Posthumanism

JAY DAVID BOLTER

Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

The term “posthumanism” is applied to a range of contemporary theoretical positions

put forward by researchers with disciplinary backgrounds in philosophy, science
and technology studies, literary studies, critical theory, theoretical sociology, and
communication studies. For these groups, posthumanism designates a series of breaks
with foundational assumptions of modern Western culture: in particular, a new way
of understanding the human subject in relationship to the natural world in general.
Posthumanist theory claims to offer a new epistemology that is not anthropocentric
and therefore not centered in Cartesian dualism. It seeks to undermine the traditional
boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological. The postmodern
theorist Ihab Hassan coined the term and offered a seminal definition in an arti-
cle entitled "Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?" (1977).
Related terms, with their own theoretical nuances, include the transhuman and the
antihuman.
As its name suggests, a defining characteristic of posthumanism is its rejection of
traditional Western humanism. Although the term “humanism” itself may be applied to
a complex set of assumptions and disciplinary commitments developing over centuries
(from the early Renaissance to the late 20th century), posthumanist scholars focus on
a few core characteristics: above all, the notion that the proper study of man is man.
Humanism was by definition anthropocentric; humanism as a historical phenomenon
drew on a renewed and reinterpreted appreciation for the rhetoric and civilization
of Greece and Rome, in placing man (rather than God) at the center of its literary
and philosophical project. Modern science beginning in the Renaissance sought to
achieve an understanding of the natural world that depended on human powers of
observation and reason to uncover universal laws. As a Cartesian thinking subject,
man could examine the world and explain its workings with scientific detachment—as
Galileo famously put it, in the language of mathematics. This view of man as an
autonomous agent, separate from though still engaged with nature, flourished in
the Enlightenment. Scholars of posthumanism regard Darwinian biology, Marxist
economists, and Freudian psychology as preliminary indications of the breakup of this
unified Enlightened subject. Nevertheless, although the separation and elevation of
man from and over the natural world were called into question by these 19th-century
developments in biology, psychology, and economics, positivist science sought to
maintain the subject–object dichotomy even in the 20th century.

The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Robert T. Craig (Editors-in-Chief), Jefferson D. Pooley and Eric W. Rothenbuhler (Associate Editors).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect220
2 PO S T H U M A N I S M

Posthumanism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism

The era of modernist art and politics (roughly the first half of the 20th century)
could be understood as the final manifestation of the paradigm of the autonomous,
enlightened agent. By the second half of the 20th century, the various poststructuralist
and postmodern theorists were all engaged in projects of displacement. What they
sought to displace were the modernist truths: the assumptions of universally applicable
aesthetics and universally valid epistemology. Poststructuralism specifically critiqued
the structuralist analysis of language, literature, and culture. The most influential
poststructuralists included Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and
Paul de Man. Critical theorists developed postmodernism into a general theoretical
category—a development exemplified by two very different works: Jean-François
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979/1984) and Fredric Jameson’s Postmod-
ernism (1991). Lyotard’s work offered a critique of the so-called master narratives,
which he identified in the ideologies and communicative practices of the modern
period. Jameson (1991) took art and aesthetics as his starting point and argued that
postmodernism’s aesthetic characteristics could not be separated from postindustrial
economic conditions. Poststructuralism and postmodernism are critical reactions to
what are perceived as totalizing practices and rhetorics of the modern era. In each case,
the reaction was an attempt to subvert claims to unity, simplicity, or universality. Those
gestures of subversion can all be seen as laying the groundwork for what Hassan (1977)
labeled as posthuman culture. The work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, not
easily characterized either as poststructuralist or as postmodern, has also profoundly
influenced posthumanist theory.

The cyborg as posthuman subject

The most influential postmodernists were concerned largely with art, literature,
historiography, and philosophy. Their deconstructions in these domains could be seen
as necessary pre-requisites or co-requisites for the explicit posthumanism of a slightly
later group of theorists, whose work focused on techno-science and biology more than
art and literature. Donna Haraway (1991) has been a key figure in exploring the porous
character of these boundaries on the continuum machine–human–animal. She offered
the cyborg as a contemporary cultural metaphor in order to capture the ambivalent
condition of the contemporary human beings, whose bodies are open to forms of
technological modification and intervention. The metaphor invokes on the one hand
the fantasies of science fiction, where prostheses or drugs not only correct characters’
deficiencies, but may also render them stronger, faster, smarter, and in general other
than conventional human. Science fiction is often the realm of the transhuman, which
refers to a condition that is arguably an extension and intensification of traditional
humanism rather than its rejection. The “six million dollar man” is still a man in the
traditional cultural sense. Haraway’s cyborg is not merely transhuman, but posthuman,
as a rejection and a reconfiguration of the values of the traditional humanist subject.
On the other hand, the cyborg metaphor indicates that Haraway’s version of feminist
 PO S T H U M A N I S M 3

posthumanism does not reject technology as a source for the reconfiguration of

the human. With her cyborg, she seeks to maintain the tensions and possibilities of
technological mediation that can be productive even at the political level.
Haraway and other posthumanists are concerned with blurring another boundary as
well: the one between human and nonhuman animals. From their perspective, a central
feature of humanism is its insistence on an unbridgeable gap between the human and
the animal. The influential Cartesian tradition of dualism insisted that the essence of
the human was cognition and that animals were merely highly intricate machines, part
of the material world over against the world of the mind. As noted above, the insistence
on a radical division between man and animals received a series of challenges in the
19th and 20th centuries, arising principally from the Darwinian revolution in the
biological sciences, and in recent decades posthumanist thinkers have offered ever
broader theoretical assaults on the tradition. Mounting complications of the paradigm
of positivist science have led to an increased willingness to emphasize continuity
rather than separateness in the biological world. Advances in genetics and techniques
of genetic manipulation seem to provide tangible evidence of the porous quality of
barriers between species and thereby complicate the notion of species altogether. The
fact that scientists could now clone even some mammals (the famous instance was
Dolly the sheep, born in 1996) has seemed emblematic of a number of boundary issues
important to posthumanists. One of the lessons they draw from cloning and other
genetic manipulations is that it is no longer clear that “nature” set any boundaries on the
continuous spectrum of the biological. But if humans are not set apart by nature, does
even the category of the political belong exclusively to humans? Posthumanist writers
of various backgrounds have come increasingly to treat animal rights as a serious philo-
sophical and sociopolitical issue. Their work represents the theoretical and academic
counterpart of a growing popular animal rights and environmental movement.

Science and technology studies and posthumanism

Scientific practice and theory in the 20th century (not only in the biological sciences
but also in physics) have contributed to the breakdown of boundaries and traditional
ontologies. In the latter half of the century, the field of science and technology studies
(STS) arose as a loose disciplinary coalition of sociologists, anthropologists, historians,
and literary scholars. Bruno Latour and many others in STS have examined contem-
porary science for inconsistencies between its positivist rhetoric and its complicated
and ambiguous practices. In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Latour argued
for the breakdown of what he called the “modern constitution,” the epistemological
framework that had governed Western scientific thinking for centuries. That epis-
temology postulated effective dichotomies, such as between society and nature and
between the human and nonhuman. These dichotomies have been jeopardized by the
proliferation of hybrids that science itself has produced. To account for such hybrids,
Latour, John Law, and others developed actor-network theory (ANT), which describes
social phenomena in terms of the interplay of human and nonhuman actors (or
actants). The vocabulary of ANT constitutes a rejection of the boundaries that seemed
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secure in traditional humanist science and philosophy, and has thus been an influential
contribution to the posthumanist project. Meanwhile, other posthumanists look
to the “general systems theory” of sociologist Niklas Luhmann for a rethinking of
the subject–object distinction fundamental to both positivist science and humanist
philosophy (Wolfe, 2010).

Feminism and posthumanism

In her essay on the cyborg and elsewhere, Haraway showed how feminism as a
theoretical position could contribute to posthumanism. For the past half-century
and more, theoretical feminism has constituted a varied set of positions with social,
cultural, biological, and political ramifications, and many of the most influential
feminist writers have contributed to the thematics of posthumanism. As noted above,
humanism itself postulated or simply assumed man as the standard and norm of the
human. The work of feminist writers and theorists from Simone de Beauvoir to Julia
Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, and many others displaces man from his central
position in the definition of the human and challenges the coherence of gender as a
category. In Gender Trouble (1990), for example, Butler argued that gender and sex,
rather than being ordained by nature, are constructed and performed by individuals
within discursive and cultural constraints. Because of the importance of gender for
identity, Butler concluded that identity itself is performative—a position radically at
odds with traditional humanism.

Informatics and posthumanism

Posthumanist theory has been applied to another realm that is particularly relevant
to communication studies: digital technology and informatics. In How We Became
Posthuman (1999) N. Katherine Hayles examined the history and impact of cyber-
netics, that is, the study of control and communication in machines and animals.
In the years following World War II, Norbert Wiener and his colleagues sought to
develop a unified approach to describing mechanisms of control in animals, humans,
and machines. Their approach was to apply increasingly elaborate versions of the
feedback loop in order to understand the nervous systems of animals and humans, and
ultimately therefore to describe the human subject as a mechanism. Warren McCul-
loch, Walter Pitts, and others began to explore the similarities between the biological
neuron and the binary devices that were then being deployed in the first generations of
electronic computers. Their goal was to develop a theory of “neural nets” (connections
between neurons conceived as off/on devices) that could account for the abilities of
animals and even humans to process information from their environments. Theirs was
the earliest version of the computer metaphor. Although they were themselves still
operating with a positivist technological framework, a Latourian might well argue that
cybernetics was developing into one of the troublesome hybrids that failed to respect
the boundaries of the human and nonhuman, of technology and nature. The neural
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nets of early cybernetics evolved in the 1980s into more sophisticated forms, which
eventually led to effective algorithms and techniques for pattern-matching applied to
contemporary digital services such as voice recognition and language-processing.
Another version of the computer analogy, however, had already become influential in
the 1950s: symbolic artificial intelligence (AI), in which the comparison is not between
brains and electronic circuits, but rather between computer programs and the human
mind. Pioneered by Alan Turing, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, and many others,
this analogy overtook the cybernetic model, in terms of both funded research and
scientific prestige. Symbolic AI was in turn one of the conceptual sources of cognitive
science, which combines disciplinary perspectives from computer science, psychology,
and philosophy.
Both the cybernetic and the symbolic AI versions of the computer metaphor suggest
a breakdown of conceptual boundaries between human and machine, but with different
emphases. In the case of cybernetics, the boundary is a material one between the organic
human body and the technology of electronic circuits. The symbolic AI movement, not
concerned with the physical embodiment of thought, focuses instead on eliding the
distinction between human thought and the symbolic and algorithmic manipulations
carried out by a computer in its abstract form as a so-called Turing machine. In either
case, the computer metaphor may arguably have contributed to the posthumanist per-
spective. Many of the computer scientists working in these areas, however, would not
have understood their work in this way; computer scientists mostly were and remain
committed to a positivist view of science.
For specialists in AI, the human mind was a symbolic program running on the
wetware of the brain: The key aspect of information-processing was abstract, not mate-
rial. Hayles argues that this insistence on the immateriality of information has been a
major obstacle to the development of a posthumanist perspective in informatics. In the
1980s and 1990s, this insistence went far beyond the symbolic AI movement (always
a relatively small group of computer scientists and philosophical fellow travelers) to a
much larger culture of computer enthusiasts, especially because of the spreading use
of the Internet. Computer communication (e-mail, bulletin boards) was becoming
widespread, first among researchers and eventually among a wide audience of general
users. Unlike earlier forms such as the written letter or the printed book, this form of
communication seemed to be abstract, devoid of any significant material signs. For
computer enthusiasts, the evanescent technology of electrons allowed cyberspace to
become a realm of pure mind. When users went online to communicate in chatrooms
and e-mail, it was claimed, they left behind their bodies and therefore their race, gender,
and ethnic or national identity. This claim was superficially plausible as late as the
mid-1990s, in part because almost all such communication was purely textual. Video
and even static images were difficult to share. While the rhetoric of the enthusiasts
was dominant in this decade, the posthumanist response to the technologists was to
demonstrate what Hayles (1999) called the “materiality of informatics.” The digital
realm is material in the same ways as earlier forms of communication. A computer
is an artifact, with which the user interacts through various physical mediations:
the keyboard, the mouse, the monitor. The affordances and limitations of the digital
machine together with the layers of programming also affect those interactions. Hence,
6 PO S T H U M A N I S M

the computer should be understood as a physical writing system, just as much as books
or manuscripts. In any case, those who communicate through computer networks
do not leave their race, gender, or other markers of identity completely behind; such
markers are reinscribed in various ways in acts of digital communication. Even when
the communication is purely textual, it still carries those markers. In the 2000s, the
sharing of images as well as videoconferencing are common, which adds further
dimensions to these verbal self-representations.

Social media and the materiality of the digital

The argument in favor of the materiality of the digital has become more convincing
with the rise of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many other digital
applications are indeed virtual channels of communication, but they are also embedded
in the social lives and embodied practices of their users. Research has shown that Face-
book and other social networking sites are used principally as virtual complements for
communication with friends and acquaintances: Such technologies extend and main-
tain embodied social relationships in their users’ lives rather than displacing them.
Furthermore, mobile versions of applications like Facebook and Twitter allow users
to take their digital communicative practices with them as they go about their daily
lives. In the 1980s and 1990s cyberspace seemed to be a separate realm in part because
going online meant withdrawing with one’s computer to some private location (cubicle,
office). In the 2000s this is no longer the case: Mobile devices allow access in a café or
on the street. And users of mobile devices come to constitute a bridge between the vast
hypertext of the Internet and the physical and social environment. They serve as both
channels and sensors; they bring information from the Internet into the world and act
on it and at the same time convert the world into digital information, either explicitly
through texts and images or implicitly by allowing their phones and mobile devices to
record their locations. Ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous media are conditions of
media culture today that require the active participation of human users in order to
operate. Posthumanist theorists make a convincing case that digital communication in
the 2000s is not a refuge from the physical and social world, but fully implicated in it.
One important site for the examination of the human subject today is therefore
digitally mediated communication. As the name suggests, social media are tech-
nologies and practices for mediating between or among individuals; they can be
seen as mass contemporary experiments (on the order of hundreds of millions)
in interpersonal communication. As such, social media provide opportunities for
redefining the subject. To examine the presentation of self in social media, many
social science and human–computer interaction researchers appeal to an analytical
framework provided by Erving Goffman (1959). Goffman’s perspective, however, is
still traditionally humanist, in that he understands individuals as actors putting on
particular masks and playing particular roles appropriate to social occasions and
audiences. Social media provide the opportunity for a more radical, posthumanist
analysis along lines suggested by Butler (1990). In contemporary media culture, users
are not autonomous actors; instead, their identities are defined by the performances
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that they give in their almost constant interaction with social media and entertainment
applications. Furthermore, users could be said to perform their identities according to
discursive frameworks constrained in part by the social media applications themselves.
Social media applications are intersubjective, as each user is communicating
synchronously or asynchronously with other human users. In other digital media
applications, particularly single-player video games, the user interacts with rather than
through a computer system. There is no human subject on the other side of the screen;
instead, the player inserts herself into an event loop in which her actions (on the game
console or keyboard) are processed by the code, which in turn provides further outputs
for the user’s response. From a posthumanist perspective, interaction with a computer
video game redefines the player’s subjectivity in a way that the traditional humanist
paradigm does not account for. The player becomes a willing, if temporary, cyborg.
From a humanist point of view, a willingness to join oneself with a digital system is
highly suspect. It is the abnegation of the autonomy of self, which explains in part the
criticism of video games that is common from traditional humanist quarters.

Posthumanism and the humanities

Finally, posthumanism has institutional consequences. The practices and assumptions

of humanism have been reified for hundreds of years in universities and national
academies and supported by various forms of private and public patronage. Thus, the
future of humanism becomes a question of the future of the humanities, particularly
in the contemporary university (e.g., Braidotti, 2013, chap. 4). Posthumanist theorists
propose nothing less than a complete reconfiguration of the humanities—a reconfig-
uration that removes the liberal subject from the center of humanistic inquiry. They
demand new approaches as well as changes in the materials studied. For example,
posthumanists often suggest STS as a controlling interdisciplinary approach—one that
can cut across the humanities and social sciences. Above all, posthumanism opposes
the essentialism that it finds in the traditional interpretive practices of the humanities.
It is joined in this opposition by poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonial
studies, feminist studies, and cultural studies, all of which have gained ground in
humanities departments in recent decades.

SEE ALSO: Actor-Network Theory; Barthes, Roland; Cybernetics; Cyborg; Derrida,

Jacques; Feminism; Foucault, Michel; Performativity; Postmodernism; Poststructural-
ism; Science, Technology, and Society Studies; System Theory

References and further readings

Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Ferrando, F. (2013). Posthumanism, transhumanism, antihumanism, metahumanism, and new
materialisms: Differences and relations. Existenz, 8(2), 26–32.
8 PO S T H U M A N I S M

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Hassan, I. (1977). Prometheus as performer: Towards a posthumanist culture? Georgia Review,
31, 830–850.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1979/1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minneapolis Press.
van Dijck, J. (2007). Mediated memories in the digital age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Wolfe, C. (2010). What is posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Jay David Bolter is the Wesley Chair of New Media and co-director of the Augmented
Environments Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. He is the author of
Remediation, with Richard Grusin, and of Windows and Mirrors, with Diane Gromala.
In addition to writing about new media, Bolter collaborates in the construction of new
digital media forms. With Michael Joyce, he created Storyspace, a hypertext authoring
system. Bolter now works closely with Blair MacIntyre, Maria Engberg, and others on
the use of augmented reality to create new media experiences for informal education
and entertainment.