Ferrando insists on the coming together of corporeal consciousness (or self-consciousness) and other-consciousness (which she also expands into ‘cosmic consciousness’ in a full chapter on the subject). In Chapter 1, Ferrando treats existential dynamics as ‘co-manifesting’ (p. 29). In Chapter 2, addressing human evolutions, Ferrando notes how anthropocentrism and ideas of human uniqueness enter biological narratives. Later chapters argue for biotic co-emergences, holobionts, and affiliations that prevent us (or ought to) from seeing human life and its evolution as linear. Ferrando calls upon us to ‘unveil our cosmic constellations and realize that we are (p)art of macroscopic environments’ (p. 93). In her chapter on technological enhancement, Ferrando proposes that humans should extend ‘posthuman polite convention to (in)organic beings, granting them techno-dignity as a form of existential dignity’ (p. 128). The book also thinks through the key debates on moral and social enhancements of the human. Overall, a strong ethical vision about response-ability (a favourite posthuman term) and ecology pervades this book.

Christine Daigle and Matt Hayler’s useful edited collection, Posthumanism in Practice, brings together essays on science and technology, art, and education, to demonstrate how posthumanism works in practice. In the section on science and technology, Stuart Murray, in his analysis of prosthetics via the art-engineering project on ‘disabled hands’ at the University of Leeds, notes that the ‘production of specifically disabled prosthetics created precisely the complex overdetermined and unpredictable processes and objects-as-knowledge’ (p. 28). A later essay, by Steve Klee and Kirsten McKenzie, describes an experiment where volunteers were called upon to imagine the types of human form that could, hypothetically, fit different planets with varying conditions. The experiment attempts, Klee and McKenzie argue, to show the multiple possibilities of human embodiment and human evolution, if humanity is forced to do so. Aaron Bradshaw, examining Parkinson’s disease research, notes that recent studies show a ‘link [from] the dysfunction of the nervous system characteristic of this illness to […] to non-human actors, and to other organ systems in the body’ (p. 31). For Bradshaw, this ‘enrolment of non-human actors in its development strongly resonates with a posthuman understanding of material life in that it decentres human biology as the locus of disease—and therefore of treatment’ (p. 33). Bryan Lim’s essay argues for rethinking the ‘human–microbial relationality’ (p. 44). Lim admits that ‘our ability to become kin with pathogens’, as called for by posthumanists, is ‘in light of the full knowledge that they may very well hurt us [and] thus hinges on our willingness to reconsider our relationship to death’ (p. 51).

The section on art and curation begins with Lin Charlston’s essay on a plant-based sympoietic art practice which involved burying her arm in soil in an empathetic gesture towards plants so as to ‘transform the human domestication of trivial plant life to the active formation of cooperative alliances with significant non-human actors, thus contributing to a wider posthuman shift’ (p. 80). Such alliances destabilize the centrality of the human. Madaleine Trigg turns to dough, where ‘kneading these materials actively reveals the agencies of non-human bodies’ (p. 95). For Trigg, using dough as an art medium allows her to sense her body differently:

Dressing my body in dough envelops it in an elastic, second skin. The texture and tone of this body echoes my folds of flesh. I can’t tell where I begin and the dough ends. Slowly I start to move around, feeling the weight of the dough displace me. I’m unstable. Circling is such a simple movement, but this load makes me falter, fumble, and fold in on myself. Wearing me down. I try to resist but it is futile. I’m forced to the ground, crumbling as my body is completely covered. (p. 102, emphasis in original)

Marie-Andrée Robitaille looks at circus artists (she herself is one) and, working with foil and other materials, attempts to think through the role and function of human bodies. In the later sections, she also examines the intersection of the circus and the museum. The museum is also the subject of Deborah Lawler-Dormer and Christopher John Müller’s essay (focusing on the Museum of Applied Arts and Science), which argues that while these places are the ‘repositories of past technologies, they also collect past visions of the future and thus expose “the gap” that separates what we imagine and believe we are creating from what we are actually creating’ (p. 149). Hélia Marçal and Rebecca Gordon’s essay on conservation calls for a posthumanist approach that ‘fosters collective engagement through collective caring’ (p. 174). Poppy Wilde focuses on video games, specifically Beyond Good and Evil, noting that game avatars are posthuman and ‘avatar “characteristics” are read, understood, and enacted, and they are all dependent on the qualities that the gamer themselves brings, inscribes, and embodies through them’ (p. 136).

In the final section, on education, Debra Harwood’s essay addresses early childhood and research via the artwork of Susan Quinn, and calls for an end to human exceptionalism in the training of children. Laryssa Paulino de Queiroz Sousa and Rosane Rocha Pessoa, using examples from their classrooms, show how new modes of language pedagogy have evolved. This pedagogy was marked by an attention not just to ‘grammatical and/or trivial microlessons (i.e. based on the notion of neutrality of language)’ but to ‘critical microlessons’ about the family, the household, sports, and other everyday domains (p. 204). This focus enabled them to examine the structural inequalities in their society. Stefan Herbrechter ponders the pedagogical implications of post-anthropocentrism. He begins by stating: ‘humanism fails humans (and non-humans) in the classroom by establishing hierarchies and exclusions: it claims to teach humans to become (more) human by embodying a universalist ideal which it claims is shared by all humans and which differentiates them, or makes them unique and exceptional to other (non-human) animals and machines’ (p. 214). Teaching the students to overcome their anthropocentric bias, says Herbrechter, ought to be the key tenet.

Surveys such as Hamilton and Lau’s and Daigle and Hayler’s cover a wide range of topics and themes in posthumanist thought and therefore provide multiple points of entry into the school, via art, pedagogy, critical race studies, and ethics. They are useful as both introductions to the field and critical appraisals of the school. Ferrando’s work has a clear agenda: she chooses instances from science, art, and philosophy to foreground relationality and co-becoming. Others, like More Posthuman Glossary, are important contributions because they define and critique new developments in the school but also map a growing lexicon in the field. The essays on art in the collections underscore the fact that artists see posthumanism’s insights, particularly on relationality, boundary-blurring or boundary-shifting and entangled ontologies, and of course technology’s intersections with the body, as useful modes of rethinking questions of matter (bodily and other) and the relations between and across different kinds of matter.

2. Posthumanisms in Literature and Culture

Literary and cultural texts, with their interest in new configurations of the human, motivated several studies in 2023. A focus on the literary is a key thread throughout this review, as for instance in the literary case studies used in Amelia DeFalco’s Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care, considered in a later section on posthumanism and care. This section on literature and culture focuses specifically on works that deal with literary texts, films, and television shows. Cultural forms enable a deeper understanding of the complexities of posthuman thought, even as they point to troubling aspects such as techno-dominance and the real or potential loss of humanness.

Carmen Laguarta-Bueno’s Representing (Post)Human Enhancement Technologies in Twenty-First Century US Fiction, published at the end of 2022, discusses three major novelists, using one representative novel from each of them: Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013), and Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016). After an opening chapter in which she surveys the antecedents of critical posthumanism in transhumanism, cyberpunk, and popular posthumanism, Laguarta-Bueno examines Powers’s novel, in which the biotechnological quest for the happiness gene is the central theme. Laguarta-Bueno argues that several transhumanist concerns and aspirations play out in the character of Thomas Kurton the genomicist. These include overcoming the limitations of the human form and the quest for technological means of improving the human condition, such as the condition of happiness and well-being. She concludes that his metafictional techniques lead us to ‘mistrust the transhumanist totalizing narrative on the biotechnological pursuit of happiness’ (p. 67). Techno-utopias are seen to produce a ‘disembodiment and dehumanization’ and eventually ‘threaten human freedom and privacy’ (p. 68). In Zero K, Don DeLillo initially suggests that cryonics is an escape from the human condition. However, as the novel proceeds, it seems to suggest quite the opposite, argues Laguarta-Bueno: ‘rather than turning to life extension technologies as a way of leaving behind our problems and responsibilities […] Zero K argues for the need to learn to cope with our problems and responsibilities in the present and to accept illness and death as integral parts of being human’ (p. 161).

Carolyn Lau’s Posthuman Subjectivity in the Novels of J. G. Ballard is a detailed study of one of the more complicated authors in the postmodern/posthuman canon. Lau opens with the statement that Ballard’s work is marked by ‘science and technology in fiction and fiction about science and technology’ (p. 13). Ballard’s interest, remarks Lau, lies in how ‘the sudden onset of catastrophe in the everyday is a moment of revelation’ (p. 16). There is, in Ballard, also an emphasis on showing how the individual is connected to the environment, and she lists ‘scientific pornography’, ‘technarchy’, and ‘interspecies intimacy’ as embodying posthuman interactions with the Other (p. 17). Reading Ballard’s 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, Lau notes his interest in forces that dehumanize, and human bodies that endure in the face of dehumanization. Turning to The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Ballard’s earlier experimental novel without a proper plot sequence or resolution (Ballard called it a ‘condensed novel’), Lau notes that Ballard focuses on the fictionalizing of reality so that we only encounter and experience ‘extreme metonymy’ (p. 77) wherein bodies are themselves events or spectacle. In Crash (1973), Ballard explores, says Lau, the chaos underlying our lives, while also employing the ‘pornographic tradition as a political critique of the extractive and utilitarian logic of market rationality in advanced capitalism’ (p. 81). In order to do so, the ‘association of sexual appeal with beautiful, idealised bodies is overturned’ (p. 96) and a ‘new sexuality’ emerges, one built around scarred, mutilated, and broken bodies. The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) and Rushing to Paradise (1994) are fantasy fictions, and focus on the making of a new subjectivity, according to Lau, through an engagement with the ‘species-other’ (p. 115). Embodied posthuman subjectivity here is a ‘transversal subjectivity that crosses stratified species boundaries’ (p. 128). In the later novels (Super-Cannes [2000] and Millennium People [2003]), the new technologized, capitalized, and informatized social systems no longer shock: they have become normalized.

Chantelle Bayes’s Reimagining Urban Nature: Literary Imaginaries for Posthuman Cities is an ecocritical study of Australian urbanisms, with attention to five spaces: houses, gardens, bodies of water, public parks, and streets. In urban-centred literature, Bayes sees the emergence of new forms of subjectivity around the nonhuman–human relationship. A reimagining of the posthuman city requires that we see it as ‘a complex entanglement of hybrid nonhuman, cultural, and technological entities’ (pp. 28–29). For Bayes, the literary text enables us to see how the nonhuman nature of the city is represented, even as such creative imaginings intersect with ‘critical research practices’ and force us to ‘reconsider how knowledge can be produced in urban ecocriticism’ (p. 4). Bayes’s reading of Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists (2011) and Fiona MacGregor’s Indelible Ink (2010) argues that gardens are spaces of healing in which the characters ‘reimagine themselves in relation to the world’ through what Bayes, following Donna Haraway, calls ‘co-mingling’ (p. 124). Next, turning to bodies of water, Bayes adapts the work of Astrid Neimanis in order to examine Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002), Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl (2015), and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), showing how in these novels ‘waters are refigured as agents of change and as co-constructors of the city’ (p. 158). In her chapter on streets and parks, Bayes reads Meg Mundell’s Black Glass (2011) and, once again, Wright’s The Swan Book, through the now-established figure of the flâneur. For Bayes, the ‘flâneur reimagined as cyborg, dishuman, and animal can work to create new narratives of the city as a multispecies community and work to make sense of the contemporary city, particularly during a time of climactic and geopolitical change’ (p. 197). But Bayes also brings in another set of what she calls the dishuman, ‘the animal flâneur and the nomad’ (p. 198), all of which destabilize the traditional geographies and mobilities of the city. Bayes’s book reinforces the fact that literary texts have been reimagining the human for some time now.

Turning towards a different medium, cinema, Missy Molloy, Pansy Duncan, and Claire Henry’s volume, Screening the Posthuman, is built on the thesis that much of contemporary cinema demonstrates

a preoccupation with forms of being that test the limits of conventional understandings of the human by emphasizing our entanglement in broader biological, technological, and/or social worlds [and] a heterogenous body of twenty-first-century films that confront evolving conceptualizations of the ‘human’. (pp. 1–2)

The critical posthumanist approach, they suggest, is about ‘yet-unrealized possibilities’ (p. 6), and ‘posthuman cinema’ sets out to explore these possibilities. Chapter 1, by all three authors, is a survey of the genre, and outlines the intersection of posthuman cinema with other genres, particularly its overlap with horror and sci-fi. They note that such cinema presents a deep ambivalence ‘between fear and desire, excitement and anxiety’ (p. 50). Molloy’s chapter on posthuman apocalypse in cinema (or posthuman disaster cinema, as she calls it) focuses on various forms of exploitation that intersect: race, class, and gender. Examining Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), Lisa Jackson’s Biidaaban: First Light (2018), Lynette Wallworth’s Collisions (2016), and others, Molloy argues that catastrophe in these films is represented as ongoing and part of the everyday and the normal. In Chapter 3, Molloy turns to gender and technosexuality through a study of women characters in posthuman cinema. Noting how many such films gender their cyborgs, Molloy argues that the construction of ‘technofetishistic synthetic women ultimately reinforce[s] the human/nonhuman boundary that cyborg theories aim to undermine’, because they remain ‘residually humanistic’ (p. 144). Henry’s chapter on queer posthumanism studies Being John Malkovich (1999), Possessor (2020), L.A. Zombie (2010), and other films from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. Henry argues that ‘the figure of the cyborg underpins the respective analog and digital queering of heteronormative humanist selfhood’ in the gay zombie, the monster, and other representations which merge the posthuman and the queer (p. 150). For Duncan and Molloy in their co-authored chapter on the crip and the posthuman in films such as Hable con ella/Talk to Her (2002) and Sound of Metal (2009), these films subvert ableist conventions although they remain ambivalent about the ‘convergence of posthumanism and disability’ (p. 183), especially because, as in the case of Sound of Metal, there is a clear ‘classic humanist suspicion of technology’ (p. 183). The volume is a welcome addition to both film studies and posthuman studies because its content points to the layering of figures such as zombies and revenants within the tropes and rhetorics of popular culture.

Chengcheng You’s 2023 journal article on Naoko Awa’s fairy tales, published in Children's Literature in Education, argues that cross-species storytelling enables Awa to focus on nonhuman materialities. For You, Awa’s theme of border-crossing exhibits an empathetic anthropomorphism whereby ‘anthropomorphism widens empathic access to an alternative subjective reality differently situated from our own’ (unpaginated). Awa’s fiction, You writes, offers ‘an ethical stance of not exploiting animals as resources for human consumption’.

Adele Guyton’s article, ‘Ways of Looking: The Composite Novel and Posthuman Community in Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13’, published in C21 Literature, argues that McGregor’s 2017 novel—lacking a clear story arc and composed of vignettes about human and nonhuman characters—is an attempt to envision a non-anthropocentric, and therefore posthuman, community. According to Guyton, there is a tension inherent in a narrator identified in the text as a collective ‘they’, that ‘implies that this narrative voice is not a “god’s-eye” or “bird’s-eye” view […] but something human’ (p. 13). That is, since there is no clear individual human narrator on many occasions in the novel, which also posits a collective ‘they’ as the narrator, it becomes difficult to identify the perspective from which the events are being narrated. In short, for Guyton, there is no monolithic human nature in the text. Guyton’s reading of the novel draws out the theme of multiplicity that, in posthumanist thought, defines the human.

Priscilla Layne’s article in The Drama Review on the performance art of Simone Dede Ayivi notes how, by depicting the death of animals (particularly the red squirrel, a native of German forests and a national icon), Ayivi unpacks the myth of human ownership of the space. Ayivi, argues Layne, seeks answers to four related and troubling questions: ‘Who are the […] native inhabitants […] of a space? What violence is necessary to make nature fit within a national framework? How might nationalist fervor negatively affect all aspects of life? And to what extent does the maintenance of the nation state always come at the expense of those who are excluded?’ (p. 86, emphasis in original). Ayivi, writes Layne, highlights the racialization of animals, and underscores ‘the narrative before the human’ (p. 99, emphasis in original).

Three further articles from 2023 examine the intersections of posthumanism and gender in literature and culture. Simran Mittal’s essay on Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape (2015) and The Island of Lost Girls (2015) argues that figures like Meiji-Smaug in the duology violate the principles of gender and of the human as well. Mittal proposes that sex and gender are no longer identity markers in the novels. What we see instead is an ‘intra-active, agential, and posthuman identity’ which is ‘post-anthropocentric, post-dualist, and post-humanist’ (p. 8). For Mittal, this is an escape from both gender and human(ist) identity-making.

Jenny Bonnevier’s journal article, ‘In the Womb of Utopia: Feminist Science Fiction, Reproductive Technology, and the Future’, focuses on the canonical speculative fiction authors from the late twentieth century, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy. Bonnevier proposes that reproductive technology is used by each of these authors as a trope to speak of a desirable social order. Arguing that reproductive technologies are enmeshed with ‘cultural technologies’ such as kinship, gender, and family, Bonnevier notes that the changed position of males and the biological fact of motherhood are central to the ways in which these authors attempt to reimagine the social order. Bonnevier, however, refuses to give primary role or importance to the technology per se, arguing that ‘while reproductive technologies have the potential to change understandings as well as realities of reproduction and of family and gender constructions, this potential is not inherent in the reproductive procedures themselves’ (p. 87). Bonnevier treats such technologies in Le Guin, Russ, and Piercy as primarily cultural in nature, and therefore located within structures such as the family—structures that the authors interrogate.

Yasemin Özkent’s essay on the Netflix series Love, Death, & Robots (2019–), notes that, in the series, ‘the vast majority of female characters presented in the future vision do not attempt to change dominant approaches or empower women’ (p. 8). In the representations of feminized and female cyborgs, she argues, ‘patriarchal violence is still a threat to the posthuman [and] the vast majority of female characters in Love, Death & Robots are … presented with their objectified naked bodies’ (p. 10). But a certain anti-humanism also emerges in the series, Özkent proposes. Robots and AI (including an artificially intelligent yogurt in one episode) represent a criticism of the myth of human supremacy, and hence human destruction is a consistent subtext, if not a theme, she writes. Taken together, these three essays contribute to posthumanist thought through their analysis of literary and cultural texts in which human ontology, the human–nonhuman relationship, and gender are all opened up to multiple possibilities.

3. Posthumanism and the Anthropocene

Posthumanism’s continuing intersections with environmentalism and the planetary anthropogenic crisis have produced interesting collections and essays in 2023. Posthumanism contributes to studies of the Anthropocene because it suggests that the current planetary crisis emerges from a lack of understanding of ontologies and identities. Its insistence that relationality and not isolation, connection rather than autonomy, define human–nonhuman and living–nonliving identities intersects with environmentalism’s emphasis on symbiotic relations.

In S. E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė’s edited collection Life in the Posthuman Condition: Critical Responses to the Anthropocene, Part I examines ‘Anthropocene Theory’, and opens with Bruce Clarke’s essay on the Gaia hypothesis. Clarke notes that in sharp contrast to ideas of human development or progress, a Gaian vision is non-linear. For Clarke, the Gaian vision is of ‘planetary solidarity’, wherein human existence acknowledges its ‘dependence upon the flourishing of the biosphere altogether’ (p. 28). As in the case of the works on literature and culture examined above, Małgorzata Sbugiera’s analysis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992, 1993, 1996) argues that such texts are crucial because they offer ‘alternative cultural narratives, and make worlds beyond human scale and perspective’ (p. 34). Two plays, Aya Ogawa’s Ludic Proxy (2015), which links two nuclear disasters, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and Yvette Nolan’s The Unplugging (2013), which explores the consequences of the loss of electric power in winter, are the subject of Patricia Ybarra’s essay. Ybarra argues that both plays are about care, and a possible future where connections across species and life forms are more important than the historical legacies of anthropocentrism (and anthropogenic disaster). Mintautas Gutauskas turns to the phenomenon of waste. Waste takes the ‘form’ of an ‘under-the-feetness’ that ‘demands a course of action—waste needs to be tidied up, taken somewhere further outside the field of attention’ (p. 74). Gutauskas argues that ‘ecological consciousness […] realises that waste does not disappear beyond the horizon but wanders uncontrollably on the planet in various different forms’ (p. 80). Such a consciousness ensures that ‘actions and social relations be interpreted through the horizon of waste, but also that the individual takes responsibility for global processes’ (p. 84).

Part II opens with Graham Harman’s essay on Helmuth Plessner, the founder of philosophical anthropology, arguing that Plessner offers a new way of examining organic life where he, Plessner, treats life as being in a special relationship with place, where the ‘hidden cores of things’ are in tension with their ‘spatio-temporally deployed qualities’ (pp. 120–21). This stance leads Harman to argue that Plessner occupies an anterior moment to Object Oriented Ontology, which has marked much posthumanist thought. Anna Barcz and Michael Cronin argue in favour of an expanded notion of ‘translation’, proposing that we seek ‘posthuman modes of translation as engaging forms of communication with and between non-human animals […] to merge ideas on interspecies communication with eco-translation to anticipate how species may respond to climate catastrophe in a telling way’ (p. 131). Jussi Parikka’s subject is Studio Tomás Saraceno and its work with spider webs. Parikka argues that the Studio ‘explores the multiple scales of webs to understand the operations that, while becoming visually tangible as sculptural works, also capture a range of discourses circulating in contemporary art, scientific models, visual diagrams and speculative architecture’ (p. 151). Rejecting the usual assumption that the web is a theoretical construct, Parikka, after examining the Studio’s installation artworks, proposes that ‘besides the rhetorical figure of the web as one of connections and relations, the materials are dynamic components that demonstrate a sense of potentials of built and grown space that shift from animal communication to diagrammatic and spatial vocabularies’ (p. 160). Agnė Narušytė’s essay revolves around the work of Aurelija Maknyte. Maknyte’s art includes filming beavers. She maps the landscape as transformed by the creatures and does not try to manage either the animals or the land. Narušytė argues that Maknyte is ‘suggesting we should see nature not from a distant vantage point, but from the perspective of beavers’ (p. 184).

Opening Part III are two essays, by Cary Wolfe and John Ó Maoilearca respectively, that return us to theoretical frames for posthumanism. Wolfe’s essay, on the question of ‘the animal’ via Bruno Latour, systems theory, and the work of Donna Haraway, evaluates autopoiesis and sympoiesis as modes of rethinking the nature of the environment and the human–nonhuman relationship within it. Maoilearca’s essay, on the ‘materialist turn’ in contemporary thought, observes that ‘whatever number of emergent, vital and non-reducible properties are allowed to matter, the idea of spirit cannot be added to the list. Non-reduced materiality alone prevails, while a transcendent, Platonist, notion of spirit […] remains the conceptual outsider to be either eliminated or simply ignored (p. 224, emphasis in original). Maoilearca argues for covariances and the necessity of seeing the spiritual life placed on the same continuum as the material one. Thomas Nail’s essay, continuing his earlier work on the philosophy of movement wherein he has proposed that bodies and identities are the effect of the flows of matter and forces, suggests that we see movement as a ‘more ontologically primary concept than life or vital forces’ (p. 243). Nail argues that ‘In the philosophy of movement, neither humans nor other beings have any privileged role in the world. We can study emergent motion patterns at any scale without ontologically privileging one scale over another. In the philosophy of movement, politics is the study of relations and their transformation’ (p. 253). Proposing the ‘kinocene’ as an alternative to the Anthropocene, Nail argues that it is the movement of energy—or its obstruction—that creates the crisis of today: ‘people and things moving around more than ever, this is actually causing a net decrease in the circulation of energy on the planet as a whole. By contracting the flow of energy and movement on Earth, certain human groups are triggering a cascade of further reduced movement and hastening mass extinction’ (p. 257). Wilmer and Žukauskaitė’s collection is a specialized introduction to posthumanism and the Anthropocene. Its theoretical essays range from studies of waste to movement, and, in juxtaposition with essays on art, are incisive insights into the state of the earth—examined from multiple perspectives such as the philosophy of movement, animal studies, and waste/discard studies, among others.

Sebastian Egholm Lund’s article ‘Underground Climate’, published in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, begins with nineteenth-century Europe’s fascination with the underground. Lund proposes that the ‘desire to control the climate system by artificialisation and insulation begins to be speculatively acted out in the material and symbolic carving out of the new underground’ (p. 329). The underground, says Lund, was a fictive and a material site. The underground was also, in some cases, a utopia, ‘based on climate engineering but also on the negation of all things organic—chirping birds, soaring sunshine, and germinating plants’ (p. 338). Driven underground by climate disasters, the subterranean was imagined as a climate refuge, or a place where the artificialization of climate could be possible.

Antje Jacobs, Steven Devleminck, and Karin Hannes, in their 2023 report, published in Social Inclusion, focus on their study of five biotech art projects that won the Bio Art & Design Award (2018–20): Microbiocene: Ancient Ooze to Future Myths, CMD: Experiments in Bio‐Algorithmic‐Politics, Funkee: Fungal Supercoating, Fur_Tilize, and Becoming a Sentinel Species. In all these projects, they argue, one can see a ‘foregrounding of the connection between humans and other‐than‐humans, nature, and culture’ (p. 54). Bio Art also draws attention to the misuse of animals, the excessive pollution of our planet—which affects human and nonhuman life forms—and the overall degradation of life itself. The artists also duly underscore the multispecies nature of life and the planet, thus providing what Jacobs et al. call ‘epistemic potential’ for recasting collaborative projects by incorporating the other-than human perspectives (p. 62).

4. Posthumanism and Care

With its emphasis on planetary consciousness, connections, and symbiosis, posthumanism’s turn towards an understanding of care as a method of living in and with the world was always expected. Caring for the other-than-human while living with the non-living has become in the last few years a tenet within posthumanist thought, as key works in 2023 attest.

Jess Dillard-Wright, Jamie B. Smith, Jane Hopkins‐Walsh, Eva Wills, Brandon B. Brown, and Emmanuel C. Tedjasukmana’s article on posthuman nursing opens with the statement that ‘nursing harbors significant transhumanist anxiety, including the notion that robots will assume the work of nursing, the idea that posthumanism demands the end of the human, the concern that ethics do not exist in posthumanism, the conceit that posthumanism offers a workaround for death’ (p. 1). After a survey of posthumanist thought—which, one assumes, the readers of nursing journals are not familiar with, because there is really no other reason to provide such a survey—the authors move towards an understanding of posthumanism in care, proposing that ‘nursing care occurs in complex relational networks that involve not only human actors, but also more‐than‐human actors including technologies, microorganisms, and environments’ (p. 5). They argue that ‘even when care is directed at the human, care involves the more/other/non/unhuman domain at the same time, serving as a tool for navigating intricate networks and shaping the ways we create or limit our environments’ (p. 6). They see such a posthuman care as affirmative and worldbuilding.

Another essay on posthumanism and nursing, by Annie-Claude Laurin and Patrick Martin, also begins with a survey of posthumanist thought. When nursing is viewed through the lens of posthumanist thought, they argue, carers come to be seen as ‘ontologically relational beings—embodied and embedded in an ontologically polyvocal environment—political concerns’ (p. 8). Focusing on mediation and power structures, they propose new nursing principles and practices. Clinics then would be places where ‘hierarchies are deconstructed and renegotiated by all those who share the clinics' collective mission, a place where care could be provided on a small scale, in a collective teleology aimed at the well‐being of the community instead of mercantile aims that divert the offer of care and services away from the needs of the population’ (p. 9).

Allison Jeffrey and Holly Thorpe’s journal article considers experiences of sport, fitness, and well-being during the pandemic from a feminist materialist point of view. As their research progressed, they report, they found that several of the individuals whom they studied experienced increased vulnerability. The researchers tried to situate themselves during the interview process by demonstrating empathy and understanding, and foregrounding their recognition that they were all in it together during the pandemic. This emphasis, the authors note, heightened the experience of the research project as ‘intensely emotional’ (p. 7). The researchers also discovered that ‘digital intimacies’ often extended beyond the Zoom calls and after the final write-up. Jeffrey and Thorpe highlight feelings of ‘connection, empathy, sadness, grief, and worry’ that the research engendered, and thereby point to the affective foundations of care (p. 9).

Amelia DeFalco’s Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care is a study of what she terms ‘posthuman care fiction’, that ‘depicts more-than-human relations in ways that expose, disorient, and often destabilize the ethical hierarchies endemic to anthropocentric ontologies’ (p. 3). DeFalco cautions that ‘anthropocentric assumptions about what qualifies as care can have grave consequences since perceived incapacities to care can disqualify one from human status with all the privileges that that status entails’ (p. 5). Reading fiction such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), DeFalco argues for ‘a dynamic model of care that addresses all creatures, human and more-than, as mutually constituting, vulnerable, embodied, and embedded beings’ (p. 21). Such a model, with its emphasis on the relational rather than the hierarchic, is posthumanist and environmentalist. In Chapter 1, DeFalco reads Louise Hall’s novel Speak (2015), the film Robot and Frank (2012), and the television programme Real Humans (2012). These texts, she notes, call into question assumptions about the very model of caring as strictly or solely human. In Chapter 2, DeFalco examines human-to-feral connections and care in Eva Hornung’s novel Dog Boy (2009), Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal: A Project for Future Children (2009), and the film Under the Skin (2013). Arguing that the tactile is central to these connections and the subsequent development of care relations, DeFalco suggests that touch may very well be the source of an affirmative possibility of becoming. Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) are the subjects of Chapter 3. Here DeFalco’s interest lies in care for the biotechnologically created, near-humans who are disposable ‘objects’ and whose purpose in life—engineered into them, not arrived at agentially—is to serve humans. What, DeFalco asks, should be our ethical ethical obligations towards such creations/creatures? Chapter 4 turns to critical race theory and Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011), and is animated by one theme: ‘the racialization of disposability and the speculative response to such disposability offered by Black (critical and fictional) literature of posthuman care’ (p. 133). In order to ‘decolonize’ care, DeFalco argues, one should be alert to a different model of care: ‘Care in the wake is disaster care; it is care practiced amidst constant threat and debilitation, care practiced in the knowledge of one’s precarity, disposability, “maimability” […] bareness, negation, non-status’ (p. 149). DeFalco’s comprehensive study extends the work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa in Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (2017). Alongside the oft-cited Rosi Braidotti, Cecilia Åsberg, Stefan Herbrechter, Astrid Neimanis, and others in posthumanism, DeFalco’s and Bellacasa’s works define a future course for posthuman care studies.

Margrit Shildrick’s Visceral Prostheses: Somatechnics and Posthuman Embodiment, published in 2022 and released in paperback towards the end of 2023, also offers interesting insights into posthumanism and care. Shildrick’s book takes as its point of departure the contemporary condition where ‘a prosthesis, whether high or low-tech, becomes integrated into selfhood’ (p. 4). Framing the theme of prosthesis through disability, organ transplantation, and microbiology, Shildrick argues that

each of us carries a variety of non-self, effectively prosthetic, cells and sub-cellular forms of life from multiple sources. Where prostheses once simply marked rehabilitation to normative practice or appearance, they now indicate transformative possibilities that both limit and extend the nature of the embodied self. (p. 2)

This means, writes Shildrick, that we have to rethink the ‘philosophical and cultural meanings and significances of prosthetic embodiment’ since established definitions of ‘prosthesis’ are no longer valid (p. 7). Phenomena such as micro-chimerism, notes Shildrick, undermine the ‘fundamental tenet of immunology that self and non-self are fully distinguished at the cellular level’ (p. 8). With prosthetic technology, especially of the organic variety, we experience a sense of ‘inherent hybridity’, she argues (p. 45). In her chapter on the disabled body and prostheses, Shildrick shows how the ambiguous experiences of prostheses in the lives of disabled people raise questions about the integrity of the embodied self. Shildrick examines the wide variety of prostheses, from wheelchairs to targeted muscle reinnervation (p. 33). She proposes that we see transplantation as an instance of ‘concorporeality that would include the hybridity of the heart transplant recipient and donor organ’ (p. 58, emphasis in original). In her chapter on microbiologies, Shildrick argues that since all bodies are assemblages with ‘countless organic others’ (p. 71), the traditional model of the immune system, founded on the self/non-self distinction, is no longer valid. In the case of micro-chimerism, where ‘a small but significant presence of so-called non-self human cells coexist[s] with a dominant population of self cells in the same body’ (p. 85), we once again see that the self/non-self model collapses (there are cases, she notes, where the DNA of a particular system in a body is different from the DNA of the rest of the body). Transcorporeal cell mobility also instantiates this blurring of the distinction of the self and non-self. In her chapter on dementia, Shildrick focuses on emotional care robots and assistance animals, both of which she characterizes as prostheses. Acknowledging the culture-based complications (the cultural sensitivity of the robots), she notes that we need to accept that prosthetic others may be experienced ‘first as external entities […] but also as the visceral presence of otherness within’ (p. 121). In the final section, on posthuman embodiment, Shildrick notes that in cases of death, organ donation, or life support, we can see the emergence of an ‘ontological and epistemological quagmire’ with the proxies and human–machine assemblages and thus trouble the understanding of both death and life. Visceral Prostheses addresses thorny biopolitical and bioethical questions, and points to the gaps in Western epistemologies and thought with the advent of new biotech and discoveries in medical biology. Shildrick’s work sets the agenda for future research in posthumanism and adjunct fields, including the philosophy of biology, feminist philosophy, and bioethics.

Like DeFalco’s book, Shildrick’s too underlines the relational nature of the human. Through her numerous examples that demonstrate how the human is constituted through the incorporation of other life forms, technologies, and the non-living, Shildrick adds to the demolition project of posthumanism as it takes apart prevalent myths of the autonomous, self-contained human. DeFalco sees instances in literature where the recognition of such relationality and symbiotic life generates new visions of human responsibility and alternatives such as human care of/for the nonhuman. Shildrick’s work provides the contextual evidence for the visions that DeFalco traces.

Conclusion

The works published in 2023 advance the posthumanist vision and approach, especially in the domains of Anthropocene studies and care studies. The explication of literary and cultural texts remains a key mode of enabling this advance. Astute readings of fiction in works by DeFalco, Ferrando, Lau, and the others surveyed here demonstrate that literature has continuously engaged with questions of the human form, the relational nature of humans, and the role played by humans in reorganizing the planet in ways that have been detrimental to several other life forms. However, as the critical works surveyed here show, literature has also called for a redefining of the human, and for a more ethical and caring approach to the planet. Of particular import in these works is the continuing emphasis on human–nonhuman engagement—which informs human–animal studies but also care studies—because it calls for and formulates a planetary vision, of solidarity, mutuality, and care.

Books Reviewed

Journal Articles Reviewed

References